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The public's growing exhaustion with Brexit offers Theresa May a lifeline

Theresa May speaking in the Commons
Theresa May talking about Brexit for the umpteenth time Credit: House of Commons

Most people simply want the Government to deliver –  which may be the PM's best hope

There's one message Theresa May has been hearing increasingly as the Brexit process has dragged on, "Get on with it!" Whether said by Boris Johnson or Ringo Starr, it has summed up the exasperation felt by many voters about the time spent arguing about the minutiae.

The summer break has given everyone a chance to escape the rows, with even those tasked with negotiating the terms of Britain's divorce and its future relationship allowing themselves some time off.

Negotiators will be happy that the talks are in their final stages. But the ongoing stalemate in Brussels means that the prospect of Britain having to walk away without a deal being done has never looked more likely. Meanwhile, bellicose Brexiteers and Remainers in Parliament threaten to mangle whatever Mrs May tries to present.

Parliamentarians, not least the Prime Minister, might want to avoid thinking about politics for the moment. But everyone in Westminster should make sure they have on their summer reading list the latest findings by Deltapoll, which took a look at how disenchanted the British people feel by the constant bickering over Brexit.

Remainers and Brexiteers could learn something valuable from this survey, which asked voters if they "no longer care how, or when we leave the European Union" and "just want it all over and done with".

Remainer MPs don't want to ease up their efforts to dilute and delay as much as possible the Government's Brexit programme, as they insist it is their duty to beat back the "Brextremists". However, the biggest group of Remain voters surveyed by Deltapoll don't really care (48 per cent) about their ongoing fight.

Such antipathy is shared by the majority of Conservative Remainers (58 per cent). That suggests the likes of Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke are fighting for the minority (35 per cent) of Tory Remain voters who care about the form Brexit ends up taking.

Brexiteer MPs are similarly feisty in their efforts to stop Mrs May delivering what they see as  "not Brexit". Deltapoll's findings suggest that the vast majority of Leave voters (around 75 per cent) aren't quite as worked up as Jacob Rees-Mogg about the eventual detail of Brexit Britain's customs arrangements.  

The public's general Brexit exhaustion (or, as it will inevitably be called, "Brexhaustion"), with Deltapoll finding around 60 per cent saying they no longer care about Brexit's eventual form, will give Downing Street hope.

Mrs May's Chequers plan has already been pronounced dead by pundits due to how widely it has been pilloried across Westminster and Europe. But her team will hope that after securing some variant of it from the negotiating grinder, the electorate will simply be grateful she had managed to make Brexit workable. Her Eurosceptic colleagues may quibble, but how far could they get in their concerns if voters are too tired to care? 

Theresa May's critics like to urge her to "get on with it", but the trench warfare her ministers have to fight over every jot and tittle of her legislation cannot but slow her down.

Brexiteer and Remainer MPs will tell themselves they are fighting for the 17.4 million Leave and 16.1 million Remain voters respectively. But many of those voters have tuned out, and just want the process to wrap up with Brexit delivered, in whatever form that might be.

 

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