Clexit! Cleese’s off to the Caribbean after UK rant
HE once joked about an exparrot – now John Cleese wants to be an expat.
Although it hasn’t quite shuffled off its mortal coil, he says the debate around Brexit has been ‘awful’ and ‘depressing’.
The 78-year-old is so fed up with the way the issue was handled before the vote he’s decided to emigrate to the Caribbean.
The Monty Python star is planning to move to the island of Nevis – population 11,000 – in November. Cleese has made no secret of his support for Brexit in the past. However, he said he was ‘so disappointed with so much about this country at the moment’ and that ‘one of the most depressing things... was the standard of debate about Brexit’.
He told BBC2’s Newsnight: ‘It was awful. There were dreadful lies on the Right about all the money that would come into the National Health Service if we went, and there was the usual thing, just scare tactics, from Cameron and Osborne, “Oh, it’ll be a disaster”.
‘That was level of the debate. Nobody said, It’s very complicated.’ Cleese, a longtime Liberal Democrat supporter, also hit out at the Press, saying: ‘It’s the lying and the triviality that I object to.’
He added: ‘I just thought to myself, “All right, I give up – I’ll try somewhere else”.’
Cleese has in the past lived in Beverly Hills and in tax-haven Monaco. He married his fourth wife Jennifer Wade, who is 32 years his junior, on the Caribbean island of Mustique in 2012. Of Nevis, Cleese said: ‘It’s one of the nicest islands I’ve ever been on.’