The argument is over and Leave has won.

I spent a lot of time agonising which way to vote in the EU referendum and eventually voted Remain. But I accepted that Britain would and must leave the European Union early on the morning of 24th June 2016, at about the time it became mathematically certain that Leave had won.

A disappointingly large number of very clever people have spent the last three and a half years trying to frustrate that result.

Some of them convinced themselves that Leave voters were thick xenophobic racists who didn't understand what they were voting for.

Others convinced themselves that the result was fraudulent and pushed ever more elaborate conspiracy theories about how the referendum had been stolen by Leave overspending, Russian money or bots, Cambridge Analytica, or lies on the side of a bus.

The fact that none of these things, insofar as there was any truth in them, were either likely to have changed the result nor were unique to Leave - there were campaigners on the Remain side was also proved to have overspent, and the Remain campaign also put out untrue or highly misleading statements - did not shift their opinion.

The Liberal Democrats openly opposed the referendum result - which seemed all along a strange thing for a party with "Democrats" in their name to do. When this took the form of a campaign for another referendum it came over as "people didn't know what they were voting for" which was arrogant enough. The decision to toughen this stance further and promise to simply revoke Article 50 and stop Brexit had the Lib/Dems won the election will go down in history as possibly the worst ever strategic mistake from a party which has made some pretty bad ones in the past decade. 

There is little doubt in my mind that if the former Lib/Dem leader Jo Swinson had stuck to the "people's vote" strategy, though I personally can and do disagree with it, she would still be in parliament and leader of a rather larger parliamentary party. But telling 17.4 million Leave voters that the Lib/Dems were determined to completely disregard their votes was a step too far even for many Remain supporters.

The Lib/Dems were, however, honest by comparison with the tiny minority of former Conservative MPs and large majority of Labour ones who were elected in 2017 on manifesto commitments to honour the referendum result and then spent the following two and a half years trying every trick in the book to frustrate that result.

I accept that these people thought that they were doing what was right for the country so I will refrain from making any personally vindictive comments about them, but I think they were absolutely wrong to break their election promises and attempt to block what the electorate had voted for.

The electorate clearly takes the same view and many of those MPs who attempted to stop Brexit or water it down to what one of them called "Common Market 2.0" have paid a heavy price for it: those former Conservative MPs who were not prepared to accept the Boris deal are no longer MPs.

Every defector who left one of the major parties on the basis of supporting remain, whether they stood as any variety of Independent or as a Lib/Dem, is no longer an MP.

Labour's candidates in the fifty seats which they lost, most of whom had taken part in the attempt to frustrate Brexit but including one or two like Caroline Flint who had honourably kept their election promises to implement the referendum result, paid the price for their party's equivocation.

As Douglas Murray wrote on the Unherd site here, anyone who is not completely determined to live in the past needs to recognise that the battle is over, Leave has won, and it's time to move on.

The 2019 election gives Boris Johnson a clear mandate to take Britain out of the EU on the terms of his deal, and that will now happen. It is clear that the election slogan "Get Brexit Done" struck a chord with a very significant part of the electorate and that promise has to be honoured.

The reaction of most businesses and millions of people, probably a majority, will be relief that we now know where Britain stands. We are leaving the EU, period. Leave has won and Remain has lost.

A pity it has taken three and a half years to reach certainty on what should have been clear, and was clear to many of us, on 24th June 2016.