Britain hates Brexit. When will our leaders admit it?

The phrase “I am their leader, I must follow them” was originally credited to the rather obscure French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, probably as a bit of a joke.

It has now come to mean that a politician is actually not free to take his supporters where he wants; he is really at their command.

Which is why a new poll in the Sunday Times on British voting intentions is such an interesting political moment. It suggests a permanent sea-change in the UK electorate, so much so that the obvious question is: When will the politicians start leading on this issue?

The poll shows that less than a third of voters would now vote to leave the EU if the referendum was repeated. According to pollsters More In Common, 29% would vote to leave but 52% would vote to remain.

It seems likely that those 29% of voters who would still take us out of the EU, if given the chance, are overwhelmingly backers of Reform and the Tories. Many will be at the upper end of the age spectrum.

Yet even then, the poll found that only 52% of 2024 Tory voters would still take us out of the EU. It makes the current Tory party leadership’s obsession with further splits with Europe seem increasingly out of step with its own membership; maybe all the Eurosceptics are now members of Reform?

The swing towards remain, or more accurately rejoin, has been 4% in just one year. With young people overwhelmingly pro-EU, it suggests these figures are likely to swing only one way in future.

The poll shows 49% thinking that there should be another referendum on membership of the EU within five years – a figure that apparently includes many people who voted to leave. Only 37% say no.

These figures suggest that at a time when Labour are distinctly unpopular, its “reset” of our relationship with the EU is one of the few things that the government has got right. Still, cautious Keir Starmer is running well behind public opinion on the issue. So are our right wing national newspapers, which continue to foam about Brexit betrayal when it seems clear that the country has made its mind up that the whole thing wasn’t worth it.

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Those same newspapers, together with politicians like Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick, also seem to have blundered on the issue of membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Reform would drag us out at the earliest possible opportunity. The Tories are “reviewing” our membership with leader-in-waiting Robert Jenrick trying to force the party to promise to pull out ASAP.

Yet according to the poll, 58% of us want to stay in the ECHR, and only 28% want to leave. Given the vitriolic propaganda about this issue, that is an amazing split. Perhaps Daily Mail headlines and disinformation spread on Facebook aren’t worth as much as we think.

The right’s attempts to weaponise this issue are happily failing and increasingly it looks like the Eurosceptic hold on the general population is weakening too. People can see the damage that Brexit has done all around them, Trump makes them nervous, and they do not believe increasingly desperate claims by Farage and Kemi Badenoch about the bright new world out there for the UK to prosper in.

The country’s population is finally seeing the world for what it really is: cold, unfriendly and dangerous, and Brexit has put us out on our own in it. All the people need now is some leadership. But who will follow them?