Delingpole: Britain’s New ‘Centrist’ Anti-Brexit Party Is the Problem, Not the Solution

This is what I told two high-profile, very rich and influential Remainers a couple of years ago when I first heard this new centrist party being mooted.

The scene was a large country estate, somewhere in England, a few months after the Brexit vote. I was off for a walk round the grounds with the two Remainers. The conversation went something like this:

Remainer One: We need a new centrist party to counter all this extremism from Corbyn and Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg and Farage – and do something to reverse this ridiculous Brexit vote.

Remainer Two: I’ve been thinking on the same lines myself. But who would lead it?

Remainer One: Well the obvious candidate would be Ed Miliband, if we can somehow lure him back from America and persuade him to give up his enormous salary. Or Chuka Umunna.

Me: Oh God not Chuka Umunna. I met him on Any Questions once. Looks great in a suit but that’s it. He’s bland and boring, he’s got nothing to say for himself, no ideology, he’s just…

Remainer One (as if I weren’t there): Would it have traction?

Remainer Two (also if I weren’t there): Oh I think so. A lot of people who voted Brexit are starting to wake up to what an awful mistake they’ve made…

Me (after about ten minutes more of this drivel): Guys, I’m sorry, but you are talking absolute bollocks. People didn’t vote Brexit because they are racist or extremist or any of that other nonsense you Remainers believe. They voted because they are sick to the teeth of the status quo: an antidemocratic stitch up where it really doesn’t matter whether you vote Labour or Conservative because you get the same bland, career-safe, politically correct bureaucrats making petty new rules, wasting money on pointless projects, bowing to the EU, sucking up to the eco-loons, slowly chipping away at every last thing that might make us proud to be British. And now here you are saying: what we need is a new centrist party offering them exactly the same thing only more so.

Obviously I don’t remember the exact details. But this, I swear to you, was the gist of what was said – including the mooting of Chuka Umunna as leader.