A provocative tweet from actress/model Elizabeth Hurley captured a lot of social media attention in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. Could have it made the difference in the final result?
Apparently nude except for a strategically placed British flag, Hurley –- a Brexit supporter — encouraged her 518,000 Twitter followers plus more on Instagram to get out and vote regardless of whether they were on the “leave” or “remain” side.
“Vote tomorrow-whatever your persuasion. I’m for #Brexit & promise to neither gloat nor whinge. But VOTE!,” Hurley tweeted about the European Union in-or-out, exit-or-stay referendum.
Hurley is currently filming Season 3 of The Royal s, in which she plays Queen Helena, the matriarch of a fictional British royal family. The series airs on the E! network in the U.S. Hurley has also been active on social media, keeping her fans updated on how things are going on location.
“[Hurley] urged her social media followers to go for Brexit by releasing a saucy picture of her smiling with just a Union Jack cushion to cover her modesty…Miss Hurley, 51, uploaded the image…to her Twitter and Instagram accounts where it was quickly ‘liked’ and retweeted thousands of times,” the Daily Mail explained .
The Austin Powers star previously revealed that she stays in shape with a regimen of plenty of sleep and fresh air, a diet with lots of vegetables that minimizes alcohol intake, plus Pilates.
Vote tomorrow-whatever your persuasion. I’m for #Brexit & promise to neither gloat nor whinge. But VOTE! ?????? pic.twitter.com/6Faq4HHMJE
— Elizabeth Hurley (@ElizabethHurley) June 22, 2016
Celebrities such as Daniel Craig, David Beckham, J,K. Rowling, Keira Knightley , and Benedict Cumberbatch took the opposite view from Hurley, endorsing the remain side. Michael Caine and Joan Collins (who has a recurring role as Grand Duchess Alexandra of Oxford on The Royals) , along with vacuum cleaner mogul James Dyson and other celebrities, supported Brexit.
In a surprise to the pollsters and the London-centric media, the pro-Brexit side (i.e., leave or out) won the referendum by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent, roughly the same margin of victory as when Barack Obama won the U.S. presidency.
“Not a single one of the well known polling aggregators/predictors picked Brexit in their last-minute final projections,” the American Thinker observed .
Brexit piled up the votes across Britain itself except for the London area, the BBC reported . “The Leave campaign triumphed right across England and Wales…The Remain campaign, in contrast, dominated in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland.” When all was said and done in the early hours of Friday morning, overall turnout was at a record or near-record 72 percent.
Hurley admitted that she was glued to her TV set all night as election officials counted Brexit ballots across the United Kingdom.
Since the vote, the British pound and global financial markets have been in turmoil.
Long, emotional night. Sweet dreams ??? #Brexit pic.twitter.com/a2IH1f0U33
— Elizabeth Hurley (@ElizabethHurley) June 24, 2016
U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who championed the Eurosceptic cause for more than 20 years, claimed that a blowback against Obama’s intervention in the referendum helped make Brexit a winner over “Bremain.” In a visit to London in April, apparently at the behest of Prime Minister David Cameron (who resigned the morning after the vote), Obama famously warned the U.K. that it might wind up in the back of the line if it had to renegotiate one-one-one trade deals with the U.S. “I think we got an Obama Brexit Bounce, because people do not want foreign leaders telling them how to think and how to vote,” Farage claimed .
According to the New York Times , the populist, anti-establishment Brexit vote has ramifications for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Clinton opposed the effort to withdraw from the EU.
“According to their friends and advisers, Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton have worried for months that she was out of sync with the mood of the electorate…Thursday’s Brexit referendum was an unnerving reminder that voter anger is deeper and broader than many elite politicians and veteran pollsters realize…Several Democrats cautioned against drawing too many lessons from the Brexit vote, saying mass immigration and economic malaise were bigger problems in Britain and the European Union than in the United States. They also said many British voters were revolting against a bureaucracy in Brussels that they regarded as bloated, overpaid and prone to interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries. Yet the Democrats acknowledged that the worldview held by Mrs. Clinton and many of the party’s elites was not as attractive to many voters as it once was…”
First day back on set #TheRoyalsSeason3 @TheRoyalsOnE @LionsgateTV ?? pic.twitter.com/4rCVGgfwT9
— Elizabeth Hurley (@ElizabethHurley) June 21, 2016
Do you think that the Elizabeth Hurley tweet influenced any Brexit votes either way on Thursday?
[Photo by Andrew Medichini/AP]