Brexit party is still on track to transform British politics

The last line of defence for the legacy parties – the maxim that they are eternally protected from challengers by the first-past-the-post electoral system – has crumbled. At Peterborough last night the two-months-old Brexit Party came within 683 votes of winning its first Westminster seat.

Of course, there would have been considerable psychological advantage if the headlines had screamed “New party wins” and Nigel Farage’s infant political creation had added Peterborough to its European election laurels – such a narrow electoral miss is always tantalising. But the underlying realities that professional politicians and psephologists will discern from this result is, in terms of substance, every bit as seismic, if less spectacular, as a Brexit Party victory.

A party that did not exist two months ago, after sustaining the massive effort of winning a landslide in the EU elections, came late to Peterborough where Labour had been planning for a by-election from the moment its MP Fiona Onasanya was charged with a criminal offence, bolstered by polling data accumulated over decades and supported on the ground by local councillors.

The Brexit Party, in contrast to both Labour and Tories, was flying blind, with no local organization, no councillors and no data. Yet it managed to come within 2 per cent of beating Labour, on a large by-election turnout of 48 per cent. In the classic terminology, Labour “got its vote out”. Often too much credit is given to party machines for election victories, but when the margin is 683 votes it is incontestable that a well-oiled operation was decisive.

The most vacuous question voiced by any commentator in the television studios after the result was: “Does this mean that the Brexit Party cannot win under the first-past-the-post system?” What an idiotic comment. When the Tories lost Peterborough to Labour in 2017 by 607 votes did anyone suggest the Conservatives could never win under first-past-the-post? So, now that the Brexit Party has failed to gain the seat by 683 votes, why would anyone imagine it cannot win FPTP elections?

In fact, last night’s result signals precisely the opposite: the Brexit Party is a serious contender and the Westminster electoral system is no barrier to its progress. If it had lost by thousands of votes, the old first-past-the-post jinx might have had some credibility. But a three-figure margin between first and second place makes it clear that the Brexit Party has surmounted the Westminster hurdle that has long bedevilled new political groupings and is poised to wreak havoc on the legacy parties.

The opinion poll in Friday’s Times on general election voting intentions puts the Brexit Party first on 26 per cent. That is no hypothetical outcome: at Peterborough yesterday it secured 29 per cent of the vote. The legacy parties are under notice to quit. The Labour celebrations at Peterborough had a brittle timbre of hysterical relief, but their strategists must know that an equivalent effort could not be mounted nationwide at a general election and they have only secured a temporary reprieve.

The Labour Party’s share of the vote was down by 17 per cent from 2017; election victories of that kind are more ominous than reassuring. An opposition party should not be haemorrhaging support on that scale. The result has the gratifying effect, for those who wish Labour ill, of leaving the party still saddled with Jeremy Corbyn. Because Labour has not been in government public anger against it is slightly blunted compared to the loathing of the Conservatives that has seized the electorate.

For the Tories the jig is well and truly up. At Peterborough their vote share declined by 25 per cent: so much for the comforting delusion that voters who deserted them at the European elections would return to the fold for Westminster contests. The reality is that most of them will not. Theresa May demits office as Tory leader today with yet another electoral disaster inscribed on her record.

And no wonder. So far from acquiring some sense of self-preservation, the Conservative parliamentary party continues its provocations against the electorate. Michael Gove, his ear finely attuned to the national mood, proposes himself as prime minister on a platform of extending the Brexit crisis even beyond 31 October.

Rory Stewart declares that a WTO Brexit would be “illegal”. Thanks, Rory, that’s just what your party needs to hear from a leadership candidate (what are you smoking these days?). Boris, the supposed great hope of the Brexiteers, is attracting Remainer support since that faction has rightly identified him as “malleable” and believes he could be turned around. Since his decision whether to support Leave or Remain in the referendum campaign was probably decided on the toss of a coin, anyone who views Boris as a guarantor of a clean Brexit is deluded.

Brexiteer Dominic Raab will be blocked by the Remainer fifth column within the parliamentary party so that the members never get an opportunity to vote for him. Significantly, his canvassing of the possibility of proroguing parliament to secure a WTO Brexit provoked an immediate angry rebuttal from John Bercow, showing that he recognizes the danger such a move would represent to his usurped authority.

This is the last Conservative government, preoccupied with selecting the last Conservative prime minister. But Labour is also facing imminent extinction. Although the Brexit Party’s Peterborough candidate Mike Greene will not be taking a seat in the House of Commons, that does not alter the remorseless progression of the legacy parties towards final dissolution.

When the Chinese imperial dynasty was overthrown in 1911, having “exhausted the mandate of heaven”, a peculiar arrangement was made. The republican government allowed the boy emperor and his imperial court, staffed by eunuchs, to continue living in the Forbidden City, maintaining all the traditional pomp and ceremony, while exercising no power outside its walls. That surreal situation endured for more than a decade before the charade was ended.

Today, we have a similar situation within the Palace of Westminster. A rump parliament, few of whose members would survive an electoral contest, is nurturing the delusion that it is “sovereign” and that it has the power to block the democratic will of the electorate by “stopping Brexit”. At the next general election it will be dispersed to the four winds, the political eunuchs evicted and the whole grisly tableau reduced to a bizarre historical memory. Parliament has exhausted the mandate of heaven.