What the commentators said

As the only person ever elected as an MP for Farage’s former party, said Douglas Carswell in The Spectator, I “really can’t see the point” in voting for his current one. Johnson’s deal delivers everything we Leavers wanted, by taking us out of the EU. Farage, like Corbyn, is opposing it on the “disingenuous” basis that we might not like the terms of as yet undecided future trade deals. But until we leave the bloc, we can’t even start negotiating such terms. Does Farage really expect Johnson to abandon his hard-won withdrawal deal at this point, asked Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. It seems this “monster of egotism” would rather block Brexit than see anyone else take credit for realising his lifelong ambition.

We Remainers are finding allies in unlikely places, said Matthew Norman in The Independent. Who would have guessed that Farage would emerge as our potential “saviour”? Don’t count on it, said Sean O’Grady in the same paper. It’s true that polling suggests that for every vote the Brexit Party takes from Labour, it detaches two from the Tories, but

“on present showing, that may not be enough votes to make much difference to anyone”. Farage’s party will likely have an impact only on the “tightest of marginal contests”, and even in those cases it will be unpredictable.

I, for one, am in no doubt about the result of the election, said Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph: the Tories are going to romp home. Some have cited the 2017 election as a cautionary tale. When that campaign started, they warn, the Tories had a big lead and nobody thought Labour had a chance of winning – and just look what happened. But the Tories, who ran a pitiful campaign in 2017 partly because they were so confident of thrashing Corbyn, are not going to make that mistake again. They also have the key advantage, this time, of campaigning on a simple, unambiguous question: do exhausted voters want the Government to proceed with Brexit on the basis of Johnson’s deal or not?