On Friday 22 November, the unofficial Brexit Party candidate for Beaconsfield, Adam David Cleary, addressed an audience of a few hundred people in a brightly lit town hall. Four other candidates shared the stage with him. One was Dominic Grieve, a former Conservative attorney general who was standing as an independent. Cleary had hardly begun his speech when he turned to Grieve and said: “And then we have Dominic Grieve, a man rejected from his own party, who spent the entire parliament trying to stop Brexit!”
Applause rippled through the crowd, which was full of Conservative Party members. Many of them had once been Grieve’s supporters and activists. Now they emboldened Cleary, whose voice rose: “–in collusion! Consulting with the French government, consid: “And then rida