I should state upfront that I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy. I know next to nothing about UK politics and parliament. I know there are two big parties, Labour and Conservative, and a number of smaller ones. I can name a few prime ministers – Winston Churchill, of course, Maggie Thatcher, of course, and Tony Blair. I vaguely remember someone named Major and a Neil somebody. In short, I’m the perfect person to do a Brexit recap.
Brexit, to an outsider, made no sense. I’ve always thought of the British as being a thoroughly sensible people, except for cricket. So how did these sensible people get themselves bogged down in what those who knew a lot more about the situation than I did called Brexit – the biggest crisis in the UK since the end of WWII? How could the nation that gave us the Magna Carta, Shakespeare, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones produce such an unholy mess? Having tumbled higgledy-piggledy into the Brexit pit, how did British politicians turn it into a cesspool?
The immediate fallout
Keep in mind that although 51.9% of those who voted ticked Leave, 73% of the 650 MPs supported Remain. About 90% of Labour MPs favoured Remain, but roughly 70% of their constituents voted Leave. Even 56% of Tory MPs wanted to stay in the EU. PM David Cameron strongly urged voters to choose Remain. Three weeks after his humiliating defeat, Cameron not only resigned as PM, he left parliament altogether. He didn’t want to have to deal with the dog’s breakfast that he and his party had served up.
Pundits thought the most vocal Leave MP, Boris Johnson (aka BoJo), would take over. Other names were bandied about: Amber Rudd, Liam Fox, Dominic Raab, Andrea Leadsom, but they all said they had other things to do, like shampoo their hair. Theresa May became prime minister by default. Reversing her support for Remain, she assured her Tory colleagues: “Brexit means Brexit.” Dealt a bad hand, she played it poorly.
May’s doomed efforts
One of the many ironic aspects of this fiasco was that May thought she might improve her chances of getting a deal by increasing her thin Conservative majority in parliament, so she called a snap election. Instead of winning more seats, Tories lost seats. May had to cut a deal with the 10-member Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to maintain her majority. DUP was 100% hardline Brexit, contrary to the Northern Irish public who voted Remain by 11 points in 2016.
Poor Tessie tried and tried and tried again to get parliament to approve her withdrawal agreement with the EU, and she failed and failed and failed again. She was stifled at every step by a minority of Conservatives known popularly as the Brextremists.
They numbered fewer than one in three Tories, but they made a lot of noise, and were led by MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who could easily be cast as one of Monty Python’s upper-class twits. If she wasn’t being zapped by the Brextremists, she was being whacked by the DUP or poked by Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. Half of May’s cabinet threatened to resign if she accommodated the Brextremists and the other half threatened to resign if she asked the EU for a longer extension. Tessie had fewer friends in her party than a brown marmorated stink bug.
A fractured parliament
Over on the other side of the chamber, Labour split into four factions: moderate Remainers, moderate Leavers, leftist Remainers (the biggest group) and leftist Leavers (the smallest group but one that included then Labour leader Corbyn). Corbyn told his people to vote against May, hoping to bring down her government so that he could move into 10 Downing Street, while Tessie tried to placate the Brextremists and keep her party from imploding. Parliament had become the hell-broth that the three witches in Macbeth cooked up, toiling and troubling, boiling and bubbling.
In 2019, parliament rejected four eminently sensible motions:
1. Customs union avoiding a hard border for Northern Ireland: defeated by three votes.
2. Common market like Norway had with the EU: defeated by 21 votes.
3. Confirmatory public vote in which voters would confirm any Brexit deal parliament came up with: defeated by 12 votes.
4. Parliamentary supremacy which would a) compel parliament to seek an extension if it couldn’t reach a deal before 10 April, and b) if the EU rejected an extension parliament would vote either to crash out with no deal, or to revoke Article 50 and remain in the EU until they could get their act together. Parliament didn’t like this one at all, defeating it by 101 votes.
This happened on April Fools’ Day, of course. Tessie tried again in May and failed again. Lord knows she gave it her all. Fed up, she resigned. Enter BoJo Johnson to shepherd the UK out of the EU. Britons waved bye-bye to the EU on 31 January 2020. Less than a month later, Britons said hello to Covid-19.
Is hindsight 20/20?
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp recently admitted to his Tory colleagues that the Johnson-led government did not have its act together at the time the UK left the EU. Regarding refugees claiming asylum, he said: “Because we’re out of the European Union now … we can’t any longer rely on sending people back to the place where they first claimed asylum.” So much for BoJo’s promise that once out of the EU, Britain would “take back control” of immigration.
During all the to-ing and fro-ing 2016–19, Sky News interviewed a fresh flower importer, Paul Smith. He said: “if Brexit isn’t worked out … everything will be affected – my family, my house, my staff … we’ve been trading for 33 years.” Yet he had voted Leave. He explained: “when I voted, I really didn’t think about the business side of it.”
Since 2020, a lot of Britons have thought about all sides of Brexit. A YouGov poll in January 2025 found the following:
- 55% think leaving the EU was the wrong move
- 30% think it was the right move
- 18% of Leave voters now think it was the wrong move
- 75% of 18–24-year-olds too young to vote in 2016 think Brexit was the wrong move
- 62% think Brexit has been a failure
- 32% of Leave voters think Brexit has been a failure
- 55% would like the UK to rejoin the EU
- 20% of Leave voters would support rejoining the EU
- 60% of Leave voters would support “a closer relationship” with the EU
EU-UK deal
So, I heard the BBC announce that the UK and EU have struck a deal. PM Keir Starmer called it a “win-win”. In my humble opinion it’s a sorta-win-sorta-win. Briefly, it will:
- Ease some, but not all, trade and travel restrictions across borders
- Extend the agreement to allow EU fishing in UK waters
- Give the UK access to the EU defence loan program
- Provide closer cooperation on crime and migration
Not an ideal deal but half a loaf is better than a nothing loaf, although not as good as the whole loaf UK used to have before February 2020. It needs to receive formal approval from both sides.
This Yank wishes only the best for the great nation that gave the world bangers and mash, mushy peas and beans on toast. I will keep my fingers crossed. Maybe there’s light at the end of the Channel Tunnel.
