Jacob Rees-Mogg promised I could stay in Britain. Now I’m worried he was wrong

It’s a story best told in three parts. First: the year is 2015, I’m working at the Evening Standard diary, and the referendum still feels like a distant threat. I attend the Conservatives’ annual conference – my first – and am instructed to cause some gentle chaos.

I attend a panel that is fringe in more ways than one. I listen to Bernard Jenkin, John Redwood and Jacob Rees-Mogg explain why “Out” must win. During the Q&A, I stand up and introduce myself – 23, journalist, came here to study, would rather like to stay. What would happen to me if Britain were to leave the EU?

“Please stay,” Rees-Mogg tells me. “I’ll write to the Secretary of State to make sure you can.” The story I write the next day does not mention the word “Brexit”. For months afterwards, the referendum both feels real and doesn’t. Somehow I end up spending my whole life covering it, attending events on it and talking about it with friends and colleagues, but I don’t really believe it’s relevant to me.

Sure, there are people talking about European immigrants in ways that feel less than kind, but I train myself to ignore them, and pretend they’re not talking about me. “Ah I’ll be fine!”, I tell people who ask me how I’m feeling. “This eccentric Tory MP told me he’d lobby the government to let me stay anyway, and there were dozens of witnesses in the room.” I’m only partially joking.

Second: it’s 2019 and I know the deadline is approaching but there’s nothing I can do about it. The 23rd of June came and went but even afterwards – after that grey morning, when I walked home and sobbed as I saw a Remain sticker on the pavement – I spent years believing that Brexit both existed and didn’t.

I wrote about it week after week after week, but it was just over there, in a way. It couldn’t touch me. Still: the end of the year is coming up and I know I have to apply for settled status, otherwise I may be deported back to France, but I can’t bring myself to do it. It feels too personal and too insulting.

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On some level I can tell that applying will be the end of something; the end of my denial, and this paper-thin belief I’d crammed down my own throat, that I wasn’t actually concerned and I wasn’t one of those European interlopers everyone talked about. I do end up doing it in the end, just before the deadline, and it’s fine. I tell myself it’s fine.

Third: it’s June 2026 and that means a few different things. Mostly, right now, what I think about is that in a few months, I will have spent as much time in Britain as I had in France.

I sort of know how I feel about it and I sort of don’t. France feels quite foreign to me now, whenever I go back, and all my friends have left town so I spend increasingly little time speaking French with anyone face-to-face. Mostly, I think of London as my real home, and I feel lightly sick if I’ve been away from it for too long. It’s in my bones and, though I have loved many other places, I just couldn’t imagine myself living anywhere else.

People keep telling me that I should apply for British citizenship and I don’t want to. I know I’m in quite an enviable situation, I tell them, but I have my settled status and it suits me fine. I don’t feel British and so I don’t see why I should become British. The state made a deal with me when I moved here – it allowed me to be European and nothing else – and I refuse to change my position because the country changed theirs.