We are leaving the European Union but we're not leaving Europe. The cake and cherry approach to the EU.

Starting from the awkwardness of the repetition of the statement “We are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe”, uttered by Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Nigel Farage, David Davis, Boris Johnson, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Jacob Rees-Mogg and many other politicians, this paper focuses on the metaphorical language used around Brexit, with a special emphasis on the metaphor “have one’s cake and eat it”, referring to the “cherry-picking” attitude that the British government wishes to have, retaining EU membership benefits without its obligations. Combining moral reasoning with humour (Charteris-Black 2019), Boris Johnson admitted that his policy on cake was “pro having it and pro eating it”, expressing an argument that, on withdrawing from the European Union, Britain would still retain many of the benefits that it had enjoyed as a member (Musolff 2019). Indeed, Britain was already “cherry-picking from the European tree without bothering to water the soil or tend to its branches”, and was already “having its cake and eating it” when it was in the EU, given the very special status and the beneficial state of affairs it had managed to achieve. The software used for the quantitative analysis is WordSmith Tools 7.0 (Scott 2017).