The Europhiles have finally snapped and Brexit is looking increasingly likely

A campaigner waves a balloon featuring a British Union Flag

Remember when there were a thousand Leave campaigns and Remain was united behind the PM? With a week left to go, the positions are reversed. Leave is remarkably coherent and positive. Remain is tearing itself apart.

When Osborne hit the nuclear button on Wednesday and threatened the country with an austerity budget, Tory backbenchers said they’d never vote for it. And Labour, under the increasingly canny leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, said it wouldn’t support it either. It used to be that only the voters didn’t believe Project Fear. Now even the politicians have lost faith in it.

Brexit is winning the referendum and is currently headed for victory next Thursday. Barring two eventualities that I’ll return to later. But for now, if the referendum were held today, I’d guess that Leave would win for the following reasons.

Poll after poll puts Leave ahead 

Maybe they are overestimating Leave’s support, maybe they are online and can’t be trusted because nothing on the internet can ever truly be trusted (I won’t even bank there). Whatever: momentum is with Leave. Even in Scotland, which traditionally is stubbornly pro-EU. 

Remain shot its bolt early

The plan was clearly to roll out Treasury/IMF/expert advice in the first weeks of the campaign, terrify the population and build a commanding early lead. It didn’t work: voters were unconvinced by prophesies of depression and a third world war. Why would they change their minds in the next seven days? What more can Remain do to alarm them?

Remain is panicking

You don’t threaten to punish the country for voting Leave unless you think that it’s likely to do so – and you’re doing everything you can to stop it. What do they know that we don't?

The Sun has endorsed Brexit

The Sun doesn’t decide election winners but it does have a history of picking them.

The country has reasons to feel patriotic 

The sun is out, the Queen is 90 and the football always unfurls the flags. Oxford Street is bedecked in red, white and blue right now. It looks like VE Day outside BHS.


My mind keeps coming back to the extraordinary Ipsos Mori poll that showed that Remain support ebbs away when net migration increases well within the historic norm. When historians come to write books about this campaign, they may well identify the release of annual net migration figures back in late May as the turning point. The number 333,000 could be a chapter heading.

Brexit has the arguments 

Last night I spoke at the Westminster Cathedral Hall debate in London on behalf of Brexit. The audience was polled beforehand and was for Remain. After the debate, it was for Leave.

This was a gathering of city workers, Catholics (who have been told by many clergymen that it’s a moral duty to vote Remain) and the descendants of immigrants – not your classic Brexit audience.

What I sense is that people are friendly towards the idea of the EU so long as it remains just an idea, a vague principle of solidarity and internationalism.

When the realities of the EU in practice are spelled out, as has been slowly happening in this campaign, people wake up to the facts and are appalled. They ask themselves: do I get enough from the EU in exchange for the democratic control that I surrender? The answer is usually a “no”.

Having said all of this, there are two things that might switch momentum back to Remain. One is a last minute vow. Some desperate bid by the EU to get us to stay by offering an even more special relationship than the supposedly special relationship that Cameron negotiated a few months ago.

Unless this vow includes something dramatic on immigration, it probably won’t work. But there are many voters who probably are looking for a positive reason to cave into Project Fear without feeling cowardly, and the prospect of a significantly reformed relationship might do it for them.

Second, it’s always possible that there are millions of shy remainers out there who are yet to speak. People who don’t share the Brexiteer’s obsession with Europe, see free movement as a convenience, and can’t understand why we’d want to take the risk of leaving. Broadly speaking, a conservative frame of mind.

Yet conservatism ain’t what it used to be. There was a time when it represented a preference for stoically muddling through. But while that sentiment retains a large constituency, the number of voters who back Ukip, back no major party, don’t usually vote, vote Labour or Tory while quietly despising both, or who are just mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to- take-it-anymore is growing.

They have been waiting for a chance to register their disgust with the direction of the country for a long time and may be judging that this is it. Absent of a positive, cohesive Remain camp to put them back on the straight and narrow, they may just seize the opportunity of a lifetime to send the elites a message.

That isn’t my reason for voting Brexit but it’s a sentiment that a lot of canvassers report from the campaign trail. And that anger, where it does exist, has only been stoked by Remain’s relentless negativity. 

The real gamble taken in this referendum wasn’t economic but political. Cameron gambled that he could all at once trash the EU and praise it – offer us a vote on membership and threaten us with disorder if we voted the wrong way. He has played for high stakes. Genuine Europhiles must resent him for it.