Nine years after the referendum, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are still arguing about which of them actually got Brexit done.
Appearing on Sky News on Sunday, Johnson dismissed Reform UK’s repeated claims to Brexit credit as baseless, insisting the party contributed nothing to the actual parliamentary process that took Britain out of the EU. His target was specifically the argument that Reform, formerly the Brexit Party, deserves recognition as the movement responsible for delivering Britain’s exit.
How Trevor Phillips turned the conversation to migration
The exchange began on different ground entirely. Presenter Trevor Phillips asked Johnson whether he felt any discomfort at Reform’s use of the term “Boriswave,” a phrase Reform figures have deployed repeatedly to describe the surge in net migration that followed Johnson’s premiership. Phillips put it bluntly: migration under Johnson’s own decisions reached the highest level in British history, whatever the merits of the wider Brexit project.
Johnson’s answer pivoted immediately to sovereignty rather than outcomes. Brexit, he argued, had handed Britain the legal power to control its own borders, a power that simply hadn’t existed before. Whether that power had actually been used to reduce migration was, notably, not the argument he chose to make.
The ‘not a bean’ line
From there, Johnson turned the conversation onto Reform directly, and delivered the line that’s now generating the most attention. “We have the power under Brexit, and under Brexit, which I secured and which those people didn’t, they didn’t even exist!” he said, before going further: “They did not have a single MP. They did not do a bean to get Brexit through the House of Commons. Not a bean. And they swank around claiming to have been responsible for it. They did nothing to deliver Brexit.”
It’s a specific, checkable claim, and on its narrowest reading it’s true. Reform UK, then the Brexit Party, held no Commons seats when the Withdrawal Agreement passed. No Reform MP walked through a division lobby to make it happen, because there wasn’t one to walk through.
Reform’s comeback
A Reform spokesperson wasn’t about to let that stand unanswered, telling HuffPost UK: “Boris only had his majority because we put country before party in 2019. Boris then broke Britain so badly that the Conservatives haven’t led a single opinion poll since.”
That’s a reference to Farage’s decision, in late 2019, to stand Brexit Party candidates down in Conservative-held seats ahead of that year’s general election, a unilateral tactical call widely credited with helping deliver Johnson’s 80-seat majority. Reform’s argument, in other words, isn’t that its MPs voted for the deal. It’s that without Farage’s electoral choices, Johnson may never have had the majority needed to pass it at all.
Two claims that can both be true
This is really an argument where neither side is straightforwardly wrong. Johnson’s government passed the legislation. Farage’s decision to stand aside almost certainly helped create the parliamentary numbers that made passing it possible. Whether “delivering Brexit” means the vote in the chamber or the electoral conditions that produced the majority is, ultimately, a matter of framing rather than fact.
What’s changed since 2019 is the balance of political power between the two men’s parties. The Conservatives now trail both Labour and Reform in national polling, a genuinely dramatic reversal that gives Reform’s version of events considerably more public traction than it might have carried a few years ago, whatever the parliamentary record actually shows.
Why the row keeps coming back
This isn’t really about 2019 anymore. It’s about which man gets to own Brexit’s legacy now that its consequences, particularly on migration, have become one of the most contested questions in British politics. Johnson wants credit for the process without blame for the outcome. Farage wants credit for the outcome without needing to have been in the room for the process.
Given how central both claims remain to each man’s political identity, don’t expect either of them to concede the point any time soon.
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Joe Connor is a UK-based reporter specialising in politics, public policy, and national affairs. He has previously contributed to publications including The London Economic (JOE Media Group) and Spotted News.
At The Daily Britain, he covers Westminster politics, elections, and breaking political developments, alongside in-depth analysis of policy decisions and their real-world impact.