The main institution which drove Britain out of the EU was the right-wing press. For decades, papers owned by oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch, Richard Desmond, and the Barclay brothers protected politicians that their journalists ought to have been holding to account, shifting the blame for their failures onto a convenient, fictionalised version of the European Union.
Any discussion of propaganda and the European referendum has to start within that context, rooted in a history of lies told not as fake news or Facebook memes, but in so-called respectable national papers, by liars who were not hidden behind anonymous Twitter accounts, but who proudly paraded on the bylines of their articles.
The original Brexit liar was the Telegraph Brussels correspondent from 1989 to 1994. Already controversial when he was appointed – he’d been sacked by The Times – this propagandist for the British establishment used his role to distract people from the struggles of the Tory government of the time by inventing a string of stories about the European Union, creating, as one of his fellow Brussels correspondents would later say, “an entire newspaper genre: the Euromyth, a story that had a tiny element of truth at the outset but which was magnified so far beyond reality that by the time it reached the reader it was false.”
