If three words – Take Back Control – won Brexit, what three words sum it up now? Not Even Wrong.

In the early hours of June 24th 2016, a man hardly anybody had heard of was the first leader at the headquarters of the Vote Leave campaign to hail the historic result, “climbing atop a desk to give a short speech, riffing on Henry V before Agincourt”. Later that morning the former Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers texted this same man, the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, “congratulating him on changing the course of European history”.

As director of the European Research Group that brought Tory Eurosceptics together, Hannan was the primary intellectual advocate for Brexit. Douglas Carswell, who became UKIP’s first MP, recently wrote that “plenty more claimed credit for Brexit after the event. But Hannan more than anyone else made it happen”.

Hannan was not an opportunist but a true believer. In 1990, while still a student, he founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain. He drove the Brexit project through arid decades in which it seemed a hopeless cause. And unlike more famous figureheads of Brexit such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, he had the decency to publish a substantial book called Why Vote Leave in the run-up to the referendum.

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