The centre ground wasn’t where Chuka Umunna and the Change UK party thought it was

When people say they want a new centre party, and they want politicians to work together across party lines, it turns out that they don’t mean what Chuka Umunna and his hopeful band thought they meant.

The MPs who set up Change UK were brave to leave their old parties – eight from Labour, three from the Conservatives – but they all did so for different reasons. The launch of what was initially a Labour breakaway was triggered by Luciana Berger, who felt most strongly about antisemitism in her party. Mike Gapes thought Jeremy Corbyn was a threat to national security; and they all wanted to keep Britain in the EU.

They were joined by three Conservatives, who were also pro-EU but who felt out of place in the rapidly radicalising, pro-Brexit Tory party – not just because of Europe, but because it was increasingly distant from their kind of one-nation, pragmatic politics.

But opposition to Brexit, the one thing that united Change UK, was not a unique selling proposition. The Liberal Democrats already held that franchise, and they had the campaign infrastructure in place, and the launch pad of local elections three weeks before the European elections.

I assumed the contagion of their role in the Cameron coalition would hold the Lib Dems back, and that the fresh-slate newcomers would do better than they did, but the inclusion of Tory defectors made Change UK more “Tory” than the Tories’ former coalition partners.

It was easier for Alastair Campbell, Charles Clarke and Cherie Blair to vote for the Lib Dems than for Labour defectors in the European elections. They could insist they were loyal to the Labour Party, and wanted it to change policy on Europe, by voting for a historical rival rather than by voting for a Labour breakaway. They want to change Labour, not abandon it.

So Change UK won just 3 per cent of the vote in those elections, and its support in the opinion polls since then averages 2 per cent. Now the party has split, with six of its MPs, including Umunna and Berger, leaving to sit as independents again, and only five remaining with the party, now led by Anna Soubry.

The wider failure of Change UK, though, is that the centre ground in British politics isn’t where they thought it was. They thought the Corbyn-led Labour Party and Brexit-crazed Tory party had become too extreme and that there was a hunger for a moderate politics of the middle.

To the extent that this was true, that hunger was satisfied by the Lib Dems. Nobody could seem more surprised by their success than Jo Swinson and Ed Davey, the two main candidates to succeed Vince Cable. They thought their leadership pitches would be about how to make their party relevant again, and now they find they have to chart a way forward for a party that beat both Labour and the Conservatives in the European elections.

(As for the idea that Umunna might run for the Lib Dem leadership – forget it: members of the Lib Dems are capable of being just as tribal as those of other parties.)

But there is plenty of opinion polling evidence that the gap in British politics is not in the liberal, free market, pro-EU centre ground, but in a different “centre” altogether. The position that has not been well represented by British parties is socially conservative, statist in economics, and nationalist. It is what Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin call national populism.

No wonder it is the Brexit Party that has succeeded where Change UK failed in realigning British politics. When people say they want a new centre party, that is what they mean. When they say they are fed up with the traditional parties, it turns out that they don’t want MPs who have defected from traditional parties, they want Nigel Farage and Claire Fox (and even Ann Widdecombe, but she was an MP for a traditional party some time ago and has been on a dancing programme since).

And when people tell opinion pollsters that they want politicians to work together across party lines, they mean something different from wanting them to leave different parties and work together in a new one – that just means the new party gets hated by both sides.

That said, Change UK has not been a total failure. It helped foment the agitation for a new EU referendum; it contributed to the unpopularity of Labour’s current policy of favouring both Leave and Remain; and it was a catalyst for the Lib Dem revival.

Politics over the next six months will not get any less turbulent, with a renewed constitutional crisis looming over the new prime minister’s attempts to take the UK out of the EU on 31 October. With such stresses on all parties’ unity, who knows what roles the founders of Change UK might yet play.