Spiked Online has noticed what we’ve been saying for some time. The Brexit revolution is dead in the water.

Tory MPs may be united in their fury with Johnson, but they still have no viable alternative. The discussions about how to get back on course are delusional. Many seem to think that a return to Thatcherism, perhaps via Iron Lady knock-off Liz Truss, is what the Red Wall is waiting for. It’s like they’ve been asleep or drunk for the past five years. The EU referendum and the 2019 election might have rejuvenated the Conservatives, handing them a new base and new moral mission. But that historic realignment could well prove to be a very brief makeover, as the old party of the establishment proves itself to be an uncomfortable long-term vehicle for blue-collar, Brexity revolt.

Then there’s Keir Starmer’s Labour, which remains a party of technocrats and woke scolds, regardless of how many Union flags it flies. And while Starmer might claim to have made his peace with Brexit, and says he wants to reconnect with Labour’s old heartlands, the metropolitan elite from which he draws so much of his support clearly hasn’t got the memo. Many of them spy in Johnson’s demise an opportunity to roll back the gains of 2016, when ordinary people gave the establishment a well-earned knock and forced their interests on to the agenda. ‘Brexit is the virus. Boris Johnson was only ever its most visible carrier’, wrote Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian last Friday, one of many now saying the quiet part out loud. For now, we are caught. Between a crumbling Boris Johnson and a hysterical opposition. Between phoney populists and anti-populists. If we are to rejuvenate the democratic revolt, we desperately need something new.

The mystery here is why anyone expected any different. The people tasked with delivering Brexit are those who never wanted it and never understood it, thus had to guess what it meant in practice. The Brexit revolutionaries failed to lay down any kind of manifesto and left it wide open to interpretation. There was nobody to insist the demands were met because those leading the charge for Brexit never ventured a vision of what post-Brexit Britain should look like.

That, in part, was UKIP’s failure – compounded by Vote Leave; a Tory operation designed to capture Brexit (or rather post-Brexit trade and regulatory policy) and tilt it in the favour of their financial backers.

As far as Johnson is concerned he has delivered Brexit for his ERG sponsors, and in the most sterile terms he has. We are no longer members of the EU. Having done so, he recognises the need for a transformational agenda, but when it comes to ideas the cupboard is bare. This explains the adoption of Net Zero – because it’s the only big idea in circulation. They needed something any anything would do.

That, though, was not on anyone’s Brexit bingo card. Nobody voted for Brexit to have heat pumps and electric cars foisted on us. Brexit, notionally, was about taking back control. It implied getting a grip on immigration, revitalising our fishing industry, reforming agriculture, and abandoning stifling green regulations. It implied reform to our sclerotic democracy.

To do that was never going to be easy. It means going up against deeply entrenched blobs within the Westminster apparatus – the very same people who tried to overturn Brexit. It required a leader who recognised what the problem was, with the tenacity and energy to take that fight to the enemy, who wouldn’t let himself be derailed by the mewling of the press. Johnson’s basic problem is that he wants to be popular in the media. That prevents him from doing what is necessary.

Consequently, we’re not going to get a grip on immigration. We’re not going to put activist lawyers out of business. We’re not going to take on the green blob or put wokery back in its box. There is nobody to carry the Brexit flag over the finish line. Brexit has been shunted into a siding and we’re back to the same old managerial politics, with the government doing whatever it can to stay on the right side of the mainstream media. The NGOcracy will continue to call the shots on climate action and immigration.

Spiked would have it that many in Labour “spy in Johnson’s demise an opportunity to roll back the gains of 2016, when ordinary people gave the establishment a well-earned knock and forced their interests on to the agenda”. One is left wondering, though, what gains they refer to. In what way are our interest on the agenda?

In all likelihood, that “democratic revolt” has lost momentum and we’re pretty much back where we started in terms of influence. The administrative chore of leaving the EU treaties is done, but that’s as much as we’re getting from this or any other establishment party.

Spiked remarks that “Between phoney populists and anti-populists. If we are to rejuvenate the democratic revolt, we desperately need something new“, except that we have something “new” in the form of Reform and Reclaim, and half a dozen other splinter groups, none of which are likely to accomplish anything. They’ll fail for the same reason the Brexit revolution failed: An absence of an intellectual foundation.

Tice’s Reform party drifts from one issue to the next, triangulating its position as it goes, but won’t say what it actually wants to do in government beyond a smattering of threadbare blurbs on its website which Tice evidently hasn’t read. Alternatively we have Reclaim, which doesn’t even say as much. It’s primarily the plaything of a faded celebrity representing a small corner of Twitter and their niche obsessions. Only UKIP is offering a coherent and comprehensive manifesto enshrining the demands of Brexit.

The narrative that abandoning Boris means “rolling back the gains” is a wholly self-serving Tory meme to save their own useless hides. Leavers don’t owe the Tories anything, not least because we’ve had as much as we’re getting from them – which amounts to very little. Net Zero is in lockstep with the EU regulatory agenda, and Patel is creeping an amnesty for illegal immigrants through the back door. To back this deadbeat Conservative Party (if we can call it that) is to give in to Stockholm syndrome.

As UKIP’s Southend candidate, Steve Laws, remarked yesterday “If the government can fast track regulations to put our entire nation into lockdown, then they can very easily do the same to stop illegal immigration. To say otherwise is a lie”. For all Johnson’s woes, he still has a sizable majority, and could easily reclaim the initiative were there the political will. But it’s just not there. Even the “red meat” we’re offered to distract us from his social gatherings is “jam tomorrow” – and it only looks like red meat to a devout vegan.

Johnson is determined to cling on to power but has no idea what to do with it, and the Tory party meekly implore us to back him out of a fear of what could replace him. That is no basis on which to govern a country. If he won’t do the job then we need someone who will. But then as the Tories keep reminding us, Johnson is the best they can do. If we want better, it is not to be found in the Conservative party.