Andrew Rawnsley
Observer chief political commentator
In Brexit: The Uncivil War, James Graham sets out to show how Britons were induced to narrowly vote to leave the EU in June 2016. Those familiar with his work will know that he is not a writer who produces lazy polemic or indulges in glib posturing. He strives to see all sides of an argument and a character and his work is the more interesting for that.
This House, his breakthrough play in 2012 about the hung parliament of the 1970s, humanised the party whips. Coalition sought audience sympathy for the agonies of Nick Clegg. So folk who like their politics and their dramas served in blacks and whites are going to react badly to this version of the referendum campaign. Fanatical Brexiters will not like the darker tints in the portrayal of their champions, while some Remainers will be upset that the Out gang are not universally depicted as mendacious charlatans.
My issue with this film is a different one. I find it unbalanced because the tale is told almost exclusively from the point of view of the campaign “strategists” on the two sides. An extremely dominant role is given to Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, played by Benedict Cumberbatch.
The politicians are reduced to bit parts and comic cameos. Nigel Farage and Arron Banks are boozy, boorish cartoons. Their most entertaining scene has the two Ukippers ranting to each other while they lie, sozzled, on a car bonnet. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are puppets twerking to strings pulled by Cummings/Cumberbatch. This is funny, but also rather absolves these senior Tories of their moral responsibilities for what was perpetrated by the Leave campaign. Cameron is a disembodied voice on the end of a phone. Jeremy Corbyn is a throwaway line in someone else’s mouth and never appears at all. This is, when you think about it, a pretty accurate reflection of the Labour leader’s contribution to the referendum battle.
I can see why Graham became so fascinated by Cummings, a self-consciously “clever” rightwing anarchist who likes to claim Mao, Bismarck, Napoleon and other “disrupters of history” as his inspirations. Cumberbatch, channelling his intensity very effectively, makes him much the most compelling of the characters. All the zingers of the drama rush from the lips of Cummings. At the outset of the campaign, he tells startled fellow Outers that they can overturn expectations and win the referendum if they “hack the political system”. On this account, it is Cummings who comes up with all the winning devices employed by the Brexiters, including the smart if deceptive “take back control” slogan and the infamous red bus emblazoned with a lie about NHS funding. He does so via a series of eureka moments, many of which occur while he is brainstorming with himself in a store cupboard.
The drama suggests that it is Cummings alone who spots the potential to use social media, data-manipulation and the psychometric targeting of the electorate to swing the result while his counterparts on the Remain side are still relying on old-fashioned voter focus groups. Even when he is behaving badly, the audience is expected to rather relish it. We are invited to admire the way in which he outmanoeuvres the booby Tory MPs on the Leave campaign’s board when they try to sack him for being too outrageous.
The Remain campaign has a very subordinate role in the drama. Oliver, played by Rory Kinnear, lurches from cocksure complacency at the beginning of the campaign to whining panic by the end of it. As he begins to fear that the battle is slipping away from them, Cameron’s man bursts into one of his focus groups to start arguing with the assembled voters. He and the rest of the Remainers are essentially there to be hapless foils for Cummings’s devilish brilliance.
Elements of the portrayal are unsympathetic. The film is not wrong to suggest that the official Leave campaign kept “its hands clean” of the most toxic stuff about immigration because it knew that the unofficial Farage/Banks outfit would whip up xenophobia for them. There are nods to the various scandals associated with the Leave campaign, but the drama struggles to do them complete justice or to integrate them fully into the story.
The action was mainly filmed over the summer and we have since learned a lot more about what the Leave campaign got up to. Caption cards with the end credits have to be employed to fill some of the holes, which is never satisfactory.
This does not support the argument that it is too early to start making dramas about Brexit. The way things are going, we may be all dead before it reaches any kind of settled resolution. I admire Graham for tackling the most significant, the most divisive and the most complex political event of our recent history. He does so with the intelligence, acuity, energy and wit we have come to expect from him.
It is fair to say that this cannot be and will not be the last dramatic word on the subject, though I rather suspect Dominic Cummings would be highly content if it were.
Gina Miller
Activist who took the government to court over its right to invoke article 50 without parliamentary approval
I experienced a mix of emotions watching the film. My abiding sense is that the referendum just shouldn’t have happened, and it reinforced that for me. It’s like an innocence in British society was polluted – and in the film you see who the polluters are. Brexit was almost like a game for these people. They weren’t thinking of the hurt it would cause. Towards the end, when Brexit is looking increasingly likely, someone says: “You can’t put it back in the box” – and that absolutely sums it all up.
The film is a good start, but we need to go much deeper into all of this. We haven’t fully understood the ramifications of what happened and what the legal outcomes and legal remedies will be. Psychological mapping for political ends is now going to be part of every campaign. But how do you regulate it? During the film, I kept thinking: it’s like an eight-legged monster has been unleashed: you tie one leg down and then another leg breaks free.
I didn’t realise how much of a personal vendetta Dominic Cummings had against the establishment. If the film is to be believed, this was about him winning against them. Not only did he use psychology, but he was being driven by his own psychological reaction to the way he was treated by those people. With Boris, the film seems to suggest that he regretted his involvement in the Leave campaign and knew what damage he’d caused, but his behaviour since the referendum doesn’t reflect that. It’s interesting, too, to see how easily turned Michael Gove was.
It’s a shame that they didn’t focus more on Cambridge Analytica and the fact that it was closed down. It’s important to show that there are repercussions for companies that manipulate the public. I think the role of BeLeave could have been explored further, as they received an illegal donation of £625,000, most of which went to AggregateIQ (the data firm that was linked to Cambridge Analytica). It looks as if it’s all just Vote Leave, but the blame should be equally shared.
I was part of the Remain campaign, but I was never in the campaign office, so it was interesting to see it from that side. What I found odd at the time was that many people didn’t want to go outside London [to test the public mood], so I specifically went out of London in February 2016. I then tried to have a conversation with the Remain office, saying that we were going to lose, because I was hearing all the rhetoric coming from the campaign ads.
What struck me was how many people were saying the same things, such as “take back control”. I’m a marketeer, and I thought the message discipline in the Leave campaign was extraordinary. Once those phrases landed, they created a barrier and you couldn’t get any other information across to people. I can see how clever Dominic Cummings was in doing that. If you were completely unemotional, you’d have to agree it was a brilliant marketing campaign. But when I tried to relay that information, the Remain office didn’t want to listen.
I found the film very sad to watch, but I do think there are positives in all of this. People are talking about politics in Britain much more than before. I also think – and when I say this, other Remainers look at me like I’m crazy – that the Leave voters cast a spotlight on what’s been going wrong in England. Politicians and people in the main cities had forgotten about them. And now they’ve made themselves heard, and I think they’ve actually done a good thing from that perspective.
When they started making the film, the people behind it couldn’t possibly have envisaged the situation we’re in now, where the anger is greater than ever and those on the winning side feel their win is being taken away. It started with lack of trust and now we’re back to lack of trust. I hope the film prompts people, when they read something, to question where it’s coming from, to read more than one source and push themselves to see both sides. Because all the same campaign things are going to be happening again if – as looks increasingly likely – we end up with a second referendum.
Interview by Killian Fox
Gloria De Piero
Labour MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire. Voted Remain but now wants to follow through with Brexit
Like the rest of the country, I’ve had Brexit up to here, so I’m not sure I was craving a drama about it. But I was absolutely gripped by this film, which takes some doing when the main character is Dominic Cummings. It’s compelling and it’s prompted a lot of valuable questions about how we reconnect with the voters that we lost. I’d advise anybody to see it.
I launched the Labour Remain campaign with Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson and I voted for Remain. The Leave campaign has rightly had a lot of criticism – about the fact that they broke the law [on electoral overspending], that they talked about £350m for the NHS, and said that Turkey was going to join the EU – but the Remain campaign has had rather less scrutiny. What I got from this film was a reminder of why we failed.
What immediately struck me was, my God, weren’t there a lot of posh white blokes? Women and minorities were hard to come by in either campaign. On the British left, we have to think: how did that happen? How did those posh white boys win over so many of our voters? They even stole our beloved NHS and used that as their tool!
Near the beginning of the film, there’s a scene where Cummings is in the pub playing pool and chatting to people about their fears and grievances. I wonder if any of us did that? When I think of my campaign, it really felt very establishment, very business-led. In the film, it’s all PowerPoint presentations and focus groups in the campaign office.
I found it funny how ridiculous all the politicians seemed. Everybody was weird and out of touch. Was that unfair? Not really – it captured us very well. (Not myself, I hope, but that’s for others to judge.) I don’t really know any of the main players in the film. I had dinner with Michael Gove when I was a journalist; he’s very clipped and polite, which is how he appeared in the film.
I don’t think the film will change the mind of any Brexit voters in my constituency about whether the vote was fair. The Leave campaign has come in for a lot of criticism already, so it’s not exactly news. Yes, there was dodginess and bad behaviour, but my constituents, they knew what they were doing. And they were optimistic. Leave constituents are portrayed as angry but, actually, they wanted change, whereas Remain wanted the status quo.
To have a second referendum would be absolutely crazy. If there was a seismic change, it would be different, but there’s no movement in the polls and there’s no appetite for it in my constituency, even among Remainers. All we’ve talked about for over two years is Brexit. I want to talk instead about the things that led to that vote: about low wages, about the fact that so few people in my constituency are able to go to university.
In my view, the only way to heal that rift now is to make a decent fist of Brexit. Those people have spoken and, if we ignore them, if we don’t heed their vote, I think the Labour party is in serious trouble.
I’d forgotten how hateful and divided it was in the run-up to the referendum, but I think I’ve become desensitised, because all that hate and division is still there. As Remain strategist Craig Oliver said at the end of the film, maybe this is just politics now.
There is a case to be made that political advertising needs greater scrutiny. The trouble is, everything is contested. The people in my constituency wanted impartial information but there is no such thing. All arguments are contested by the other side. That’s politics, I guess. Of course, the Leave campaign told some massive porkies and broke electoral law. But if you’re the British left now, you should be thinking, what the hell happened to the Remain campaign? Why didn’t our voters listen to us and why did they listen to a bunch of posh boys instead? Killian Fox
Shahmir Sanni
Former Leave campaign volunteer turned whistleblower over Vote Leave’s breaking of electoral law
When I was told that Benedict Cumberbatch would be starring as Vote Leave strategist Dominic Cummings in a Channel 4 film I was immediately wary. Since the referendum result, it has gradually emerged that Cummings was part of the biggest electoral scandal in modern British history. He and his former colleagues at Vote Leave, the official Leave campaign, are being, or have been, investigated by multiple authorities. Yet Cummings, in contempt of parliamentary procedure, has refused to be questioned by the DCMS select committee.
I worked on the official campaign, in the same office as Cummings, so I was keen to see how accurately the film represented what happened there.
Cumberbatch’s performance is good. It is an evocative portrayal of a man who liked to write 8,000-word blogs about how stupid everyone else is. Most of the key figures from the Leave side are there and are pretty accurate impersonations: Leave.EU’s Arron Banks and Nigel Farage; Vote Leave’s Boris Johnson, Stephen Parkinson, Victoria Woodcock and Matthew Elliott; and Canadian data firm AggregateIQ’s Zack Massingham. The relationship between Vote Leave and Leave.EU is represented fairly and the story is sort of accurate. Sort of.
The film is not a true representation of what happened in a few critical areas. Brexit was won via illegal activity – that is a fact. Vote Leave used BeLeave (an outreach group that has a two-second cameo in the entire film) to funnel £625,000 to AIQ for micro-targeting digital ads, on top of the millions of pounds it had already given the company - and someone seemingly tried to cover up the fact that the two campaigns coordinated.
Cummings’s campaign was found guilty of breaking the law because this breached campaign spending limits and has been referred to the Met police. The only mention of this in the film is a line of text at the end that says that since the referendum Vote Leave has been found to have broken electoral law.
AIQ has – since the vote – been censured by the Information Commissioner’s Office. That is not mentioned in the film. Darren Grimes, campaign manager of BeLeave, who was found guilty of breaking electoral law [he is appealing], also has no mention. Banks’s meetings around the time of the vote with Russian embassy officials are not mentioned. These aren’t just outlying facts, tangential to the story – they are an integral part of the Brexit story.
There is no philosophical, artistic or “aiming for balance” argument that justifies missing out these key elements of the story. It’s woefully complacent. We are at a pivotal point in this country’s history. It is a time of uncertainty, division and ignorance. A lack of fact-based debate has undermined British democracy in ways that will have serious implications in the near future, both culturally and economically. And behind this lies a complacency and ignorance about corruption within Westminster and the establishment. An electoral scandal on a scale we have never seen before has been largely ignored.
A film about Brexit was an opportunity to tell the real story and raise the institutional problems facing our country (and all western democracies). Yet the film‑makers continue to propagate a misrepresentation of the truth.
Artists who examine politically volatile topics like Brexit have a responsibility to provide the public with honest portrayals - especially in a time where misinformation is a mainstream problem. Putting your own mark on a film is every film-maker’s goal, but to do that by omitting central parts of the story because it’s too complicated, or for whatever reason, is a big mistake. This film is not a film about Brexit – it’s a film about Dominic Cummings, for Dominic Cummings.
Brexit; The Uncivil War is on Channel 4 on Monday 7 January, 9 pm.
This article was amended on 6 January 2018 to correct a statement that Dominic Cummings and Craig Oliver are listed as a consultants on the film. In fact, the consultants are Tim Shipman and Craig Oliver.
