And then there was the Thames flotilla.
Boris Johnson’s sister — and ardent Remain campaigner — Rachel Johnson still sounds half-amused, half-horrified recalling the moment she boarded a boat with the rock star Bob Geldof to protest against Nigel Farage’s flotilla of pro-Brexit fishermen.
The image of celebrities and metropolitan figures shouting at fishermen from a luxury boat became, in miniature, the accusation Brexit campaigners had leveled all along: that an establishment elite was sneering at people whose lives it neither understood nor respected.
At the time, the spectacle felt absurd. Looking back, it captured something deeper about the referendum campaign’s cultural divide.
“It seemed to crystallize,” Johnson said, “what many people really hated about the Remain campaign.”
What strikes me going back over these moments 10 years later is how little of Brexit now feels self-contained. The referendum was not just a vote about Europe. It was the moment Britain’s political system, media culture and party loyalties began mutating into the form we now recognize.
The arguments unleashed in 2016 were never really resolved. In many ways, we are still living inside them.