Meet the Brexiteers who moan that Brexit has made them unpopular

Instead, let’s take a beat to think of the ones who have suffered most: The Brexiteers themselves.

This, at least, seems to be the message from those on the Leave side now beginning to share their memories of the referendum campaign. After 10 years of soul-searching, they have concluded that they were completely right, that we were completely wrong and that our ingratitude and stubborn refusal to recognise their genius is the only downside of the glory that is Brexit. Enough about poor old thee, what about me, me, me?

The self-pity party began with Sarah Vine’s memoir last year, in which the Daily Mail columnist spoke of her shock and disappointment at no longer being invited to karaoke nights with David and Sam Cameron after her then-husband Michael Gove had stabbed their best mates in the back. 

“You’d find a few tipsy grown-ups warbling through Jolene and air-guitaring madly through Stairway To Heaven,” she wrote of the halcyon days when the four were still chums and at Chequers, “evening drinks were by the fire in the great hall, sprawled in the deep sofas facing each other, mags on the ottoman; swimming through White Ladies, a cocktail that Dave had perfected: slugs of tart lemon juice, sweet Cointreau and an extra cosh of vodka.”

The irony of these Gatsbyesque gambols going on during the imposition of the crippling austerity measures that made Cameron and George Osborne deeply unpopular ahead of the EU referendum seemed to have escaped Vine, as so much does.

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Now the anniversary is leading others to reflect with a similar lack of self-reflection. Vote Leave co-founder Matthew Elliott moaned to the Telegraph that even though in his view Brexit had been a “100 per cent” success, “there were occasions when we were basically invited along to little dinner parties to be pilloried by everybody else, and to be figures of fun… it was a very difficult few years.” 

Another bitter winner is Douglas Carswell, the former Ukip MP who has since used his Brexit freedoms to move to Mississippi, USA. In a chapter of Anthony Seldon’s new book The Brexit Effect, he writes: “Sometimes when our detractors really meant to insult us they’d call us swivel-eyed loons… Before the vote, we Leavers were dismissed as eccentrics; in its wake, the media recast us as racist extremists or even Kremlin stooges… The demonisation of those of us who had won a free election fair and square was relentless, personal and nasty. A few weeks after the result, my eight-year-old daughter was asked to leave her London school.”

It seems strange that Carswell is so upset at having been cast as a swivel-eyed racist extremist in 2016 when he is certainly one in 2026, with his calls for the mass deportation of Muslims and his social media posts including “From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free.”

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Meanwhile, it’s not hard to feel sorry for Carswell’s daughter – after all, her dad is Douglas Carswell. Yet since he offers no further explanation or evidence, a cynic would conclude that the idea of a junior school kicking out a sitting MP’s daughter at age eight, purely because her father’s political beliefs were causing discord during playground hopscotch, seems fishy. 

Every bit as accurate, perhaps, as Carswell’s decade-old predictions about what would happen in the event of a Leave victory (“we will retain unrestricted access to the single market – that is actually far more straightforward than many people assume”; a “free trade (deal) would be relatively straightforward between the United Kingdom and America”).

Vine, Elliott and Carswell sound like modern-day descendants of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the National Assembly member who in 1789 proposed an efficient execution machine. As friends and colleagues found themselves under the blade, his social invitations dried up, his enthusiasm waned, and his family begged the French government to stop using their surname to describe Joseph-Ignace’s killing device as it was making them unpopular. 

In their eyes, the Guillotins, not the guillotined, were the real victims. As with the Brexiteers, it was a sad case of losing your head.