The BBC’s two-part documentary series Brexit: A Very British Civil War is an engrossing, hilarious, and highly-revealing retrospective of the 2016 EU referendum campaigns.
Series producer Norma Percy has once again managed to pull together a stellar cast of almost all the key figures of the 2016 campaign; from David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage, and even disgraced Peter Mandelson.
Then Chancellor George Osborne sums up the drama perfectly, claiming “It was Game of Thrones.”
Who shall be king?
The first episode begins on the eve of the 2015 General Election, where David Cameron’s ‘spin doctor’ Craig Oliver admits the mood was sour, thinking they’d perhaps lost. And looking back, perhaps they wish they had!
The question of a referendum on the EU was an idea Cameron and Osborne never thought they’d needed to carry out. But after winning, reality struck.
Tory Brexiter Steve Baker recalls smugly that “David Cameron looked like a man who was surprised he’d won. He did not look elated. He looked daunted, actually.” Whilst ‘master strategist’ Osborne “was a despondent looking man.”
The Conservative Party was in a hidden, now very open, war with itself. And our central protagonist and intriguer-in-chief was London Mayor Boris Johnson. Johnson’s sister aptly describes his childhood rivalry with fellow Etonian Cameron as if “he thought it was his turn to be world king”.
The cynicism at the top is both disgusting and hilarious at the same time. After an invitation to tennis in some private grounds, Cameron offered Johnson a ‘top 5 job’ to buy him off to be a part of the Remain camp; but ego, hubris and a chance of glory proved too great, no matter the cost. And that meant Johnson backed Leave.
As we see the campaign begin, the back-stabbing ratchets up. Johnson’s then-wife was smeared in the media in a proclaimed sex scandal at Waterloo station. Vote Leave believed this to be Osbourne’s doing, which only fired up Johnson to go in hard on immigration – something he’d previously been squeamish about.
Establishment not working
On the other side, Remain is shown to be a complete shambles. Cameron, Osborne, and then little-known Liz Truss, went full-in on ‘project fear’, which went down like a led balloon. We see a propaganda campaign from the treasury of a £4,300 cost to each family if Britain laughed at on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire.
Osborne says something revealing here, claiming “the Treasury got a real bashing, and I got a real bashing. But this is how we’d won the last general election, this is how Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher had won elections”, but something was not cutting through this time.
This after all was also how the 2014 Scottish Independence campaign was also won. But a threshold which had held for so long was crossed.
Little context is given as to why, or why the establishment was so hated. A clear omission in the series was the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis or the austerity dictated by the EU upon countries like Greece at the time.
But the comical nature of the Remain camp trying to get it together is. David Cameron has the idea of all four living Prime Ministers giving a joint speech together outside Downing Street. But Gordon Brown’s idea is “Instead of what I would have called an establishment stitch-up I wanted…all the Labour leaders trying to get out the Labour vote”.
But Corbyn is having none of it, “I said absolutely no”, to which he correctly points out Tony Blair’s hypocrisy and how a large portion of the country viewed the man as a war criminal.
Thus the leaders of both political parties – Cameron and Corbyn – were both themselves half-hearted about the EU, whilst the Leave campaign, for all its demagogy, clearly had an insurgent anti-establishment veneer which even surprised the official Leave campaign.
Labour MP and Leave campaigner Gisela Stuart who is shown campaigning with Boris is surprised by the enthusiastic response they were receiving and recalls “you almost got the sense that Boris’s presence gave permission to be enthusiastic about something which they were told by everybody else they should not be enthusiastic about.”
No plan
But the short-termism, infighting, ‘f*ck business’ attitude, and forces conjured up by the Leave campaign were only starting to dawn, and were explicitly brought to the surface following the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right loon shouting ‘Britain First’, days before the referendum.
And then the results came in. Hounds of pitchfork-like people line up outside Johnson’s house, whilst Cameron resigns. Pandora’s box has opened.
The final scene beautifully depicts the whole mess, with Johnson babbling “We didn’t have a plan, *mumbles* of what to do next, because we didn’t think it’s our job to, to have a plan…” with credits rolling to the sound of The Chemical Brothers – ‘Out Of Control’.
Brexit: A Very British Civil War is available to view on BBC iPlayer
