Independence Day special: Lord Hannan of Kingslcere has no shame.

This came up in Private Eye the other day:

“What Britain looks like after Brexit. . . It’s 24 June 2025, and Britain is marking its annual Independence Day celebration. As the fireworks stream through the summer sky, still not quite dark, we wonder why it took us so long to leave. The years that followed the 2016 referendum didn’t just reinvigorate our economy, our democracy and our liberty. They improved relations with our neighbours. The United Kingdom is now the region’s foremost knowledge-based economy. . . Financial services are booming — not only in London, but in Birmingham, Leeds and Edinburgh too. . . Our universities are flourishing, taking the world’s brightest students and, where appropriate, charging accordingly. . . Britain has recovered its self-belief.” — Daniel Hannan MEP, Reaction, 21 June 2016

“Britain is turning into a Third World country. . . We are sliding into what used to be called the Third World. And the worst of it is that we don’t seem to care.” — Daniel (now Lord) Hannan, Telegraph, 14 June 2025

The funny thing is, I was in Britain on 25 June 2025, and I don’t recall hearing anyone talking about the Independence Day celebration the day before.

Whassup with that? Did the whole country throw a party and not tell me about it? Even if the festivities had ended the night before, you’d still expect to see a bit of residual vomit on the street the next day, no?

Out of curiosity I did some web searching, and, no, Britain does not have an annual Independence Day celebration on 24 June. Googling *britain independence day* leads you to this wikipedia page which states: “Currently the UK has no single official national day, although the King’s Official Birthday is used for this purpose in some contexts.” The King’s birthday is 14 June. Later on, the wikipedia page says: “Most of the suggested proposals for a British Day are already existing holidays or days of celebration in the UK which either are poorly marked by the government and the people, or are not readily associated with the idea of Britishness at present.” The listed dates are 1 May, 21 Apr, 8 May, 6 Jun, 7 Jun, 15 Jun, 24 Aug, 14 Oct, 21 Oct, 11 Nov, and the Sunday following 11 Nov. 24 Jun isn’t even listed as a possibility.

Googling *Daniel Hannan independence day* turns up lots of derisive references to the now-lord’s ill-fated 2016 article:

Daniel Hannan Day celebrates his chronicle of Brexit idiocy foretold, featuring the delightful image caption, “Dan is living proof that even halfwits and liabilities need not be excluded from the upper chamber.”

‘World’s wrongest man’: The Brexit prediction that went bad.

So, Daniel Hannan… have any of your post-Brexit Britain predictions come true?, which begins, “Did you enjoy the fireworks last night? The ones marking our annual Independence Day celebration? You missed them? That is a shame. Allow me to bring you up to date with some other things you may have missed,” and continues:

[Hannan] is like a preacher who promised the Rapture on a certain date and then has to explain to his disbelieving followers why it hasn’t happened. As sometimes happens with end-of-the-world cults, the followers refuse to adjust their beliefs to the failure of the prediction.

Sometimes they turn to rival preachers, who explain that the promise of deliverance was executed in the wrong way. Hence, Nigel Farage and his claim that the real Brexit has never been tried. Still, they will always have Hannan’s words to remind us of what could have been.

This all made me wonder how Hannan himself addressed the failures of his predictions on this year’s “Daniel Hannan Day.” I did some searching, starting with the charming Lord Hannan of Kingsclere page, currently featuring “Get ready to be expropriated” and “Where the Tory/Reform pact should begin,” and I went through his twitter feed, but nothing on Independence Day.

He loves to admit he was wrong . . .

But . . . he didn’t acknowledge his Day even once? Just to be sure, I googled *Daniel Hannan “I was wrong”*, and some things did come up:

– I was wrong about @BorisJohnson. Sir, I apologise, and I doff my hat in deep respect.

“I doff my hat in deep respect” . . . that sounds like sarcasm to me, but it seems that he was dead serious. I guess that’s just how Lords talk.

– I have held off from criticising the PM until now from a combination of sympathy, loyalty and even (if I’m honest) chivalry. I was wrong.

Here he’s talking about former U.K. prime minister Theresa May–apparently she was “the reason we’re in such a mess over Brexit.”

– I Was Wrong to Have Supported Obama.

Wow–kind of amazing that this guy ever supported Obama. What was his problem with John McCain, anyway? Ummm, Hannan has an answer to that: The same people who decried John McCain as a war-mongering nut (because he wasn’t Barack Obama) now praise him as a selfless hero (because he wasn’t Donald Trump). Funny old game, politics. So Hannan opposed McCain when he was running against Obama, but then he opposed him again when he voted against Trump in Congress. Some consistency there, I guess.

– I was wrong. The EU’s rage, like Caliban’s, is elemental. It will last for years, possibly decades, and we need to adjust our foreign policy . . .

– I predicted that Putin would draw back [and not invade Ukraine] . . . I was wrong. The boys from Langley and from Vauxhall Cross were right. However illogically, however self-woundingly, Putin has decided to stake his leadership on an attempt to hold down a population that has no intention of suffering Kremlin rule again.

– I suggested to the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, that he should begin with healthcare workers and care home staff. He disagreed, arguing the absolute priority was to save as many lives as possible.He was right and I was wrong. The British people have been admirably calm and level-headed, ignoring the deranged conspiracies of anti-vaxxers.

– Plenty of Conservative activists and MPs had wanted, quite rightly, to give the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt. They hoped that something unexpected might be announced, something beyond what had been publicly declared. Frankly, I was in this category myself . . . I was wrong.

– I started writing this column shortly before the 2016 election. I could not bring myself to support either candidate at the time and eventually wrote that if I had a vote, I would cast it for the Libertarian candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. In 2020, well aware (as most people were) of Biden’s cognitive decline, I again could not bring myself to back either candidate. I had hoped that those two elections were a blip. I was wrong.

– I assumed that, when it came to it, the EU would prioritise the economic interests of its 27 members. I was wrong.

– I’ve written a great deal over the years about Brussels corruption: the fraud, the waste, the tax-free perks, the entertainment budgets, the petty scams. But perhaps I was wrong to pick on the EU. All international bureaucracies tend to be self-serving, and for the same reason: there is nothing to stop them.

I don’t know why he restricts himself to “international” bureaucracies. At least here in the U.S. we have lots of national, state, and local bureaucracies–public and private–that are self-serving and pretty much unstoppable.

. . . but never about Independence Day

So, interesting! Unlike many people we write about on this blog, Hannan is willing to admit his mistakes. He’s done it many times.

But then this makes me even more baffled why he doesn’t talk about how wrong he was in the most notable thing he ever did.

I can’t find any place where he mentions his hilariously bad Independence Day forecast, the Brexit prediction that went bad, the column that gave him the arguably-accurate title, “The world’s wrongest man.”

I kind of get it. In the heat of the Brexit referendum, Hannan went a bit over the top with the rhetoric. It happens. Campaign promises are often pretty ridiculous, and then you don’t want to be reminded of them after the election is over and there are new battles to be fought.

Let me put it another way. The single most celebrated thing Hannan has done was to write that amazing post-Brexit fantasy scenario. If he’s famous for anything, this is it. And yet he’s completely silent on the matter–even on 24 June, Daniel Hannan Day itself.

C’mon, dude. Just own it already.

Hey, Lord Kingsclere!

Just as a certain mustached New York Times columnist’s most famous contribution to world culture is the Friedman Unit, your most notable contribution is U.K. Independence Day. Hundreds of years from now, after we and our descendants have all been gone, after Private Eye has finally been sued out of existence and all the copies of Bayesian Data Analysis have disintegrated, after LeBron Jones and Simone Biles and Carl Lewis and all the rest are no longer even footnotes, after Putin and Zelensky have been reduced to a one-paragraph summary in the history books, proud Englishmen will still be celebrating Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Day each year on 24 June.

And, look, it’s not like you can’t defend yourself on the matter. If someone asks you why Hoxton never quite became “the software capital of the world,” you can answer that it’s the result of the ineptitude of the 17 or so Conservative governments that implemented Brexit. At that point you might question your judgment about a prediction that was failed due to the nefarious antics of your own political party, but, yeah, “I was wrong” would be a start. You could go counterfactual and argue that, in the absence of Brexit, the software industry in Hoxton would be even further from world dominance than it currently is.

And, about that annual celebration that never happened? Again, own it! Laugh at yourself a little bit–or is that unbecoming to a Lord?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We learn from our mistakes. But only if we confront those errors. You don’t learn by sweeping your errors under the rug.

I’m talking to you, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, and I’m being completely serious, no joke: Confront your past mistakes, look them in the face, and use them as an opportunity to learn. Otherwise you’re no better than Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Or Paul Samuelson, who year after year when revising his textbook never addressed his failed prediction that the Soviet economy would catch up to the U.S.–he just kept pushing his prediction forward, wrestling in no serious way with his errors. You can do better than those clowns.

P.S. Kingsclere’s above-quoted articles from 2016 and 2025 are here and here. The excerpts provided by Private Eye seem like fair summaries, but for entertainment value I recommend you read them both from beginning to end.