Brexit is finished. A Leave constituency just voted in a Remain MP

Only a handful of lunatics still want Brexit - it's game over, gammons

We had a vote. Leave has lost. Get over it.

"Oh bloody hell, it's us next isn't it" (Image: Getty)

The fact a 56%-Leave constituency just chose a Remain campaigner who wants a people's vote to be its MP is delicious. But joy must be tempered by the fact that, to hardline Brexit wingnuts, 'irony' could refer to broccoli, the Earth's core, or something the metropolitan elite uses as a weapon.

The turnout was low. The majority was cut. UKIP put on 8%. And besides, if you stuck a red rosette on a house brick it could get elected in Wales, they'll say.

But there's more at work in the by-election of Ruth Jones than the Brexit campaigners want you to notice.

Newport is a former steel town and its docks were used to export coal. It has needed decades of regeneration. The accepted opinion is that regional, urban, former industrial centres like this are so determinedly Leave that Labour will lose its heartlands if it doesn't back Brexit.

Ruth has successfully disproved that, as well as two of the ERG's most bloodthirsty threats - that Leave voters "will never forgive" a "betrayal", and that they will destroy our political system in revenge.

Her nearest opponent, Tory Matthew Evans, broadly supported Theresa's deal but it wasn't enough to get Leavers to vote for him.

And the most wingnutty candidate of all, cash-for-questions dimwit Neil Hamilton, drew a measly 2,023 votes. He got his deposit back, and no doubt some will crow about the 8% swing.

But in the 2015 general election UKIP got a 9.5% swing, and HALVED its number of MPs, from 2 to 1.

Newport's not a purple wave, so much as a wave goodbye.

If Newport West is doing what it always has, if Brexit doesn't matter, if a people's vote is gaining ground, if UKIP can't persuade more than 1/7th of Centre Court that Brexit needs its vote, if former steel towns are going Remain, then every threat from the hardliners has melted away like, well, like threats from complete melts.

Even fears of a Hard Right insurgence proved groundless. The anti-Muslim For Britain Movement founded by former UKIP deplorable Anne Marie Waters polled just 159 votes.

So much for Jacob Rees-Mogg's claim that "if we stopped Brexit... that will be an opening for extremists".

It's an opening all right. But then so's an anus, and they're designed for pushing unpleasant things away.

The UK has its share of racists, but the maths isn't there to make them an electoral force alone.

The more extreme Brexit becomes - the more a screaming Stephen Yaxley-Lennon puts himself at the head of the marches, the more Mark Francois behaves like an angry Sunday roast on the evening news - the less appealing it is to the vast majority of Britons.

Combine that with the unappealing facts that the IRA has been reactivated, the NHS is stockpiling toilet rolls like the rest of us, and Parliament is officially answering "don't know" to all questions asked of it, then we ought to have a country that's falling to pieces.

Instead, if Newport West is a barometer of these things, we've got a country that just can't be arsed with this any more.

Fascists, idiots, saboteurs, traitors, hardliners, and leadership coups haven't impressed us. They've damaged the eye-rolling whackos who took part in it all, and if I had to bet who'd pay the highest price at the next general election it will be people in blue rosettes with a lust for conspiracy and TV cameras.

Many of whom, coincidentally, have majorities smaller than the number of their constituents who want to revoke Article 50

Britons may not much like the EU, but they don't like chaos and cocking about, either. They think red buses are sacrosanct, loathe false advertising, and take a dim view of being rude to people, except in an amusing and light-hearted fashion at the expense of the French and Germans.

When it looks like Pierre and Fritz pity us, when people who couldn't run a tap vie to run the country, and when the NHS which is the closest thing we have to a national religion is clearly going to be irrepairably damaged for the sake of a Tory wet dream that would seriously piss off the Queen, then you will find that Britons in general decide they don't like Brexit a lot more than they don't like the EU.

We'll never like the EU. We'll always be frenemies with the French and Germans. But as a nation we can put up with them a lot easier than we'll put up with bad-mannered twats who double the cost of prescriptions and frighten the nurses.

By

Fleet Street FoxColumnist