The Daily Express is demanding a ‘Proper Brexit’. What’s it talking about?

An extreme level of this, though, would be to launch a campaign for something which already happened a not inconsiderable time ago. To cancel Little Britain, say, or for Woolworth’s to stop decimating the teeth of our nation’s children with its delicious pick ‘n’ mix. Yet this is what happened this week when the Daily Express chose the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum to call for, er… Brexit.

“GIVE US A PROPER BREXIT” demanded the paper’s front page on Tuesday, a decade after the electorate voted for that and five-and-a-half years after it was delivered in almost the hardest way imaginable, with the UK leaving not only every political institution of the European Union but, with departure from the Single Market and Customs Union, cutting every formal economic tie too.

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Quite how much more of a Proper Brexit the current Brexit could be is unknown, and reading through the paper’s coverage over the past couple of days, now no clearer. The only firm policy the Express is demanding is for Britain to leave the European Con­ven­tion on Human Rights, which has nothing to do with Brexit. The ECHR has 46 member states, is not connected to the EU and would leave us alongside Russia and Belarus, who, even the most ardent Brexiteer might concede, are wrong ‘uns.

Last Tuesday, what a Proper Brexit wasn’t explained in any more detail; several pages instead being devoted to celebrating the small-circulation paper’s supposed huge role in delivering the referendum outcome.

“I had the determ­in­a­tion to do it and I was lucky that people like the Daily Express backed me very strongly and very staunchly,” Nigel Farage, never a man reticent to tootle his own bugle when handed it, told the paper.

“The Express cru­sade has been phe­nom­enal. In many ways, prior to the Express doing this, it was easier for the other side to say that Brexit was just a bunch of Far­ageis­tas. But then sud­denly, gosh, a national news­pa­per backed it. And isn’t it funny, it was the same national news­pa­per that cried foul on the appease­ment of Hitler back in the 1930s.” Isn’t it funny indeed!

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Interestingly, most commentators and, almost certainly, future historians tend to attest the success of the campaign more to the decision of the likes of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to join the Leave campaign and then decisively sideline the Farageistas, including Farage himself, rather than the backing of the paper behind Rupert Bear. But there you go.

The battle for a Proper Brexit, wrote Farage in an entirely separate op-ed the following day, had “exposed the gap between pat­ri­otic Brit­ish voters and the unpat­ri­ot­ic West­min­ster parties”. What patriotism meant to a man who has been exposed as getting a £5 million bung from a Thai-based cryptocurrency billionaire was not explained, alas, not just in Farage’s piece but in the paper more widely, which has not managed to find a single paragraph this week to cover his round of humiliating interviews over the subject.

But it’s an interesting philosophical question nonetheless. Can you campaign for something which has already happened? Is it somehow pulling at the strings of time? Are we in danger of some kind of Back To The Future-style disappearing photo scenario? One, perhaps, for our philosophy columnist, Nigel Warburton, to conjure with.

In the meantime, by Thursday the Express was back on its other hobby-horse: protecting “our cherished triple lock”, with shadow chancellor Mel Stride warning of the horrors to come should Britain’s already wealthy pensioners not continue to be given lots of money that everybody knows the country can’t afford. It’s surely only a matter of time before it’s campaigning for the end of decimalisation and the return of The Army Game and pear drops. Proper pear drops!