Hannan: ‘I’ve lost friends over Brexit’

Hannan has been a long-standing critic of the EU and a leading Leave campaigner.

He said: ‘I was a very prominent critic of the EU for 20 years and I’ve seen people who are on the other side who have now stopped talking to me, who were always on perfectly good terms until the referendum.

Hannan told the Express that he was ‘quite shocked by it’ and that it was ‘not a very British way of behaving’. He put the reaction down to them ‘not getting their way on something’.

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He explained: ‘They are accustomed to politics having happened within certain parameters, in June 2016 those parameters were blown away.

‘During the campaign Remainers decided the ‘Leave’ case was reactionary, small-minded, anti-immigrant and so on.

‘By polling day I think they’d come to believe their own propaganda.’

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Part of Hannan’s problem could be his knee-jerk reaction to blocking people on Twitter – especially when they point out his inaccuracies.

Dr Richard North, a former colleague of Hannan, told this newspaper’s Mandrake column in June 2018: ‘Hannan might learn something if he engaged more with people who know what they’re talking about, but he’s blocked me on Twitter without my ever having responded one of his tweets.

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He added: ‘If you prove him wrong on anything, likely as not his tweet will disappear – like his famous tweet of July 7 2015 when he confidently predicted that Greece would be out of the euro in a week. His tweets have become collectors’ items, much sought-after for entertainment value as Hannan’s narrative changes minute-by-minute.’