Get your Eurovision goggles, it’s time for yet another election

Two years and 11 months since Britain voted to leave the EU, the country is voting again, on how we’d like to be represented in it while we struggle to work out what leaving actually means.

Yes, we found out this week that the Euros are definitely on, despite the best efforts of an embattled Prime Minister to stick her fingers in her ears and pretend that, if she can’t hear the roar of the incoming avalanche of popular outrage, it won’t materialise into European elections.

That message of denial has infiltrated the whole of the blue corner. The Conservatives pretty much gave up campaigning before the race even started – their leaflets contain a hopeful “how can these elections be stopped?” paragraph (answer: even Theresa May has finally admitted that they can’t).

The aim seems to be to spend as little money as possible (convenient, since many Tory donors are so furious at the party’s shambolic handling of Brexit that they’re refusing to open their wallets) and keep expectations low, much like a schoolgirl who thinks it’s fine for her to fail the exam as long as everyone knows she didn’t revise for it.

Failure in this case looks like the Conservatives polling at below 10 per cent and losing most of their MEPs – a “see me after class, Theresa” result if ever there was one.

Despite the sense of jubilistic schadenfreude over in the red corner, Labour isn’t doing much better.

The local election results last week, while damning for the Tories, were arguably even more devastating for Jeremy Corbyn – nobody expects the governing party to do well in locals nine years after coming to power, but the main opposition is meant to make gains, not lose 84 seats and six councils.

On the back of this damp squib, Labour is going for broke with the European elections. At the campaign launch in Kent yesterday, Corbyn claimed that Labour could “unite the country” and heal the divisions of Brexit.

This might be more convincing if Labour had managed over the past three years to heal its own divisions and unite around a Brexit policy.

Instead, it has presented itself as the only viable opponent to May’s “hard Tory Brexit” in Remain-leaning areas, while at the same time keeping the message decidedly vague in its Leave-voting heartlands.

Labour is committed to leaving the EU (according to its manifesto, at any rate), but if you ask the right members of its front-bench, you’ll find that a second referendum is still very definitely on the table, where all possible Labour positions on Brexit are laid out to be viewed but never actually selected.

That worked as a magnet attracting anyone disillusioned with May and the Conservatives when Labour was the only alternative in town, but the Euros have changed all that.

The anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and Change UK (if that’s still its name by the time this goes to print) are all hammering Labour on Corbyn’s euroscepticism and the party’s refusal to commit to a second referendum. Their message to pro-EU voters is that support for Labour in the 2017 General Election was interpreted as support for Brexit, and a relatively hard Brexit at that.

That’s tricky to argue with, but some are trying. The Labour peer Andrew Adonis, who has been one of the most zealous fanatics of a second referendum, has been shouting to all who will listen that his is a party that will fight Brexit to the bitter end, while Labour posters in the North East call on voters to “back the biggest Remain party, to stop Brexit”.

That’s a message that’s been seized on – justifiably – as proof that Labour isn’t serious about leaving the EU after all, opening the door for Nigel Farage’s expertly-minted Brexit Party.

Unlike the ashes of Ukip, which has taken a break from racism scandals to coalesce around a candidate’s right to make rape threats, the Brexit Party is set to wipe the floor with the major players.

Its simple messaging and broad spectrum of credible candidates from a variety of political backgrounds is a reminder that Farage, for all his everyday-bloke bluster, is a savvy political operator who knows exactly what he’s doing.

The name itself is genius – if you support Brexit, why vote for anyone other than the Brexit Party?

All the debate about what type of Brexit to aim for that has consumed Westminster for three years has been drowned out by three simple words, guaranteed to give both Labour and the Conservatives a thorough beating.

It also conveniently masks the fact that Farage’s offering is actually the No-Deal Party – a valid position, but hardly one that can claim majority support, as the passionate yet tactically vague call for “Brexit” can.

So if Farage is adding a layer of subtlety to his man-in-the-pub populism, the lofty-minded Lib Dems are swooping down to his level. Their campaign slogan is the crude but clear “Bollocks to Brexit”.

All of this means that, barring some miracle breakthrough deal, it will be a ragtag rainbow of passionate enemies that take up their seats in Strasbourg in June.

Ironically, this looks set to be the most enthusiastic – if futile – exercise in European democracy that Britain has ever been fortunate enough to attempt.