Claire Fox

After appearing on Newsnight last week, an #FBPE-monikered keyboard warrior wrote a much liked comment above my picture that read: "Bat shit crazy, howling at the moon @brexitparty_uk  neo Nazi fascist apologist tries to blame the judiciary. Straight out of the Hitler/Goebbels Handbook. We are living in dangerous times. #stopbrexit #RevokeA50 #SaveDemocracy". This was one of the more polite responses. We all know that the internet has become somewhat unhinged and I get a daily dose of such unrestrained invective. But it is a shock when such attitudes spill over into face-to-face encounters.

As the by-election result came through from Wales last week, one Tory Leaver tweeted this: “Brecon and Radnor is a timely warning to Brexiteers. Vote for the @brexitparty_uk and you will hand another seat to Remain. How could you be so stupid?”.  So stupid? The nerve, when after all, it was the the Brexit party that resuscitated the referendum result after a near death experience created by his party. I was furious at the arrogance. But he isn't alone; this view has now become the narrative popularised by some Tory grandees and voters, even though many of the latter loaned the Brexit party their votes in the Euro elections.  Yet without the Brexit party, it is likely that Theresa May would still be prime minister.

Since being elected a Brexit Party MEP, I have gone from gamekeeper to poacher as far as the broadcast media is concerned. Until six weeks ago, I had the privilege of being a commentator who could sit on couches endlessly pontificating. Now as a politician, I’m the target of my fellow commentators. They either discuss me in my absence or ask a series of staccato questions with little room for context or nuance.  Maybe I’m fair game. After all, I have spent two decades as a Radio 4 Moral Maze panelist interrogating witnesses. This, perhaps, is my comeuppance.

Much has been made of the Brexit Party’s insurgency amongst people in Leave-voting communities, who have been subject to disparaging and patronising establishment contempt ever since they dared to vote the ‘wrong’ way in the EU referendum. But far less attention is given to the minority of Leave voters who work and live in the professions and other areas where support for Remain is the default position. One woman who approached the Brexit Party stall in Chester last week told me his: “I am a solicitor; my friend here is a physiotherapist and we are both fed up of being shunned by colleagues because we voted Leave. I just don’t tell people anymore.” She speaks for millions.

I am standing as Brexit Party candidate in the forthcoming EU elections. The response of voters so far has been overwhelmingly positive. Phew. Here’s a chance to demonstrate that the shambles that parliament has made of delivering on a referendum mandate will be challenged by a democratic fightback. It really is exciting. But, I admit, deciding to stand was rather more nerve wracking, and sent shockwaves among my peers.   *** “Why on earth rock the boat, it could ruin your life and career?”. Just one of the incredulous warning notes sent to me when a friend heard I was considering standing. I certainly had doubts about throwing my hat in the electoral ring.

Since the EU referendum result last June our nation has been divided: not only by the vote but also by language. If 62 per cent of Britons (many of whom undoubtedly voted for Brexit) now say Britain ‘sometimes feels like a foreign country’, it’s not anti-foreigner prejudice so much as a feeling that people in authority are speaking at them in a foreign language. Not Polish or Punjabi but PC-speak, that opaque code that connotes whether you are ‘on message’ and one of ‘our kind of people’ or one of those racist lizard-brained Leaver oiks. Look at the new language of diversity that is now being prescribed in much of the public sector.

Donald Trump’s shock US election victory has provoked a transatlantic howl of disbelief from a cosmopolitan elite aghast that American voters have had the temerity to reject its one true liberal world-view. Hillary Clinton’s loss is seen less as the rightful humiliation of a discredited machine politician and more as proof that the masses have, once again, rejected ‘the facts’ of the situation. To this elite, installing the Donald in the White House represents the apocalyptic dawn of a ‘post-factual era’. After all, Hillary Clinton’s chief weapon against Trump was an army of fact-checkers.