Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’

"Dominic is an absolutely fascinating character and has often been described as the ‘brains’ of the Vote Leave campaign. I’ve chosen this as an illustration of how the campaign was won on the Leave side. What I really like about this is that, in contrast to Dan Hannan, Dominic is very frank and honest. He’s quite prepared to say, ‘We did this, and we think it works, we weren’t so sure about that but we did it anyway. This is what we know, this is what we don’t know, this is what I think.’ He’s very dispassionate and there’s a degree of scientific method and rigour in his approach that you rarely see. At the same time, he’s very entertaining. “When I first saw the slogan “Vote Leave, take back control” I thought, ‘Really? What does that even mean? Is that going to work?’” It’s very revealing. I don’t think Dominic would claim that he won it himself or that he necessarily knows which of these particular things won it, but it’s a very good insight into how they were thinking. And I do think that there was a contrast with the Remain campaign which was very old-fashioned and did not apply this sort of rigour in analysis that Dominic and his team did. Yes, the other side is that Dominic is pretty cynical and ruthless about his approach to campaigning. The £350 million figure was, of course, simply untrue. Everyone knows that and I think pretty much everyone on both sides will admit it, at least privately. With Farage, Dominic was quite ruthless. But politics is a ruthless business. It’s quite reasonable, I suppose, for Nigel Farage to say, ‘We’d have never got the referendum without me.’ Equally, Dominic’s priority was winning and his view —and I think he had some pretty good evidence for it—was that the right way to win was to approach Farage in the way that he did. By and large, I find that convincing. “Dominic is an absolutely fascinating character and has often been described as the ‘brains’ of the Vote Leave campaign.” I have to say, when I first saw the slogan “Vote Leave, take back control” I thought, ‘Really? What does that even mean? Is that going to work?’ I was completely wrong. I’m not just saying that because Leave won, I think there is enough evidence—some of which is here and some of which is elsewhere—that that did genuinely resonate with people. That was Dominic and he was right. So, I think he has a pretty good case to make. He doesn’t oversell himself too much in this post, at least. He admits somewhere that the result was over-determined in that, if you have a very close result like 52-48, there’s a lot of different things that could have won it. You can’t point to any one single factor. And you can’t say that it was inevitable. He’s quite clear that it wasn’t inevitable. Yes. Again, I think one of the impressive things about Dominic—whether or not you agree with his objectives—is that he takes proper scientific evidence in the social sciences seriously and tries to apply it. Again, I think this was in contrast to the Remain campaign, which was a much more traditional election campaign by PR professionals and special advisors."