This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking charity which works to give people access to reliable information they can trust.
Does polling suggest the UK would vote to rejoin the EU?
With this week marking 10 years since the Brexit referendum, we’ve been looking at what the polling now shows on the public’s views.
While all polling comes with a margin of error, and public opinion can change, recent polls suggest that a clear majority of voters now in principle support the UK rejoining the EU – though it depends on what the terms of rejoining would be.
In the referendum in 2016, of course, some 52% of voters chose to leave the EU. But a recent Ipsos poll found public opinion is now about 61% to 39% in favour of rejoining, when you remove the people who said they don’t know, and focus only on likely voters.
This big lead for rejoining is partly because Leave voters are about twice as likely to have changed their minds since the referendum.
In principle, these voters might change their minds back again one day, but there have also been large demographic shifts in the past 10 years.
Put simply, older people were always more likely to support Brexit, and they still are today. But as older voters have died and younger people have joined the electorate, there has been a net shift towards support for rejoining.
The impact of this is so significant that the former chairman of YouGov, Peter Kellner, estimated in December 2025 that the change in demographics alone since 2016 suggests that a majority of voters in the UK would now favour EU membership, even if nobody had changed their minds.
And of course the demographic changes continue. As the polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice wrote in an article for the UK in a Changing Europe think tank earlier this month: “The clear implication is that generational turnover could gradually serve to reduce the level of support for being outside the EU even further.”
However, these figures all relate simply to whether there is overall support for rejoining the EU, and when more specific questions about what that might look like are asked, the picture becomes more complicated.
If the UK were to hold another referendum on EU membership, “rejoining” might have a specific meaning that it lacks today – for example, if the government of the time were to have negotiated new terms with the EU. And this might be important.
For example, a YouGov poll this month found that if the UK were about to rejoin, but could only do so if it meant accepting all the EU rules from which the UK used to be exempt, such as joining the euro and being part of the Schengen passport-free travel zone, only 35% would support rejoining, with 43% opposed.
Does Sir Keir Starmer get a £115,000 ‘pension’ as an ex-PM?
After his resignation announcement on Monday we’ve seen several claims on social media that the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, will be entitled to £115,000 a year “for the rest of his life” after he leaves office.
Some have described this annual amount as his “salary” or “pension”, but that’s not what it is.
The £115,000 figure refers to the Public Duty Costs Allowance (PDCA) – an allowance that can be used by former PMs to reimburse expenses “for necessary administrative costs arising from their special position in public life”, such as managing an office, dealing with correspondence and covering the costs of appearing at events in their capacity as an ex-prime minister.
It is not paid automatically, £115,000 is the maximum amount they can claim in a year once costs have been incurred.
Former prime ministers can also claim a “pension allowance” on top of this to contribute towards their staff’s pension costs, limited to a maximum of 10% of the PDCA.
The most recent government figures show that in 2024/25, of the eight living former PMs, five claimed the maximum or close to the maximum £115,000 allowance.
David Cameron did not claim the full amount and was not entitled to claim the PDCA for part of this financial year while serving as foreign secretary, while Liz Truss also did not claim the full amount. Rishi Sunak has said that he does not intend to claim the PDCA.
Since 2015 there has been no special pension for prime ministers specifically.
Unless he has opted out of either scheme, Mr Starmer is likely to be enrolled in the Ministerial Pension Scheme, which covers government ministers, in addition to the pension scheme for MPs. But we don’t know how much either of these pensions might be worth in Mr Starmer’s case and both these schemes only provide a pension once someone retires, not upon them leaving office.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen misleading claims about the PDCA following the resignation of a prime minister – we wrote in more detail about this and other support available to former PMs back in 2024.
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