Peter Foster, left, and James O’Brien explore the B word at the festival in Hay on Wye

BREXIT, said author and broadcaster James O’Brien, “was a reverse trade deal. It was the first time in human history a nation voted to impose economic sanctions on itself.”

And while it has dominated both political discourse and can be linked to the economic troubles the UK finds itself in, no one wants to talk about it during this election campaign, added the Financial Times writer Peter Foster.

“Brexit is everywhere but nowhere,” he told a sold-out crowd at the Hay Festival.

“No political party wants to talk about it. Most people do not think it has gone well. Labour do not want to be asked the question – what are you going to do about it?”

Foster’s What Went Wrong With Brexit, and O’Brien’s How They Broke Britain deal with the perpetrators of Brexit, the reasons behind leaving the EU, and what it has meant.

They illustrated the issue by saying the nation’s economic troubles are linked to losing a favoured trading-partner status with our nearest markets.

“You can make a Brexit story from anything. Ask why you can’t get a dentist? It’s because many were from Europe,” says Foster.

“It split the Tory Party and forced a Brexit that demented government

“It was f*** business, then f*** parliament, then f*** the judges and then f*** the UN. Then you had Liz Truss ignore the advice of the Office for Budget Responsibility. and said let’s have a budget without doing any homework. They have f****d themselves. A lot of where they are in the polls was because they promoted a vision of Brexit that simply did not exist.”

O’Brien slammed the Conservatives for lying.

He outlined how prime minister Rishi Sunak recently said that 15 EU countries were going to use the Rwanda scheme to tackle asylum seekers.

“That is demonstrably untrue,” he said. “There is not a single country in the EU which wants to change the word unsafe to safe in their domestic laws to allow them to send asylum seekers to another place to be processed,” he said, as Sunak had claimed about the EU and his Rwanda policy.

O’Brien said he was disappointed so many Tory MPs had decided not to stand again.

“Seeing its architects, being publicly presented with the consequences of their actions, and what happens? They are all pi**ing off,” he added.

“I have asked Michael Gove to consider the toxicity of nonsense Brexit has become. But he does not have the simple integrity, the basic dignity, to take some responsib­ility for it.”

And what might happen post-July 4? O’Brien believes there is a slow change in the way the issue of the UK / EU relationship is playing out.

“There was an op-ed in the pro-Brexit Sunday Times and they said Breixt had hobbled the economy as matter of recorded fact,” he said.“It is slowly becoming a given.”

Foster was stinging in his criticism. “The blue team has laid a big steaming turd on the national doorstep,” he said. “Look at what they have done to the car industry, to farming. “Labour knows this is hard to fix and it means Starmer will not say the B word. It will all happen off the books.

“Starmer has made a career on fluidity – as the facts change, I change my mind, he says. They will start talking about rejoining the single market and the customs union in simple language.”

Foster said the Brexit result was a long time in coming: that since the UK joined Europe in 1974, it was shackled by jingoism.

“We first joined the year John Cleese was goosestepping in Fawlty Towers. They were saying we are going to have to be friends with the Germans if we join.

“It has carried on. In 2016, Boris Johnson said Napoleon and Hitler had tried to unify Europe and the EU is doing the same.

“You could have thrown a box of bangers in a transit van in Birmingham to to sell in Barcelona because there are the same rules across 28 sovereign countries, but the anti-Europe narrative is long standing.

“All those Johnson stories about bendy bananas made out Britain was shackled by red tape and we just needed to be free, to be nimble. There was the pledge to rip up the EU law book. But so much of daily life was enshrined in it. All that Brussels red tape has simply become red, white and blue tape.”

O’Brien added that the supposed bonfire of regulations was another preposterous lie.

“Ask a Brexiteer, what is it about these laws that you say are obnoxious?

“It ignores the existence of the rest of the world, and also that we are not in charge of it. Can they dispute the proof that rules are good for business, or schools, or the NHS, or for the workforce? They would have to say well, it is a bit foreign. They wanted to ban a library full of statute books because it smells a bit French.”

Foster added: “Businesses will happily suck up regulation if it gives them access to a market of 500 million people. This is where I lose patience. David Cameron had a review done on EU legal power. They went through 15 volumes and what did they find they could do away with? Nothing. Not one thing.”

The issues over Northern Ireland are the clearest sign of how poorly thought-out Brexit was, they said.

“Northern Ireland was thought of as a slightly funny place,” said Foster. “Tony Blair and John Major went to a Peace Bridge in Belfast and warned it will damage the Irish process.

“But this basic fact was wished away. Johnson lied and put a border in the Irish Sea. It is an English nationalist project delivered at the expense of Northern Ireland.”

Tory minister Brandon Lewis’s despatch box claim that the UK government would break a law relating to customs and Northern Ireland was summed up by O’Brien as “the dog caught the car and bit the exhaust pipe”.

Our fractured relationship with our nearest neighbours follows a nationalist pattern across the world.

“Brexit is a form of populism unique to the UK,” said O’Brien.

“Putting Humpty back together again requires you to go back to Brussels and start negotiating, and that gives every one cold sweats. They might want us back, but don’t hold your breath.”

• What Went Wrong With Brexit: and what we can do about it. By Peter Foster. Canongate Books, £14.99
• How They Broke Britain. By James O’Brien. WH Allen, £10.99 paperback