In fact, the figure that comes closest to a “Britain Trump” in 2025 shows how the Brexit story is now eating its own tail. His name is Jeremy Clarkson, and he is a TV quiz show host, a farmer (with a TV show about that), a journalist who writes about cars and a newspaper columnist. He was fired from the BBC for punching a producer. He has never stood for election in his life. But he is edging his way into politics. In November 2024, Clarkson found himself speaking at a rally of farmers infuriated by the Labour government’s inheritance-tax policies. He articulated — as he regularly does in his columns — raw hatred for Keir Starmer and the metropolitan, lawyerly, woke, overeducated (Clarkson never went to college), patronizing disdain for ordinary people that he believes Westminster politics represents. “It was hard,” Tom McTague wrote at the time, “not to hear the distant sounds of the great populist panjandrum across the water.”
In February this year, however, Clarkson declared, referring to Brexit, “If I encounter someone who still thinks it was all a brilliant idea, I get so cross my hair catches fire and my teeth start to itch.” Why does he hate it so? Because it has made everything worse, slower, more bureaucratic and more irritating. It means endless form-filling and standing in line just to get into France. And there’s no upside because Britain is even more at the mercy of its conventional political class than ever. “We are told it’s better to be governed by a democratically elected Parliament than some bankers in Brussels, but I’m not sure about that,” Clarkson announced in his column. “I’d certainly prefer the bankers to Starmer.” He added: “I’d prefer anything. The fourth form of my local school. My dogs. Trump, even.”
If he were prime minister, Clarkson said, he would crawl on his hands and knees to ask to be let back into the E.U. Here is where the Trump story and the Brexit story have definitively come apart. “Britain Trump” loathes Brexit in 2025 because Brexit has become the new establishment, a symbol of a political elite that dare not say what everyone can see: that nothing is working.
For some committed Brexiteers, Trump’s Liberation Day on April 2 offered hopes for redemption. The announcement that Britain would face only 10 percent tariffs on its exports, compared with 20 percent for the E.U., was claimed as evidence of a long-deferred Brexit dividend. Finally, the ideological affinity between MAGA and the Brexit movement had paid off. Britain’s preferential status would enable it to forge ahead, while the rest of Europe remained firmly in Trump’s naughty book.
That reward didn’t last long. Within a week, Trump announced a 90-day pause on his “reciprocal” tariffs and a new global rate of 10 percent. Brexit Britain was now lumped together with everyone else. But then on May 8 came euphoria for the Brexiteers: a trade deal between the United States and Britain was unveiled in the Oval Office, which Trump said would not have been possible if Britain were still in the E.U. Within moments, Johnson was announcing that Brexit had finally delivered after all. Hannan got to his feet in the House of Lords to declare that global Britain — which earlier in the week struck another trade deal with India — was back.
