Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won

[Denzil_DC]

(First published 9 January 2017.)

In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics. A few days after the 2015 election I wrote a blog about Michael Gove’s new job touching on the referendum. When I wrote it I assumed I would carry on studying and would not be involved in it. About ten days later I was asked by an assortment of MPs, rich businessmen, and campaigners including Matthew Elliott to help put together an organisation that could fight the referendum. I was very reluctant and prevaricated but ended up agreeing. I left my happy life away from SW1 and spent eight weeks biking around London persuading people to take what was likely to be a car crash career decision – to quit their jobs and join a low probability proposition: hacking the political system to win a referendum against almost every force with power and money in politics. In September we had an office, in October ‘Vote Leave’ went public, in April we were designated the official campaign, 10 weeks later we won.

Why and how? The first draft of history was written in the days and weeks after the 23 June and the second draft has appeared over the past few weeks in the form of a handful of books. There is no competition between them. Shipman’s is by far the best and he is the only one to have spoken to key people. I will review it soon. One of his few errors is to give me the credit for things that were done by others, often people in their twenties like Oliver Lewis, Jonny Suart, and Cleo Watson who, unknown outside the office, made extreme efforts and ran rings around supposed ‘experts’. His book has encouraged people to exaggerate greatly my importance.

I have been urged by some of those who worked on the campaign to write about it. I have avoided it, and interviews, for a few reasons (though I had to write one blog to explain that with the formal closing of VL we had made the first online canvassing software that really works in the UK freely available HERE). For months I couldn’t face it. The idea of writing about the referendum made me feel sick. It still does but a bit less.

For about a year I worked on this project every day often for 18 hours and sometimes awake almost constantly. Most of the ‘debate’ was moronic as political debate always is. Many hours of life I’m never getting back were spent dealing with abysmal infighting among dysfunctional egomaniacs while trying to build a ~£10 million startup in 10 months when very few powerful people thought the probability of victory was worth the risk of helping us. (Two rare heroes who put up a lot of their own money and supported the team were Peter Cruddas and Stuart Wheeler.) Many of those involved regarded their TV appearances as by far the most important aspect of the campaign. Many regarded Vote Leave as ‘the real enemy’.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/dominic-cummings-brexit-referendum-won/

Spoiler/key passage from a long read:

[pkdu]

1. Lies worked...damned fucking lies. nt

[Denzil_DC]

2. Other polls since

(such as Ashcroft's) have given different interpretations of voter motivations (though it's not clear whether his methodology push-polled the factors he found - in the end it more likely came down to national mood rather than anything strictly rational, especially bearing in mind Remain was expected to win), but (a) Ashcroft didn't run the "winning" campaign in the referendum, and (b) however accurate/inaccurate Cummings' views are (and he does cite polling data in the article to back them up), it was what they deliberately ran with.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. I think they're referring to the "350m", which was a lie as a figure

Yes, that may have persuaded a lot of people. But it was itself a lie.

[Denzil_DC]

4. Yeah, the article covers that.

Cummings (the article's a strange mix of self-serving ranting and false modesty) claims that Boris and Gove were committed verbally to ploughing at least some substantial extra funding into the NHS immediately after the vote, before both their leadership campaigns imploded (but then they were high on the win and goodness knows what else at the time).

I suspect Cummings's conscience is troubling him about the porkies he was party to spreading - e.g. that there's any serious prospect of Turkey joining the EU any time in the next couple of decades. Ironically, the UK may have to open its doors to immigrants from Turkey anyway as May flails around looking for trade deals. (He sticks by the £350 million figure, but acknowledges this doesn't include funding the UK receives back from the EU. He puts the net amount paid to the EU closer to £180 million/week, IIRC.)

I was just pointing out that other polling about Leavers' motivations since the referendum contradicts Cummings's internal polling and what he says in that quote above.

He goes on at length about it being multifactorial, and having read the whole thing, despite the article title, I'm not sure he's clear himself how they won (one main takeaway is that having useless leadership on the Remain side didn't hurt).