Brexit Party Loses Plot

There is a lot of interest in what the Brexit Party are going to do in the General Election.   Armchair strategists are looking at polls and constituency results and trying to come up with the optimum deployment to achieve their objective.

These things do matter and can have an impact on the final result.  Party managers need to make the best decisions they can in the circumstances in which they find themselves.  But it is easy to get obsessed and miss the big picture.   The intervention of the Brexit Party is important, but the exact level of its support and representation isn't the measure of its success.   A country that has a Brexit Party in contention is different to one that doesn't.   It is a big statement about what kind of country we are.  Leavers didn't cheer when the Brexit Party beat the Conservatives in the Euro elections, or at least shouldn't have.  Their success was a huge boost to the argument for leaving the EU.  As we have seen, it pushed the Tories in the direction of being even keener to leave the EU than they were before.

So will concentrating on winning a handful of seats be a better strategy for the Brexit Party?  It might be tempting to get a few MPs rather than none at all.  But if doing so means that they don't fight every constituency and so means they don't get their message across to as many people as they can then they aren't winning the argument.

I know very well that the current knife edge nature of opinion polling means that the Brexit Party risk splitting the leave vote and so putting the current process of leaving the EU at risk.  But in the long run leavers can't keep the UK out of the EU if people really want to be in it.  Likewise, remainers will not have much of a victory if they keep the UK in the EU against their will for a few more years. 

So if the Brexit Party withdraws from its aspiration to be a national party that is great news for remainers.   It means that they are conceding the field.  If as a consequence of this they manage to create the conditions whereby the Conservatives get into power again it will feel bad the morning after the votes are cast.  But if also means there isn't a story about how there are now 2 million people willing to vote for an out and out Brexit Party, that's a price worth paying.  I hope the Brexit Party limit their ambitions and reduce their impact.