The man who brought you Brexit | Sam Knight | Politics | The Guardian

The man who brought you Brexit | Sam Knight | Politics | The Guardian

"[Daniel] Hannan, who is 45, is by no ordinary measure a front-rank British politician. He has never been an MP, or a minister, or a mayor. Instead, since the age of 19, he has fought for what he calls British independence - fomenting, protesting, strategising, undermining, writing books, writing speeches and then delivering them without notes....

"Hannan may have contributed more to the ideas, arguments and tactics of Euroscepticism than any other individual. It was Hannan, in 2012, who asked Matthew Elliott, the founder of the Taxpayers' Alliance, to set up the embryonic campaign group that later became Vote Leave. Elliott, who is 38, describes Hannan as the pamphleteer who made Brexit seem like a reasonable proposition for millions of people. 'I can't think of anybody who has done more on this,' he told me. Others laboured too, of course, and Elliott cited veteran Tory MPs Bill Cash and John Redwood, who spent decades attacking the constitutional and economic aspects of the EU - 'but Dan is the only person who has successfully created a whole worldview,' he said. 'And also then done better than anyone else to be the propagandist for it.'...

"Besides, to allies and enemies alike, Hannan's role has never been on centre stage. Trying to characterise his contribution to Brexit, many people I spoke to likened him to dogmatic intellectuals from the past who came first and prepared the way. Admirers mentioned Patrick Henry and Tom Paine, whose writings catalysed the American Revolution. Opponents compared Hannan to Trotsky. 'You have got to have hard arses,' the Marquess of Salisbury, a long-term Eurosceptic and Hannan supporter, told me, 'who are morally courageous, who consistently make the arguments, who don't mind being unfashionable.'...

"Concentrating on arcane goals such as breaking up the EPP was a telltale move of the hardcore Eurosceptics. Another inch gained. Another bolt loosened. 'Our goal in politics should not be to get the right people in,' Hannan told me once, paraphrasing Milton Friedman, the American free-market economist. 'It should be to set the incentives so that even the wrong people will do the right things.'"