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The dream of a big reconfiguration of politics never dies. But it never quite comes to life. For a few brief moments, the departure of a handful of MPs, mainly from Labour and three from the

Conservatives in February managed to capture headlines. But any breakaway has to be confirmed quickly, in real-time elections. When the last major breakaway party – the Social Democratic

Party – emerged in 1981 (also as a result of disagreements over Europe and a hard left controlled Labour Party) the new party quickly validated itself by winning by-elections for its

illuminati, including Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams. In that era, MPs had the political decency to die more often. Today’s House of Commons is full of men and women in their eighth or

ninth decade, including the current Labour and Lib Dem leaders, but few are in clog-popping territory. So the Labour and Tory MPs  who became Change UK have had no luck with elections, nor

with the flow of political events. So far Brexit has not happened. The June 2016 referendum took place, but Mrs May and the House of Commons has kept us in the EU, so there is not the

dramatic rupture that allows a new politics to emerge. The Change UK MPs did not have the organisation to stand in the European Parliament election, nor in the Peterborough by-election. None

of their MPs has dared resign his or her seat and see what support there is in a by-election. Their leader, Chuka Umanna, has scuttled off to the Lib Dems, and been rewarded with instant

promotion to the front bench. But he has no chance of turning his Streatham seat into a Lib Dem win. The word on Lib Dem street is that he will be offered Vince Cable’s Twickenham seat.

Disraeli pointed out in 1852 that “England does not like coalitions” and a modern version of this might be “England does not like new parties”. That is why the calls for a Remain party do

not make sense. There is little doubt that much of the nation is now very wary of full amputation Brexit, as the European Parliament elections votes for the only authentic Remain party, the

Lib Dems, show. But there is no surging enthusiasm for Europe as an ideal or even as an idea. Voters do not need to be told to coalesce around a Remain party when they have the Lib Dems to

vote for if their main preoccupation overriding all other political priorities is Brexit. As Mrs May found out in 2017 and Boris Johnson will find out if he tries to copy her and calls a

coupon election on Europe, though headlines will be made on Days One and Two of the election, by Days Ten, and Twenty the focus will change. The issues of  the enfeebled economy, mounting

debt and deficits, the poor state of the NHS, schools, care homes, the growth of food banks and beggars on the streets, the disappearance of police constables from the community, the fears

over air pollution, Britain’s alignment with President Trump: all of these will quickly become more important than Brexit. Labour will not win many, if any, votes from the UK’s 260,000 Jews,

but how many of Britain’s 3.3 million Muslim citizens will vote for a Prime Minister who calls Muslim women “letter-boxes” and has written a dictionary of quotations disparaging the BAME

community? So any election may begin with Brexit, but will end somewhere else, and a single issue Remain party will not win a single seat. Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system

forces disparate political groups into the two main parties to win power.  Labour is now offering a new referendum after three years of equivocation. In a general election, that will be a

powerful offer, as voters like parties who promise them plebiscites and punish parties which deny them a vote. There might be some point in the unique circumstances of the forthcoming Brecon

by-election for all anti-Tory and anti-Brexit parties to stand down, in favour of a single candidate who was non-party (rather like when Martin Bell won Tatton in 1997, when Labour and Lib

Dems did not field a candidate). But, in the end, the main parties will have to work their way through their Brexit agonies. It will take many years, and a Brexeternity of political wrangles

inside UK political parties, as much as between them, lies ahead.