David Cameron’s Big Brexit Slip-Up May Have Happened Over Pizza

Left: Getty Images, Right: Shutterstock

Forgot Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris, Great Britain’s breakup with the European Union after Thursday’s Brexit vote is the dissolution of the summer (and probably for some time beyond that, of course). The fallout from Brexit will likely be bad enough, but now the British media is trying to bring humanity’s most perfect foodstuff — pizza — into the fray.

According to the Chicago Tribune, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron (who is resigning because of the vote) agreed to hold a voter referendum all the way back in May of 2012 on whether the country would stay in the EU. This meeting was conducted at a pizzeria in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, where he later met with other NATO leaders. Apparently, if Cameron had just skipped the deep dish that day, we wouldn’t be where we are on this Friday.

Ah, the internet in 2016, where we have to package important news stories in ludicrous ways for things like “engagement.” Here’s supposedly how pizza figures into all of this:

In a concession to the Euroskeptic wing of his Conservative Party that helped him win Britain’s 2015 general election, he made the “fateful decision” over the pizza to grant a referendum before 2017, the Financial Times reported.

Okay, so how did pizza cause the terrible idea to have a referendum of Britain’s place in the EU? Maybe it’s because Cameron apparently prefers Italian thincrust-style Pizza Express, which is another thing I learned from this Tribune article, and can’t deal with Chicago deep dish. Or maybe pizza is being scapegoated here. Pizza is a perfect food; it would never do anything like this. In fact, if pizza could talk, it probably would’ve been like, “Are you sure about this?” during this fateful summit.

Now if the Financial Times had said that the lesson to all of this is to not have important political strategy sessions at O’Hare, then there would be no argument here.

(via Chicago Tribune & Financial Times)

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