It is the reunion no-one was crying out for: the self-styled bad boys with their performative swagger, getting the band together to play all the old tunes one last time – even if many of their fans from last time round have since died of old age and younger people seem more inured to their appeal.
According to rock bible the Daily Telegraph, the superannuated punks of the Bad Boys of Brexit (lead singer: one N. Farage) are to reform to re-fight EU membership, spurred on by Andy Burnham’s stated desire to take Britain closer to the bloc, possibly even with the aim of once more taking its seat at the table.
The paper reported that Farage has been in talks with Arron Banks, the co-founder of Leave.EU, to “reactivate” the unofficial Brexit campaign and had already had “two or three” discussions with the businessman. “I’ve spoken to Arron, and I’m seeing him next week, and we’re getting reactivated,” Farage said. “Clearly, if Burnham wants a fight on this, we’ll give him a fight on this.”
And once again, it appears that Andy Burnham is a very lucky politician indeed.
Despite their own rewritings of history, Leave.EU – Farage, Banks, Richard Tice and Andy Wigmore – did not deliver the Brexit referendum. In an example of a stopped clock being right twice a day, official Leave campaign boss Dominic Cummings kept Farage at a deliberate distance during the campaign and viewed him as a “toxic” liability to the campaign’s broad appeal.
Not that you’d know if you’d read their book, The Bad Boys of Brexit (now available online for as little as £1.10). “Written” by Banks (it was actually ghostwritten by sometime journalist and now Mrs Tice, Isabel Oakeshott), the self-serving vanity project portrays the group as a bunch of absolute lads yanking Britain out of the world’s most successful trading bloc for a lark.
And if they have a few beers along the way? Don’t mind if I do, squire! The Inbetweeners do geopolitics, if you will.
In fact, so compelling was their story that Hollywood came calling, with it being reported in 2017 that a major studio was poised to sign a £60 million deal with Farage and Banks to turn it into a film. Publisher and LBC presenter Iain Dale said at the time that “Having conquered Europe it seems The Bad Boys of Brexit are about to woo Hollywood”.
You didn’t miss it at the cinema: the film never came out. A year later, it emerged Dale had never been to a meeting about it and he described Banks as having a touch of the “fantasist” about him.
“Strangely, given I held the rights, I never actually got to go [to the meetings]. And whenever I said I need to meet these people, there was always an excuse why I couldn’t,” said Dale. Farage, meanwhile, dodged a bullet. The name being tipped to play him – possibly by Farage himself – was, er, Kevin Spacey.
The band then descended into acrimony. In 2018, a cache of private emails apparently linked to the book found their way to the Sunday Times (Matt Hancock learned nothing from this). These emails revealed that Banks and Wigmore had held multiple undisclosed meetings with Russian officials, including ambassador Alexander Yakovenko and diplomat Alexander Udod, between 2015 and 2017.
Oakeshott, writing for the Sunday Times at the time, wrote that Banks and Wigmore had been “shamelessly used by the Russians” (Banks dismissed the allegations as a political witch-hunt and downplayed the meetings as casual lunches).
Since then, Banks has devoted his time to half-hearted and unsuccessful political campaigning and hard right social media posting. Last year he was Reform’s candidate for the West of England mayoralty, a role he derided as a “meaningless job” with little power to help anyone in an interview just days before voters went to the polls (he told a Times journalist – in an interview in which he “poured himself a second glass of red wine” at midday – that polls showing he had a chance of winning were “a bit worrying” and that he was “hoping for an honourable second”).
Otherwise, during Wales’s Senedd election this spring he posted “Welsh Lad?” on X in response to a Plaid Cymru election video fronted by Elbashir Idris, a Black community organiser and Welsh-Sudanese man from Cardiff. And just last month he hit an absolute nadir, posting on, yes, X: “Going through Heathrow today, there wasn’t one white face in security or airport services. The Home Office is staffed by the type of people we are trying to keep out! What hope?”
What hope, indeed? If Farage truly believes that a reunion with Banks, and the wider Leave.EU mob – a mob too crackers for Dominic Cummings – is the key to stopping the broad realignment with Europe with every poll shows that the electorate wants, then his political antennae are even more skewed than his recent erratic decision-making has suggested.
So bring on the Bad Boys of Brexit tour 2027 – and let’s see how long-forgotten hits like Every Turk is Coming to Britain play now.
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