Warburtons boss toasted on Twitter as old comments about ‘rotting’ EU come back to haunt him

Things have gone a little bit sour(dough) for the boss of the baking brand Warburtons, after old comments he made about Brexit appear to have gone stale.

In an article by Campaign in November 2016, chairman Jonathan Warburton is quoted as saying: “Brexit is a very good thing to have happened. We are well out of the rotting corpse of Europe.

“We could either continue to be in the European Union and wait for it all to collapse around us, or we could make our own way out of it and crack on as an independent nation. We decided the latter.”

However, almost five years later, after a deadly public health crisis and the ratification of the EU Withdrawal Agreement, the haulage industry is facing a severe shortage of lorry drivers.

“At the start of the pandemic, there was a shortfall of at least 76,000 HGV drivers and with the additional loss of EU workers who have returned home, the industry estimates that this number is higher than that,” Logistics UK, a business group representing logistics firms, wrote in a press release earlier this month.

Then on Monday, a spokesman for Warburtons told The Grocer that while they are “managing to maintain a good level of service” for customers nationally, “things are more challenging” at a local level.

“We, like many businesses, are experiencing higher levels of absence due to the rise in community infection rates of Covid-19 and the knock-on effect that has with more people having to self-isolate,” they said.

It’s almost as if the two things are connected, and one Twitter user has since made the comparison:

Others have since responded by suggesting a boycott of the company would help solve its driver shortage problem:

And some made bread puns, because... of course:

Looks like Warburton needs to have a good think about which side his bread is buttered…

Indy100 has contacted Warburtons for comment.