Benedict Cumberbatch stars as leave campaigner Dominic
Cummings in a contentious new TV film. What do the people who were at the
centre of the drama really think of it?
Stephen Moss
@StephenMossGdn
Mon 7 Jan 2019 06.00 GMT Last modified on Mon 7 Jan 2019
06.03 GMT
Dominic Cummings, the campaign director for Vote Leave,
doesn’t just feature in James Graham’s scintillating new film about Brexit – he
takes over it. Brilliantly brought to life by Benedict Cumberbatch (despite his
struggles with Cummings’ oddly inflected, vaguely north-east English accent),
the Cummings we see on screen is impulsive, implacable and virtually impossible
to read. What were his motivations for wrenching Britain out of Europe? Even
Graham admits to being unsure still. Brexit: The Uncivil War depicts Cummings
as a man loathed by the MPs on the Vote Leave board who try to get him fired,
loathed even more by Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and the more nationalistic
Leave.EU campaigners … and yet deeply attractive in all his disruptive glory.
But is this portrayal of the uncompromising strategist accurate?
Some prominent remainers are sceptical. “He’s no Alan Turing,” one tells me.
But Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign, is in no doubt
the film captures Cummings’ energy, unwillingness to compromise and capacity
for lateral thinking.
“Cumberbatch has got Dom down to a T,” says Elliott, who was
instrumental in getting Cummings to lead the campaign. “He captures his
passion, his focus, his dedication, his frustration with members of
parliament.” I ask him whether Cummings is as feisty as the film suggests.
“Very much so,” he says with a laugh. “He’s good at enthusing, he’s got the
killer instinct, he was willing to go into battle with the establishment. It
takes a very special person to go into that sort of battle.”
Elliott says not everything in the film is strictly accurate
– the account of the battles on the Vote Leave board between Cummings and MPs
such as Bill Cash and Bernard Jenkin are so compressed as to be baffling – but
he accepts that such compression is inevitable. “I don’t blame James Graham for
this,” he says. “Everything has to be hugely simplified for a 90-minute show.”
Graham says there was enough material for a miniseries, and
that what he set out to achieve was a dramatic truth. Elliott reckons he has
caught the atmosphere perfectly. “The film captures how fast-paced and manic
and high-pressured the campaign was,” he says. “For me, it also captures the
fact that I was like a shock absorber between the campaign team and the board.”
Other key leave figures, however, are less impressed. Daniel
Hannan – a Conservative MEP, one of the founders of Vote Leave and dubbed “the
man who brought you Brexit” by the Guardian – is dismissive. “This is very much
a remainer take on the vote,” he tells me. “The acting is brilliant, but there
is something almost cartoonish about the presentation of leavers.”
Hannan says the key figures in the leave campaign are
caricatured. “Matt Elliott was chief executive of the most successful campaign
in British political history, but is portrayed here as a gormless chump.
Douglas Carswell had a personal following few MPs could dream of, yet is absurdly
portrayed as not wanting to visit the rougher estates in his constituency.
Michael Gove is one of the cleverest men in parliament, but is portrayed here
as a vacillating fool. Boris Johnson is shown as being secretly disappointed by
leave’s success, which is idiotic, as anyone who campaigned with him will
know.”
“The whole premise, however dramatically engaging, is
false,” insists Hannan. “The referendum campaign did not unleash demons. The
number of British voters who see immigration as positive is higher than for any
other country in the EU, and has risen significantly since the vote. Britain is
one of a tiny number of EU countries with no populist anti-immigrant party in
its main legislative chamber. You might say that Brexit is already working.”
The remain side get much less attention in the film, which
Lucy Thomas, deputy director of the remain campaign, believes is a weakness.
“Leave was the underdog, so if you’re writing this you’re going to focus on how
did they overturn the establishment,” she says. “The story almost writes
itself: the very smart guy who comes out of self-imposed exile to run this
amazing campaign and win. That is a really compelling story, but what it
therefore lacks is a lot of the decisions and tension points within the remain
campaign.”
A key source of tension on the remain side was that four
months before the vote, Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s director of
communications, moved in to take over running much of the campaign from Will
Straw, who had been directing it for more than a year. Straw is introduced in
the film but never speaks, and his contention that the remain campaign should
have taken on the issue of immigration and made a positive argument for it is
never considered. Graham needs the dramatic arc of the film to become a
personal duel between Cummings and Oliver (played by Rory Kinnear), which means
significant figures such as Straw and remain’s official director of strategy,
Ryan Coetzee, are left out.
Peter Mandelson – who appears in the film only in a single
news clip and as a disembodied voice in a chaotic conference call with Cameron
and Oliver – accepts the use of artistic licence and believes Graham has caught
the central struggle in the campaign perfectly. “The film is extraordinary,” he
tells me. “It presses every button and captures Britain at the time.”
Mandelson is scathing about the limitations of Oliver, who
he says was no match for the “mad genius” of Cummings. “Craig is a very
hard-working, very sincere, workaday press officer,” says Mandelson. “He worked
very hard, but he’s not Lynton Crosby.” Mandelson had put together the campaign
team headed by Straw, Thomas and Coetzee, and was frustrated when Oliver and No
10 took over.
Early scripts were
too data obsessed. There’s a danger of creating an idea that it was an act of
political brilliance
Craig Oliver
“All the people who knew the campaign and had been working
on it for months were put to one side,” he says. “It was then run rather like
David Cameron’s government – as a private members’ club.” Mandelson says the
remain campaign assumed Cummings’ eccentricities meant the Vote Leave campaign
would at some point implode, but it never did.
Mandelson and Oliver disagree about pretty much everything.
They can’t even agree that the conference call depicted in the film took place.
Oliver insists it did; Mandelson claims it didn’t and that Cameron blanked him
for the entire campaign, so much so that he had to get Tony Blair to approach
Cameron directly to try to change the remain strategy on immigration.
Oliver hotly denies Mandelson’s account. “That’s utter
rubbish,” he tells me. “He had meetings all the time with people in No 10, and
his claim after the event that somehow he hadn’t been allowed to be involved is
totally disingenuous. The frustration was that he couldn’t talk to the Labour
party and neither could other members of the campaign. That was a real struggle.”
Mandelson and Oliver also disagree on how important data
analytics were to the result. Mandelson believes Vote Leave’s use of personally
tailored messaging was crucial. “It wasn’t a fair fight,” he says. “There was a
lack of transparency in what they were doing, and it was highly manipulative.
In that sense the country was hijacked.” Oliver counters that remain’s data
analysis techniques were equally sophisticated, and says the real problems were
that decades of anti-EU propaganda could not be reversed in a few months and
that insurgents are always likely to triumph over proponents of the status quo.
“Take back control” trumps “steady as she goes”.
Oliver acted as a consultant on the film – his book,
Unleashing Demons, and Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman’s All Out War
were key sources for Graham – and says he tried to ensure it wasn’t all about
data analytics and the subtext that leave won by using shadowy methods. “My
concern was that the early scripts were too data obsessed,” he says. “There’s a
danger of creating an idea that it was an act of political brilliance, but you
still need the messaging to be there, and to me it was clear that immigration
was, to paraphrase the Sun, what won it for them. They did emphasise that more
in later scripts.”
This is a battle for
the future of the UK. James’s film exposes that leave had no real idea of
Britain and its future
Peter Mandelson
In the film, the Vote Leave campaign is portrayed as leaving
the “heavy lifting” on anti-immigration messaging to the Ukip-dominated
Leave.EU, but leading remainers tell me that Cummings and Elliott also played
dirty on the threat of Turkey joining the EU and immigrants arriving from the
Middle East. Elliott, in his urbane way, says only that in 2016 Turkey was on a
path to accession and that Vote Leave was citing what was a probability.
Will the film make any difference to the polarised nature of
the Brexit debate in Britain? Graham, Oliver and Elliott all express the hope
that it will. “In that [entirely fictional] scene where Dom and Craig Oliver
are having a pint together,” says Elliott, “what you see are two people who
passionately think they are doing the best for their country and are putting
their heart and soul into the campaign. They feel that if the outcome doesn’t
go their way it will be disastrous. But at the same time, both of them are
acting with the best intentions, and neither of them is being malevolent.”
I ask Mandelson if there is any chance the film might act as
balm for a troubled nation. “Not a hope,” he says. “This is a battle for the
future of the country. What James’s film exposes is that leave had no real idea
of Britain and its future beyond the duration of the referendum campaign. It
didn’t represent a vision or a set of policies or a programme for the country.
I think what people will take out of the film is, ‘What on earth was it all
for? What has the country gained? How is it better? How are our prospects
transformed?’ They will feel a profound sense of emptiness.”
We have taken back control; we’re just not quite sure of
what.
• Brexit: The Uncivil War is on Channel 4 on Monday at 9pm.
OPINION
How groupthink polarized Brexit
As a new film retells the story of the 2016 campaign, a
prominent Remain figure reflects on the importance of diversity in politics.
By LUCY
THOMAS 1/6/19, 5:50 PM CET Updated
1/7/19, 6:14 AM CET
Anti brexit protesters demonstrate outside parliament on
December 11, 2018 in London, England | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
LONDON — A new film about the U.K.'s 2016 EU referendum will
air on Monday night. Watching the grueling, relentless campaign play out in
Channel 4's Brexit drama, as I did at a pre-screening in December, brings to
life the reality of a political campaign. It also shows how bitter and divisive
any second referendum could be. An out-of-control focus group scene captures
perfectly the strength of feeling that existed then, let alone how it could be
now.
As former deputy director of the Remain campaign, it also
reminds me of the many things I wish we could have done differently:
Successfully persuading more non-political national treasures to speak out;
landing a relatable and tangible economic case against withdrawing from the EU;
avoiding a popularity contest between Boris Johnson and David Cameron … I could
go on.
But, as I relived the events of more than two years ago, one
other question kept returning: Where are the women? As the only woman portrayed
on the Remain side (and with just two featured for Leave), I found myself
wondering what impact — if any — that had on our decisions, particularly as the
majority of "undecided" voters we wanted to reach in 2016 were
female.
With speculation growing around a possible second
referendum, it’s worth reflecting on how well our campaigns — and those of our
successors today — mirror the voting public they hope to persuade.
When we built the board of the Remain campaign, we were
conscious that we wanted to be as reflective of society as possible.
One hundred years on from female suffrage, we often
hear how far we’ve come. After all, the managing director of the IMF, the
German chancellor and the British prime minister are all women
.webp)
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