Back when I was sharing a house with Marge, Joe, and the glorious force of nature that was their daughter, Little Miss Sunshine (LMS), LMS thought that my idea of a good time was to watch “Peppa Pig’ on the computer with her. It wasn’t, and I told her this, but as it suited her needs to do so, she ignored me. I watched so much of it that I ended up venting my frustration in a post entitled ‘Is Peppa Pig mind control’

She was only about 4 and I resigned that it couldn’t get worse. How wrong I was. She then went through her ‘Holly and Ben’ phase, made using a style of animation that might charitably be called ‘naive playfulness’ but to my eyes, made ‘Scooby-Do’ look like the work of a creative visionary. Telling the ‘stories’ of the ‘adventures of ‘Holly’ – a fairy princess – and ‘Ben’- an elf – it was worse than it sounds. But she’d watch, equally enthralled and with an endless appetite for more of them. By now she was about 6, and I owed her.

Because no matter how many different anti-depressants I was prescribed after my brain injury, nothing was as effective as an insistent 2 year old banging on my bedroom door, telling me to get up because she wanted to play. So it was the least I could do, but too late I realised that by enduring both ‘Peppa Pig’ and ‘Holly and Ben’, I’d made a rod for my own back and that rod had a name.

“Frozen’

If you know why this cultural abomination is so reviled by anyone over 10 who has had the misfortune to see it, then you have my sympathy. If you haven’t seen it, don’t. It makes ‘The Greatest Showman’ – which I’ve also watched more times than a grown man should – seem like a towering cinematic achievement in comparison. It’s that bad. But she loved it – I mean she really loved it – to such a point where she could sing all of the aural detritus -‘songs’ – far more enjoyably to my ear than the film versions. ‘Let It Go’ was a particular favourite of hers and she would sing as if she were channelling the spirit of Ethel Merman. That’s high praise, by the way, just in case you think otherwise.

Anyway, I was thinking of ‘Let It Go’ when I saw yet another poll in ‘The Guardian’ seeking to bolster their position that Brexit was a con, that people who voted for it were conned and that anyone who campaigned for ‘No’ was unspeakably guilty of enabling something that they didn’t like. They way they carry-on one might imagine them patiently admonishing a truculent child,

‘Now it would be in everyone’s best interests if we just put the whole thing behind us and pretended like it never happened. We know you had a temper tantrum and we hope you feel better for it now, now you’ve got it out of your system. But that’s all it was, a temper tantrum, and as the adults here it would be remiss of us not just to point out that you were wrong to act in that way to begin with, not just to point out that what you thought would make things better, hasn’t. But more importantly, to make sure you never get such wrong-headed idea’s ever again. Because that would upset us, and we don’t like being upset.’

Thus we had on this bit of democracy bashing on Thursday,

Only 18% of leave voters think Brexit has been a success, poll finds

Mmm. But if 18% think that, doesn’t that mean 82% think something else? What might that something else be, I wonder. Oh hang, a detail that wasn’t worthy of an eyeball grabbing top story clickbait was to be found in the text, once you had clicked on the story and bothered to read a bit that is, that 30% said it had gone neither well nor badly, and 26% said it was still too soon to say.

That means then that if 18% of people polled think one thing but 56% think a combination of other things, that’s, er a total of 74%. That can’t be right, can it, that 26% of people polled just vanish? But it seems that they can and did, because there’s no mention of them anywhere else, but the story just throws up other percentages that prove this and damn that.

It does helpfully note however that the pollsters Public First asked more than 4,000 leavers how they felt now about Brexit. Not helpful enough to tell us how much more than 4,000 leavers were polled – was 1 or 207 – or how the pollsters were able to accurately identify leave voters, but hey, what’s the use a running a story about a poll if you can’t cherry pick the results?

Hilarious, as it turned out. It provided proof that the Law of Unintended Consequence’s can cause embarrassment to be dressed up giving space to an alternative view. Because the next day ‘The Guardian’ ran – or more likely was forced to run after complaints from the pollsters Public First – an opinion piece by Anand Menon, the director of The UK in a Changing Europe, who commissioned the survey and Sophie Stowers, a researcher there. Ostensibly to reinforce the sentiments expressed by the audience in the previous nights BBC1’s ‘Brexit Question Time’, with findings from their survey, they wrote,

One of the most interesting comments last night came from an audience member who was sick of being told she had been lied to. A majority of leavers feel they had all the information they needed to make a decision in 2016. And a plurality think that they had sufficient information from both sides of the referendum campaign to make an informed decision. What they resent is the fact that political leaders have not capitalised on the sovereignty for which they voted; 39% of them think politicians have not even tried to make Brexit work.

Hang on, that’s not quite the narrative that ‘The Guardian’ endlessly perpetuates, that of leave voters being hoodwinked, lied to or subjected to Russian something or other. Nay, nay, and thrice nay! But they weren’t done yet, endowing those who voted to leave with rational thinking, which must’ve been something of a shock to a ‘Guardian reader/organ grinder/sponsor who imagined them all to be pitch-fork wielding illiterates.

Yet while they are frustrated, leavers did not expect instant results. A quarter of them think not enough time has passed to judge whether Brexit has gone well or badly; 61% think Brexit will turn out well or very well in the future. There was a sense among those in the audience last night that they did not expect to wake up on 24 June 2016 in a whole different Britain. Rather, Brexit is an ongoing process that, while politicians have messed it up to date, still holds the promise of greater successes to come.

Steady on! Next you’ll saying that leavers don’t experience any doubt as to the certainty of how they voted, oh, that is what they say

So, it should come as no surprise that many – including most of those in Clacton last night – still back the decision they made in 2016. In our survey, 72% of 2016 leave voters, knowing what they do now, would still vote as they did. There was much groaning and eye-rolling at (Alastair) Campbell’s support to rejoin the EU. For most leavers, even those who are “Bregretful”, another referendum is not the answer.

The Guardian’ is treating its disciples in much the same way that ‘Peppa Pig’, then ‘Holly and ‘Ben’ and finally ‘Frozen’ treated LMS It gives them what they want, a simple and graspable narrative, that they know will get them and more importantly, keep them hooked. The one difference being that LMS was a child and was treated as a child, with no discernible ill effects. ‘The Guardian’, by contrast, treats adults as children, with a poll seemingly every other week, always finding something that’ll reinforce their increasingly contemptuous attitude to democracy. That democracy only works when it works for us, and if it doesn’t, well we’ll just have moan and complain until it does.

I just want to point out, in case you’ve forgotten, that I voted to Remain. I didn’t however, vote to remain perpetually petulant about the result though.

And if I did, then I’d blame 27.2% of voters who could have voted and changed things, but couldn’t be bothered. That’s who the real villains are, the one’s that exercised their democratic right not to vote, that’s who “The Guardian’ should demonise instead, but doesn’t because it doesn’t suit their simplistic narrative.