What we know about the EU referendum result: It looks like David Cameron's career has been saved

The YouGov on-the-day poll suggests Remain is on course to win by 52 to 48 per cent: if so, the Prime Minister's career is saved, but he will spend the rest of his time in power fighting an enraged Tory party

David Cameron makes an appeal this week for a Remain vote: Getty

The first sign is a cautious indication in Remain’s favour. YouGov’s on-the-day poll suggests Remain is on 52 per cent, Leave on 48 per cent. It is not an exit poll, but it is different from an ordinary poll because it involves re-interviewing people after they have voted to find out if they did what they said they were going to do.

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Nigel Farage certainly thinks it is over for the Leave campaign. He has put out a statement, apparently based on UKIP’s own polling, saying that he thinks Remain has “edged it”. He added, blissfully unaware of the ambiguity, that he and his party “are going nowhere”. They are certainly headed for an uncertain future as a marginal protest party if the British people have indeed settled the question at the heart of its existence.

I detected a lessening of the panic in Number 10 this week. Over the weekend, there were people in Downing Street, including the Prime Minister, who thought it could all be over by now. They thought Boris Johnson probably would be Cameron’s successor, and that the result of a Leave vote would be chaos. But by Monday the mood had become a little calmer.

I understand that the Remain campaign polling was not very different from the public polls, although it was in greater depth. In which case, it would have picked up the trend detected by other polls, that the Leave surge peaked last week and had started to recede. It may have been significant that Populus, the Remain campaign pollster, published its only public poll today showing Remain 10 points ahead – the first online poll to have shown such a big Remain lead in the whole campaign.

If Remain has won by YouGov’s narrower four-point margin, David Cameron’s career is still saved. He will go down in history as the prime minister who gambled and won, who held three referendums to keep things as they are – on the voting system, Scotland and Europe – and won them all. But for any actual monument, he has little to show and he now has little time to construct it.

He will face a rage against him in the Conservative Party. The Leave MPs won’t be able to get rid of him, although they might still try, which would be damaging enough, but they won’t let him govern either. It takes only nine Tory MPs to vote the wrong way and the Government’s majority has gone.

It may not make much sense, but the rage against Cameron would not necessarily be rational. Many Conservative Leavers feel that the Prime Minister tilted the odds against a Leave vote unfairly. And they are the sensible ones: it is true that public money paid for two Remain leaflets and one Leave one to be delivered to every household in the country.

But beyond them is an army of conspiracy theorists which in the final week included an online campaign against the use of pencils in polling booths so that MI5 couldn’t alter ballot papers. YouGov found that nearly half of Leave voters believe it “likely that the EU referendum will be rigged”.

From now on, if Cameron has survived this referendum, he will be driving the machine of government with the handbrake on.