The Brex Factor: Blowing the doors off open immigration

The 84-year-old actor told an audience at the Venice Film Festival that he supported Brexit because ‘I’d rather be a poor master of my own fate than a rich servant of someone else’s’.

That’ll be the same Michael Caine who has not been poor for 60 years, who lives in a £10 million mansion set in 20 acres of Surrey countryside and whose net worth is estimated at £60million.

9 Terence Jones of Eltham

This pleasant-sounding correspondent to the Daily Express letters page believes that ‘the need is for all immigration to be stopped’ because ‘continentals look at their qualifications differently and exaggeratedly and our managers gullibly accept that’. ]

Not being a continental, one ‘Terry’ Jones was unable to exaggerate his way into a job when he stood in Eltham for UKIP in the 2001 general election. He polled 706 votes, narrowly missing out on defeating Labour incumbent Clive Efford by just the 17,149 votes.

8 Peter Whittle

‘It’s amazing the turnout at these hustings,’ tweeted the UKIP leadership favourite after their London debate. ‘It just proves this is NOT a dying party!’

Actual turnout at UKIP’s London hustings: Around 100. As Frank Zappa nearly said: ‘UKIP isn’t dead; it just smells funny.’

7 Peter Hargreaves

With friends like the billionaire co-founder of financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown, Brexit needs no enemies.

The man who gave £3.2 million to Leave.EU told the Sunday Times its leader Arron Banks was ‘very odd’, said the official Vote Leave campaign had been based on ‘porky pies’ and admitted that the one he backed was ‘a little bit racist.’

Happily he clarified that as far as he was concerned, Brexit ‘has been fantastic’ so far.

6 Theresa May

In 1893, Oscar Wilde described fox hunting as ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’. At Chequers 124 years later, fox hunting fan Theresa May served Tory bigwigs chicken lasagne with boiled potatoes.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

5 Anne Marie Waters

The Islam-bashing Kipper Joan of Arc admitted at a hustings in Basingstoke that she was ‘disorganised and impatient’. So, she’s overqualified to be leader of UKIP, then.

Dubliner Waters went on to tell a newspaper interviewer that her ‘core aim is to … dismantle this entire mess of a media’ – a welcome development if it means no more newspaper interviews with Anne Marie Waters.

4 David Coburn

‘We have to stop the EU open-door immigration policy,’ said UKIP’s Scottish leader three years ago, adding that ‘Scotland is lovely because it’s not full of people. That’s why a lot of people love Scotland’.

Coburn loves it so much that he’s now the proud owner of a mansion in Normandy, where he’s recently had a marble floor fitted in his hallway and where, of course, he has the right to reside as part of the EU’s open-door immigration policy.

3 Sarah Vine

The London opening of American war of independence musical Hamilton has been delayed, perhaps as the cast recoil in horror from the approval of Madam Gove. She told Spectator readers that having watched the show on Broadway, she was ‘struck by the (unintentional) parallels’ to Brexit, including ‘a rag-tag bunch of rebels standing up to an entitled and unelected elite’. True, because there’s nothing more rag-tag and non-elitist than a handsomely-funded campaign led by the then-Lord Chancellor and the just-retired Mayor of London, supported by a couple of billionaire newspaper owners … Vine added that her key takeaway from Hamilton was that ‘politics is not a popularity contest’. In which case, her husband is doing swimmingly.

2 Aidan Powlesland

The 100/1 outsider for UKIP’s leadership has outlined his commonsense manifesto and it’s literally out of this world. No more child benefits, tax credits, rail subsidies, maternity and paternity benefits and overseas aid.

The BBC’s budget will be cut in half and we’ll all have to pay £15 each time we want to see a doctor.

But on the upside we’ll be spending up to £25billion on a secret underwater missile base in the Falklands and another £5billion on an asteroid belt mining rocket, a crewed interstellar ship design, a flying aircraft carrier and more.

Aidan writes: ‘Of all the candidates I am the most painful candidate to vote for because I am the one who will change us most.’ He should have stopped halfway through that sentence…

1 Nigel Farage

Fresh from speaking at a far-right rally in Germany organised by the granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister, the nicotine-stained man-frog tweeted: ‘The EU isn’t desirable and it isn’t working. We need a Europe of democratic nation states who co-operate together.’

What, like some kind of … European union?