Nigel Farage may be a brilliant campaigner, but the Brexit party will soon be over

For those who felt that one Rees-Mogg in public life was ample, the arrival of the even more Eurosceptic Annunziata may come as something of an unwelcome surprise.

Sister to the more familiar Jacob, Ms Rees-Mogg seems a marginally more “with it” character than her fogeyish sibling.

She is one of the exciting candidates being fielded by Nigel Farage’s freshly launched Brexit Party in the European elections. The nation looks forward to making her acquaintance, another intriguing cast member in the Brexit soap opera.

The arrival of the Brexit Party is much anticipated, and its agenda hardly needs spelling out. Mr Farage believes that Brexit has been “betrayed”, and he has returned to frontline politics to save it.

Brexit, after all, is Mr Farage’s baby, whether we like it or not. More than any of the other wizards of Leave, Mr Farage was the one who, with Ukip, spent years campaigning, seemingly hopelessly, to win an In/Out referendum on the EU.

An accomplished campaigner, Mr Farage was able to scoop the protest vote that might usually have gone to the Liberal Democrats when Nick Clegg led his party into coalition with the Conservatives, after 2010. People were being pummelled by austerity and the Great Recession; bewildered by the banking crisis and the unending troubles of the euro and the Greek economy; worried about migration.

Mr Farage, brilliantly – in purely technical terms – capitalised on such discontents to huge effect. He “won” the 2014 elections to the European parliament, after all. Fear of what he was about to inflict on the Tory base at the coming general election then panicked David Cameron sufficiently into promising the EU referendum. His unexpected overall majority at the 2015 general election removed the hope that the Liberal Democrats might conveniently veto it for him. The rest of the story is painfully well known.

So, Mr Farage can claim paternity of Brexit. He was arguing the toss about the CAP and sovereignty when Boris Johnson was styling himself as a Europhile mayor of London. Mr Farage was insulting EU officials in the European parliament while Michael Gove was studiously following his leader’s advice to “stop banging on about Europe”. Theresa May was a famously reluctant Remainer at the 2016 referendum, while Mr Farage and his self-styled “bad boys of Brexit” were pulling any and every stunt to win the vote. Against his own expectations, Mr Farage triumphed.

Mr Farage and the Brexit Party should not therefore be underestimated as a political force. Mr Farage can still argue his case with a passion that beggars belief, but seems sincere. He apparently genuinely believes that a no-deal Brexit is the best option for the UK, and that such a move will lead to a golden age of peace and prosperity. Every one of the practical obstacles that confronted Ms May is dismissed as treachery, fiction or “project fear”. The Brexit unicorn is still being ridden by Mr Farage around the country, and is still attracting some fans.

Even so, the exhalation many feel about Brexit is morphing into a realisation that Brexit simply hasn’t worked, and is hardly worth persevering with. It is certainly not worth risking millions of jobs to go through the whole process again under, say, a government led by Boris Johnson.

Mr Farage at least has the honesty to campaign in his own right in his own party. Others of his type have been busily infiltrating the Conservatives. Arron Banks, a long-time ally of Mr Farage, likes to think of the “blukip” movement as the “‘SOE’ of British politics behind Vichy Tory lines blowing up their railways and going after MPs with deselections. With 25,000 members of Leave.eu behind enemy lines. Very happy to be under estimated.”

The Eurosceptics, in other words, have not gone away, and are capable of making trouble for the other parties, one way or another.

And yet, in truth, the stock of the Brexit Party and the rump of Ukip is devalued by the very disaster of Brexit. It is now a demonstrably failed project, whatever Mr Farage might pretend.

The Leave groups may prosper to the extent that they will, as ever, attract a protest vote, and Mr Farage will be able to do his turns in the chambers in Strasbourg and Brussels.

But, for now at least, the momentum seems to have drained away from Brexit. The Brexit party’s over.