Jeremy Blair and the gathering Brexit revolt

What Brexit-supporters perceive instead is just one big thing – that a Remainer parliament, possibly now aided by the courts, is determined to rob them of their democratically expressed wish for Britain to leave the EU. They see Boris Johnson, who is championing the people against parliament, now being trapped and bullied by both MPs and the Speaker in order to destroy his power to do so. And their fury is at boiling point.

That’s why I’m picking up an extraordinary political shift that appears to be taking place in nothing other than Labour’s most deeply tribal heartlands.

It is accepted wisdom that working-class Labour voters will never, ever vote Tory. Those who voted for Brexit are thought more likely to vote in a general election for Nigel Farage and his Brexit party as the only acceptable alternative to Remainer Labour.

But I’m now hearing astounding stories from hitherto rock-solid Labour constituencies in the north of England: the kind of places, some of them old colliery towns, where voting for the Labour party is in their DNA and it would be unthinkable for people there even to consider voting Tory. At the last general election, they voted en bloc for Jeremy Corbyn. Now, though, many say they intend to vote for Boris Johnson. The unthinkable is being thought.