The Vote Leave campaign didn't win the referendum

Thursday’s Daily Politics showed an absurd film made by Matthew Elliott about the brilliance of the Vote Leave campaign. A film praised on air by Steve Richards as ‘brilliant’, and on twitter by Douglas Carswell, who calls Matthew Elliott a ‘genius’. Carswell should know better, as he was part of the Vote Leave campaign. It was a shambles.

Elliott rightly says that Remain was expected to win. Unsurprisingly, he forgot to mention the disastrous appearances that Dominic Cummings and he made before the Treasury Select Committee, dragged before it like two naughty little boys and utterly unable to defend their claim that £350m a week would be available to the NHS. Why? Because it was an outright lie.

It wasn’t pleasant to be delivering leaflets peddling a big lie. But the organisation was also shambolic. The structure of the website changed in mid-campaign for not obvious reason. Campaign materials were hard to obtain, and at one point the organisation seemed to have run out of money.

The lie in Matthew’s film was that the UK voted for Brexit because of Vote Leave’s campaign. The central campaign did make two contributions: they produced better teams for TV debates than the Remain side; and the slogan “Vote Leave, Take Control”. That was all.

With the media, the so called experts, and the political establishment favouring Remain, the campaign on the ground served to reassure Leave voters that they were not alone. The centre just produced campaign materials fitfully, and make us cringe every time Leave politicians tried and failed to defend the £350m lie in the media. They seemed wholly unable to understand that this lie gave Remain repeated opportunities to attack our truthfulness.

So why didn’t Remain win? There were three reasons.

Unexpectedly, prominent mainstream politicians came out for Leave. Cameron and Osborne had probably expected to be opposed by Nigel Farage and Peter Bone, but Michael Gove was followed on board by Boris Johnson. Vote Leave was designated as the official campaign, pushing UKIP to the sidelines. Thus the notion of Brexit felt less marginal, less extreme.

Second, the Remain campaign was even worse than Vote Leave. We never heard any positive arguments for staying in the EU, except that we could avoid all the economic punishments promised by Project Fear. Astonishingly, the Remain campaign managed to tell more lies than Vote Leave; and as each threat failed to move the polls, a bigger threat would be produced. This was exactly the wrong way to do it, as it suggested desperation rather than calm prediction; indeed, a time came when the threats became risible and were being openly scoffed at.

Responsible for this this strategy was political genius Osborne, now deservedly banished from government after cynically trying to bludgen us into Remaining by using lies. His ignominy is wholly deserved.

But  maybe Remain were never going to win once Cameron came back from the EU with no visible concessions and Gove and Johnson decided to oppose him. The polls had got the general election wrong, and in the referendum the public polling at least failed to pick up the heavy preference for Brexit among many Labour voters. John Harris of The Guardian and Labour MP John Mann knew. One Labour MP was said to have been shocked by the postal votes in a Labour heartland, and was quoted as ssaying “It’s over”. But this comment quickly vanished, because it was illegal.

An exhaustive analysis of why Remain lost would take this post into deep TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) territory. Perhaps the die had been cast right at the start of the campaign, and by then it was too late for Remain. In Lynton Crosby’s famous phrase, you can’t fatten a pig on market day. The Westminster commentariat may applaud the Leave campaign. But they are wrong.