This week, the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum was overshadowed by the excitement surrounding King of the North, Remainer Andy Burnham’s, latest steps to take over the running of the country from the clump of the south, Keir Starmer. There isn’t even a Question Time to mull over the bloodless chopping of a prime minister – the sixth since the fateful Leave vote a decade ago. Nor will there be QTs during any leadership contest or coronation of Andeh.
Expensive to make, the programme finished on 4th June, whereas in 2016 QT obsessives will tell you it ended for the summer on July 7th. The cash-strapped BBC prefers to save money by sacking £30,000 a year wallahs in the sticks, while keeping £30,000 an hour Fiona Bruce, and making less telly.
I won’t bother you with a list of panellists from June 2016, other than to report they were pretty much the same yawn of bores from a tiny incestuous Westminster gene pool that we get now, minus the ones who’ve died. Not to worry. Shall we take the vacuum as an opportunity to tell our own Brexit decade stories? I think we might as well. I’ll go first.
On the actual night, I was watching history being made on TV while commenting on Fatty Fawkes’ inferior Order Order politics weblog. In those days, it was both free to use and enjoyed by many lively contributors.
I was up all night – perhaps you were too – with the bantz being off the scale as Boris Johnson conceding defeat to someone on the Underground seagued from a narrow win for Remain in the first declaration at studenty Newcastle Central to a massive Leave majority in Sunderland. The dye was being cast as Fatty’s finests’ fingers finessed the Fawkes website.
In my part of the world, there had been one or two Remain posters – often in the fields of farmers who had some kind of obligation to the NFU or the Tories – and a mass of Leave material.
Dimbleby was less well prepared. The Charterhouse old boy’s face turned pale as one side of the BBC’s coverage screen rattled through the Leave provinces, while the other side occasionally clanked a London borough or bit of Scotland.
By early morning, the victory was complete. What happens now, asked Mrs AWS. Harking back to the killing off of the Poll Tax, I assured her that the Civil Service would have planned for all eventualities. Mr Cameron would be handed a folder to read out from the dispatch box, and Plan B would be enacted with due haste.
How wrong I was! Mr Cameron, who spent the campaign telling us he wasn’t a quitter, quit. The political, legal, media elite in London did everything they could to reverse the will of the people until Mr Johnson (who repaced Mrs May, who’d replaced Mr Cameron, and who was to be replaced Mrs Truss, who was repaced by Mr Sunak, who was replaced by Mr Starmer, and who is about to be replaced by Mr Andeh) managed a stonking 80 majority in his ‘Get Brexit Done’ election of December 2019.
By which time, the gods of bantz saw me, not joining in the lolz below the line on Fatty’s, but authoring the December 2019 pre-election Question Time Reviews after recently taking over from the late, impressive and sorely missed Roger Ackroyd.
How so? We must turn the clock back to 2018, when Fatty got himself into a tangle by sneering at Jeremy Corbyn for attending an April Passover Seder organised by Jewdas, a radical, far-left Jewish group who don’t recognise Israel as a Jewish homeland.
The event was revealed by the ultra, hard, far, extreem right-wing blog amid severe allegations of institutional antisemitism within Corbyn’s Labour Party. Mainstream
Jewish organisations strongly condemned Corbyn’s attendance, viewing it as an insult to the community due to Jewdas’s history of anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.
Meanwhile, Guido Fawkes faced fierce criticism for hosting alleged rampant racism and antisemitism, primarily driven by its unmoderated “below-the-line” commenters. Critics argued the site’s provocative right-wing stories deliberately acted as dog whistles to attract ‘toxic bigotry’. Gosh.
Editor Paul Staines defended this as free speech, utilising offshore servers to bypass UK regulations while simultaneously utilising his joint British and Irish citizenship. His mother hails from Finglas in Dublin. He owns property in County Wexford. Ireland is listed as his country of residence for business purposes.
This shielded him from the immediate reach of UK internet regulations, making it exceedingly difficult and prohibitively expensive for individuals or political groups to mount speculative legal challenges against him.
When questioned about bypassing UK legal injunctions at Lord Leveson’s inquiry, he even told the court, “I’m a citizen of a free republic and, since 1922, I don’t have to pay attention to what a British judge orders my countrymen to do.” Listen to her!
As Fatty was about to find out, there are other ways and means. A leftie establishment, spearheaded by Owen Jones (not of this parish), used the race card against Fatty by selectively tweeting screenshots of allegedly bigoted and abusive comments made by “below the line” contributors.
Relying on insider Westminster tittle-tattle for above-the-line content, leaked by a political bubble now finding him toxic, Fatty folded and banned hundreds of his best contributors – including many Puffins and soon-to-be Puffins such as me.
When I contacted Staines and asked why, rather than explain the above, he called me ‘a small town Nazi’. One or two degrees up, or down, from the ‘small town taxi driver’ identity I understand he other-allocated to fellow-travellers in my position.
Incidentally, I must tell you this. As I was being thrown overboard, an honest-looking chap called George kindly offered to look after my car keys and wallet while I swam ashore, and email them to me when I safely reached a distant beach. Never heard from him again.
Besides Brexit, one of the other regular topics of conversation on Fatty’s was where people went when they were banned. G-P always got a mention. I had no idea what that meant, but recalled it during a few lonely days of not being able to post.
Eventually, the gods of browsing directed me to Going-Postal. Following a couple of weeks of lurking – after being told to keep my neck wound in and soak up the culture of the place before saying anything – I was welcomed to the fold with a resounding chorus of ‘f-offs’ from older and more experienced Puffins.
This brings us to the summer 2018, at the end of which I had an appointment in Lille which coincided with an appeal from Swiss Bob for articles. Why not write a postcard of somewhere you’ve been? Review the place. Tell a couple of funny stories and include some pictures. Game on.
I hammered something out and read it to my daughter. ‘Hmmm,’ she replied. ‘Instead, why not go way over the top, like you do when we have guests at meal times?’ Why not indeed.
The innocent ten-minute read ‘Postcard From Lille’ was rewritten as a 90-episode ‘Are We There Yet?’ memoir de derring-bravoure. Partway through, I had an opportunity to volunteer for the dubious last man standing battlefield promotion that is reviewing Question Time.
The rest is history! How about yourselves? What’s your post-Brexit experience? Tell us below the line, or, better still, write an article.
PS. Now that I have mastered the unblurring of photos using AI, some tall tales of derring-do omitted from ‘Lille’ for want of a good photo can now be told. Be afraid, be very afraid. Be as very, very afraid as a Remainer on June 23rd all those years ago.
© Always Worth Saying 2026
