Gove’s Brexit lies pay off

The Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson once proposed the following course of action for a politician who he felt had done the nation irreparable harm. He would drive to their house, throw a typewriter through their front window in “an act of lunatic violence, then soak him down with mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high powered ‘Ball Buster’ cattle prod.”

In Britain, we give them their own TV shows, newspaper columns and book deals. Or we make them editor of the Spectator.

I don’t know how much Michael Gove will trouser as the new editor of the influential right wing weekly, but he doesn’t do cheap. After being sacked by Theresa May in 2016, Gove did eight hours work a week for the Times for the princely sum of £150,000 a year.

Neither is the Spectator’s new owner Paul Marshall regarded as a miser. He has already thrown a reported £70m-plus down the diseased “Conservatives plus conspiracies” hole of GB News.

Meanwhile Gove’s old partner in the official Leave campaign, Boris Johnson, is about to begin the publicity tour for his memoir Unleashed. Having already earned £5m since being thrown out of office – the Mail pay him £1m a year for a useless column – the shiftless Partygate liar hopes to add another £3.5m to his pot through sales, syndication and other activities around the book. Johnson must be delighted to have been handed a half-hour prime-time BBC special with Laura Kuennsberg on October 3 in which to promote it.

As for the leader of the unofficial Leave campaign, Nigel Farage has recently been forced to reveal that as well as his new parliamentary salary of £91,346 plus expenses and housing costs, he has been earning £1m a year from non-parliamentary activities. That includes close to £100,000 a month from Marshall’s GB News sinkhole (Farage disputes this figure but has not said what the real one is).

In short, Brexit has been a nice little earner for Gove, who shamefully denigrated experts and lied about Turkey joining the EU. It has also been lucrative for Johnson, who also lied about Turkey, as well as lying about everything else.

It has worked out pretty well too for Farage, who promised he would leave the country if Brexit failed, then admitted it had failed, then became an MP – although to be fair, he continues to leave the country on a regular basis. Just remember – Brexit means never having to say you’re sorry.

Alas it seems the Brexit dividend is limited purely to Brexiteers. It has not been a nice little earner for the rest of us, with an estimated hit to GDP of 4% per year. I doubt those who will be at the National Rejoin March on September 28 are feeling the benefit.

Good luck, and good weather to them. As for the sometime MP for Clacton, the author of Unleashed and the new editor of the Spectator… where’s that cattle prod?