Sherelle Jacobs is the Assistant Comment Editor at The Daily Telegraph and was once an avid Brexiteer but is now having some sort of epiphany. She has been busy preparing a ladder to climb down after concluding Brexit has been a dismal failure. As far as I know, Ms Jacobs is the first of the self-styled 2016 “Brexit media battalion” to come clean. The ‘battalion’ - the media ignorati of Brexit - enjoyed a celebratory dinner at Brown’s Hotel in London in January 2020 and she was No 25 on the list sandwiched between Jonathan Isaby of Brexit Central, and now working as an adviser to Liz Truss and Dr. Sheila Lawlor of Politeia, a think tank.
The dinner was organised by Allison Pearson of The Daily Mail and took place at a hotel owned by Rocco Forte, another crazed Brexiteer. Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, seems to have taken and published the images below which show the media attendees who genuinely thought they had played a significant role in getting Brexit over the line:
Two years later, in July 2022 she wrote that she was "beginning to fear that Brexit was going to be crushed."
He fears have now been realised apparently because in her latest column, she is now advocating that we REJOIN THE EU! I kid you not. This is the title: Britain is now irrationally terrified of freedom. It should just rejoin the EU
I love the 'just' in there, don't you?
After a trip to the Devon fishing town of Brixham, she seems to at last recognise the problem:
"Tory Brexiteers promised that leaving the EU would allow Britain to 'take back control' of its waters, and enable our fishermen to feast on a 'sea of opportunity'. Instead, the fishermen of Brixham told me that they are at the mercy on a daily basis 'to whatever side of the bed French customs get up on' and are 'drowning in red tape'. They are in despair, as Defra – with a zeal reminiscent of Brussels bureaucrats – slaps questionable quotas on fish, from cuttlefish to pollack."
One skipper she met, Tom, who voted Leave, told her: “To be honest it ain’t much better, because we’ve still got the same people in government who were there before, who have still got the EU ideology.”
Tom still doesn’t understand. And for "ain't much better" read it's much, much worse.
Jacobs says it isn't only fishing either, other industries are also being impacted. She bemoans the fact we haven’t actually ditched any significant EU regulations and argues therefore, if we aren't "going to fight for freedom on the global stage by forging a new model for liberty in the 21st century" we should just admit it and rejoin.
"What we categorically should not do is go on pretending that the country can afford to live with a halfway Brexit," She says.
Where we have changed regulations, it’s for the worse she thinks. The new Brexit alcohol duty regime linking rates of duty to specific alcohol strength "outdoes Brussels in its convoluted paternalism." Sunak, a fellow Brexiteer, designed it when he was chancellor.
Back in February 2020, still euphoric after the dinner at Brown's Hotel, Jacobs wrote: As the panicked EU goes into Brexit meltdown, Britain finally has the upper hand.
This was shortly after Johnson had signed the Withdrawal Agreement and the trade talks had commenced. Jacobs told her readers that Barnier had stopped "gloomily instructing Britain to sign up to vassalage" in a lecture where he had explained “why Britain must take responsibility” and why “choices” must have “consequences”.
She now admits that the EU has little incentive to reopen talks because Barnier actually "outwitted British negotiators into signing an agreement almost entirely on Brussels’ terms." And it wasn't only British negotiators was it Ms Jacobs?
She thinks the rest of us are “irrationally terrified of freedom.” It isn’t terror that is preventing us from adopting entirely different rules to those of the EU single market but simple self-interest. The prospect of making life and work harder and costlier than it already is for millions of people doesn’t actually appeal that much to politicians when it comes to making decisions.
This was blindingly obvious in 2016 if only she had listened to those who tried to explain it to her.
There isn’t an explicit mea culpa or an apology. She has no regrets apparently about the years of anxiety for instance that European citizens have been put through or the huge economic damage inflicted on this country. Nothing about the jobs and livelihoods that have gone forever or the uncertainty, stress, and fear that business owners and workers have suffered over the last eight years.
She is like a parent after tossing an offspring into the deep end and when they sink to the bottom, saying we gave you the chance to learn to swim and you blew it.
