The Brexit Decade

Another chair short in the Number 10 musical chairs farce.

A Decade of Self-Harm

Even irony has come to joke at the expense of the United Kingdom. On the eve of the 10^th anniversary of the Brexit vote, the sixth prime minister since that act of unmitigated self-harm resigned.

Whether you like it or not, Brexit made the UK ungovernable, and it is the spectre of Brexit that has deftly conducted the dirge of musical chairs at 10 Downing Street.

Obviously, the personification of this rotten enterprise is Nigel Farage, along with all the cloaks of calumnious obfuscation he has donned aboard the various political vehicles he has ridden to beguile the natives.

Cameron's Fatal Gamble

In trying to outmanoeuvre and upstage Farage, David Cameron promised an in-out referendum without thresholds, believing he could gamble with our future in Europe and win. He lost. Once the result was announced, he resigned.

The chicanery between Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, who were the opportunistic ruling party figureheads of the Brexit proposition, meant that Theresa May, a remainer, became prime minister.

Everything she tried to negotiate with Europe was rubbished and undermined by the antics of Boris Johnson and a cohort of implacables. First, Theresa May gambled away her majority, and every Brexit negotiation ended in stalemate. She resigned within three years.

Johnson Gets Brexit Done

Boris Johnson then took the helm and purged the Tory Party of the reasonable, level-headed and moderate One Nation Tories, before calling an election to "Get Brexit Done".

The least qualified person ever to negotiate a deal, having had a background in the Scottish whisky industry, became the point man: Lord David Frost. What he brought back was a mishmash of imponderables, and we signed ourselves out of prosperity just as the coronavirus took hold of the world.

Boris made stringent rules for us, with punitive fines for breaking them, yet he and his staff were partying in Downing Street. That scandal, along with a few others, engulfed his premiership and culminated in the resignation of more than half his cabinet. It soon dawned on him that he had to go. He held office for three years.

Truss and the Lettuce

Enter Liz Truss, who, after kissing hands at Balmoral, may well have hastened the demise of Queen Elizabeth II two days later. Her curtsey was so awkward that you couldn't tell if she was flat-footed, bow-legged, or suffering from some yet unexplained ailment of her lower ambulatory system. Rather than laugh, you pitied her.

Her uncosted mini-budget, aiming to introduce us as the new Singapore on Thames, one of the sunlit uplands of Brexit, much as Canaan was given to the Jews, wreaked havoc on the financial markets.

The fallout was so drastic that she sacked her Chancellor of the Exchequer and brought in a Tory grandee of a sort, Jeremy Hunt. The sand was running out of her hourglass; days became minutes, and even a patch of lettuce outlasted her. She was gone in 50 days.

Sunak Steadies the Ship

Rishi Sunak, the first Asian, the first Hindu, and possibly the richest ever prime minister, walked into 10 Downing Street. He steadied the ship that had been caught in various post-Covid, Brexit and immigration eddies. We were in a spiral, and it was only a matter of time before we lost our heads in a dizzy spell.

He called an election about twenty months into his premiership and handed the reins over to the Labour Party in a landslide, after the party had been out of power for 14 years.

Starmer's Short Tenure

Sir Keir Starmer was now at the helm, honourable and lawyerly. After a number of missteps, bad calls and U-turns, his popularity sank so low that by the local elections of May 2026 the Parliamentary Labour Party had decided he could not lead them into the next general election. A few weeks short of two years as prime minister, he resigned.

It is likely that Andy Burnham will become the next prime minister. Meanwhile, in one way or another, the office has been haunted by the banshee cries of Nigel Farage, first in UKIP, then in the Brexit Party, and now in Reform.

The Myth of Control

One of the things Brexit was supposed to give us back control of was our borders. It now transpires that the problem was never Europe, but policies within our own domain.

Whereas European immigrants were near enough that they could, if they wished, return home every weekend, the immigrants now arrive in larger numbers from further afield. They cannot return home every weekend; they are full settlers with family ties that must be accommodated if their services are to be procured for the nation.

Likewise, Brexit was supposed to ignite a bonfire of rules, mostly from the EU. Yet to trade with any trading bloc, we need alignment and agreement on standards.

We were once involved in crafting those rules, but for the purposes of ease of business, the very rules we thought we could jettison must now be absorbed into our regulatory system for seamless commercial activity. We are rule takers where we were once rule makers, in concert with the community to which we belonged.

No Justice in Sight

Then there is the question of how the UK economy has suffered since Brexit, with the loss of about 6% in GDP. You may not be able to call Brexit a failure, but if it looks like one and walks like one, there can be no other conclusion.

The fight for the soul of the country continues as we struggle to get the facts before the people, who are bombarded and cajoled into working against their self-interest, sold easy solutions to complex problems.

We cannot defeat geography. Europe is our closest trading partner, and a softening of Brexit, with a bold and courageous defence of the associated policies, is needed.

They say a majority would now vote against Brexit. The fact is, the perpetrators of this travesty have never been held accountable, and it is doubtful we'll ever get justice for the harm they caused. What a wasted decade.

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