Can you remember what you were doing on 23 June 2016? You might well have been out to cast your vote in the EU referendum, which has thrown its interminable shadow over our benighted country ever since.
Or maybe you just stayed in bed, which wouldn’t have been a bad choice because after all the shouting, campaigning, anger and bitterness, nobody got what they wanted. Remainers failed to remain, and Brexiteers didn’t get anything they considered worthy of the name “Brexit”. President Obama had theatrically flown in to warn us to remain or else, but he must have been disappointed when nobody took much notice. Prime Minister David Cameron, having promised to carry on and deliver the public’s wishes whatever the result, in fine Churchillian style promptly threw in the towel and quit.
Despite the staggeringly lame “A Very British…” suffix in the title – especially when BBC Two aired Brexit: A Very British Coup? in 2016 – this is an entertaining two-part documentary tracing the course of the countdown to the referendum. It gathers together most of the major players, from Cameron and Tory bigwigs Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and chancellor George Osborne to Vote Leave fanatic Dominic Cummings, an ambivalent Jeremy Corbyn (then Labour leader), and a strangely benign Gordon Brown. Leave.UK’s Arron Banks recalls how Cummings called him the c-word. Nigel “Mr Brexit” Farage (pictured above) naturally looms large, and seems to be the most strategically aware and single-minded campaigner (and being virtually a one-man band, he wasn’t surrounded by people trying to talk him out of it).
Obviously nobody will be watching this on tenterhooks as they wait to find out the result, but much of the show’s intrigue lies its detailing of the shenanigans behind the scenes, mostly on the Reform and Tory side of the ledger. Cameron was desperately keen to keep Gove and Boris inside the Remain camp, but his position was fatally holed when both of them succumbed to the Leave persuasion. Boris’s sister, Rachel Johnson, adds some droll detail about the long-standing rivalry between Boris and Dave, exacerbated by the way Dave always beat Bojo at tennis.
Cameron told Boris that if he voted leave, “I’ll fuck you up forever.” Perhaps a cannier and more strategic Cameron could have considered allowing the blond Bozo to win occasionally, which might have eased his path to victory in the Brexit wars. Meanwhile, Osborne’s threats of a punitive tax-raising budget if Britain voted to leave failed catastrophically, and cost him any chance of becoming Tory leader.
The whole Brexit issue remains astonishingly toxic, liable to generate threats, hysteria and fisticuffs at a moment’s notice, defying all attempts at rational debate. However, in this arena of hyperbole and entrenched bloody-mindedness, there are some insightful observations from Marina Wheeler (Boris’s wife, pictured above, until their divorce in 2020). She was a QC at the time, and her own Euro-scepticism was fuelled by her concern about the ever-expanding reach of EU law and the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over British courts.
But an objective view of the Brexit battlefield is impossible, when even supposedly factual evidence has been contaminated. Whether Brexit caused more or less immigration, or just different kinds of immigration, is another landmine waiting to be stepped on. You often hear Remainers claiming Brexit has caused a 6 per cent hit to the UK economy as well as depressing employment, while opponents will point out that, au contraire, the British economy has subsequently been growing faster than Italy, France and Germany (bearing in mind that all of Europe is more of a basket case than it was 10 years ago). It seems the Leave campaign’s strategy of reducing the entire quagmire to the minimalist slogan “take back control” may have been their masterstroke.
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