For the tenth anniversary of Brexit, the BBC has broadcast a two-part series with people at the centre of it all reminiscing about events leading up to and following the 2016 referendum. It's title is: Brexit: A Very British Civil War, and its described as: "The inside story of a vote that divided a nation. Unravelling the rivalries, betrayals and conflicts that tore apart the campaigns, told by those at the heart of Leave and Remain." I confess I haven’t bothered to watch it all, but I have seen a few clips and social media comments. As far as I can see, nobody who was deeply - or even peripherally - involved is crowing about it and proclaiming that it has been a great success, something we should have done years before.
The message seems to be: it was all a dreadful mistake, but never mind, wasn't the campaign a lot of fun?
Elsewhere, the former CEO of Vote Leave, Matthew Elliot, now Baron Elliott of Mickle Fell, has been pushing his new book, which again focuses on the campaign: Ten Years On: The Untold Story of Brexit – Reflections on a Life of Campaigning, published by Biteback Publishing and scheduled for release on 23 June.
In an interview for The New World, Elliot claims he is the "real victim of Brexit" because he was "pilloried" at dinner parties in the years following the vote." Asked if he thinks Brexit has been a success, he says: “Yes, 100 per cent.” Elliot seems to think he has been ridiculed and castigated for delivering a huge triumph for the nation, one that only he and a few stalwarts recognise.
He is in a very small minority. According to polling by YouGov, only 12% of voters think it has been more of a success than a failure. This compares with 61% who think Brexit has been more of a failure:
A whole 12% of voters think Brexit has been a success. And just 25% of Leave voters. Sigh.— Sam Freedman (@samfr.bsky.social) 9 June 2026 at 10:59
And, oddly, Mr. Elliot, who writes frequently for The Telegraph, also appears to believe Britain is in a state of permanent crisis. Here is a list of titles from his most recent contributions, which include:
- Britain’s entrepreneurs are starting to miss the 1970s
- This staggering stat is proof that Britain isn’t working
- Britain’s economy will soon be overtaken by Lithuania unless we act now
I don't see one tiny flicker of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel he helped create, in Elliot's scribblings. Goodness knows what kind of end-of-days stuff he would have been writing if he thought Brexit had been a failure.
One imagines he would be among the first to boast how well it has all gone if he truly felt that it had.
Another book about Brexit, this time by Anthony Seldon, Blair’s biographer among other things, is an anthology approaching 700 pages in length, with contributions from various Brexit protagonists. The Brexit Effect 2015-2026.
The FT has a review of it:
The Brexit Effect — postmortem finds neither triumph nor closure https://t.co/GRI2lPKRCE
— FT Europe (@ftbrussels) June 12, 2026
The reviewer, Phillip Gordon, says that in 2016, “puzzled outsiders” asked themselves “why the British a decade ago chose to commit what to many looked like economic suicide and political isolation.”
He concludes that nobody from either side appears to be happy with the result (except perhaps Baron Elliot, who earns £371 per day simply for attending the House of Lords, and Nigel Farage, who received £5 million from a crypto billionaire as a reward for Brexit).
Gordon writes:
"One of the ironies of the Brexit saga is that by saddling Britain’s main political parties with responsibility for massive economic discontent, it has led them to cede unprecedented ground to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, the descendant of Ukip, which now leads most national polls and dominated recent local elections.
"Should Reform win a majority in the next parliamentary election, hardly an implausible scenario, Britain would have a government led by the very party most responsible for the discontent that brought it to power, and more determined to 'complete' Brexit than reverse it. In that scenario, not only would 'banging on about Europe' not be over but it would enter a whole new and highly unpredictable phase."
Incidentally, speaking about Farage and the possibility that he could become PM in two or three years, I noted a couple of weeks ago, The New York Times carried an opinion piece by David French, a columnist, entitled: The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained. It's about America, but it applies equally to the UK.
Support for Reform and Rupert Lowe's even more extreme Restore UK comes predominantly from older generations, people like me. But, these are precisely the groups with the longest memories of what happens when a society succumbs to authoritarianism of the type Farage and Lowe are pushing.
We should remember what events in the 1930s in Germany led to, but it seems the collective memory has been wiped.
Every nation has a minority of psychopaths and idiots hell-bent on causing chaos and inflicting as much pain as possible on their fellow citizens. Normally, the decent majority is alert enough and wise enough to keep them far away from power. In the USA, under Trump, we are seeing what happens when the violent minority manage to seize control. We cannot allow that to happen here, but it could under Farage and Lowe.
Mr French has a couple of quotes that are highly relevant. The first is from the Spanish American philosopher George Santayana in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He says, we can argue about the precise historical parallels, but the echoes of the past are everywhere.
And the second is from Winston Churchill in 1947: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.”
We would do well to remember what flows from those advocating harsh, simplistic and even violent solutions to society's problems, focused on blaming and scapegoating minorities.
Finally, Lord Heseltine in The Independent today has a typically excoriating piece about the guilty men of Brexit. He asks, not unreasonably in my view:
"Where are the paeans of praise to Brexit from Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings and their accomplices for the land of milk and honey they told us it would deliver?”
“They don’t normally hold back from giving their opinions. The reason is obvious I would suggest: their scandalously false prospectus has turned to dust and ashes. They are the guilty men and should hang their heads in shame.”
And finally, finally, the news that Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire through the stock market float of his rocket business, SpaceX, is a moment that should cause all of us to think seriously about what that means. Just as the people eventually had to restrain the capricious power of ancient monarchs, so they will need to do the same to the ultra-wealthy.
And I say this not because Musk is an avid supporter of racist, far-right politicians, both in the USA and in Europe. It would be true, however altruistic the person was. A trillion dollars is a colossal, almost obscene amount of money to be under the control of one man or woman, even if they were saints. To put it into perspective, only the top twenty countries in the world have a GDP greater than $1 trillion.
Every country (out of the 191 that exist) below Poland, starting with Taiwan (population 23 million) has a GDP less than a trillion dollars. This isn’t to say that the GDP earned by one nation in a single year is the same as one man’s total accumulated wealth, because it clearly isn’t. But it gives you some idea of what it means to have control of that sort of money.
And in truth, Musk controls even more because he is frequently a minority shareholder (he owns about 13% of Tesla, for example), but his opinion is given far more weight because the share value is often boosted into the stratosphere by Musk’s involvement.
Imagine the power that a man like Musk now has. If he went to (say) Thailand or Columbia or Malaysia or Vietnam or Bangladesh and said he wanted to build a factory. The governments would be falling over themselves to offer all sorts of incentives, sweeteners, tax breaks, regulatory changes, cheap land and so on, to get that plant. I chose those countries by the way because they all have GDP’s around $500 billion. Musk already does this to bigger, developed nations so he wouldn’t think twice about doing the same to third world countries.
In addition, Musk owns 75% or so of the social media platform known previously as Twitter, where he retweets this sort of thing:
this should frighten you— Toby Buckle (@polphilpod.bsky.social) 9 June 2026 at 22:46
The world urgently needs a wealth tax, before it's too late.
