They resent a foreign power overruling their courts and their elected government. They are frustrated at being unable to change key policies when they vote. They detest contributing £8.5 billion a year net for Brussels to spend in countries less efficient, less productive and more corrupt than ours. They have had enough, above all, of being told that unless the UK concedes in perpetuity to foreign rule it will be worthless, and face ruin, danger and unremitting failure.

The ruling elite has forgotten one eternal truth: that the British people don’t like being told what to do, and we especially don’t like being told what to do by those who patronise us or use their clout to control us (as with big business). We don’t like threats; we don’t like having our intelligence insulted, and we don’t like people who try to frighten us. To judge from my mailbag and from people I have met during the campaign, this has all created an upsurge in national consciousness not about British values, but about the value of being British, that we have not known since the Second World War.

Harnessed to this rising sense of consciousness about what sort of people we are, and why independence is our due, is our national sense of humour, which as history recalls, was deployed so effectively in the trenches and in the Blitz to defeat despair. It has turned the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and their smart international friends into figures of fun as they talk with increasing hysteria about the inevitable third world war, the recession, years of grass-stewing austerity, the evaporation of pensions or the end of western civilisation. And when an American president who manifestly disdains us tells us that we shall go to the back of the queue for a trade deal if we dare leave, we show our regard for his opinion by increasing Leave’s standing in the polls. Such defiance is not foolhardy, but enlightened, given what the world offers whether we are in the EU or not.