CUMBERBATCH & BREXIT MADE SEXY

Review:  'Brexit: The Uncivil War' on C4
by Brian Bamford

Dominic Cummings

ON Monday the 25th, April 2016, Derek Pattison put a post up on the NV Blog entitled 'Vote Leaves' Campaign Director tells select committee: "Accuracy is for snake-oil pussies".'  It accused Dominic Cummings, the newly appointed to run Vote Leave campaigner, of being the 'Vote Leave silly Ass - Dominic Cummings'.  In last night's Channel 4’s drama Brexit: The Uncivil War, Dominic Cummings, as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch was presented as a genius.  So much so that this morning I took a closer look at Mr. Cummings's arguments for how he succeeded in his campaign against the EU, Cameron and Osbourne.

When asked Cummings claims that three things helped his Leave campaign:  immigration; the public's anger about the 2008 financial crisis; and the pubic awareness that the Euro was causing problems in other countries like Greece.

Indeed it was these three factors plus the NHS that perhaps did more than the MPs to help Leave win.  According to Cummings, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove came on aboard later after the campaign was in full swing.

Cummings had to keep the politicians, who he does not trust, at a distance from the core management of the operation.  Farage and the speculator Aron Banks are both sidelined, and left to run their own campaign dedicated more to resisting immigration.

Basically Cummings adopts the theme to 'Take Back Control' for the British public, both from Brussels and from the British establishment system itself.: that is the London elite who were perceived as having been responsible for the financial crisis of 2008.

The idea is to engage and energise that fraction of the public who do not normally vote in elections and to discourage those favouring the status quo of Remain.  This involve mathematical targeting based on algorithms and large-scale data analysis.  Then hit them on social media.

'Hit them with £350m and Turkey' proclaims Cummings, addressing his staff from the office table..

Elsewhere, Cummings has argued that the dominant mental model of the Left / Right axis is no longer valid and empirically false.  Particularly among swing voters who he says are both more Left-wing and at the same time more Right wing than most politicians.  Simultaneously they will support more money for the NHS and favour confiscation of property, while favouring harsher action against terrorism or crime than the vast majority of MPs would support.

In last night's Channel Four production Benedict Cumberbatch's Cummings realises that a monster has escaped out of the bottle when Joe Cox was murdered.  Somehow it seems that Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall, and British culture is now in pieces.  Cumberbatch's performance was both stunning and sexy.

Meanwhile, Cummings was right to avoid talking about the single market, as no one would understand that because in the end the Brexit vote was sociological rather than economic.  It wasn't a repeat of Clinton's 'It's the economy stupid!'.  It was about seizing control.

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