The Brexiteers: where are they now?

The six prime movers behind Brexit are all white men who grasped this mighty political nettle in the prime of their professional lives. Some have prospered. Others, not so much. One became prime minister and another still might. Two have been given peerages but none has found the global Britain that they promised an easy place to do business, and none, 10 years on, is going out of his way to call Brexit a success.

The insurance broker who bankrolled Ukip and funded the insurgent Leave.EU campaign described himself as one of the “bad boys of Brexit” and claimed once to have washed down lunch with the Russian ambassador to London with vodka bottled for Stalin. Since 2016 his profile has dipped and he has focused mostly on business. Banks liquidated Leave.EU in 2022, reportedly writing off £7m. He could afford it, having sold his insurance firms in 2021 for about £100m – rather less than the £250m he was said to have been worth during the referendum.

Banks’s post-referendum ventures have seen mixed fortunes. He created Westmonster, a rightwing news site that folded in 2019, and stood for Reform UK to be west of England combined authority mayor in 2025, coming second. His business interests now include a racecourse and a country estate. He dropped out of the top 1,000 Sunday Times Rich List in 2018.

When he resigned as prime minister in 2022, Johnson said, “Like Cincinnatus, I am returning to my plough”, an allusion to the Roman dictator who retired before making a political comeback. His post-Whitehall career has involved a lot of tilling: £8m from corporate speaking gigs, a column for the Daily Mail, a bestselling memoir and the directorship of Better Earth, a consultancy created by the Canadian mining mogul Amir Adnani.

He has reaped a few weeds though. For his reported Better Earth salary of £120,000 a year, leaked documents showed he drafted letters to Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, touting for business. This raised questions about whether he had breached rules on post-government appointments. And the Covid inquiry has picked over the carcass of his premiership and his decisions about lockdowns, not to mention Partygate.

The “mad monk” of Brexit has returned to the political backrooms since resigning as chief adviser to Boris Johnson following his eye-test innovations at Barnard Castle during the pandemic. His Substack newsletter has 73,000 subscribers, some paying £10 a month to read his views on Westminster, and he runs a tech consultancy with modest assets.

In 2024 Cummings mused on setting up a new political party aimed at replacing the Conservatives, a plan he dropped in 2025 after a private dinner with Nigel Farage, who had once described his fellow disruptor as a “horrible, nasty little man”. He remains active on social media, reposting material by Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson.

The Ukip leader became the Brexit party leader in 2018, then incorporated and became leader of Reform UK. In 2024 he became an MP at the eighth attempt, representing Clacton-on-Sea. But for much of the post-referendum period, politics was a side hustle next to Farage’s media career as a presenter for LBC Radio, then GB News, not to mention his appearance on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! and thousands of Cameo video clips, some in praise of Canadian neo-Nazis and the IRA.

As Reform UK’s electoral fortunes have risen, so has scrutiny of Farage’s finances. An undeclared £5m gift from the Thailand-based donor Christopher Harborne is the largest we know of. Other gifts and earnings include Abu Dhabi grand prix tickets, £400,000 for promoting gold bullion, a portfolio of four properties and dozens of speaking fees.

The founder of the Vote Leave campaign was one of the original Eurosceptics and has followed a path traditional among politicos, moving between the media, politics and thinktanks. He remained a member of the European parliament until Brexit day and less than a year later was elevated to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson, becoming Baron Hannan of Kingsclere.

Despite pledging confidently that “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”, Hannan has continued to air his views in a Sunday Telegraph column and published various books on Brexit. This year he became director of the Institute for Economic Affairs, part of the Tufton Street network of libertarian lobbying organisations that was instrumental to the Brexit project.

After standing against Boris Johnson in the 2016 Tory leadership race, being sacked by Theresa May for disloyalty, then reinstated by her as environment secretary, then losing another leadership race in 2019, becoming the no-deal Brexit minister under Johnson, and eventually being sacked again by Johnson in 2022, Michael Gove might have been forgiven for wanting to tidy up his LinkedIn profile.

Earlier this year Gove sought to explain his 2016 betrayal of Johnson by saying the former London mayor had a “fundamental unseriousness” about the task of PM. Since leaving office he has returned to his roots as a journalist, editing the Spectator since 2024, although he retains a foothold in politics. In 2025 Rishi Sunak gave Westminster a parting gift in his resignation honours list by making his former housing secretary a life peer: Baron Gove of Torry in the City of Aberdeen.

Photographs by Samir Hussein/WireImage, Carl Court/Getty Images, David Tramontan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images, Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images, Leon Neal/Getty Images