Andrew Cooper: Voters just want Brexit over with. Whether they like it or not, it won’t be

Nearly one thousand days on from the 2016 referendum and with March 29 — currently defined in law as Brexit Day, regardless of how unready we are — now a mere six weeks away, most voters want, more than anything else, just for Brexit to be over.

Every week Populus asks a nationally representative sample of 2,000 people to name, unprompted, the news story they have noticed most over the previous week. This provides a valuable reality check of how few news stories cut through at all. Very often the political issue of the moment that’s dominating Westminster is barely noticed by the public.

Brexit news is very much being noticed — and because most people have a very low capacity for political news, it generally crowds out everything else, so very little else is cutting through. But most find the coverage of Brexit as boring and confusing as it is ubiquitous. And the volume of the coverage is not helping general comprehension.

Focus group discussions reveal that very few people have even the vaguest idea of what “Theresa May’s deal” actually comprises. The fact that it was so heavily rejected by MPs — and is so energetically denounced by the devout on both sides of the argument — reinforces a widespread presumption that it must be quite a bad deal. But many were long ago resigned to the probability that we wouldn’t get a good deal — and this doesn’t necessarily stop people from wanting Parliament, nevertheless, to endorse it, so strong is the desire to put Brexit behind us.

This points to a crucial misunderstanding among many voters, who assume that the “deal” over which MPs are bickering covers not only the terms by which we leave the EU, but also the details of our trading relationship after we’ve left.

The proposition that, far from marking the end of the tedious and vexatious period of negotiation, the fact of Brexit will actually trigger a new and almost certainly much longer and more complex new phase of talks, can bring focus groups to horrified silence.

Research indicates that “no deal” is a bit better understood. In YouGov polls presenting different summaries of what no deal means in principle, most people pick the right answer. But a significant minority — about a third, including some who say they are in favour of a no-deal Brexit — don’t know what it means.

One in eight think it means leaving the EU but everything else continuing as if we were still members, and five per cent think it means not leaving at all — significant numbers to misunderstand a concept so completely, remembering that the margin in the referendum was less than four per cent.

Even those who correctly understand what no deal would mean in principle generally have little sense of what impact it might have in practice, and often dismiss specific examples of how it could affect the country — whether these are cited by the Government or by businesses — as “scaremongering” or “Project Fear”.

Many also discount no-deal scenarios because the more damaging they sound, the more likely it seems that even politicians as useless as ours are perceived to be wouldn’t actually land the country in that reality; brinksmanship was always widely expected and many take comfort in Micawberism.

A substantial majority — Leavers and Remainers alike — agree that Brexit has turned out to be much more complicated than we were led to believe, the negotiations much harder, the ongoing costs higher, the EU much more intransigent, and the benefits nowhere near as tangible.

As a result, the 2016 referendum campaign is viewed as even worse in hindsight than it felt at the time: both campaigns, it now seems clear to people, were characterised by overstatement, misdirection and outright lies.

There is an even stronger consensus that the Brexit process has been a catastrophic system failure of the whole of the British political system and the entire political class — every leader, most MPs, all parties. The handling, as well as the issue, of Brexit has brought many voters near the limits of tribal patience with the parties they’ve generally supported — just as it has to breakaway Labour and Conservative MPs.

The Independent Group’s raison d’être evokes a wide and deep feeling among large chunks of the electorate.

I recently asked focus groups to sum up how Brexit was going and the recurring phrase was: “We’re a laughing stock”.

Many Remain voters fear the rest of the world thinks the UK ridiculous for the hubristic self-harm of voting to opt out of the EU single market. Perhaps more tellingly, most Leave voters — much of whose motive for supporting Brexit in the first place was to reassert our national exceptionalism — think that the collective ineptitude in implementing the referendum decision has made us the butt of the world’s jokes.

The bottom line from all of this is that the vast majority of us still stand by the view of Brexit that we took in the 2016 referendum.

Of those who have changed their minds, more were Leave voters than Remain voters. And people who didn’t vote in the referendum but say they would now do so break for Remain by nearly three to one.

This adds up to an anti-Brexit majority of about eight per cent to 10 per cent if there were another referendum now.

Furthermore, because of the margins by which young adults oppose Brexit and old people support it, the balance of opinion in the country continues to move from Leave to Remain funeral by funeral and new voter by new voter.

By the apparently remorseless force of the referendum, we hurtle towards a Brexit that few understand and which a majority no longer wants.

• Andrew Cooper is the co-founder of market research company Populus and was director of strategy at 10 Downing Street from 2011 to 2013