The liberating Brexit 17.4 million voted for is being mugged by the very people meant to implement it. When the masses lose faith in democracy, bad things happen ...

Mrs May’s Downing Street adviser on Europe, Oliver Robbins. This influential, unelected figure has cobbled together an impractical-sounding arrangement which would involve British officials monitoring the destination of any goods entering the UK, and paying relevant taxes to Brussels on goods which were bound for the Continent.

Mr Robbins, who is defended by the likes of Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood and Conservative Chief Whip Julian Smith, is often described as a clever man. Well, clever people often have daft ideas — and this is one.

Worse, it looks like a ruse for delaying or even wrecking Brexit.

No doubt, this earns Mr Robbins lots of murmured compliments in the elevated circles in which he moves — ‘well done, Olly, let’s spin it out a few more years, old boy’.

BUT let us be in no doubt: it is a stinking obstruction to the sort of liberating, electrifying Brexit the British people want and deserve — the Brexit they voted for comprehensively two summers ago.

If Mrs May, Chancellor Philip Hammond and a clutch of other pro-Remain Cabinet ministers go along with this ‘ cretinous’ plan, as Jacob Rees-Mogg was so right to call it, they will lead their party to a deserved defeat at the next General Election. In the Commons, you will hear lawyerly talk from Europhiles such as Labour’s Sir Ke i r Starmer and the Tories’ Dominic Grieve that customs union membership is not the same as being in the EU. Ignore it.

The distinctions are as minor as the differences between identical twins.

The Starmers and Grieves know that the customs union would prevent us striking trade deals with countries such as India, the U.S., Canada and China. They know that it would wreck Brexit. Their cynicism is sickening, as is that of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Mr Corbyn is widely thought to be a Eurosceptic, but for the purposes of short-term political advantage he goes along with the plots to stop our departure from the EU.

For this supposed man of principle, nothing beats opportunism.

All those Labour voters who supported Brexit can get stuffed. Jeremy is a member of the game-playing political elite now.

One of Mr Grieve’s little helpers, oddball Tory backbencher Anna Soubry, argues that the people’s referendum vote was superseded by the General Election of June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. Let us deal swiftly with that lie. The General Election — in which Mrs May admittedly campaigned like a sickly goat — saw the national vote go overwhelmingly to two parties ( Labour and Conservatives) who promised in their manifestos to honour Brexit. The electorate was told that the Brexit argument had been settled. Game over. Alas, we were too trusting. We underestimated the sly, deceitful determination of the British ruling class to hold on to its bone.

The Establishment is fighting hard and its enemy is the British public. JUST look at some of the serial boot-fillers (on £300 a day, just for turning up) who voted against Mrs May in the Lords on Monday: former Whitehall mandarins such as Lord Kerslake and Lord Kerr; ex-children’s television presenter Lady Benjamin; Tony Blair’s former flatmate Lord Falconer; both the Kinnocks, Neil and Glenys; expenses cheat Lady Uddin; Dalek-like former BBC director-general Lord Birt, and many more. These are not people who surge with democratic fervour. They are patronising, self-enriching snoots who think they, and they alone, know what is best. June 2016 was exceptional not only in that it was an extra-parliamentary election (i.e. set up to give Parliament an express order), but also in that it saw many people vote for the first time. These were citizens, many of them workingclass, who had never previously bothered to vote because they thought their voices would never be heard. For the referendum they came out and they seized the democratic moment. They felt strongly about immigration and our national independence. Now they are seeing their scintillating, revolutionary vote being dragged into legalistic alleyways and mugged by the very people it was meant to instruct. That could so demoralise them that they will give up on democracy altogether. When the masses give up on democracy, bad things happen. Such an awful possibility must be resisted, so I plead with our truculent and selfish elite to surrender their bone and do as they have been commanded. There really can be no alternative.

HAVE you ever had trouble persuading a dog to release its bone? Not easy, is it? At first, you play nice, asking Rover to surrender his prize, but this is met with snarls.

When the softly- softly approach fails, you try alternatives — mild reprimands, distraction tactics, simmering exasperation — but these only result in worse truculence from the dog. Eventually, your patience snaps.

You wrench the juicy marrow bone from those clenched teeth and throw the treat into distant bushes.

A happy day has ended in messy aggro and you vow never again to indulge the growling, ill-tempered mutt. Much the same is happening at present with our ruling class. In recent days, we have seen, in Westminster and Whitehall, some appalling behaviour from the pampered pets of our political Establishment.

For years, they have gnawed on the bone that was the post-war liberal, Brussels-centred consensus. How delicious it was for the people at the top. Chomp chomp chomp.

Two years ago, they were told in the EU referendum — by their masters, the British people — to surrender that bone. They have no intention of complying with such an order.

And so they are growling and snapping and holding tight with increasingly bared fangs.

This unedifying tantrum was most glaringly on display in the House of Lords on Monday, when peers voted to let Parliament force Theresa May to accept a bad deal from Brussels as we quit the EU.

This could prevent her from walking away from the talks, should she wish to resort to that maybe necessary extreme.

By denying Mrs May the option of saying to the European Commission: ‘Right, that’s it, we’re off without a deal and we’ll resort to World Trade Organisation rules, thank you,’ the Lords hopes to rob our Prime Minister of the vital backstop in any negotiation: the walkout.

It is hard to think of a surer way of weakening our country — or, for that matter, of fomenting a public desire to scrap the Upper House.

There was little subtlety about what the 335 peers who voted against the Government were doing. Actually, let’s be more blunt: they were voting against Britain.

One of their number, a crossbencher called Lord Bilimoria, actually blurted it out. The Indian-born beer tycoon gloated that Parliament would have ‘ the ability to stop the train crash that is Brexit’.

THAT is exactly the goal set by Tony Blair and Remain campaigners funded by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.

Meanwhile, lifelong Euro-obsessive Lord Heseltine is rubbing his hands and claims Brexit is daily becoming less likely to happen.

Ah, Brexit. That mighty 2016 plebiscite — the biggest vote ever held in Britain — has driven our political elite round the twist.

If you think that allegation of madness is unkind, consider the wild hyperbole of Lib Dem peer Lord Roberts who compared Mrs May to Adolf Hitler.

Lord Roberts is a Methodist preacher. If he made that sort of unjustified claim from his pulpit, one trusts he would be struck by a divine thunderbolt.

Madness or wickedness. It can only be one of those two that drives a Christian minister to make such lurid comparisons.

Most members of the Lords, composed as it is of Establishment careerists, wanted to remain in the EU. Many of them — in the diplomatic corps, home Civil Service or the Law — devoted their professional lives to the European project. Several even receive hefty pensions from Brussels (though they never declare that financial interest when they speak in parliamentary debates).

When the British electorate voted clearly, in its millions, to leave the EU, these privileged poohbahs were aghast. Like Hillary Clinton, who contrived to lose the U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump, they considered the common people to be ‘a basket of deplorables’.

Parliament may have created the referendum and may have promised to abide by its result — but not that result, for goodness’ sake!

Ordinary Remain voters, being decent and reasonable, accepted the verdict of the majority. That, after all, is how a democracy works. But Europhile hardliners from the political machine reacted differently.

At first came angry disbelief, illustrated in snippy social-media comments about the vulgarity of Leave voters. This was followed by breezy predictions that support for Remain would grow as the months passed.

Obnoxious Remainers such as novelist Ian McEwan relished the prospect of older Brexit voters dying. That would swing the balance in favour of Remain, just you see.

In fact, almost two years since the referendum, there is little evidence of a change in the public’s opinion on Brexit. The electorate is not budging. They voted out and they still want out.

What, therefore, must those voters make of current attempts by Downing Street officials and some Tory ministers to weaken Brexit by another avenue: making us, in effect, stay in the EU’s customs union?

The customs union is an arrangement whereby countries surrender their independence. Instead of making their own trade deals, they let unelected Brussels technocrats set import taxes on goods.

This is the very opposite of ‘taking back control’, the slogan of the winning Leave side in June 2016’s referendum.

Supporters of a customs union, or at least customs cooperation, include