Britain was notionally voting on its place in the world but the EU referendum also held up a mirror to a country that has seldom looked more divided or ill at ease with itself.
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As the votes were counted on Thursday night and Friday morning, the piles of ballot papers told their own story about those parts of Britain that felt comfortable in a modern, connected world, and those which felt cut off from the fruits of globalisation.
Voters in London and Scotland, the two most prosperous parts of the UK, turned out in large numbers to deliver a clear message that they wanted to remain in the EU and its huge single market.
But elsewhere — in the old industrial centres of the north, the small towns of the Midlands and the faded seaside resorts — the ballot papers were stacked high in favour of Leave, rejection of an establishment that had let them down.
The official Vote Leave campaign set out to exploit this “them and us” feeling in an email to supporters on Thursday, urging those in the “heartlands” not to let those living in “LONDON and SCOTLAND” make the decision for them. To illustrate the point, voters lining up at a polling station in a “leafy London suburb” were pictured in the email as if to frighten those living in less prosperous areas outside the capital into voting.
Chuka Umunna, a London Labour MP, said: “Londoners and Scots have as much right to exercise their democratic choice as anyone else. Implying that our votes are somehow less legitimate than those cast in other parts of Britain is utterly disgraceful.”
Nonetheless, a suspicion of a “metropolitan elite” and “experts” infused the Vote Leave campaign, fuelling a range of conspiracy theories that invisible and malign powers were guiding the lives of ordinary Britons.
Rob Hayward, a psephologist and former Conservative MP, said many Labour voters had been drawn to vote Out. “A lot of the manual, private sector Labour support is responding to gut ‘British instinct’,” he said.
“These are people who have been the ‘hidden’ Ukip voters of the Midlands and the North in recent years.”
Vote Leave used the issue of immigration to galvanise its supporters, adding to the sense of a divided country. “People don’t understand the EU,” said one member of the official campaign.
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This anti-immigration tone, particularly as presented by Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence party, culminated in the notorious “Breaking Point” poster depicting a file of Syrian refugees in Slovenia.
One symptom of the gap between politicians and voters came when Leave campaigners urged supporters to use pens on the ballot sheets, claiming votes made by the pencils provided by councils could be erased and changed afterwards.
The campaign may come to be regarded as a turning point in British politics, which until recently has developed along traditional left/right lines, with power rotating between Conservatives and Labour.
This time most of the Conservative cabinet and Labour were in the same camp, along with Liberal Democrats, Greens, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, trade unionists and others. “The establishment against the people,” as Vote Leave depicted it.
Instead, the campaign was defined by a new and ill-tempered politics along the lines of identity and culture — between those who feel they have everything to gain from an open economy and those who want to close the doors.
David Cameron, prime minister, will therefore have two pressing tasks when the dust settles on this dispiriting campaign. The most immediate will be to try to unite his own warring Conservative party.
The more daunting task will be to bring the country back together. He has a “life chances” strategy on the stocks, ready to flesh out his idea of “One Nation” Conservativism. But after almost a decade of austerity and with parts of Britain feeling cut off from London, let alone Brussels, binding the country could be the work of more than one prime minister and more than one parliament.