17.4 million votes

The billionaire George Soros yesterday responded to the story, exclusively published in the last week, that he is financing a plot to reverse Brexit to the tune of £400,000. Towards the end of this response comes a sentence that is revealing: “The electorate needs to push their MPS to give them the courage to rebel against the party leadership, and the electorate needs to be motivated not just to vote but to take an active role in politics.”

This is rum indeed. Mr Soros made his fortune through the canny analysis of data. He himself notes his formative learning at the London School of Economics. Few doubt that he is a very brilliant man. So what is it about the number 17.4 million that so eludes him? Is this – the number of people who backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum – not a demonstration of an “active role in politics”? It was, after all, a bigger number than has ever backed any other cause or party in British history. Indeed, many people have been politically engaged as never before by the subject of this nation’s departure from the EU – so much so that others might be forgiven for feeling, wearily, that the subject has become ubiquitous and alternative conversation impossible. Either way, Britain today does not seem a nation whose people are turning their back on politics. On the contrary.

Mr Soros is entirely free to spend his money how he chooses, and no one can doubt that his determination to preserve democracies against totalitarianism has noble intent. But he himself acknowledges that, having survived Nazi, then Soviet occupation of his native Hungary, he fled to the freedom of Britain. It is precisely that freedom which Brexit aims to preserve.