Bad politics and bad journalism

Based on votes counted so far: the great British press has decided that Nigel Farage has thoroughly trounced the Tories, and Labour has ceded ground to the Lib Dems by its vacillation.

This is stupid. Look at the numbers (for all of England and Wales - Scotland and Northern Ireland still to report, at time of writing), as compared with 2014. (All numbers below are expressed as a share of the total vote.)

The great "triumph" of the Brexit party, taking the plurality, has come overwhelmingly not from the Tories, but from the utter collapse of UKIP. That 33.3% of voters for Brexit needs to be balanced against 25.6% of voters deserting UKIP. The net gain to (Brexit plus UKIP combined) is a rather more modest 7.7%.

(As a bonus, the separation of the two parties has allowed the respectable Brexiters to distance themselves from the swivel-eyed bigots of UKIP, and a full 90% of their voters have taken the opportunity to do just that. Good for them.)

Now, granted 7.7% isn't nothing. But it's hardly a tsunami.

So of the 15.8% of voters deserting the Tories, we can say with confidence that less than half have switched to pro-Brexit parties. Which implies that what's disaffecting them is not the "failure to deliver Brexit".

Similarly, Labour's vote declined by 10.8% (of the electorate), but the Lib Dems' increased by 14%. Which implies that even if every single one of those Labour voters turned LD (and they didn't), there must still be a substantial number of defectors from other parties. In fact, those Labour defectors must be reckoned to include at least 2.5% going to Change UK, and probably at least half of the 4.6% swing toward the Greens - call it 2.3%. So the "Labour to Lib Dem" shift accounts for less than half of the Lib Dem's gain. The rest - fully 8% of the total electorate - must have come from the Tories.

I would go on to some regional analysis, but a quick glance makes me very doubtful that anything in those figures would change my mind.

Now, the Tories seem to think that if only they can deliver Brexit, all those Brexit and UKIP voters will return to the fold. But again, the numbers tell a different story. During UKIP's rise, it gained voters from both Labour and Tory ranks; there is no reason to imagine that if Brexit happened, and those parties evaporated together with their supposed raison d'etre, they would all flock back one way.

No, the real danger for them is that they will permanently lose the 20%-or-so of their party who have (provably) defected to the Lib Dems. If they press on with a hard Brexit, the Remainers will not forgive or forget that. It hurts to have your country sold out from under you.

For Labour, the message is clearer. If Corbyn can deliver a second referendum, the coalition of voters waiting to swing behind that is overwhelming - and even better, he'll frustrate the Tory plan to draw a line under the Brexit/UKIP insurgency. The Tories are suffering because they are torn apart by this issue. Labour doesn't have to be the same.