Red-faced executives at the Nissan plant in Sunderland are expecting harsh words from their bosses in Japan tomorrow morning as their counterparts at Honda’s Swindon factory stole a march by announcing the closure of their factory first.

Sunderland, the poster town for Vote Leave, realised it had dropped a clanger roughly twenty seconds after polls closed at the 2016 EU Referendum, and Remainers everywhere have scoffed ever since at people voting to become unemployed. Now Swindon has joined in on the act, also voting Leave and succeeding in closing a major local employer in consequence, but doing it first.

Ian Napton, a Leave voter and shop steward at the plant, said, “All of us voted Leave. We saw Boris on the telly with his bus saying we could put money in the NHS. The Great Western Hospital is just down the dual carriageway, so I thought we’d have £350 million a week for it. Boris didn’t put ‘Vote Leave and be out on your jacksie’ on the side of his bus, did he? W*nker.”

Japanese businesses are known for the highest standards of integrity and it’s believed that Honda executives were forced to conclude that any workforce so clearly and obviously voting to voluntarily become unemployed should have their wishes respected.

A spokesman for Honda said, “Our Swindon plant builds the best selling Civic model. No other British-built car sells in greater numbers in America. Swindon’s local economy has benefitted enormously since the company moved there, so it was no mean feat on the part of the workforce to vote for the closure of the factory.”