Brexit may be five years old but the battle to bring it about began in earnest almost a decade before that.
It was way back in November 2010 that the Daily Express launched a crusade to get the United Kingdom out of the European Union, engaging the active support of many hundreds of thousands of readers sending in campaign coupons.
Prior to us becoming the first mainstream national newspaper to pin our colours to this mast, Westminster politicians overwhelmingly treated rising public Euroscepticism with contempt. And many media outlets posed as EU-sceptic just by harrumphing about individual new power grabs by the Brussels machine and then offering no better way forward.
As the chief political commentator of this newspaper at the time, I had noticed a growing postbag of Express readers writing in to say they thought we should just leave. It initially seemed an unlikely outcome – beyond the “art of the possible” limits to political action once identified by the post-war Tory Cabinet minister Rab Butler.
But a detailed perusal of the terms and impact of our EU membership suggested otherwise. Our annual financial contributions were among the highest of any member country, our trade was always in massive deficit with the EU, freedom of movement was flooding the UK labour market and dragging down pay rates in working class jobs and the Eurozone financial crisis had burst the bubble of credibility around the European political class. There was no good news for Britain coming out of this organisation anytime soon.
Domestic politics had also settled in a place which offered major opportunities for a Brexit campaign. Lib Dem participation in a coalition government with the Tories had led to their poll ratings crashing and most of their naturally left-of-centre voters transferring to Labour. Meanwhile, right-wing habitual Tories were dismayed to see David Cameron cosying up to the likes of Nick Clegg, creating a potential upswing in support for UKIP.
If our Brexit campaign could knock the Tory poll rating down and UKIP up by about five points, while Labour was being boosted by the same or even more via its new Lib Dem recruits then it followed that Cameron would come under enormous political pressure. And we knew that Cameron travelled light in ideological terms, meaning he might easily buckle in the face of calls for an In-Out referendum.
Our campaign took off like wildfire and it turned out that the political establishment struggled to articulate a case as to why staying in the Brussels club was necessary.
UKIP under its charismatic leader Nigel Farage began to surge in the polls and in parliamentary by-elections, mainly at Tory expense. Cameron started making increasingly Eurosceptic noises, warning that democratic consent for EU membership was “hanging by a thread”.
Early in 2013, he gave way, abandoning his previous claims that a referendum would not be in the national interest and promising to hold one during a second term of office.
Many people think he intended to cite a continued dependence on Lib Dem support as a reason for breaking that pledge further down the line. Yet the British people gave him a wafer-thin outright majority in 2015, so he had no such excuse.
The referendum we had fought so hard to bring about was suddenly in view and the British people would finally have the chance to bring sovereignty home.
