Who are the 10 biggest villains of Brexit?

Five years on, with only 30 per cent of voters saying that leaving the EU was the right decision, more Leave voters saying Brexit has been a failure than a success, and with the nation poorer as a result, it is time to take stock of where the blame lies…

The numero uno head honcho of Brexit opportunism: a journalist who built his career on writing anti-EU stories from Brussels and a politician who saw the leadership of the Leave campaign as his chance to become prime minister. If it had served his ambition better, he could just as easily have backed Remain. An exceptional campaigner, he helped Leave win and, after a detour on the way to No 10, won the 2019 election that settled the issue. Then he proceeded to make the most almighty mess of it, negotiating a bad exit deal and losing control of immigration policy.

The plausible City trader with a pub bore’s easy solution to every problem, he rallied British public opinion, always suspicious of “Europe”, with the simple answer: just get out. He was brilliant at it and at avoiding the trap of outright xenophobia that might have marginalised him. Even so, he was judged too toxic to be allowed near the official Leave campaign (Vote Leave) and was only able to get back onto the public stage because of the incompetence of the mainstream politicians charged with implementing the referendum decision.

It was Gove’s defection to the Leave cause that hurt David Cameron the most. He was the first serious cabinet minister to endorse withdrawing from the EU, which until that point had been an extreme and slightly cranky position. He brought intellectual weight to the argument; in his case, sincerely made, and paved the way for Johnson to take the customer-facing role at the head of the campaign.

The wild genius of the Leave campaign, the energy of his ideas carried him far beyond his early beginnings as chief of staff to Iain Duncan Smith, the doomed Tory leader of the mid-Blair years. Without the simplicity of his focus on the NHS, with control of immigration playing an underlying bass line throughout, the result of the referendum would have been in doubt. After the vote, however, he made the mistake of thinking he could install Johnson as prime minister but run the country himself. It was bound to end in tears.

The reputation of the saint of European centrist solidarity has been tarnished since she stood down as German chancellor four years ago, shortly after Brexit. As the dominant force in EU politics, she could have given David Cameron concessions on the free movement of people that might have swung the referendum for Remain. But at the time, she was waving one million asylum seekers into Germany, mostly from Syria, and insisted on the movement of people as one of the fundamental “four freedoms” of the EU.

Hubris gets them all in the end. Cameron thought he had called Alex Salmond’s bluff by letting him have a Scottish independence referendum and winning it. He thought he could win an EU referendum too, against the kind of people he called “swivel-eyed loons”. He seemed genuinely surprised when Gove and Johnson turned against him. Part of his calculation was that he thought his successor as leader of the Tory party was likely to be a Leaver, and that a referendum was inevitable; therefore it was better for him to fight it. George Osborne was wise to disagree.

She started it all in the last few years of her premiership. Having campaigned for “Yes” in the 1975 referendum to confirm membership of the European Community; having signed up to the single market in the Single European Act of 1986; she took a stand against further European integration in her Bruges speech in 1988. Her defiant “No, no, no” in the Commons – to a European state with a parliament, an executive and a senate – helped trigger her downfall in 1990, and create a myth of her stand against European political union.

The lifelong opponent of a “bankers’ Europe” sabotaged Labour’s contribution to the Remain campaign. Hiding behind a refusal to work with the hated Tories, he ended up campaigning ineffectually to stay in the EU only because the overwhelming majority of Labour members wanted him to. And who can forget – I am sorry, I mean, who can remember – the position he got himself into in the 2019 election? It was that, as prime minister, he would renegotiate Johnson’s Brexit deal and put it to the British people in another referendum, in which he would not take a view either way.

In the decades before the referendum, The Sun, The Times, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph all enjoyed a running campaign of blaming the EU for all sorts of terrible things that no one can remember now at the behest of proprietors who were ideologically opposed to European integration. By the time of the referendum, the power of the press had been diluted as the media moved online, but by then, so much damage had been done.

The crowning paradox of Blair’s premiership was that he sought to put Britain at the heart of a new, enlarged EU. He had some success until the Iraq war turned most of “old” Europe against him, but his policy towards the 10 new member states that joined in 2004 helped pave the way for Brexit. He decided – ignoring warnings from Jack Straw and John Prescott – to allow new EU citizens free movement to the UK from day one, instead of imposing a transition period of up to seven years. When 800,000 Poles arrived over the next decade, “free movement” became a controversial and divisive issue.

We do need to note, however, that leaving the EU was a decision made by the British people at the ballot box, in a democratic exercise in which more people voted than in any election. If Brexit was a mistake, there are more than 10 people who made it.