One man, two houses. The first, a Victorian terrace made of kidney-bean bricks, with a white PVC door splattered by the South Wales weather. Estimated value: £60,000. The other, a Grade II listed townhouse fronted with 17 sash windows arranged in beautiful symmetry, once the London home of the governor of Hong Kong and sitting at the end of a row described by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as “among the most perfect early Georgian streets in Westminster”. Estimated value: £6,000,000.
In the first house, he was Steve Bray, a Port Talbot man who left school at 15 and became a father while he was still a teenager. He wandered the country for years – a stint in the army, some time spent in the north of England for work – but was always drawn back to Port Talbot. In the Forge Tavern they remember him as a regular. But that was in the old days. Before 23 June 2016. Before he told them all to go to hell because they had voted for Brexit.
In the second house, on Cowley Street, a moment’s stroll from the Palace of Westminster, he was the Stop Brexit Man. In the morning he would rise early with purpose, donning his blue top hat with its yellow “Stop Brexit” band and wheeling his speaker system round the corner to spend the day pummelling the walls of parliament with a cannonade of home-recorded pro-EU tunes. Journalists clamoured to interview him. His image splashed the front of broadsheets. One senior official at the Foreign Office would approach him on their way to work to discuss the ongoing Brexit stalemate. Anna Soubry, a Tory MP and defence minister, sang “Happy Birthday” to him on his 50th. The Liberal Democrats selected him as a parliamentary candidate at the 2019 election. As Stop Brexit Man, Steve Bray from Port Talbot became the most famous British protester since Emily Davison.
In the summer of 2016, Bray was working as a rare-coins dealer in Port Talbot. As the referendum campaign rolled on, he took a vague interest, realising that more trade friction with the EU would be bad for business. But he expected the result that most Remainers did. When the vote came through, it was a body blow. While the radical anti-Brexit movement was characterised as out of touch and overwhelmingly middle class, Bray was in fact one of the “ordinary people” whom the Brexit demagogues had idolised. He thought the result was illegitimate, pushed forward by liars and charlatans. And while some of what became the Second Referendum campaign saw the working-class Leave voter as an essentially imagined figure, because they had never met any, Bray had been drinking with them and living alongside them until the traumatic schism of 23 June 2016.
He travelled down to London, not with a head full of ideas about the tradition of British dissidents, but with a guileless urge to do something. During the early anti-Brexit marches of 2016 and 2017, which were hastily organised on social media, he had expected to find “a sea of people” on the streets of Westminster. He was disappointed by the turnout and decided something more determined and radical was necessary. His campaign began, and has been going on for ten years now. First he travelled up and down from Wales, and later he became a permanent resident in Westminster. He did not stop Brexit and Brexit did not stop him. By 2026, Bray had become a fixture of British politics entirely through nuisance-making. His technique evolved, from waving signs in front of the rolling news cameras, to heckling politicians as they walked the streets and starting tedious arguments with Leavers on the pavements of Westminster.
In July 2022, more than five years into his new life, Bray perfected his technique when he disrupted the resignation of Boris Johnson by blasting a home-made rendition of the Bay City Rollers (“Bye, Bye, Boris”) on to Downing Street. He became an international news story. He repeated the trick when Liz Truss resigned a few months later (“I Predict a Riot”), when Rishi Sunak called a general election (“Things Can Only Get Better”) and when Keir Starmer stepped down (“Ode to Joy”, the EU anthem). As Andy Burnham prepared to become prime minister in July, the Metropolitan Police issued a special order to ban the use of loudspeakers around Downing Street. When Burnham approached the black door, a husky voice could be heard singing about the daughter of Elysium.
Some of the most influential people in Britain – cabinet ministers, senior political journalists – now have a years-old parasocial relationship with Bray. His music echoes through the high-ceilinged corridors of parliament every Wednesday. Whenever a loudspeaker disrupts a moment of political pageantry, fists are raised in anger as though he were a cartoon villain in a superhero comic. The lyrics of his parodic songs have become earworms to the SW1 elite – my favourite is a recent composition, “Where the Fuck Is Farage?”, mocking the Reform leader’s attendance and set to the refrain once made popular by Roy Chubby Brown: “Who the fuck is Alice?”
For Bray’s enemies – the MPs, the press, the police, the taxi drivers who heckle him as they drive by – his omnipresence is discombobulating. Elaborate theories about his origins and his backers have proliferated, as though one man could not give up his life to stand on street corners shouting at people simply because he believed in it. When the papers first reported his name, enemies on the right said it was fake and intended to hide his past – about which even friends say he is taciturn (one told me to have my “bullshit goggles” on before interviewing him). The Brexit hardliners thought Steve Bray was an obvious cipher for Stop Brexit – a charge circulated by Nadine Dorries, who in her book The Plot wrote “it’s much rumoured that [Steve Bray] isn’t his real name”. Bray called it “a far-right slur”. Just one small reminder of the delirium of the Brexit wars.
They asked about his funding, too. Paul Staines of the right-anarchist blog Guido Fawkes asserted that Bray was being bankrolled by a consortium including Goldman Sachs (there is no evidence for this). Lee Anderson claimed he paid for his dissident lifestyle with welfare benefit claims (this is untrue). There were reports in the Mail that he had been funded by Charlie Mullins, the Rod Stewart lookalike who owns Pimlico Plumbers. I called up Mullins to check: “I never financially supported him. We supported him with food and drink, sent a driver along with bits and pieces, clothes and things,” he says. Mullins has since become a Reform supporter but he admires Bray as “a great example of a British campaigner who never gives up”. And yet: “He’s cold, he’s hungry. It probably hasn’t done him any good.” His admiration for Bray’s tenacity, combined with growing concern for his welfare, is something I would encounter often as I travelled into Bray’s world, reaching out to old friends and comrades.
A few years ago I started to take an interest in the man about whom there were so many unanswered questions. I got Bray’s number from a friend who had interviewed him back when he was a figure at the centre of the Brexit wars. We struck up an on-off correspondence. Then I was crossing a road in Westminster in the days leading up to Christmas 2024, after lunch with a friend. It was that time of year when everyone in the SW1 bubble is drunk and merry and indulging the worst delusions of the insider class that everything will be fine, the nation will settle, etc. We were caught in the buzz: the Tories were vanquished, Sir Keir of Remainshire was in No 10 and Labour were still ahead in the polls.
Then I spotted him standing beside us at the traffic lights, hunched like a babushka. The old colourful ensemble – bright blue “SabotEUr” T-shirt, EU flag worn as a cape – had been replaced by a drab winter coat, and the old hat was faded by years of wear. “Steve,” I called. He shook my hand with hypertrophic fingers poking through a threadbare glove, and muttered some friendly greetings. “That was the Stop Brexit guy,” I told my friend. He asked me if I thought he had somewhere to sleep that night. I started to worry about Steve Bray. Wasn’t his side winning now? And yet he was still there, looking worse than ever.
An energetic but chaotic figure, Bray was flanked in the early days by a rag-tag team of supporters. They formed the group he called Sodem, for “Stand of Defiance European Movement”, pronounced “sod ’em”. Most of his entourage were women approaching pension age who felt like they had been hit by a bus after the Brexit result and wanted to reverse it. These women, with a range of professional skills, began to take charge of organising Bray’s life: living arrangements, finances, social media accounts, and press engagements. One recalls: “We were traipsing around after Steve one day and we said: ‘Oh, we’re the back of the pantomime horse.’”
The pantomime horse helped to turn Steve Bray into Stop Brexit Man over the course of 2017 and 2018. “We realised we had this amazing ability to get images into the press,” says one. “We were very Machiavellian. The photographers loved us because there’s nothing more boring than covering Brexit politics. We realised we could have control of the pictorial narrative: that the UK had not just caved in. That we were passionate Europeans and we were fighting this.”
As Bray’s profile rose, offers of help came thick and fast. A well-off woman in Balham was the first to provide him with a steady place to stay in London. Others offered to care for his pet dog, stranded in Port Talbot. Bray had been single for seven years before the campaign but he found companionship with a fellow protester. (They have since parted ways.)
Most of the old gang wince at the idea of Bray still protesting, yet they have fond memories of an “amazing time”. They remember one particularly stirring instance of the dissidents standing up to The Man, when the BBC erected large platforms outside parliament so it could broadcast without being disrupted by Bray and company. “We thought: ‘Oh well, that’s it then, no more TV.’ Then Steve took us all down to Screwfix to buy big poles, plumbing pipes. We attached the signs to them and then we had someone at home watching the news,” a Sodem activist recalled.” They would give us directions – left a bit, right a bit – so we were always in shot, factoring in the few seconds of delay. One day a producer from the BBC said to us, ‘It cost us thousands of pounds to put up these towers. How much did those poles cost you?’ Steve told him: £2.74. People thought we were mad, but so what?” It all sounds like a return to the mischievous fun of childhood for people in late-middle age.
As the Brexit wars intensified, Bray’s protesting became more dedicated and he spent less time in the real world. Counter-protesters from the Leave side started launching raids on his permanent protest encampment outside parliament. In order to keep their spot and protect their equipment, Sodem had to defend it from their opponents 24/7. While Bray had been spending a few nights a week in Balham, a fundraising effort began to get a place in Westminster so that he could perform a night watch. The group established a 24-hour rota. Some began to call their pro-EU protest a “vigil”. One crowdfunder raised £20,000 in a month. At anti-Brexit marches, they sold badges at a profit and sometimes brought in £30,000 in revenue. “I reckon we turned over, in terms of money at that time, well over six figures. People were sending over so much money. It was incredibly trusting, sending stuff over PayPal,” says one of the group. Then they found Cowley Street. “We rented a house, a beautiful house, just next to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s place in Westminster.” Another former resident: “All the activists would pile in with sleeping bags, then Steve had the place to himself on weekends.”
It began to go wrong on Brexit day. As Boris Johnson banged a gong in No 10, the Sodem crew repeated an old ritual for what most of them knew would be the last time. One member recalls: “On 31 January 2020, we left. Then Covid happened, obviously. It was over. We’d lost. I couldn’t see any future. You needed a real focus for a proper political movement. I knew that day was coming. We stayed up until midnight. The Leave lot were cheering and letting off fireworks. Every day since the start of the campaign, Steve had done his walk. He walked up to the gates at the entrance to parliament, where the MPs go in to vote, and he shouted, twice, ‘Stop Brexit!’ On that last night we walked with him, with fairy lights in our hair, and we all joined in with him one last time. Then we went home.”
But Bray didn’t go home. While most of the group was pulling away and he was trying to stay, there were ugly arguments about money, pet-sitting arrangements and the like. The members of the group who went back to their lives stay in touch and follow Bray’s continuing life of spectacle with well-meaning concern. Their WhatsApp group is called “SODIT”. While failure hurt, some tried to put their energies into other pursuits – there is an excellent website that is still collecting testimonies for an oral history project. One even considered a PhD in the subject. But Bray stayed. Another ex-Sodem member recalls: “Steve, he found himself through the protest, he found meaning. We went back to our families. Steve didn’t have that.” His crusade became lonelier, harder and less exciting. First, of course, the money from fundraising dried up. In 2019, when he was bedded in to Cowley Street with a small knapsack of personal treasures – expensive cameras, an Xbox, his collection of rare coins and a cherished tankard – Bray told a newspaper interviewer: “I can never go back to Port Talbot, because my worldview has changed.”
He was wrong. Bray is now living in Port Talbot again. He has to. The middle-class supporters who gave money, time and spare rooms in London have been replaced by the cold reality of the “affordable option”: a rented room in Zone 4 where he stops in London overnight before setting up his protest stall on a designated traffic island in Westminster in the morning. “It’s a long day,” he tells me. “I drive from Port Talbot, check in to a cheap place in Beckenham, and then I’m here by half six in the morning. But I don’t set up on the island till about half nine.” At 4pm he starts to pack up and hopes to be on the road by early evening for the three-hour drive home.
There have been other trials. When a law was passed to crack down on noisy protests, he had to defend himself in court (and won) after his amps were confiscated by police. Meanwhile, Bray began getting caught up in nasty bust-ups with right-wing politicians that looked like pub brawls and went viral online. His entourage got much smaller.
When I visited them at the island in July, the rest of Bray’s crew were bivouacked under a powder-blue bedsheet to protect them from the glare of the hostile sun. Gareth Kearns, Bray’s effective deputy, was lying on the gum-dappled pavement. An out-of-work actor, Kearns is the McCartney to Bray’s Lennon. “Gareth, he’s a bit of a singer. He does the mixing. Kinda like with ‘Brexit Tragedy’ [a rendering of ‘Yellow Submarine’], I give him a hint of the song, give him a few lines – he does the rest.” They had been developing some new songs in support of Count Binface.
An ex-Sodem member views the entourage in brutal terms: “He’s lost his way. He’s talented. He’s clever. He’s now got a few waifs and strays who don’t know what to do. He needs the pantomime horse. Him and Gareth are very similar. Men in middle age who haven’t partnered and settled down. They’ve got nothing to do… [and] didn’t know what to do with themselves after it ended. He is a loner. He’s someone who was designed to be a protester. He just hadn’t found his cause until Brexit.”
The last time I met with Bray on his island, he found it harder than ever to explain why he is still there. “We’re a reminder. I like to think of it more now as a campaign than a protest,” he said as the familiar EU flag on the lamppost licked his face like a dog. “There was a lot more going on back in those days than there is now.” He lays down some hints of a goodbye: “If you notice, slowly I’m moving away from the social media of it. I’m not putting anything out that I’m here.”
The decade milestone has triggered deeper thought from Bray about what he wants to do with his time. He is currently trying to revive his old coin business. “I was sorting through my coins; I need to catch back up with value. Things have moved on since I stopped, so I used to have it all in my head. I would pick up a coin, I would know the value from the grade, the rarity, pretty much anything. But now I struggle, so I’m back to the books.” He thinks the value of his collection has increased by at least 200 per cent since he stopped trading ten years ago. More promisingly, he has recently bought a property in the north of France which he is slowly renovating. This summer he swerved the Clacton by-election and broke from Westminster entirely to spend time working on the house. While he has some hope for Andy Burnham (because, he says, he would take us back into the EU “in a heartbeat” if the chance arose), like many who spend too much time in Westminster, he has become cynical about electoral politics.
He was once a vibrant character in a large coalition of left-liberal Remainers that took in eccentrics alongside elite figures from politics and business. MPs spoke warmly of him (a senior Labour MP praised him in 2019 as “an international celebrity”). In the highly polarised political scene after Brexit, he was embraced by one side. Now, that clear political identity has slipped away as he has been pushed out of Westminster’s social milieu. While Bray is still firmly anti-Brexit, he has developed a fierce contempt for all politicians, not just Brexiteers. He was glad to see the back of Starmer, who betrayed the Second Referendum cause, and was burned by his dalliance with the Lib Dems (“They just wanted me for my social media; they kind of abandoned me,” he says). He thinks he could never become a politician of any party because “I am the worst liar in the world. I couldn’t do it.”
Now he revels in sabotaging Labour prime ministers as much as Tory ones. Bray’s trajectory over the past decade, I realise, has tracked the country’s at large – from a condition of high polarisation, which was then ground down over ten years into a state of apathy and a radical anti-politics feeling. But, perhaps, with a new prime minister who could stay the course, Bray can imagine a life after politics, and Westminster can imagine a world without Bray. One day, parliament will wake to find the Stop Brexit Man has gone. Having made his mark on history, Steve Bray will have got his life back. And when the traffic island falls silent, perhaps we can finally say that the crazed and colourful Brexit era is over.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage isn’t laughing any more]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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Subscribe here to commentI was then and still am a Remainer and still amazed that 36% of the voters registered to vote could enable a government to take us out of the EU. Not only that but win two elections following the referendum. This is the equivalent of Trump winning the presidential election in 2024 despite January 6th 2021 and his prosecution for sexual harassment. We desperately need to codify the laws which define our democracy so that simple majorities of voters bothering to vote cannot revoke 40 years of trade partnership. I cannot admire people like old testament prophets crying in the wilderness “I disagree with the result of the Referendum, let’s hold another referendum “. These matters are best left to the Commons and a reformed second chamber. If we cannot trust the Lords to accept the will of the Commons it has to go, and the sooner the better.
In other words, you want to defy majority votes. The usual Remainer arrogance. And you prefer indirect democracy to direct votes. The people won’t vote the right way so ignore the people, let their betters decide. As I regularly comment, people who profess themselves “amazed” by things are admitting that the model of the world which they hold in their head bears little relationship to reality. Physicists whose mental model is entirely based on Newtonian physics, and are “amazed” by observations related to quantum mechanics and relativity, would be regarded as desperately out of date and would have no professional standing. Worth thinking about that.
no its not..its an analogy that seems impressive but is meaningless..physicists have been taking relativity into account since 1915..so your pure Newtonians would be impossibly old. But then Leavers don’t really deal with the operations of reality.
He lost his mind a long time ago, and has been massively overindulged by everyone involved. All for frictionless rare-coin trade. You couldn’t make it up.