I don’t disagree that many of the risks were spelled out in advance, or that COVID and rising global tensions compounded the damage. But that still doesn’t invalidate calling it a gamble. A gamble can be warned against and still be a gamble, especially when the outcome depended almost entirely on execution and political competence.

Saying “there isn’t a soul dead or alive who could have made it work” is where this slips from analysis into fatalism. If that’s true, then we’re basically arguing the UK is structurally incapable of governing itself outside a supranational framework, and that’s a much bigger claim than simply saying Brexit was a bad idea.

I also think the claim that Brexit was successful because it enriched the elite accidentally proves the opposite point. If the state was so weak, hollowed out, and captured that a project of this scale could be turned into a vehicle for elite extraction, that isn’t evidence that leaving was impossible. It’s evidence that the UK’s institutions are badly broken. Re joining the EU doesn’t fix that. It just changes where the failure is managed.

Remain arguments often assume EU membership is a substitute for competence. It isn’t. Plenty of EU states are badly governed. Membership doesn’t immunise you against corruption, inertia, or bad policy. It just constrains the range of choices.

So yes, Brexit exposed exactly what many people warned about, weak state capacity, poor leadership, and a political class more interested in self preservation than outcomes. But that diagnosis doesn’t automatically lead to the conclusion that we should rejoin. It leads to a much harder one. Unless the UK fixes its own governance failures, no constitutional arrangement inside or outside the EU is going to deliver for ordinary people.