To those still fighting the Brexit forever war, the latest poll on leaving the EU will either be a source of consternation or vindication. According to the Sunday Times, only 29% of Britons now say they would vote to leave the European Union if a referendum were held today. But how much does this actually tell us?

As far as a second referendum goes, relatively little — not least because there remains a significant gap between expressing a different view to a pollster in theory and witnessing politicians attempt to overturn the original vote in practice. Nor should we overlook that one reason for the rise in support might be that, having left the EU, we are no longer affected by its policies and Brussels is no longer covered nearly so heavily in the popular press.

The likely real driver, or at least the principal one, is simpler: voters are unhappy with the status quo, and will direct their anger at whatever the status quo happens to be. Prior to Brexit, that meant the EU — largely because politicians were eager to redirect blame towards Brussels, without fully considering that this might backfire if things didn’t go well in the aftermath. Now that we’ve left, that anger is instead directed towards Brexit.

Is this fair? For the most part, no: Britain’s big structural problems, such as flatlining productivity, stagnant wages, and a spiraling cost of living, predate Brexit. Nor is the argument made by some Remainers — that we might have sorted one or more of these issues had we not been “distracted” by leaving — particularly convincing. There is precious little evidence that our politicians were ever just itching to get round to making really hard decisions.

But fair or not, it does matter. During the Conservatives’ 2016 leadership contest, I advised one prospective candidate that the party needed to win the peace on Brexit. If the years that followed the vote were good, voters would look favorably on the decision to leave; if not, they would blame the Tories.

Crucially, this analysis didn’t depend specifically on finding lots of “Brexit dividends”. Most voters don’t follow politics closely enough to track which policies were or were not facilitated by leaving the EU. What mattered was simply the general mood music over the next five or 10 years.

Of course, we know what actually happened: the Brexiteer candidates imploded, the party spent several fractious years trying to leave under a leader who voted Remain, and then Boris Johnson’s purported golden age was cut short by the pandemic.

Add to that spiraling housing and energy costs, a buckling court system, and the early release of dangerous prisoners, and it’s easy to see why voters are angry — or to blame them for thinking that the issue which dominated politics for years must have played some part in the trouble.

But, honestly, it doesn’t really matter. I wrote recently about the plague of “pseudo-events”, which are announcements staged purely for the press coverage. Polls are, if anything, even worse: they allow private interests and resource-starved newspapers to conjure up stories where, literally, nothing has happened.

Polls are often commissioned by people with specific objectives, and can easily be crafted — without resorting to questions so obviously leading as those of Sir Humphrey — to tilt the results. On less well-known issues, the mere question of asking may cause respondents to come up with positions on things they hadn’t previously considered and, more importantly, don’t really care about. It’s all fodder for the next press release.

Some people will never get over Brexit, and that’s a shame. But the rest of us should not let pollsters lure us back into the trenches; there are far more important battles to fight.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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