Never-ending stories

I spent a bit of time last week on the set of the new Brexit film, which James Graham has written for Channel 4. My book on the referendum has been plundered by the new production, so it was fascinating seeing real events given life again, in several pitch-perfect performances.

The subject of conversation on set was the public slating of a leaked (early) copy of the script earlier that week.

Most agitated of the slaters was Carole Cadwalladr, the Observer reporter who has made her name by uncovering malfeasance around the use of data in politics and the financing of the referendum. ‘It’s profoundly wrong on every level,’ she moaned. ‘It’s wilfully misleading the public.’ Cadwalladr has done some superb reporting but she has also got some things wrong and appears irritated that the smoking gun she seeks won’t be in the first film of those events.

Also agitated were her sometime targets, the self-styled Bad Boys of Brexit — Arron Banks and Nigel Farage — and their American alter ego Steve Bannon, who pronounced the drama ‘bullshit’. Banks’s sidekick Andy Wigmore expressed concern that their ilk would be depicted as ‘bellends’.

What the reaction to the leak shows is how much of a contested space the Brexit referendum remains. Brexit is the story of our times and everyone wants it to be told their way. Yet, more than two years after the referendum vote, there is no settled view about what it means, what it is and what it could be.

None of the mainstream Brexiteers followed Churchill’s dictum that ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.’ Bravely, they left that to the likes of me. Arron Banks did so and played it for laughs. If, as Bannon complained, the Banks-Farage parts of the production are ‘a clown show’, they can hardly complain that they have become the comic relief.