The great Brexit bus delusion

I know many Leave voters. Most of my family. Around half of my friends. Lots of the people in the immigrant community in London I grew up in. (We’re bad immigrants, being anti-EU, so we never feature in the migrant-sympathetic commentary of EU-pining hacks.) And not one of them has ever said they chose Brexit because of that £350m-for-the-NHS thing on the side of a bus. The idea that that bus swung the referendum, that it duped the voting hordes, has become one of the great, and nasty, myths of the Brexit era.

The bloody bus is back in the news this week after Boris Johnson said he’d like to get our cash back from the EU and possibly give some of it to the NHS. Judging from the reaction to his words — reams of press outrage, a finger-wagging letter of condemnation from the UK Statistics Authority, a Twitterati on the floor, fanning itself, struggling to breath — you’d think Boris had driven the actual bus down Oxford Street or repeated verbatim its questionable claims.