Back in 2018, in the depths of the Theresa May premiership, and with Sir Keir Starmer’s campaign for a second EU referendum in its pomp, Vote Leave strategists began preparing to take on and defeat Remain once more. After the success of “Take Back Control”, a key question was what the Brexiteer slogan and lodestar would be a second time around.

The answer from the team around Dominic Cummings was characteristically clear and simple: “Tell Them Again”. Like its predecessor (and its eventual successor, 2019’s “Get Brexit Done”) it used plain, direct English and summed up popular dissatisfaction with an out of touch governing class and political establishment.

The campaign would speak to the deep vein of frustration felt around the country that there is a gulf between the consensus in Westminster and the interests, concerns and desires of the people. Like the victorious 2016 campaign before it, the campaign for a second Leave vote would leverage the elevated position of its opponents against them: authority would become talking down to people, cross-party coalitions for Remain would become a closed shop from which voters were excluded, and the very fact that the referendum campaign was being rerun despite the promise to honour the first referendum would be the decisive evidence that those on the pro-EU side were only paying lip service to democracy.

As it was, the doomed idea of a second referendum was........

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