Tony Blair is right, the people want a Final Say – but we also want him to be quiet

I make this plea on behalf of literally everyone, other than the duo named below, who craves a Final Say:

Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, in the name of all that is decent and holy, fall silent. Not fairly muted, or a little hushed. Silent, entirely silent, to the inaudible tune of not one more syllable about Brexit until it is done.

The second referendum see-saw is so finely poised that Michael Frayn’s overquoted dictum – it’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope – demands another run out.

A powerful Cabinet cabal including Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond and allegedly de facto deputy PM David Lidington, is pushing for it.

All the latest polling suggests public opinion is decisively turning. A YouGov sample of 5,000 finds that Remain crushes no deal and Theresa May’s dodo deal in individual matchups. Even when all three options were put, a majority opted to stay.

Another poll suggests that should Jeremy Corbyn’s cosmic inaction enable the no deal cataclysm, Labour would haemorrhage enough support to the Liberal Democrats to slide to third place.

There is one compelling reason why we are heading towards a second plebiscite – the lack of a viable alternative on the farthest horizon – and several strong ones why we might not get there.

One is the question of democracy. You can try to dismiss the 2016 result by reference to dodgy campaign financing, whoppers on buses, and the miasma of ignorance about what it would mean. These arguments have some truth.

But you cannot magically vanish the gigantic fact that, unfairly manipulated or otherwise, the people spoke.

If Remain had edged it and today’s polls showed a majority for Leave, those who voted to stay would treat Brexiteer demands for a rerun as they treat ours. We’d dismiss it as a grotesque affront to democracy.

Since it is futile to deny this, the sensible course is to own it. Of course a second referendum is a monstrous choice. But when the alternatives are so much worse, it is a choice in name alone. Reversing Brexit is a sufficiently overriding economic imperative to ride roughshod over the genuine democratic problem it raises.

From the moment the PM’s kamikaze vote goes down, the second referendum (currently an almost 54 per cent chance) goes favourite. If she chickens out, the mounting panic is on course to shift the odds in the same direction.

But this, like all else, is nebulous. The trajectory is desperately fragile. It could be altered by various winds, one of which is the injection of hot air from voices the public inherently distrusts.

Blair must appreciate this. He may be incapable of grasping why from his panic room in the self-righteous sanctuary of his own mind. But he knows the punters loathe him as a pathological liar with a messiah complex that has sent him repeatedly to Brussels to offer tactical advice about how the EU can help bring no Brexit to pass.

In a way, I can respect him for speaking publicly. Clearly he feels so passionately that he is willing to take the hatred in the belief that not speaking would be unforgivable cowardice.

His old enforcer is another matter. Where Blair remains an instinctive political genius and much the most gifted communicator in or on the outskirts of British politics (albeit almost no one will listen), Alastair Campbell is a… But I’m not allowed to use the word even with asterisks.

What I can do is direct you to his recent appearance on Newsnight. Interrupting the journalist Jenni Russell with the automatic gunfire of his snarling, simplistic certainties about a matter of infinite complexity, he must have recruited a few thousand Remainers for Leave At Any Price Even I End Up Sleeping Rough.

“This is exactly the kind of attitude that is going to destroy the Remain campaign,” said Russell. “If you talk to people with slightly different points of view like that.”

Over the last two years, I’ve had the same debate with some of Campbell’s confreres in the New Labour In Exile Model Army. All good people, some good friends, they cannot accept that the Brexit vote wasn’t only against Brussels, it was also against them and their rigid refusal to contemplate the causes of resentment towards those within the city-state of London who ignored them and their life chances for so long.

Russell was alarmingly correct. If there is a new referendum with no Brexit on the ballot, and if Remain campaigners show a hint of condescension (let alone Campbell’s rage) towards those who need gently coaxing to shift their votes, it might well end the same.

“You were troglodyte bus slogan dupes last time. Now you’ve seen a hint of what true chaos looks like, don’t ruin it for us again,” is not a clinching argument.

There are voices that can present the winning case with eloquence, wisdom and credibility. For the antidote to Campbell, check out Michael Heseltine on Channel 4 News, talking with magnificent sadness about how 70 per cent of his generation damaged the prospects of the 70 per cent of the young who voted to stay.

Yet they haven’t done the damage yet. We can still squeak out of this if all the cards fall right.

Speaking of playing cards brings to mind the pack of Mesopotamian targets drolly printed by the Americans after the invasion of 2003.

I have avoided the I-word in the Blair-Campbell context, because I want to propose a deal between them and every Remainer like me who has obsessively banged on about their part in that for 15 years.

If they will promise to fall silent about Brexit until the day it is settled, join me in pledging never to utter another word about you know where.

It’s highly unlikely that such a morally repugnant non-aggression pact would last more than half the 22-month lifespan of the earlier one between Hitler and Stalin. But that might just be enough.