Fair enough, but what about the mate who tried to stop him as much as he could, but failed regardless?
Not the same situation is it. And they arenât getting citizenship unless individual EU countries decide to fast track possible applications and confer emergency eg German citizenship, which I donât think is happening.
Apply for citizenship! Once you get it, problem sorted.
Sorry to bang on but technically you werenât EU citizens, that is just a convenient but misleading shorthand. What you were is citizens of an EU member state with discretion to manage all sorts of stuff internally on its own terms. If that discretion extends to having a referendum on unilaterally deciding to leave the EU, and you then leave, then there isnât anything that can be done about that by the EU, since it isnât down to it to say no you canât leave etc. If the state of which you are a citizen leaves the club then you as an individual cease to benefit from club membership.
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He can apply for a sponge 
I donât think that it is just âa convenient shorthand but, other than that, you are right - to be an EU citizen one needs to be a citizen of a member state. There is no such thing as an âEUâ passport for example - just the member statesâ national passports.
Well, true enough - that, of course, being the irony that the UK was sovereign, even though a member of the EU.
It is frustrating, however, that those of us who could see the benefits, and could also see that the Leave campaign was at both mendacious and misguided could not fight against many years of anti-EU headlines because the benefits had never really been explained to, or understood by, a lot of British citizens.
I think thatâs what people are trying to do.
Sadly I canât see it as a possibility, for one thing who would uphold your âEUâ rights were they violated by your state. The EU can hardly force a non-member to change its behaviour on your behalf.
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My comment about the Ukrainians was not meant to be making them out to be in the same situation, it was to demonstrate that whatever rules the EU had it had the ability to be flexible. Guy Verhofstadt thought so but his solution was not taken up. At very little cost to itself, perhaps none, it could have stood by its enthusuastic citizens, and we were citizens before 2016, its name even appears on the most valuable document I have, my passport, and supported them. It would have cost nothing, but it would have mattered alot.
French citzenship. Yes, easy to say, when with everything else going on in our lives we have to expensively chase documents over a hundred years old. I took and passed the language test a few weeks after the referendum but for the rest of it, gave up.