Daniel Hannan, the man with no shame

“It was all a fib, a fiction, a falsehood, a fabrication,” Daniel Hannan wrote recently in the Telegraph. The reason for this sudden attack of pearl-clutching? Why, Rachel Reeves’s budget, of course.

“Labour was elected promising to maintain, with only a few tweaks, the broadly private economy,” Hannan wrote. “Once in office, it decided instead to drain every drop it could in taxes so as to firehose that money in the direction of its supporters.”

“That collapse of our economy,” Hannan boomed at his Telegraph readers, “is now a matter of time, for the government is stuck in a doom loop.”

The sight of Hannan complaining about politicians who make big promises that turn out to be nonsense and that tip the country into the economic mire is a reminder of both his total lack of self-awareness and his brass neck. He was at the centre of the Brexit project. It was Hannan who popped up on Newsnight in 2016 with a now notorious short film explaining why Britain would be better off after leaving the EU.

Hannan told viewers how post-Brexit Britain was poised to become a new Silicon Valley, how financial services would boom and how farmers would export all over the world. In Britain, food would become cheaper, energy would drop in price and taxes would fall.

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Every single one of those claims turned out to be, to borrow Hannan’s words, “a fib, a fiction, a falsehood, a fabrication”. Brexit achieved none of these things. It was an economic catastrophe. A recent paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a US policy institute, showed Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6-8%.

Hannan, however, is unrepentant, writing in the same Telegraph column, “when the Chancellor of the Exchequer tried to blame her tax rises on a deteriorating economy, or on 14 years of Tory rule, or on Brexit, she wasn’t just engaging in knockabout. She was cynically misleading everyone.”

In his mind, Brexit remains a spotless triumph, even though almost everyone agrees that its economic effects were in fact crushing. In another recent column, one clear-eyed Fleet Street commentator wrote: “Even Brexit’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders – including the leading lights of Reform – would concede that on almost every front, Brexit has so far proved a major disappointment.”

“Small state, low tax, free trade libertarians do not make natural bedfellows for anti-immigrant, nationalistic protectionists, yet this was the coalition required to give Brexit its majority.”

“In the event, Brexit has failed to enable either of these two conflicting visions. Instead, we’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds.”

Wise words indeed. And who was the commentator responsible for this sobering assessment? Why, it was Jeremy Warner, writing in, er, The Telegraph.

Perhaps the shame-free Hannan should spend less time looking up words beginning with “f” in the dictionary, and a bit longer reading the newspaper for which he writes.