Well that’s a first — a Brexit drama that made me laugh!
...but says DOMINIC SANDBROOK, after watching Benedict Cumberbatch’s brilliant turn as an anarchic geek, there’s nothing funny about the next chapter
‘ BRITAIN makes a noise,’ says Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, the strategist behind Vote Leave, in the first moments of last night’s Channel 4’s Brexit drama. ‘an actual noise. Did you know that?’
not exactly the opening you expect from a drama about the most controversial political campaign in modern British history, not least because he is sitting in a stationery cupboard. But there is more of that to come.
Later, after listening to alienated voters in Essex, the eccentric Cummings lies fulllength on the road outside, ‘listening’ to the sound of England. What is it? a groan of depression? a howl of rage? the roar of an awakening lion?
Or just the chaotic babble inside the head of a strange, driven man?
any drama about the Brexit campaign, of course, is bound to be partial. More than two years on, the scars have not yet healed, and the partisan shrieking is worse than ever.
For some Leavers, anything short of a patriotic paean would look like sour grapes, while in the weekend papers some ultraremainers were outraged that Channel 4 had made Brexit: the Uncivil War at all.
But by focusing on Cummings, a backroom figure little known to the public, the writer James Graham found a clever way to make the familiar seem surprising.
Formerly Michael Gove’s controversial special adviser, Cummings was widely seen as the anarchic brains behind the Leave campaign.
Graham’s script had him reading thucydides, Kipling and tolstoy in his spare time, before instructing his fellow strategists that the Leave campaign should be based on the principles of Socrates and Chairman Mao.
Even when played by Benedict Cumberbatch, Cummings often comes over as utterly insufferable. at one point, the Eurosceptic donor Lord Mills calls him a ‘geeky anarchist’, while his opposite number Craig Oliver, who was Prime Minister David Cameron’s chief Pr man, dismisses his ‘pseudo-intellectual bulls**t’.
as we all know, though, Cummings was on to something.
in one brilliant early scene, the drama had him taking the national temperature with drinkers in a pub, asking them about their anxieties about immigration and identity, and weaving them into that famously simple, stark message: ‘take back control.’
PERSONALLY, i find it hard to believe the slogan’s key word ‘back’ — which implied that, under the EU, Britons had lost something that was once their birthright — was inspired by a passage Cummings found in a book about how to prepare for fatherhood.
But if you’re making a political drama, you can be forgiven a bit of dramatic licence. and since Graham is our finest political dramatist for decades — his play, this House, about the politics of the late Seventies, was a well-deserved West End hit — i wasn’t surprised to find myself utterly riveted.
What did surprise me was that it was so funny. the tone was set early on, when Cummings’s boss Matthew Elliott has a clandestine meeting with the Ukip MP Douglas Carswell in an art gallery, exchanging muttered asides like extras in a spy spoof.
the big names were generally played for laughs, which will no doubt have infuriated some of Channel 4’s bien-pensant viewers.
arron Banks and nigel Farage are seen drinking at midnight on the bonnet of a range rover. We first meet Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, depicted as a pantomime double-act, warily waving to each other at the opera.
and in one gloriously written scene, Cameron’s strategist Craig Oliver (who, in real life, was a consultant on the film) desperately tries to co-ordinate a conference call between his boss and an outrageously camp Peter Mandelson while simultaneously making fish fingers for his daughters and their friends.
‘this is a strange little gettogether!’ chuckles Cameron. ‘nothing to lose, i suppose, except perhaps the European alliance and perhaps the United Kingdom itself!’
More earnest, ideologically committed viewers may well have found this all a bit too broad. But i think Graham is right to see that politics is often indistinguishable from black farce.
as he told one interviewer before the show went out, he knew well that this was a subject ‘people feel passionately and often tribal about... we want the audience to feel that no matter what their political stripe is, they are being given a fair hearing and asked to question their beliefs.’
in that respect, his drama was far more successful than i had expected. i doubt i am alone in admitting that at first, the prospect of a fictionalised Brexit campaign struck me as thoroughly depressing. But Graham’s drama did not just make me laugh, it made me think. and despite all the publicity about Cumberbatch’s admittedly excellent performance, the programme was at its best when it got away from the campaign machinations and tried to say something about the deeper issues. For me, the most memorable scene came near the end, when Craig Oliver and his fellow remain strategists are watching ordinary people discuss the campaign in a focus group.
TO OLIVER’S frustration, none of his slogans are hitting home. He bursts in to reason with them, but they refuse to believe him. ‘How do you know?’ one woman says when he tells her that Brexit will produce a massive recession.
But the discussion rapidly escalates into a blazing row. a black woman accuses the others of being racist. ‘We can’t say nothing now without that coming up!’ a man says angrily.
Black against white, young against old, liberal against conservative, the divisions are laid shockingly bare.
‘i’m sick of feeling like nothing, like i have nothing, like i know nothing, like i am nothing!’ screams one woman — and bursts into tears.
and in the middle of it all sits Oliver, the representative of the political elite, struck dumb with horror. ‘i hadn’t realised,’ he says afterwards. ‘and now it’s too late.’
it’s a brilliant moment, perfectly capturing the gulf between the metropolitan political class and the voters in the country, as well as the cultural divisions exacerbated by what was, on both sides, a demeaning and often dishonest campaign.
revealingly, though, the drama ends with Cummings simply walking away, having told a committee that is sitting in 2020 that the Brexit dream has been betrayed because the politicians refused to put in place the nebulous new ‘system’ he wanted to manage it. and what happened next? Well, that part of the drama has yet to be written. We’ll know the answer in a few weeks — and i suspect there may be rather fewer laughs.