In January 2020, the self-described “Brexit Media Corps” gathered for a dinner at Brown’s Hotel in London. Organised by the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson and Leave-supporting hotelier Sir Rocco Forte, the meal started with a French convention done in a self-consciously British way – an amuse-gueule of watercress and potato soup served with smoked trout-topped crumpets.
But more than six years after that event and nearly 10 years after the referendum it celebrated, do the attendees still find Brexit so easy to swallow? And why?
Forte has since abandoned London in favour of Rome. Last year, he told the Telegraph that he considers Brexit a huge disappointment and blames the man to whom he donated £100,000 and whose victory he celebrated with a £12,000 dinner at Brown’s, Boris Johnson, for that. His co-host, Pearson, still trumpets Brexit in the pages of the same paper. At the end of this month, she’ll be one of the panellists at its “Big Debate: How to Make Brexit a Success” event.
The word “debate” is a bit of a misnomer there. Pearson will be joined by Lord Daniel Hannan, the Vote Leave co-founder turned Tory peer turned head of the Institute of Economic Affairs. There will also be Lord David Frost, Johnson’s fundamentalist Brexit negotiator, plus her apocalyptically minded columnist colleague Allister Heath, and the Tory political strategist and lobbyist James Frayne. To “enjoy” their furious agreement, Telegraph readers have stumped up £25 per head.
Turning back to the list of Brexit Media Corps dinner guests – proudly tweeted out by several attendees at the time – the person in the number one slot was Kate Andrews, then economics editor at the Spectator, now back in her home country of the USA as an opinion journalist at the Washington Post. In May 2026, she flew into Britain to write a piece about Sir Keir Starmer’s current travails. It featured not a single mention of Brexit.
Ross Clark, another Spectator writer who was at Brown’s that day, is not so circumspect. Both there and at his other regular berth, Spiked, he continues to bang the drum for Brexit.
In March, he wrote a column for the Spectator headlined “This is how Brexit dies”, decrying the government’s policy of pursuing closer alignment with Europe. He dismissed the widely accepted suggestion that leaving Europe has cost Britain 8% of GDP as “a fantasy figure” and claimed that all Britain needs is a “more competent occupant of No 11” to succeed. The Office for Budget Responsibility says both exports and imports will be around 15% lower in the long run than if the UK had remained in the EU.
Liam Halligan, co-host with Pearson of the Telegraph’s oxymoronically titled Planet Normal podcast, was also at the dinner. In the immediate aftermath of Brexit, he published a book called Clean Brexit: Why Leaving the EU Still Makes Sense, with the pro-Leave economist Gerard Lyons. He hasn’t changed his mind.
Last month, he wrote a Telegraph column purporting to prove that “the Brexit horror stories aren’t true”. He crowed that “the value of the UK’s total exports of goods and services has soared by more than 45% since mid-2016 – outstripping France, Italy and Germany”.
The problem with this – and many of the other claims he made in the piece – is that they’re highly selective. As the Centre for European Reform noted last year, while the UK’s nominal trade has grown, much of that growth was driven by elevated inflation. In real terms, UK trade volumes have grown just 1% on their 2019 levels, compared with 8% growth in the rest of the G7 and across the 27 EU nations.
Halligan’s conclusion – “if we so choose, Britain could soar economically outside the EU” – is just another variation of the now-common Brexiteer refrain: True Brexit simply hasn’t been tried. It’s a line that has been rolled out by many of his former comrades in the Brexit Media Corps.
Last month, in the Sun yet another dinner guest, Julia Hartley-Brewer, raged at the prime minister for suggesting greater alignment with the EU, writing dismissively of the “onerous problem of doing some extra paperwork to sell stuff to Europe” and wondering if “when [Starmer] spills his tea or stubs his toe, he blames that on Brexit as well”.
Last year, the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade said Brexit had created nearly 2bn extra pieces of paperwork for UK businesses, and Marks & Spencer admitted it had to dedicate an entire warehouse to storing the thousands of pages of documents produced when transporting goods between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. But Hartley-Brewer thinks that’s no big deal, so it’s obviously fine, right?
Andrew Pierce, the GB News host and Daily Mail contributor who also had a place at that January 2020 dinner, made himself look even more foolish than usual when he complained about airport queues in Madrid earlier this year. The fact that he campaigned and voted for the inconvenience seemed to be lost on him.
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In the pages of the Mail, he rages about the referendum: when Sir Olly Robbins was in the news, Pierce dubbed him “the Brexit betrayer”, and late last year, he concocted a conspiracy theory about a “malevolent trio hellbent on reversing Brexit”. Lord Alli, Tom Baldwin, and Tim Allen’s supposed plot doesn’t seem to have got anywhere yet, given that Starmer is still stubbornly sticking to his manifesto commitment not to go back in.
Over at the Times, Juliet Samuel – who was still at the Telegraph when she earned her spot at the Brexit Battalion dinner – used a recent column to explain, “I was a Remainer – this is why I was wrong”. In the article, she congratulates herself for not doing “the careerist thing” in 2016, while absolutely doing “the careerist thing” in 2026 by cobbling together a pro-Brexit argument for the Times, which increasingly resembles a more self-satisfied version of the Daily Mail under former Mail man Tony Gallagher.
She paints a picture of pre-Brexit Britain in which “wages were stagnant, whole regions were in decay, and we were (and are) propping up a broken model”. Boy, it’s all so different now, isn’t it?
Samuel concludes that “compared with the opportunity, the costs of Brexit are a rounding error”. The Times embedded a poll in the online version of the column asking, ‘How would you vote if there was a Brexit referendum today?’. As I write, 60% of the 19,214 votes were for Remain. It seems Times readers don’t agree with Times writers.
Another of the Brexit Battalion who has left Britain for Europe is Lionel Shriver, the novelist and Spectator columnist who wasn’t actually eligible to vote in the referendum. Last summer, she wrote in the Times that in her new home in Portugal “the red wine is both rich and cheap; the fish is fresh; the coastal walks are enchanting” and “it’s a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Heathrow, so I can keep a foot in both worlds”. The hypocrisy of Brexiteers is another one of those things that is “both rich and cheap”.
Tim Stanley, who was also among the Telegraph contingent at the Media Corps dinner, wrote in the paper last month that “Labour would be raving mad to reopen the Brexit culture war”. It was one of those columns that is so obviously disingenuous that you almost have to marvel at the gall of it.
Stanley writes, “some of us backed Brexit, suspecting it might make us poorer, but believing sovereignty is a gift from our ancestors, and calculated that it was worth the price”. Demanding respect for that line of thinking is like arguing you’re right to shoot yourself in the foot, as you could save money on shoes.
Looking through the current output of those who bundled into Brown’s to enjoy a rib of Angus beef or buttered cod in celebration of Brexit being “done” – whatever that means – back in January 2020 is like peering into a snow globe filled with swirling delusions. Those voices that cheered so loudly for Brexit then have either gone strikingly silent on the topic now or stuck resolutely to the same lines, sneering at anyone who suggests that the experiment has failed. That the Telegraph, which was so central to the media propaganda campaign in favour of Brexit, is still debating how to make it a success should be pause for thought, but thinking isn’t the point here.
When Allison Pearson, the co-host of that dinner, went to Wales to cover the recent elections there, she wrote that it felt “like that Brexit feeling all over again, the people preparing to rise up”. That’s what the Brexit cheerleaders in the press rely on; vibes and nationalist symbols, a vague sense of rebellion and an even vaguer set of shoddily framed statistics.
The Brexit Media Corps marches on because to admit they were wrong would be both a professional catastrophe and a personal humiliation.
Mic Wright is the author of Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t and Why it Matters
