Brexit: We’d be mad to trust anyone associated with it unless on our terms

I spent a couple of hours last week glued to a drama documentary on Channel 4.

And then, because it was so fascinating, and yet so outlandish, I read every single review of it that I could find.

It was called Brexit – The Uncivil War, and it told the story of how the Brexit referendum was won and lost.

I thought I knew that story, because didn’t we all follow it closely at the time? It turns out that none of us knew then what was really going on.

The strange thing, when I did get to read the reviews, was that no-one denied the essential truth of the movie.

This was, we thought, a referendum campaign fought out between two camps — on the one side, led by Tory complacency, accompanied by a range of barely competent supporters from the other political parties.

And on the other, by a gang of bully boys prepared to say and do anything to command media attention.

But actually, it transpires, the bully boys didn’t matter.

The mastermind behind the campaign to leave Europe was a sociopathic genius that none of us heard of until the campaign was well over, a man called Dominic Cummings whose primary interest was in the upending of British politics and its manipulation by data.

The film shows the Remain side of the campaign conducting old-fashioned focus groups, and being unable to learn even from them.

At one point the leader of the Remain campaign is watching a focus group from behind a two-way mirror, when an argument breaks out in the room among previously mild-mannered people.

He’s so appalled at what he’s hearing — how can they believe this stuff? — that he ends up bursting into the room and joining in the argument.

What he never gets is that the thoughts being expressed by the focus group are essentially thoughts that Cummings has planted there.

Cummings is the first political operative (that we know of) on this side of the world to use the enormous wealth of data assembled by the algorithms of social media to effectively tap into people’s hearts and minds.

He finds more than three million completely disaffected and alienated voters in Britain, most of whom have lost any sense of control of their own lives and blame the political system for that.

He crafts a key, overarching message as a reason to leave Europe, knowing it will speak to the thing they feel they’ve lost — Take Back Control.

He designs the famous red bus with its lie about how much can be invested in the NHS if Britain leaves Europe as an example of what taking back control means.

But more than that, over the course of the campaign, he uses every tool and platform of digital technology to deliver more than a billion carefully targeted messages to millions of disaffected voters.

People disaffected with the lives they were leading and looking for someone to blame.

There were, of course, two Leave campaigns.

There was the official one, masterminded by Cummings, that used Boris Johnson and Michael Gove as its spokespeople.

Nigel Farage

And then there was what you might call the provisional campaign, run by Nigel Farage.

The officials were able to keep their distance from the provos, and from the more racist elements of Farage’s campaign, while at the same time carefully measuring, and then capitalising on, the fear he stoked.

They triumphed, of course. Cynically.

The one thing they never thought about, while they were busy winning, was what to do next.

Just as David Cameron went blithely into a referendum thinking he couldn’t lose — and destroyed his reputation for ever in the process — Johnson, Cummings, Gove et al hadn’t a clue what to do with their win.

It never dawned on them that “taking back control” meant taking control of a complete fiasco.

Which appears to be the reason that it’s all now our fault.

Yes, the people who campaigned so energetically to get out of Europe, without ever thinking about how it could be done, are now saying that it’s the bloody Irish and their backstop that are the problem.

Come down off your high horse, Leo, and give us back our freedom is the new message of the Brexiteers, and of course it has been echoed by some people over here.

We’ve overplayed our hand, they say, and placed Theresa May in an impossible situation. We need to give much more flexibility. This is all nonsense.

The negotiating position followed by the Irish Government has put Ireland in a position of considerable strength.

It has been a coherent and entirely consistent position.

What’s more, the Irish Government never set out to trap Britain, but only to protect Ireland (and Northern Ireland).

Without Europe-wide agreement on a backstop, there is little doubt that the first and immediate consequence of Britain’s withdrawal would be the reopening of border posts between Dundalk and Newry.

And can you just imagine what some of the commentators now calling for flexibility on the backstop would be saying if Varadkar and Coveney hadn’t put up the strong resistance they did put up?

If our government had looked, at any stage in the negotiations, like they were happy to cave in to whatever the British government wanted, they’d have been hounded out of office.

With Theresa May facing defeat in the House of Commons, probably today, the entire apparatus of the EU is trying to figure out, not how to screw Britain, but how it can help.

While some of the Brexit side become more demented in their condemnation of anyone they see as standing in their way, the rest of Europe is trying to arrive at a point where Britain is facilitated to leave without doing too much damage.

There will be further reassurances around technical aspects of the backstop, further extensions of time if they are asked for — all designed to help a more orderly exit, in everyone’s interests.

Or perhaps to buy enough time to allow the people of Britain to change their minds, if they choose to — and if they’re not manipulated again.

But as I said, just as David Cameron didn’t know what he was unleashing when he started all this, the Brexiteers never had a clue what they were unleashing when they won.

Sadly, they didn’t care either. Led by Dominic Cummings, they set out to manipulate and mislead public opinion, and to win a victory on the basis of one untruth after another.

And now apparently we’re supposed to abandon a hard won guarantee in order to facilitate them.

Make it temporary, we’re told. Promise we’ll do everything in our power not to invoke the backstop.

It’s up to us, apparently, to give Theresa May a bit of a dig-out.

Here’s the hard if unpalatable truth. We’d be mad to trust anyone associated with Brexit with any important interest of ours.

They’ve shown again and again that they couldn’t care less about anything except wining the argument.

The idea of lessening our position, to help Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage?

Unless we do it on our own terms, we’d want to have our heads examined.