During his Sunday morning broadcast rounds, Michael Gove, the arch-Brexiteer and now U.K. cabinet secretary in charge of leveling up, repeated a claim he’d made countless times before: Brexit, he said, had been "a significant success for this country.”
Even a veteran spinner like Gove struggled to sustain the assertion. "What planet has this lunatic been living on?” asked Australian vlogger Peter Stefanovic in a viral video detailing all the ways Brexit has exacerbated economic weaknesses.
It may seem like little has changed in the Conservative Party’s attitude toward Brexit. After all, the Tories just promoted Rishi Sunak, who enthusiastically backed Brexit even before Boris Johnson, to the top job. Sunak then controversially reappointed Suella Braverman to the Home Office, a move widely seen as a sop to the most Brexity wing of his party. There is also a ticking legislative bomb in the form of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which unilaterally scraps large parts of the divorce agreement that governs trade in Northern Ireland.