Dominic Cummings, the campaign director for Vote Leave, doesn’t just feature in James Graham’s scintillating new film about Brexit – he takes over it. Brilliantly brought to life by Benedict Cumberbatch (despite his struggles with Cummings’ oddly inflected, vaguely north-east English accent), the Cummings we see on screen is impulsive, implacable and virtually impossible to read. What were his motivations for wrenching Britain out of Europe? Even Graham admits to being unsure still. Brexit: The Uncivil War depicts Cummings as a man loathed by the MPs on the Vote Leave board who try to get him fired, loathed even more by Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and the more nationalistic Leave.EU campaigners … and yet deeply attractive in all his disruptive glory.

But is this portrayal of the uncompromising strategist accurate? Some prominent remainers are sceptical. “He’s no Alan Turing,” one tells me. But Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign, is in no doubt the film captures Cummings’ energy, unwillingness to compromise and capacity for lateral thinking.

“Cumberbatch has got Dom down to a T,” says Elliott, who was instrumental in getting Cummings to lead the campaign. “He captures his passion, his focus, his dedication, his frustration with members of parliament.” I ask him whether Cummings is as feisty as the film suggests. “Very much so,” he says with a laugh. “He’s good at enthusing, he’s got the killer instinct, he was willing to go into battle with the establishment. It takes a very special person to go into that sort of battle.”

Elliott says not everything in the film is strictly accurate – the account of the battles on the Vote Leave board between Cummings and MPs such as Bill Cash and Bernard Jenkin are so compressed as to be baffling – but he accepts that such compression is inevitable. “I don’t blame James Graham for this,” he says. “Everything has to be hugely simplified for a 90-minute show.”

Graham says there was enough material for a miniseries, and that what he set out to achieve was a dramatic truth. Elliott reckons he has caught the atmosphere perfectly. “The film captures how fast-paced and manic and high-pressured the campaign was,” he says. “For me, it also captures the fact that I was like a shock absorber between the campaign team and the board.”



Other key leave figures, however, are less impressed. Daniel Hannan – a Conservative MEP, one of the founders of Vote Leave and dubbed “the man who brought you Brexit” by the Guardian – is dismissive. “This is very much a remainer take on the vote,” he tells me. “The acting is brilliant, but there is something almost cartoonish about the presentation of leavers.”

Boris Johnson is shown as being secretly disappointed by leave’s success, which is idiotic Daniel Hannan

Hannan says the key figures in the leave campaign are caricatured. “Matt Elliott was chief executive of the most successful campaign in British political history, but is portrayed here as a gormless chump. Douglas Carswell had a personal following few MPs could dream of, yet is absurdly portrayed as not wanting to visit the rougher estates in his constituency. Michael Gove is one of the cleverest men in parliament, but is portrayed here as a vacillating fool. Boris Johnson is shown as being secretly disappointed by leave’s success, which is idiotic, as anyone who campaigned with him will know.”

“The whole premise, however dramatically engaging, is false,” insists Hannan. “The referendum campaign did not unleash demons. The number of British voters who see immigration as positive is higher than for any other country in the EU, and has risen significantly since the vote. Britain is one of a tiny number of EU countries with no populist anti-immigrant party in its main legislative chamber. You might say that Brexit is already working.”

‘Matt is portrayed here as a gormless chump’ … John Heffernan as Matthew Elliott in Brexit: The Uncivil War. Photograph: Nick Wall/Channel 4

The remain side get much less attention in the film, which Lucy Thomas, deputy director of the remain campaign, believes is a weakness. “Leave was the underdog, so if you’re writing this you’re going to focus on how did they overturn the establishment,” she says. “The story almost writes itself: the very smart guy who comes out of self-imposed exile to run this amazing campaign and win. That is a really compelling story, but what it therefore lacks is a lot of the decisions and tension points within the remain campaign.”

A key source of tension on the remain side was that four months before the vote, Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s director of communications, moved in to take over running much of the campaign from Will Straw, who had been directing it for more than a year. Straw is introduced in the film but never speaks, and his contention that the remain campaign should have taken on the issue of immigration and made a positive argument for it is never considered. Graham needs the dramatic arc of the film to become a personal duel between Cummings and Oliver (played by Rory Kinnear), which means significant figures such as Straw and remain’s official director of strategy, Ryan Coetzee, are left out.

‘Cumberbatch got Dom down to a T’ … Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings. Composite: Peter Nicholls/Reuters/David Levenson/Getty Images

Peter Mandelson – who appears in the film only in a single news clip and as a disembodied voice in a chaotic conference call with Cameron and Oliver – accepts the use of artistic licence and believes Graham has caught the central struggle in the campaign perfectly. “The film is extraordinary,” he tells me. “It presses every button and captures Britain at the time.”

Mandelson is scathing about the limitations of Oliver, who he says was no match for the “mad genius” of Cummings. “Craig is a very hard-working, very sincere, workaday press officer,” says Mandelson. “He worked very hard, but he’s not Lynton Crosby.” Mandelson had put together the campaign team headed by Straw, Thomas and Coetzee, and was frustrated when Oliver and No 10 took over.

Early scripts were too data obsessed. There’s a danger of creating an idea that it was an act of political brilliance Craig Oliver

“All the people who knew the campaign and had been working on it for months were put to one side,” he says. “It was then run rather like David Cameron’s government – as a private members’ club.” Mandelson says the remain campaign assumed Cummings’ eccentricities meant the Vote Leave campaign would at some point implode, but it never did.

Mandelson and Oliver disagree about pretty much everything. They can’t even agree that the conference call depicted in the film took place. Oliver insists it did; Mandelson claims it didn’t and that Cameron blanked him for the entire campaign, so much so that he had to get Tony Blair to approach Cameron directly to try to change the remain strategy on immigration.

Oliver hotly denies Mandelson’s account. “That’s utter rubbish,” he tells me. “He had meetings all the time with people in No 10, and his claim after the event that somehow he hadn’t been allowed to be involved is totally disingenuous. The frustration was that he couldn’t talk to the Labour party and neither could other members of the campaign. That was a real struggle.”

Rory Kinnear as Craig Oliver in Brexit: The Uncivil War. Photograph: Nick Wall/Channel 4

Mandelson and Oliver also disagree on how important data analytics were to the result. Mandelson believes Vote Leave’s use of personally tailored messaging was crucial. “It wasn’t a fair fight,” he says. “There was a lack of transparency in what they were doing, and it was highly manipulative. In that sense the country was hijacked.” Oliver counters that remain’s data analysis techniques were equally sophisticated, and says the real problems were that decades of anti-EU propaganda could not be reversed in a few months and that insurgents are always likely to triumph over proponents of the status quo. “Take back control” trumps “steady as she goes”.

Oliver acted as a consultant on the film – his book, Unleashing Demons, and Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman’s All Out War were key sources for Graham – and says he tried to ensure it wasn’t all about data analytics and the subtext that leave won by using shadowy methods. “My concern was that the early scripts were too data obsessed,” he says. “There’s a danger of creating an idea that it was an act of political brilliance, but you still need the messaging to be there, and to me it was clear that immigration was, to paraphrase the Sun, what won it for them. They did emphasise that more in later scripts.”

This is a battle for the future of the UK. James’s film exposes that leave had no real idea of Britain and its future Peter Mandelson

In the film, the Vote Leave campaign is portrayed as leaving the “heavy lifting” on anti-immigration messaging to the Ukip-dominated Leave.EU, but leading remainers tell me that Cummings and Elliott also played dirty on the threat of Turkey joining the EU and immigrants arriving from the Middle East. Elliott, in his urbane way, says only that in 2016 Turkey was on a path to accession and that Vote Leave was citing what was a probability.

Will the film make any difference to the polarised nature of the Brexit debate in Britain? Graham, Oliver and Elliott all express the hope that it will. “In that [entirely fictional] scene where Dom and Craig Oliver are having a pint together,” says Elliott, “what you see are two people who passionately think they are doing the best for their country and are putting their heart and soul into the campaign. They feel that if the outcome doesn’t go their way it will be disastrous. But at the same time, both of them are acting with the best intentions, and neither of them is being malevolent.”

I ask Mandelson if there is any chance the film might act as balm for a troubled nation. “Not a hope,” he says. “This is a battle for the future of the country. What James’s film exposes is that leave had no real idea of Britain and its future beyond the duration of the referendum campaign. It didn’t represent a vision or a set of policies or a programme for the country. I think what people will take out of the film is, ‘What on earth was it all for? What has the country gained? How is it better? How are our prospects transformed?’ They will feel a profound sense of emptiness.”

We have taken back control; we’re just not quite sure of what.



• Brexit: The Uncivil War is on Channel 4 on Monday at 9pm.