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Since the minute that British citizens voted, in a 2016 referendum, to leave the European Union, confusion and disorganization has consumed the U.K. Three years later, little has changed: confusion and disorganization may carry the U.K. over the cliff of a no-deal Brexit, with devastating economic consequences.

Though we can’t predict what will happen, we continue to learn about what brought the U.K. to this precarious position. Like the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., the campaign for Brexit employed divisive social-media campaigns, mysterious sources of financing, Cambridge Analytica, and questionable meetings with Russians. At the center of it was a man named Arron Banks, an insurance magnate who is happy to take credit for his efforts to promote Brexit by whatever means necessary. Ed Caesar reported on Banks’s outsized role in the referendum, and found that Banks is under investigation in Britain and in South Africa, where he has business interests in diamonds, and was also a person of interest in the Mueller investigation. Caesar spoke with David Remnick about Brexit’s shady past and uncertain future.