So once more unto the breach, Nigel. Where else but Clacton, a place that has, like Essex itself, become a byword for the leave vote. The seaside town that last year BBC Question Time visited to mark the seventh anniversary of the 2016 EU referendum. Clacton didn’t top the table – Boston in Lincolnshire had the highest leave vote – but it has become synonymous with the project after Ukip’s most successful MP, Douglas Carswell, proclaimed Clacton was the “deliverer of Brexit”.
Brexit is often offered up as a kind of direct and potent message from something politicians like to call “the people”, a guttural demand from the id of the body politic. But, over years of talking to people in Essex, I have less often heard people speak about it in those terms than got the reply: “I’m not really that into politics.” In a sense, Brexit was proof of the apathy of British democracy, but also voters’ innate knowledge that something was wrong in the UK.
