Brexit: The Uncivil War

“Referendums are quite simply the worst way to decide anything. They’re divisive. They pretend complex choices are simple binaries- red or blue, black or white.”

It’s interesting watching this so soon after the National Theatre production of another James Graham play, This House; the parallels are striking, from the focus on back room operators rather than big political names to the introduction of each character as either "Remain" or "Leave", paralleling the uses of constituencies in This House. And, of course, the script is superb- human, philosophical, witty and awfully clever in how it presents the Brexit referendum as a coherent narrative.

Benedict Cumberbatch is superb as Dominic Cummings, unconvincing Mackem accent notwithstanding; this Leicestershire lad is married to a Geordie and knows these things. Cummings is, of course, much more well known today as Boris' puppet master and devotee of the driving-based eye test. This is a fascinating character study of a highly intelligent and capable man and a campaigning genius- I like how his clear campaigning methods are juxtaposed with those of the useless Remain campaign- whose sheer talent in this area should not be mistaken for a coherent or clever political philosophy. We are already seeing how his campaigning talents do not transfer to governing. Yet there's no denying his talents in the campaigning arena, especially against the uselessness of his opponents, unthinkingly rolling out the Clinton '92 "economy, stupid" campaign after a quarter of a century and not for once presenting Brexit as the massive surrender of sovereignty that it is, or speaking to those who have been forgotten by such campaigners.

We see both Cummings' arrogance and his unlikely charisma as well as, interestingly, as much of a clash between the two Leave campaigns as between the two opposing sides. And the script does not let Cummings off the hook for his "dead cat" methods of lying, nor for either the cynicism of letting Farage and his rabble of not-racist-buts talk about immigration, nor for his own mendacity about seventy million Turks. And yet the use of Bill Cash and Bernard Jenkin as foils allow even a Remainer like me to enjoy Cumming's effortless batting off of an attempted coup. One would think I would find this depressing, given the awfulness of its subject matter. It's a real credit to the script and to Cumberbatch that I don't.