Our Conservative member poll shows how a Brexit ‘betrayal’ would threaten the Tories

A large chunk of the party's rank and file have been definitively convinced that no deal really is better than a bad deal

The Christmas holidays weren’t supposed to be relaxing for Tory MPs – especially for those intending to return to Westminster next week to vote against Theresa May’s Brexit deal. As far as the prime minister was concerned, the recess should have been a fortnight or so during which they were told by their local party members to stop playing silly buggers and to get behind the leader.

But if there was any ear-bashing done over the mince pies and sherry, that probably wasn’t the message those MPs received. Indeed, it may have been precisely the opposite.

It turns out that the majority of grassroots Tories really don’t think very much of the deal their own leader has negotiated. More than that, they would actually prefer the UK to leave the EU without any deal at all.

We know this because a few days before Christmas, my colleagues Paul Webb and Monica Poletti, and I surveyed voters and party members on Brexit as part of the ESRC-funded Party Members Project run out of Queen Mary University of London and Sussex University.

To say people think May’s deal is a bit of a turkey is an understatement.

Among voters as a whole, some 49 per cent oppose it and only 23 per cent support it. Among those intending to vote Conservative, as one might expect, things aren’t quite so bad: opposition is running at 38 per cent, compared to 46 per cent who support it.

Incredibly, however, among paid-up members of the Conservative Party, opposition to the deal negotiated by their own leader outweighs support for it by a margin of 59 per cent to 38 per cent.

It’s hardly likely, then, that Tory MPs intending to vote against the deal in the next week or so had anything to fear from their activists as they returned to their constituencies for the festive recess.

If anything, they may well have been told to keep up the good work by a bunch of true blues utterly convinced that, to use a phrase that for some reason we no longer hear so much from Downing Street: ”No deal is better than a bad deal”.

Tory members’ real feelings emerge when they’re presented with a hypothetical binary referendum between May’s deal or No Deal. Only 29 per cent of them would vote for what she’s offering compared to 64 per cent who would vote to leave without a deal.

And, when faced with a three-way choice instead, support for No Deal among rank-and-file Conservatives is equally solid: 57 per cent say that leaving without a deal would be their first preference compared to 23 per cent whose first preference is to leave on the basis of May’s deal, and only 15 per cent who plump for Remain.

That’s partly down to their underlying Euroscepticism – something that’s been fed and fuelled for decades by both Conservative politicians and the Conservative-supporting press until it’s become so overwhelming that even a change of heart (based on a change of editor) by the Daily Mail (which now supports May’s deal) can do little to counter it.

But it’s also down to members being persuaded by some of those self-same politicians that leaving without a deal is not only nothing to worry about but will be actively beneficial.

A whopping 72 per cent of Tory members think that warnings about the severe disruption that “crashing out” of the EU could cause are “exaggerated or invented”. And members are convinced – by 64 per cent to 19 per cent – that leaving without a deal will actually have a positive effect on the economy in the medium-to-long term.

Scary stuff, some Remainers (and many economists) will say. But not as scary perhaps as quite how upset the Tory rank and file will be should the UK end up staying in the EU after all. If that were to happen, 6 per cent of Tory members say they would feel “disappointed”, 15 per cent say they’d feel “angry” and 58 per cent say they’d feel “betrayed”.

Politics is already pretty polarised, even poisonous. This year it could get even uglier.

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron.