What will happen to Sealand, after Brexit?

For all the exhaustive coverage of Brexit, its impact on one small country has hitherto been ignored.


I speak of Sealand. Now the Daily Telegraph has put this right with news from the plucky, embattled island.

'Seven miles off the Suffolk coast, it is officially the smallest micronation in the world. For more than half a century, Sealand – a wind-lashed, Second World War naval fort whose main platform, some 60ft above the North Sea, can only be reached by being winched up by crane – has seen off not only German advances but also those from the British government.

'Now, with increasing uncertainty about Brexit on the UK mainland, the sovereign state is receiving hundreds of applications for citizenship each week. According to Michael Bates, the principality’s 67-year-old prince, would-be Sealanders are inspired by the ruling family’s “desire for freedom from authority” – as well as its black passport, embossed with two crowned sea creatures.'  

I draw this to your attention in order to tell you that my father knew not Lloyd George but King Roy, who used to live in the next street to us in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, when not in residence in Sealand.


So did the novelist Robert Nye, who used to come into my father's garden shed to listen to Dick Barton Special Agent, before I was thought of. Mr and Mrs Nye disapproved, for some reason. 

His first novel was full of caricatures of local people and I should read it. I wish I had got in touch with him before he died.