One of the best stories about British showbiz involves a young act struggling to cope with a tough Glasgow crowd in the 1960s. Mike Winters bounds onstage and belts out one of the hits of the day, to first indifference and then simmering hostility. As the song continues, the tension grows, until just as Mike comes to a crescendo, his brother Bernie pokes his head through the theatre curtains, crosses his eyes and emits his trademark “Eeeeeeee”. The space for applause and laughter is filled by complete silence, broken only by a disconsolate Glaswegian voice from the stalls: “Oh Christ, there’s two of them.”
Reading a tweet by Annunziata Rees-Mogg, sister of Jacob, the other day, I felt Glaswegian.
“So Europe now controls Gibraltar’s border. Lammy should be in the Tower of London,” she wrote on X on Wednesday. It was one of 22 messages Annunziata posted that day, mostly raging blindly at David Lammy or Rachel Reeves but occasionally delivering a fascinating insight into the struggle and pain of being a wealthy upper-middle-class woman in today’s Britain (“I love potatoes and buy a lot… My local farm shops only sell sacks of varieties I don’t like, mainly Marfona – which I’ve never seen in a supermarket but has an unpleasant taste”).
Setting aside the great potato crisis of 2025, what’s really got Ms Rees-Mogg steamed, boiled, mashed and fried is Britain’s new deal with the European Union over Gibraltar. This preserves easy passage between Spain and the Rock for the 15,000 people who cross the land border every day for work, while also avoiding checks on goods that cross too. Nine long years of post-Brexit negotiation, during which Spain has repeatedly threatened to harden the border in order to reduce the risk of unchecked products flowing into the EU, are finally over.
Yet it does not matter to Annunziata Rees-Mogg that nearly a decade of paralysing uncertainty for local businesses is at an end. She, and other Brexiteers, are furious that (much in the manner of dual passport controls at Eurostar’s St Pancras terminal), Spanish border officials will work alongside Gibraltarian British staff at Gibraltar airport’s passport control. This prevents British citizens from arriving there and continuing straight into Spain and the entire Schengen zone unchecked by any representative from one of the EU countries. It’s an eminently sensible trade-off, which is why Nigel Farage calls it “yet another surrender”.
This government seems to create new disappointment every day, but one reason to be optimistic is its clearance of logjams that have hampered businesses and clogged up civil service in-trays for years. Limbo is being abolished. Strikes have (for now) been settled, world trade deals signed off, Brexit made a bit less nasty. This is pragmatism and progress.
And now another long-running issue has been put to bed, with Gibraltar’s chief minister Fabian Picardo, who helped negotiate the deal, saying it will “protect future generations of British Gibraltarians and does not in any way affect our British sovereignty”. If Annunziata Rees-Mogg, Farage, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and the other voices raised in protest disagree with that, they should ask the people of Gibraltar – who in 2016 voted 98% to remain in the EU, fearful that it might restrict their easy access to the EU. David Lammy, you might say, is implementing the will of the people.
Or you might say he belongs in the Tower as a traitor. For this is the way our post-Brexit conversation is going to go now, until the whole bad idea is finally forgotten: Annunziata Rees-Mogg bounds onstage and belts out a song of sovereignty. And then Nigel Farage pokes his head through the curtains, and a voice in the darkness sighs that the comedians are back.
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