About

Please Leave My Town is a statement said to Prime Minister Boris Johnson by a Leeds citizen while shaking his hand. The quick interaction filmed by the BBC was caught by a Twitter user who then posted a clip of the interaction in September 2019. The sentence promptly turned into a hashtag and rally-cry for those not in support of Boris Johnson.

Origin

On September 5th, 2019, Twitter user @sturdyAlex uploaded a BBC clip of a Leeds man shaking Brois Johnson's hand and saying, “Please leave my town" to which Johnson replied “I will, very soon" (shown below). The tweet gained over 120,300 likes and 32,400 retweets in a day.

Spread

On September 5th, 2019, many Twitter users commented on the interaction as a very British thing to do. Twitter user @SnazzyAzzy^[1] tweeted, "What a quintessentially British and polite way to basically tell the Prime Minister to fuck off. #PleaseLeaveMyTown" (shown below, left). The hashtag spread and the next day the @ChronHib^[2] Twitter account posted the Old Irish translation of Please Leave My Town (shown below, center). Various Twitter users, like @KevinPascoe^[3] began posting the hashtag #PleaseLeaveMyCountry to relay that Boris Johnson is not welcome in Scotland and Wales either (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References