In all the excitement you may have missed one of the more telling moments of Friday morning’s news coverage. Interviewed on the Today programme, Peter Mandelson made a particular point of praising the splendid “professionalism” of the Stronger In campaign and its director, Will Straw – as if the fact that they had lost, and utterly misjudged the feelings of the electorate, was purely incidental. It was like a television critic lauding the production values of a programme that had totally flopped with the viewing audience.

What matters in politics apparently is not the verdict of the voters but the quality of the message delivery. Suddenly it was possible to see with luminous clarity all the absurdity of modern political strategy and the terrible end to which it has come.

This defeat for Remain is about much more than the country’s dislike of the EU. When politics became a branch of the advertising industry, it was just a matter of time before it lost touch entirely with the point of the democratic process: it became at least as important to run a “professional” (slick, controlled, flawlessly manipulated) campaign as to represent the views of real people.

Or even to listen to them. Because if anybody in that sinister alliance of mainstream parties had bothered to listen they would have gathered that what had alienated the public most was precisely what political strategists call “professionalism”.

What the voters want – as they have now made stunningly clear – is unprofessionalism: genuine, spontaneous responses from people who may sometimes look amateurish and flawed but who appear to have sincere opinions and authentic, idiosyncratic personalities.(Cue Boris Johnson?)

There was a time when British political life was full of such people. Jim Callaghan, George Brown, Norman Tebbit and Ken Clarke are names that drift inevitably into memory: they had wildly differing opinions and degrees of effectiveness but they were alike in their authentic humanity, and were often popular with people who disagreed with them.

Then they were replaced by homogenised androids whose messages were honed and performances strictly managed – and now we are where we are: with a population so furious and disillusioned that it does not believe a word that its national leaders utter.

It is important to understand who it is exactly that is so angry and disgusted with the super-professional management of politics. There is a dangerous myth being reinforced in the post-mortem discussion that the result of this vote was entirely attributable to the anger of the “white working class” (code for “reactionary bigots”).

This is certainly not true. The real white working class, as opposed to the demonic one that suits the purposes of cosmopolitan liberals, is a now a shrinking minority of the population. It could not, by itself, have accounted for the fact that every single region of England apart from London, voted for Leave.

There aren’t that many white van men and disgruntled low-paid workers in Surrey and Berkshire. If affluent Home Counties and economically successful Midlands towns went for Brexit then there is something more going on here than the condescending cosmopolitans of London like to tell themselves and each other (because they speak only to each other).

David Fuller's view

Here is a PDF of Janet Daley’s current article.

Well said, although I wish she had included Margaret Thatcher in that list.  It has been fashionable to vilify her in recent decades but she put the UK economy back on an economically competitive course by reigning in the UK’s equivalent of the French unions.

I commend the rest of Janet Daley’s column to you; it is one of her best.

(See also Janet Daley’s prescient column: If the Era of Democracy is Over in Europe, It Is Time for Britain to Get Out, posted on September 29 2015.)