The Brexfactor: Hoey is all at sea over phantom ‘rally millions’

Having made the titanic error of joining Nigel Farage on the prow of his Thames cruiser, Kate Hoey is now following him as a supporter of the Leave Means Leave campaign.

LML intend to put the frighteners on Remainer MPs in Brexit-voting areas who might be thinking of ‘betraying’ their constituents’ wishes. Just like Kate Hoey does every time she bangs the Brexit drum despite her voters in Vauxhall going 78% for Remain at the referendum.

But then Kate’s logic is as corkscrewy as her Leo Sayer barnet. Despite being a Labour MP she sees nothing wrong with approvingly retweeting alt-right sites like Breitbart and Spiked. In July, having agreed to be interviewed by the Sunday Times, she expressed surprise at being asked about Brexit and told journalist Rosie Kinchen ‘I don’t know why you throw all these questions at me’.

And despite those photographs of her and Nigel enjoying a laugh at the front of their boat – the instrumental version of My Heart Will Go On sadly replaced by the soundtrack of Bob Geldof yelling through a megaphone – she told the Evening Standard in 2017, ‘I wasn’t on the boat with Farage.’ Eh? ‘I was on the boat 
but I was there to support the fishing unions I’d met in Aberdeen,’ she explained. ‘Just because I’m photographed with Farage, what does that say?’ Just to be clear, it says you were on the boat with Farage.

In typical style, Hoey came out for Leave Means Leave in an opinion piece for the virulently hard Brexit Daily Express. And her piece contained a quite remarkable paragraph about her pride in Leave voters.

‘We were even more proud of the millions who came along to the huge rallies and told us, some with tears in their eyes, that for the first time they believed that it was worth voting,’ Hoey wrote.

Huge pro-Brexit rallies involving millions of people? This simply didn’t happen. Not to either the official or unofficial Leave campaigns. But Brexiteers now think they can get away with claiming that black is white and cheerleaders like the Express are unlikely to pull them 
up on it.

The Collins Dictionary defines the American slang term ‘hooey’ as ‘rubbish, nonsense’. Much the same can be said of the output of the word’s near-namesake.

The trolling of Brexit Britain by countries remaining in the EU has begun with these posters referencing the classic Second World War slogan, spotted at Copenhagen airport.

When/if we officially leave the EU, Britons will lose their automatic right to travel anywhere in the EU just by presenting a passport. Instead we will be subject to the same rules as Americans and are likely to have to apply for an ESTA-style pass into the Schengen zone. The European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) will cost 7 euros and will last for three years.

Prospective travellers will be asked to list personal information including any criminal convictions over the past 20 years. Even successfully being approved will not guarantee entry and British passengers are likely to face additional questions about the travel plans at passport control – yet another Brexit benefit they didn’t put on the side of a big red bus.

Artist Miguel Vasquez, who you can follow on Instagram at marvelous_mikee, specialises in making ‘real’ 3D versions of well-known cartoon characters.

Here is his stab at what Homer Simpson would look like if he were flesh and blood – remind you of any mysterious backers of Leave.EU? We’d all love to know where he got all that d’oh from!

BREXITEERS OF THE WEEK:

DAVID DAVIS

The hapless former Brexit secretary penned a full-page Sun article describing economic predictions as completely worthless and criticising Philip Hammond for ‘­trotting out yet another bogus forecast’.

Davis added: ‘I suspect we are quite likely to have the odd hiccup when we leave the EU, but we will be able to cope … any problems we have will be over in months not years.’ Does that sound suspiciously like an economic forecast to you?

DR RICHARD BANHAM

Jeremy Corbyn might want to save one of his lessons in irony for this Twitter user, who describes himself as a ‘anti EU ex-pat… retired pharmacist, patriot and freaky music fan’. Banham recently moaned that he was ‘stuck here in southern Spain seeing all this shit happening in the UK. As a true patriot it makes me both sad and angry. Spain too is

heading for big problems

with the new Socialist govt letting all the bloody immigrants in.’

Damn those bloody immigrants, ruining Spain for its indigenous British ex-pat people!

OWEN PATERSON

‘The badgers have moved the goalposts,’ said then-environment secretary Paterson in 2013, describing why a cull had failed. Five years on, Paterson has learned from cunning old brock and become an expert in goalpost shifting himself.

‘We must all unite around delivering referendum result: Brexit in full, leaving the single market, customs union & ECJ,’ he tweeted this week. That’s somewhat of a change from the Paterson who wrote in 2014 that ‘we should… negotiate a new settlement, while keeping our vital position in the single market’. During the referendum campaign he went further, claiming: ‘Only a madman would leave the (single) market.’

Today’s Paterson also dismisses the ‘Norway option’, writing: ‘EFTA and/or the EEA or an EFTA-type arrangement… would not be Brexit at all.’ Again, a far cry from the Paterson who in 2014 wrote: ‘The only realistic option… is to stay within the EEA agreement. The EEA is tailor-made for this purpose and can be accessed by joining EFTA first.’

Maybe all the badgering by Brexiteers has taken its toll.