The man trying to make sense of Brexit is tired. He’d now like to call it a day

LONDON: By day, Jon Worth works as a communications consultant for European politicians. In his spare time, he makes Brexit flowcharts — 27 versions since January, to be exact.
Brexit has become a tangled, confusing web of decisions and possible outcomes that change almost daily. It is both the perfect candidate for diagraming what happens next and a Sisyphean task of trying to outline every possibility.


“In the beginning people were like, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ and then people were like, ‘Wait, it’s actually a really useful way to understand Brexit,’ ” Worth said. “And now people ask me, ‘Where’s the next version of the diagram?’ ” But he’s exhausted. After more than two dozen updates to his flowchart, he’ll take a break April 12, the deadline for Britain to leave EU — regardless of what is happens. He says he can’t keep going at this pace.

Worth has become a bit of a cult hero among the Brexit flowchart community (if the dozen or so of us that have attempted to make visual sense of Brexit count as a community). He’s admired more for his commitment to keeping up with every Brexit turn than any graphic design sensibility. Still, he said he has photographic evidence that officials in the British government like his diagrams so much they are printing them out and hanging them up on their walls.

Worth’s flowcharts also try to do the impossible: assign a likelihood that each Brexit scenario will occur. In one, he thinks the most likely single outcome is a no-deal Brexit on April 12.


No one can be sure what will happen next, and the chart is more an educated guess than actual statistical analysis. But he argues that Brexit is not completely unpredictable. “Each actor in the Brexit process has a hierarchy of preferences and has behaved in certain ways until now, so to some extent you can predict what they’ll do next,” Worth said.

Last week he gave the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, just a 10% chance of blocking May from a third vote. And then Bercow did just that. “The British government itself hadn’t even thought he would do that, so at least I had it as an option,” he said, laughing.

There are some outcomes he believes are impossible to assess. For example, the likelihood that May would resign or be forced out. On Monday, his latest version of the chart addressed the what-if scenario with a cute cloudlike annotation. By Wednesday, the cloud was outdated. May offered to resign if her plan were approved.

For those considering entering into the Brexit flowchart game, Worth has some salient advice: have a clear objective before you start drawing, and think about what you’re trying to achieve. “My aim is to see Brexit decisions as predictable and see these decisions flow from one to another,” he said. It is a reasonable, fleeting goal. Now, onto version 28. “To be honest I kind of hoped we might’ve had a solution by now,” he said. “But if there’s one thing predictable about Brexit, it’s that when you think you’re going to reach a solution, you never do.”