SOMETIMES A LOOK

is worth a thousand words. But few have nailed a nation’s feelings as neatly as Harriet Ellis, aka #eyerollgirl. The student from Bristol was caught on camera last week, in the middle of a Channel 4 debate about Brexit, executing such an epic eye-roll behind Nigel Farage’s back that Remainers thought they’d found their queen. ‘We are, in a very real sense, all Harriet,’ tweeted the Labour MP Karen Buck, as the gif went viral. And that was just the beginning.

‘I got marriage proposals, I had people asking me to be their best friend,’ Harriet, who is reading classics at Birmingham university, tells Grazia. ‘Someone asked me out for dinner in Toronto. Someone else offered me money to run an anti-theresa May campaign. On the other side, people assume I’m a fascist, or a Remoaner, or a stoner who just goes to university and smokes weed.’ A surprising number, meanwhile, simply wanted to know what Farage was actually like up close. ‘A lot of people asked me how he smells. You know when people used to be able to smoke in pubs? He smelled like that: beer and stale tobacco.’

So it might surprise some to know that while Harriet, 21, is no fan of Farage or his take on immigration, she actually voted for Brexit. She’s wanted to leave the EU for years because: ‘I don’t like the bureaucracy, I don’t like the fact that you don’t know who’s running it’ – and what actually annoyed her was Farage rubbishing the Prime Minister’s proposed Brexit deal. ‘Anything he says merits an eye-roll, but he was saying that we’ve now got a Remainer Brexit, which just confused me because we definitely haven’t. Remainers definitely aren’t happy. Theresa May’s trying her hardest to make a Brexit that works for the people who voted for it.’ As she says, it’s striking how much people assume from a facial expression. A reminder, maybe, that viral images don’t always tell the story we think.

But if Harriet’s eye-roll was universally relatable, that’s partly, she reckons, because the Brexit debate is normally so impenetrable. ‘I think people are just looking for something they identify with, because a lot of our politics isn’t identifiable. I voted for Brexit, I feel quite well-informed and I keep up with politics, but it’s just inaccessible. If a gif of me rolling my eyes represents that, so be it.’

Maybe it’s not that young women are apathetic about politics, so much as turned off by what they hear. The record number of women elected in this week’s US midterm elections, on a high female turnout and amid furious debate about the threat Trump may pose to their rights, suggests plenty of women do engage when the issues are vivid enough.

Nonetheless, Harriet, who only ended up in the audience after a friend roped her in, and swears she had no idea she’d be behind Farage, has no political ambitions herself. ‘God, no. I want to be a teacher. I’d rather change the world through that. I’m barely well known, but if this is a fraction of what it’s like to be famous, I don’t know why anyone would want it.’