Brexit: Remainers are moving heaven and earth – but not the polls, by Allister Heath.

Goliath wants to annihilate David, and do it in style. Day after day, the massed forces of the global establishment are delivering their blood-curdling warnings, with one simple mission: stop Brexit at any cost.

The plan is ruthlessly efficient, the roll-out beautifully choreographed, the elite troops perfectly briefed. Generals, diplomats, company bosses, economists, entertainers, assorted virtue-signallers: they are all rigidly on-message with their grotesque claims that Britain could not possibly cope with standing on its own two feet.

It is like nothing the UK has seen before, a display of raw power and political professionalism that makes the Referendum of 1975 and even the Scottish campaign of 2014 look like amateur theatrics. The next six weeks will see total war, with all weapons and tactics fair game.

Apocalyptic claims from endless grey-suited figures may come to sound like old news. Hysteria only works when it is seen as plausible and dispassionate. Barack Obama’s heavy-handed intervention backfired, while the Prime Minister’s claim that a Brexit would increase the risk of war was so over the top that it will have encouraged many undecided voters to switch off altogether.

The Government’s biggest problem is that it can preach and bully, but can’t do real populism. Its tone oozes a certain class-based disdain: how dare these uppity Leavers defy us?

It’s almost as if they thought that everybody who matters is on the Remain side, and that anybody else, by definition, is a non-entity unaware of their lowly station in the world. There are few real arguments, endless appeals to authority and a nasty assumption that elites and international technocracies are always right, a faulty approach in our non-deferential, post-Iraq and post-economic crisis age.