The Brex Factor: Man-frog hops it on Brexit benefits

Two years after driving around the country in his Big Red Lie Bus as part of his duties as joint-head of a Vote Leave campaign built on falsehoods, the environment secretary has finally admitted that he ‘could have done things better’ during the referendum.

Alas, Gove’s mea culpa didn’t come in a tearful tell-all press conference but rather in a chat with musician Damon Albarn, who’d barracked him in the street while Gove was jogging. So the Leavers have got round to apologising to celebrities – now, what about the rest of us?

ROBERT KIMBELL

A North-East ‘Kipper who has somehow amassed 38,000 Twitter followers by tweeting ostensibly good news about Brexit, Kimball wrote in December 2015: ‘Our history decided who we are but in no way does it determine who we will be. Our future will be glorious #LeaveEU.’

Fast forward 29 months and Kimball’s glorious future is looking slightly different. He recently told followers: ‘We survived the bubonic plague of 1603 (as many as 2,500,000 dead), the Civil War of 1642 to 1651 (211,000 dead), and the Great Fire of 1666 (unspecified numbers dead, most from smoke inhalation). We can certainly escape the EU.’

Just think how good ‘Brexit will be not quite as bad as the bubonic plague’ would have looked on that bus…

DAVID DAVIS

Asked in September 2017 about the unique problems facing Ireland post-Brexit, David Davis said: ‘We can get a non-visible border operational by using the most up-to-date technology.’ As recently as late March he was boasting that the border would be invisible as ‘we’ve got a whole load of new technology now’.

And now, all the talk of new tech has disappeared from the Brexit secretary’s vision of the Irish border, which now encompasses double production lines making goods for EU and non-EU countries and a 10-mile buffer zone; between the North and the Republic.

Just a reminder than in 2008, a younger DD wrote: ‘Faced with intractable problems with political pressure for a solution the government reaches for a headline-grabbing high-tech ‘solution’. Rather than spend the resources, time and thought necessary to get a real answer, they naively grasp solutions that to the technologically illiterate ministers look like magic.’

GERARD BATTEN

Already shaping up to be the best UKIP leader ever, Batten lost the party’s only council in March, 123 of its council seats in May and now has lost one of its MEPs – James Carver, who has quit over his support for Tommy Robinson.

‘Batty’ fumed on Twitter that Carver had ‘betrayed members’ by refusing ‘to do the honourable thing and resign his seat, handing it back to us’. You know, just like Batten’s former colleague Roger Helmer didn’t do when defecting from the Tories to UKIP in 2012!

LORD DIGBY JONES

‘Brexit means the British people escaping the tyranny of unelected, unaccountable Brussels,’ tweeted the EU-phobic former CBI boss on May 31. ‘Voters don’t want unelected, unaccountable rulers telling them what to do,’ he added two days later, returning to his theme on June 5 to advocate ‘getting out of a regime that is unaccountable, unelected’.

A question for Lord Digby Jones: Can you think of any other unelected and unaccountable bodies you yourself might be a part of? Clues: Red seats, decent central London location, subsidised wine list, you get £305 a day just for turning up…

DANIEL HANNAN

Suggested in the EU Parliament that part of the reason for landlocked Switzerland’s financial success was that they are ‘outside the Common Fisheries Policy’ … and you were wondering why they call him the ‘Brain of Brexit’!

LORD LAWSON

‘The British people voted in part to get away from the doctrine of the free movement of people,’ declared Vote Leave’s chairman in August 2016.

But free movement is OK for some. The former chancellor has applied for a carte de sejours which would give him the right to permanently reside in France, where he will be completely insulated from the worst effects of the policy he promoted.

A clear case of what the French call ‘avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre’ – their version of ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’.

IAIN DUNCAN SMITH

The failed Tory leader has told Remainers: ‘If you don’t like Brexit, find somewhere else to live.’ Wouldn’t this plan to scourge the country of snowflakes have been a whole lot easier to achieve if IDS and his chums hadn’t just taken away our right to live and work in 27 other countries?

DAVID KURTEN

For those who found the ‘Breaking Point’ poster a little too tasteful and understated, UKIP’s candidate in the Lewisham East by-election has produced this revolting leaflet attacking Sadiq Khan.

Kurten’s pamphlet also claims ‘a top economist has calculated that ordinary working people will be up to 12% better off if Britain leaves the EU’. The economist in question is the much-debunked Patrick Minford, who once wrote that the Poll Tax would be a roaring success (‘the Community Charge has much to commend it… opponents underestimate the political maturity of the electorate’) and more recently conceded that his vision of Brexit in the UK ‘would mostly eliminate manufacturing’.

NIGEL FARAGE

The nicotine-stained man-frog seems to have changed his tune about the benefits of Brexit. ‘I never promised that it would be a huge success,’ he told LBC listeners on May 29. ‘I never said it would be a beneficial thing to leave and everyone would be better off.’

How then to explain this tweet from June 10, 2016, ‘we will be safer and better off outside EU’? Or indeed this one from and February 23, 2016, ‘British workers will be better off outside EU’?

Not to mention his Telegraph column of May 16, 2016 where he stated: ‘An EU exit would mean Britain could fulfil her global economic potential.

‘It truly is a terribly exciting proposition’​.

Oh and then there are his words in the Express on July 18, 2015: ‘Outside the EU, Great Britain would not only survive but thrive, and become a beacon of hope for other countries too.’