Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers.

Last week was the tenth anniversary of Britain voting to leave the European Union, so we thought we’d commemorate the occasion by featuring this Brexit cartoon.

The result of the vote on June 23rd 2016 was as much of a surprise to us here at the Alex cartoon as it was to David Cameron and, indeed, Nigel Farage. The country had been reassured by the media so many times in the run-up to the referendum that the outcome was a foregone conclusion and that Britain would deliver a resounding “No” to quitting the EU, that we had a whole week’s worth of Alex cartoons prepared in advance about how Brexit had proved to be a fuss over nothing and business was set to go on as normal. When we woke up and read the news on the morning of June 24th we had to consign all these jokes to the bin. But we subsequently wrote 143 cartoons about the economic and political chaos and confusion that followed Britain’s landmark decision, so it was probably worth it (from a strictly satirical point of view at least).

The featured cartoon ran in May 2016 during the referendum campaign. We had decided that Alex (possibly contrary to people’s expectations) would be a Remainer. Not because he was any sort of Europhile, but because, like most City bankers, he was a short-termist, just looking to next year’s bonus, and he wouldn’t want anything to happen that would put that at risk. The City is known to hate uncertainty, and the disruption that a vote to leave the EU would almost certainly (and indeed did) cause would be too bothersome to be worthwhile. Clive, on the other hand, we thought would be funny as a Brexiteer. His naivety and idealism would contrast with the cynicism he encountered on his campaign trail in the countryside from locals who planned to vote Remain purely in order to protect the various EU grants and subsidies they were receiving for letting their land lie fallow, not harvesting their walnuts etc.

Even though he didn’t vote for it, Alex managed to extract plenty of fees from the unforeseen result of the referendum: by offering clients strategic advice seminars on “the implications of Brexit”, something which he understood as much about as everyone else (ie very little). One of the unintended consequences of Brexit was London-based banks transferring staff to their Frankfurt office order to retain a presence in the EU. This proved fertile territory for us and we did 44 cartoons post-Brexit about bankers being sent to work in Frankfurt. Whether it was due to xenophobia or cultural discernment, no one seemed very keen to volunteer for this particular placement.

We’ve run many puns in the Alex cartoon over the years, but this is one of the very few bilingual ones (we did one on “craic" and “crack” once), which proves we’re confident that our readership is sophisticated enough to know how French words are pronounced.

Though “Brexit” was Collins English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016, it’s often forgotten that the original term it was based on was “Grexit”, which dates from just after the Global Financial Crisis, when Greece was the economic basket case that was tipped to be the first country to exit the EU. However, unlike the Elgin Marbles, this expression is a cultural export that Greece is not keen to have back. Its bonds - once known in the City as “BOG paper” (Bank of Greece, geddit?) - are now doing better that the UK’s.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.