In 2015, on this day fearing for his life if he returned to Britain, entertainer and former Beatle Paul McCartney, who'd been touring continental Europe when David Cameron resigned as prime minister, went to the U.S. embassy in Madrid and requested political asylum in America for himself and his family.

That McCartney had considered such drastic action, much less actually gone through with it, was one of the clearest signs yet just how bad things had gotten in the swiftly and inexorably disintegrating United Kingdom. Indeed, even as McCartney was filing his asylum request dozens of London's top police officers had resigned their commissions in disgust over the sky-high crime rate in the British capital.