Remainers missed the point: the biggest blow is unrelenting boredom

The Remain campaign must be kicking themselves. All that time they wasted, banging on about how Brexit would mean economic ruin, mass redundancies and loss of global influence. What a blunder. Only now, 18 months too late, do they realise what their message should have been. The trouble with Brexit, they should have said, is that it will be monumentally tedious.

So tedious, in fact, that beleaguered voters will actually beg their MPS to make the media shut up about it. Such has been the experience of Tracey Crouch, Tory MP for Chatham & Aylesford. “People come up to me in the street,” she revealed in an interview yesterday, “and say, ‘Can you ask the BBC to stop reporting on Brexit?’” For many voters, explained Ms Crouch, the whole subject had become overpoweringly dull. Even though they themselves had voted for Brexit, they were sick to the back teeth of hearing about it.

We shall never know, of course, but I wonder what the result of the referendum would have been if, rather than threaten voters with penury, David Cameron had simply said, “Look. If you vote Leave, you’re never going to hear the end of it. Literally. Never. Every time you turn on the TV or open a paper, it’s going to be BREXIT-BREXIT-BREXIT-BREXIT. And that means wall-to-wall, unadulterated, 24-carat solid-gold boredom. Ferocious boredom, tyrannical boredom, savage, suffocating, spirit-crushing boredom: day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. At every turn you’ll be subjected to news about monotonous negotiations, insufferable debates, exhausting amendments and impenetrable in-fighting.

“And unless you destroy your TV, radio, phone and laptop, lock your doors and cut yourself off from all human contact, there will be no escape. You’ll be trapped. Your family will be trapped. We’ll all be trapped. Trapped, in the 24-hour Brexit news cycle. Tomorrow, the day after, and very possibly the rest of our lives.

“Vote Remain: For a Different Story Leading the Six O’clock News At Least Every Once in a While.”

Now that’s what I call Project Fear. Personally, I do sympathise with Ms Crouch’s constituents, but at least they can switch off the TV when anything about Brexit comes on. I actually have to turn up and sit through this stuff, And, with all due respect and deference, dear people of Chatham & Aylesford: you don’t know you’re born. Yesterday, for example, I had to go to a Brexit-themed conference in London, at which David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, gave a speech saying nothing of interest and then took no questions. The most memorable moment came when he said goodbye, turned away from the lectern, missed his step, and almost fell flat on his face. In the nick of time, he caught himself, regained his balance, and hastened out. If only he’d fallen over. Even the long-suffering denizens of Chatham & Aylesford would have tuned in for that.