A painting by England’s anonymous street artist, Banksy showing the British House of Commons overrun by chimpanzees has sold at auction for just under £9.9 million.

Expected to fetch up to £2 million, the painting sold for nearly five times its estimate at Sotheby’s in London on Thursday.

Sotheby’s tweeted that the 13ft artwork titled Devolved Parliament  painted by the anonymous Bristol artist in 2009 had sold ‘to applause at £9,879,500, nine times its previous record after a 13-minute bidding battle’.

“Regardless of where you sit in the Brexit debate, there’s no doubt that this work is more pertinent now than it has ever been,” the auction house tweeted.

Banksy has also reacted to the sale of the painting on Instagram, saying it was a ‘record price for a Banksy painting’.

Devolved Parliament, which is the artist’s biggest known work on canvas beat the previous auction record for a Banksy piece, believed to be the £1.4 million for Keep It Spotless, which sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2008.

Banksy created Devolved Parliament for the takeover of Bristol Museum in 2009. At that time, it attracted more than 300,000 visitors and was said to be one of the most visited exhibitions in the world that year.

The painting’s anonymous owner lent it to the museum earlier this year to mark both the exhibition’s 10th anniversary and Britain’s original planned exit from the European Union on March 29.

The auction took place a year after Banksy himself intervened in a Sotheby’s auction when his artwork Girl with Balloon self-destructed as the gavel came down to become the newly titled Love is in the Bin.