Cold calculation suggests there won’t be a second referendum. It could destroy both the Tory and Labour parties, and in any case, we appear to be heading for a classic EU fudge that will postpone hard choices. But as all predictions in 2018 are likely to be false, and the Tory right appears determined to provoke a crisis, it’s worth understanding why the People’s Vote campaign thinks that next time it will be different.
They will be the insurgents and the Brexiters will be defending the status quo. Running against a failed establishment has always been a good tactic, but never more so than in the 2010s.
Remain campaigners find in focus groups that the double standards of the Brexit elite have ‘cut through,’ as the marketing departments say. They will make great play of the investment funds set up by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s firm in Ireland, Nigel Farage’s children getting German passports and Boris Johnson’s large Telegraph salary. ‘Brexit is for the little people’ will be their slogan. The men who led you on have taken great care to protect themselves and their families from the miseries you are suffering.
The idea of rich men playing with Britain’s future in a game they can never lose will draw blood. As will absence of the Tory establishment from the Remain side. You only read the work of Tim Shipman – the British Bob Woodward – to see that David Cameron’s inaction did as much damage to the remain cause in 2016 as Jeremy Corbyn’s passivity. Cameron put the party interest before the national interest and vetoed aggressive campaigning against Johnson and Gove in the interests of holding the Conservatives together. ‘I’ve told Boris I’m going to make him competitive’ and he’ll get a ‘big job’ in Cabinet, Cameron said during the 2016 referendum campaign, as he reassured his opponents that there would be no hard feelings once the game was over, and reassured himself that he would win it.
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