Eight years ago today, Daniel Hannan wrote an op-ed in The Sun, (Why Project Sneer was doomed to be rejected) rubbing in Vote Leave’s victory two days before. He ended by quoting approvingly some lines from a 1907 poem by G K Chesterton – The Secret People – as if the voters had suddenly stopped doffing their flat caps to the establishment and for the first time, expressed the opinion of the common man, one that coincided perfectly with his own of course.
These were the lines he chose to quote:
We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.
For we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
He implied that Brexit was the true voice of the people of England.
Voters to ‘regret’ Tory annihilation
In a few days the people of these islands are about to speak again, but for some reason Hannan, or Baron Hannan of Kingsclere as he became in 2020 as a reward for his efforts in getting Brexit done, is now somewhat less eager to accept their opinion. He writes in The Telegraph that: British voters will come to regret annihilating the Conservative Party claiming there is “simply no rational case for the sort of Labour landslide we are about to see”.
The Tory peer ponders about what “calamity” could explain such a dramatic swing and recalls his own recent experience canvassing in the home counties. Former Tory voters are certainly switching and the reasons they cite include, according to Hannan, assisted dying, HS2, Just Stop Oil, aid to Ukraine and the badger cull. One thing nobody raises with him – apparently – is Brexit. Fancy that.
Of all the people who are puzzled by the Conservatives’ imminent annihilation, Hannan should be the last, if only he had an iota of self-awareness. How many of the voters abandoning the party watched his predictions about Brexit, broadcast on BBC’s Newsnight a few days before the referendum?
Hannan’s post-Brexit Britain was a fantasy
The picture he painted of life in the UK in 2025, of a Utopian fantasy flowing with milk and honey (albeit presumably not to EU 1308/2013 or Directive 2001/110), is about as far from the lived reality of citizens in this country as you can get. Like Boris Johnson in 2019, he oversold Brexit and it simply isn’t enough now to say the UK economy “has neither taken off not tanked”.
This is like a jerry builder offering the excuse that the extension he messed up hasn’t caught fire or flooded.
Unlike the voters Hannan claims to have canvassed, a lot of former and current senior Conservatives put the blame for the party’s dire polling numbers squarely on Brexit, something he admits to having spent his entire adult life working towards. No wonder he’s deaf to criticism.
Young voters have turned against the Tories
Eight years on, new polling suggests 84% of voters aged 18–24 want to rejoin the EU. Brexiters may have satisfied themselves and the majority of over 50s but gave no thought to those who would come after. In 2016 they were not allowed to speak but from now on we will hear their voice growing louder and louder.
To help him understand why the voters are on the verge of annihilating his party, Lord Hannan should look back on Chesterton’s poem and particularly the previous stanza:
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.
When the result of the referendum was announced on the morning of 24 June 2016, although nobody realised it at the time, the Conservative Party had signed its own death warrant. We are about to witness its execution.
Get the tumbrils ready.
Read more from Anthony Robinson on Brexit here, and check out our free Yorkshire Bylines Election Gazette:
