BREXITEERS OF THE WEEK: Daniel Kawczynski tries to overturn result of two referendums

DANIEL KAWCZYNSKI

Last year the Shropshire MP was ranting about ‘MPs wishing to overturn the will of the British people’ but now he seems willing to overturn the will of the Welsh people as expressed at two referendums. Kawczynski tweeted that he ‘looked forward to the day when we return to one parliament and one policy for the whole United Kingdom’, adding that the Welsh parliament was ‘a massive additional expense’ and ‘just another layer of red tape’.

When the discrepancy between his view on Brexit and his view on the Senedd was pointed out, the tweets quickly disappeared. Public votes in 1997 and 2011 have backed devolution in Wales and as recently as March, a poll found 83% in favour of the Senedd while only 14% wanted to abolish it.

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ALLISON PEARSON

The Telegraph columnist and self-styled ‘humble handmaiden of Brexit’ (as she told a pre-lockdown Leavers’ rally) has established herself as one of the shrillest and daftest voices for ending the lockdown. When Monday May 4 brought news of 288 fatalities, she tweeted: ‘Remember 450 people die of cancer every day.’ Quite, but if we could stop 450 deaths by preventing people from standing next to one another, don’t you think we’d have a go?

Pearson also drew giggles by tweeting a photo of what she had been told was a bonfire tribute to 100-year-old Colonel Tom Moore. It turned out to be the giant burning effigy poor Edward Woodward is sacrificed in during the final scenes of 1973’s seminal horror film The Wicker Man.

CONOR BURNS

Boris Johnson’s former aide has resigned as trade minister after misusing his office to intervene in a dispute over a loan owed to his father, warning on Commons-headed notepaper ‘that my role in the public eye could well attract interest especially if I were to use parliamentary privilege to raise the case’.

Brexiteer watchers might recall that while he was working for BoJo in 2017, Burns’ Twitter account sent a series of aggressive messages to Michel Barnier demanding he publish the legal basis on which Britain needed to pay the so-called ‘divorce bill’. Burns soon explained he had been hacked. The tweets called for Barnier to quote the correct ‘treaty obligations and directives’ – just Burns’ luck to have been hacked by someone with detailed knowledge of EU law!

NIGEL FARAGE

The nicotine-stained man-frog blasted the ‘hypocrisy’ of lockdown breakers just hours before police warned him over his 100-mile trip to Kent in search of illegal migrants – a jaunt which could only be classed as ‘essential’ if the person doing the classifying was the same one who came up with Waitrose’s essentials range (featuring artichoke hearts, cambozola cheese and cappuccino-flavoured mousse).

On Monday, Farage told listeners to his LBC show that he was sick of lockdown breakers ‘popping out for the day in absolutely huge numbers’. He added: ‘It almost seems to me there’s a bit of middle-class hypocrisy here. It’s as if lockdown needs to stay but lockdown really is for everybody else and not me.’ Strange he’s now upset about people having their freedom of movement taken away, isn’t it?

• Read more from Steve Anglesey here and get the latest podcast from The New European to hear more on the Brexiteers of the Week.