Brexit: ‘A Very British Civil War’

Now in her mid-80s, Norma Percy is one of the great TV documentary makers of the past forty years. Since 1985 she has produced almost two dozen series about the great contemporary events of our time, from Watergate (1994) and The Death of Yugoslavia (1995) to Putin, Russia and the West (2012) and The Iraq War (2013). Her long collaboration with Brian Lapping has been one of the great achievements of British television in recent decades.

Now Percy and her series director Max Stern have made two documentaries marking the 10th anniversary of Brexit, A Very British Civil War, for the BBC. It bears all the hallmarks of Percy’s best work. Like all her documentaries, it is about high politics, talking to the key figures from the great events of our time. As in that great song from the musical Hamilton, her programmes are all about The Room Where It Happens.

A Very British Civil War is about Brexit as seen by the major players of the time, from Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson to Cameron, Osborne, Gove and Corbyn.  She also gets the perspectives of key women — Johnson’s then wife Marina Wheeler and the Labour politicians Kate Hoey and Gisela Stewart — and political advisers and PR men, though Dominic Cummings is a significant absence. Also missing are the views of leading contemporary historians and journalists. What has always mattered to Norma Percy are the key players, not the observers or, one might say, the experts — people who actually know something.

One problem with this approach is that it is personality-driven. What Cameron said to Johnson or Gove and what Gordon Brown said to Corbyn. What gets left out is the importance of the economy in 2016, or immigration, the north/south divide and the collapse of Labour after Blair.

And often the viewer has to draw their own conclusions from what is said. For example, no one says how disastrous it was for Britain that Brown succeeded Blair as Britain’s Prime Minister. This made a Lib-Lab coalition impossible. While Brown didn’t last long as Labour leader, his successors – Ed Miliband and the hapless Corbyn – were useless and indirectly played a huge role in making Brexit possible. Working class areas that had been staunchly Labour for years became pro-Brexit overnight. Just as they later voted for Johnson and now threaten to vote for Reform.

These programmes are a useful reminder of what a divisive figure Corbyn always was. If the hopeless Ed Miliband had not beaten his brother David to the Labour leadership, Brexit might never have happened. No one says this in the two programmes, but it is implicit throughout. Labour has not had a good leader since Blair. Or one might say, Blair is the only great leader Labour has had since Wilson and before him Attlee. Someone should have been asked about this. Instead, there is too much about how Cameron beat Johnson at tennis and who knew whom at Eton.

Daniel Hannan says at one point, ‘It [Brexit] was a reminder of how the Westminster bubble was just talking to itself.’ True. But he doesn’t say, and nor does anyone else, that the British media played a disturbing role in Brexit, with its obsession with personalities, giving ridiculous amounts of airtime to insignificant Brexit backbenchers on both sides. Just ten years on, many of the people interviewed in these programmes are yesterday’s men and women. Who today cares what Theresa Villiers, Amber Rudd, Kate Hoey or Jeremy Corbyn think about anything?

There are other important questions that go missing. Why did Cameron not insist that any referendum would need to be won by a particular percentage of the vote, not just be an outright majority? Leave only won 52 per cent of the vote. That’s barely even an outright majority. Is that the way to decide issues of historic importance? Who was advising him?

Why did Cameron fail to get a grip on immigration in the run-up to the Referendum? At one point Cameron says, “When we were talking about the economy we were winning. When we were talking about migration, we were losing.” Is this true? Isn’t it truer to say that when they were talking about the economy he and Osborne sounded like a couple of posh boys who didn’t know the price of milk in Sunderland or Basildon? No one mentions that just a few years before Brexit there was a huge financial crisis, which had led to Osborne’s austerity measures leaving large parts of working-class Britain reeling and reaching out for easy solutions from cheeky chappies like Johnson and Farage.

Labour was leaderless, but so were the Lib Dems after Clegg and Danny Alexander had gone off to make serious money. And the Conservatives were leaderless too, though, of course, Cameron and Osborne were never going to say this to Norma Percy. These are big questions and her format of talking to whoever was in the room might not be the best way of finding the right answers. Cameron and Osborne only defeated Labour in 2010 because Brown was the  wrong leader at the wrong time. If Blair had still been Labour’s leader he could have negotiated a Lib-Lab coalition with Clegg. Such a government would never have held a referendum on EU membership — which, as Percy’s programmes make clear, was largely the product of a civil war inside the Conservative Party.

Perhaps the most telling line in the  series comes from Boris Johnson at the very end of the series. “We didn’t have a plan for what to do [after the Referendum] because we didn’t think it was our job to have a plan.” This should be engraved on the front door of Number 10 so that Keir Starmer, Rachel  Reeves and Nigel Farage cannot say they weren’t warned. Perhaps Norma Percy’s next series could be about how the chancers took over Britain and were given a free ride by our media.

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