May failed to learn lessons of Leave victory

A message of hope over pessimism will always prevail – and it could be needed in the days ahead

On this day last year, I mournfully made my way to the polling station and ended my lifelong support for the European Union. Most people don’t change their mind in election campaigns, but the referendum was different. I have always believed in an ever-closer union of peoples, but the EU’S intransigence had turned it into a source of instability and division. Not that I expected my vote to do anything: David Cameron was anticipated to win easily. At noon on polling day his campaign chief, Andrew Cooper, predicted a 10-point victory for Remain.

I’m not sure how many of us who voted for Brexit expected anything to come of it. That referendum result seemed to break every rule of political science. On one side you had the government, opposition, almost every business group, spymasters, national icons like Stephen Hawking and divinities like Keira Knightley. And those opposed? A rag tag team led by a 10-month-old outfit, Vote Leave, that had been beset by feuding and forced to fight at a time of its opponent’s choosing. It ought to have been a walkover.

So why wasn’t it? Even now, it’s hard to have a rational discussion about what Vote Leave got right. The referendum result was a profound psychological blow for many of those in the business of political analysis, so they ended up talking about voters duped by a “post-truth” era.

Vote Leave itself dissolved in the turmoil that followed Mr Cameron’s resignation. As a result, very few of the lessons of the campaign a year ago were learnt by the Tories – which is rather a shame. If they had been, Theresa May might not have lost her majority in the general election.

The Prime Minister wanted to run her own Brexit campaign, perhaps to atone for not supporting it last time. But she never quite explained what Brexit was for, or what it might lead to. She needed to tell people why we were leaving, and never did.

From the offset, Vote Leave sold Brexit as an agenda of national renewal, of tending to people who had been left behind. Its message – “take control” – actually meant something. “Strong and stable” did not. So the idea, last year, was to serve up an inspiring message that would lead millions to back change. Lesson one: hope sells.

Perhaps it was because Mrs May did not support Brexit that she never quite saw the need to frame it as being open and globalist. As Vote Leave knew from the offset, they would be accused of being xenophobic little Englanders with no interest in life beyond the English Channel. So they chose internationalist arguments: why, they asked, do we discriminate against immigrants from non-eu countries? Why not trade fairly with the Third World? And yes, let’s offer immediate and unconditional assurances to every single EU migrant in Britain: we need them, they can stay.

But it is a colder, meaner version of Brexit that Mrs May ended serving up in the election. The warmer version that Boris Johnson worked on – offering unilateral security to EU migrants, emphasising good relations with European neighbours – is a policy that ended up being stolen by the Labour Party. The Tories found themselves looking a bit like (as someone once put it) the nasty party.

It was as if the Conservatives had grown addicted to the negative campaigning deployed in the Scottish referendum then by Remain. When so much is at stake, voters want more than to be told to fear the other side. Lesson two: Project Fear doesn’t work.

Then came the great Brexit variety show. Vote Leave’s two star strikers were Boris and Michael Gove, but if you don’t like them then there were the Labour MPS Kate Hoey and Gisela Stuart. In fact, if you found Boris a bit too wet – with his declarations of being “passionately pro-immigration” – then there was Nigel Farage, with his (to me, repulsive) points about Hiv-infected migrants and his notorious “Breaking Point” poster showing Syrian refugees. And then the other outriders: Business for Britain, Muslims for Britain, Labour Leave, Out and Proud.

So the Brexit campaign had a great many people with a great many messages. A contrast to the 2017 Tory general election campaign which only featured one Tory: Mrs May herself. If you found her indecisive, robotic, power-hungry (or all three) then there wasn’t an alternative. It was Jeremy Corbyn who used outrider groups – like his Momentum and other Leftwing campaigners – with different messages spread on digital platforms to reach younger voters, two thirds of whom turned up. Lesson three: coalitions win campaigns.

Perhaps the strongest weapon in Vote Leave’s arsenal was its claim that Britain sends £350 million a week to the EU, and that this could be better spent on priorities like the National Health Service. Monstrous lies, said Remain: factor in the rebate and the real figure is far lower. And to be sure, the real sum that Vote Leave was promising for the NHS was closer to £100 million a week. But whether you believed the big or the small figure, the overall impression was the same: there’d be a lot more money for the NHS after Brexit. And here was something else that Theresa May lacked in the election: a firm offer for voters.

None of this is genius: times change, and successful campaigns change with them. Politicians take note and adapt: or do, if they want to win majorities. But given that the Tories might find themselves fighting another campaign at any moment, it might be worth thinking about a message that goes beyond attacking the other chap.

In all of the drama of the last year, the Tories have lost sight of what people voted for in the referendum. It was not about using EU nationals as bargaining chips, or snarling at Brussels. It was about retrieving sovereignty while managing immigration better, disengaging from the European Union while finding better ways to be good Europeans.

This is not about a hard Brexit or soft Brexit – neither of which mean anything – but an open Brexit, one that lets Britain better engage with the rest of the world. A rather compelling agenda, and one that’s still there for the taking.