How should people vote in the European elections tomorrow?

Some who support Brexit will be so disgusted that they are even taking place that they will boycott the poll. Many others, who yearn for the not-so-distant past when Britain was a model of success on the outer tier of EU membership, will wonder whether voting will do anything to end the division and malaise that descended on the country since that misguided referendum and its disastrous result.

Both would be making be a mistake.

Votes matter, because our democracy cannot be representative if citizens don’t participate. These elections matter because the one thing everyone can agree on is that our relationship with the EU matters.

People should exercise their right to vote.

A protest vote is a waste. The outcome won’t affect the fate of the Prime Minister; she’s finished. But it could help determine the fate of her successor.

Yesterday’s desperate speech by Theresa May tried to offer something for everyone and in the end, like her premiership, it offered nothing to anyone.

“Seeking common ground in Parliament” was the slogan behind her. It’s a good idea, Mrs May, but it comes three years too late.

Her fate was sealed when she indulged the divisional politics of Brexit on entering Downing Street and as a result lost the centre ground and her party’s majority with it.

She should have gone with dignity in 2017; instead her weak party indulged her weakness.

Mrs May’s dwindling team are apparently putting together plans for a series of “legacy” speeches on the issues she wishes her premiership had been about, and asking a reluctant Treasury to cough up some money for them. No one will notice.

Instead, to the accolades of the worst manifesto, worst conference speech and worst parliamentary defeat in history, she is likely to add tomorrow the worst Conservative performance in a national election.

That would not much matter to anyone else, were it not for the fact that the biggest beneficiary will be the Brexit Party.

In this election, Nigel Farage reminded us both why he’s such an impressive campaigner and why the country is in the mess it’s in. He has more than proved the Evening Standard's theory a month ago that a single-issue pro-Brexit party could scoop close to half the pot.

But while he channels the anger of those who feel ignored, he offers nothing that would help them.

Instead the Brexit Party has driven the Tories into a blind panic that is, in turn, driving the many candidates to succeed Mrs May to set exactly the undeliverable red lines that sunk her.

Open door

If the Brexit Party’s vote tomorrow was a little lower, and the Tory vote a little higher, that might create the space for a leadership contender who makes the case for a radical return to the centre ground.

That will need to happen at some point, so why waste several years on the fringes in the wilderness beforehand? That is reason enough to vote Conservative tomorrow.

Those who feel the 16 million people who voted Remain have been ignored will struggle to vote Tory. It is one of the failures of this administration that it has turned its back on so many of these natural Conservative supporters.

They should be ripe pickings for a sensible Labour opposition. But we don’t have one of those.

Jeremy Corbyn is an extremist. The public don’t like that, as the local elections showed.

His Euro campaign has been a study in political cowardice — refusing to make the case for a new referendum, and refusing to make the case against.

Change UK, the group of independent MPs, should have been able to capitalise on this. Their creation generated excitement and their list of candidates featured some impressive faces.

They’re not yet the sum of their parts — but could still become so. They have not become the single-issue Remain Party that, we advised a month ago, could scoop that half of the electorate Mr Farage could never reach.

This has left the door open to the Liberal Democrats.

They had the courage from the start to say the referendum result was a mistake — and Britain needed to think again. As a result, voters have started to think again about them.

We wish them well.