The Brex Factor: Rich irony as Arron suffers run on Banks

A plotline worthy of EastEnders in the East Anglian resort of Great Yarmouth, where the sole remaining UKIP councillor has defected after claiming the party’s home affairs spokesman said his partner looked like a stripper.

Chris Walch will sit as an independent after clashing with David Moreland outside a photographic shop in the town, the duo swore and jabbed fingers at each other in an incident recorded by a local BBC news team.

With dialogue which might have been written for Phil Mitchell, Moreland explained: ‘He started ranting and raving like a lunatic saying I thought his wife looked like a stripper. I’m ex-military. I’m not going to put up with him having a go, so this is not political, it’s personal – simple as.’

PETER BONE

When asked on a television debate what the Remainer next to him should do now, the Wellingborough MP replied: ‘Maybe leaving the country would help.’ Probably not the best turn of phrase since the Remainer in question was The New European’s Uganda-born writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

In a memorable week, Bone – who voted against House of Lords reform back in 2012 – went on to call for the second chamber to be scrapped now he disagrees with its decisions. He also voted against the government in favour of tighter controls on the press… nothing, of course, to do with recent tabloid stories revealing the devout Christian had left his wife for a married physio 20 years his junior.

CHARLES TYRWHITT

The shirtmaker, whose owner Nick Wheeler says he is a ‘no regrets’ Brexit supporter, is having to put up its prices because of Brexit.

The company made a £5.9million loss last year and its celebrated ‘four shirts for £100’ offer will soon be no more thanks to sterling’s weak performance since the referendum. Wheeler said: ‘We are going to put the price up, we’ve got to. It’s a currency issue, our shirts are costing us 20% more than they used to.’

THE GAMMONBUSTERS

A year or so after a photo collage of red-faced male Brexiteers in Question Time audiences was christened ‘gammon’ on Twitter, right-wingers are claiming the phrase is racist.

Prime among them are tiresome controversialist Brendan O’Neill, who moaned in The Spectator that ‘the Gammon insult is typical of Corbynista intolerance’ and claimed it was akin to what ‘hardcore racists did.. to black people’.

A far cry from three weeks ago, when in the same title O’Neill wrote, ‘on freedom of speech, Britain has become the laughing stock of the Western world… censorship in this country is out of control… We have to challenge this dark new censorship every time it emerges’. And indeed, a world away from August 2017, when he argued on an obscure far-right blog that ‘Nazis must enjoy the same freedom of speech as everyone else’.

JACOB REES-MOGG

Railing against the Lords on his LBC show, the Victorian Undertaker asked listeners: ‘What is the superior mystical wisdom that gives them a greater insight than the British people?’

Maybe it’s similar to the mystical wisdom which Jacob Rees-Mogg believes gives him a greater insight on the Irish border than people who actually live there and who voted heavily to Remain. He told Northern Ireland political television show The View that he had no intention to go to the border territories and ask locals what they thought, saying: ‘I don’t think an actual visit is going to be relevant… My going and wandering across a few roads isn’t going to tell me anything.’

TERENCE JONES

This letter-writer to the Daily Express believes the Tory power stance recently demonstrated by Sajid Javid is a secret Remainer code for ‘one foot in and one foot out of the EU’. Mr Jones, from Eltham, added: ‘It would be better altogether to have a pose showing the flat of the hand held forward, keeping the EU at bay.’

Great idea – or perhaps Brexity politicians could simply incline their right arms upwards to represent rising British fortunes after Brexit, keeping their hand open and palm down in a gesture of dismissal to the EU?

Terence’s last published letter to the Express, which appeared on Boxing Day, hoped that Brexit meant that the ‘BBC and Met Office (would) be ordered to speak classical English and use classical British imperial weights and measures’. His previous epistle, published last September, argued that there was no need for any skills-based immigration whatsoever as ‘continentals look at their qualifications differently and exaggeratedly and our managers gullibly accept that’.

PAUL DACRE

On the attack against ‘serial Tory traitor Lord Heseltine’, Saturday’s Daily Mail thundered that ‘despite his wealth he’s trousered around £90,000 every year since 2000 in EU farming subsidies’.

Alas, the Mail did not have room to mention someone else who in 2014 trousered around £90,000 in EU subsidies for his country piles in Sussex and Scotland… Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre!

HENRY BOLTON

As revealed by his girlfriend Jo Marney, the former UKIP leader was recently admitted on to an international flight despite forgetting his passport.

Honestly, this ‘open borders’ policy allows any old dodgy character to come and go from Britain as they please. Someone should start a political party to oppose it …

LIAM FOX

Foxy defended Brexit on Any Questions by boasting that ‘we had the highest level of foreign direct investment into our country than we have had in our history’.

The crucial phrase in that sentence is ‘we had the highest level’. Because although Britain took in a net high of $119.6bn in 2016, the figure was massively distorted by two big takeovers, with brewers Anheuser-Busch’s $79bn purchase of SABMiller accounting for two-thirds of it alone.

By contrast, foreign investment in 2017 figure was a mere $15bn, the lowest return for the UK since 2005. Oddly, the Fanatic Mr Fox neglected to mention that.

ARRON BANKS

Last year the Sunday Times Rich List estimated the Leave.EU funder’s personal wealth at £250m. This time, in the week when his campaign was fined and referred to police for breaking electoral law during the referendum, Banks didn’t even make the £115m cut-off to be in the top 1,000 wealthiest people in the UK.

How’s that for a Brexit bonus?