The three scenes from Ch4’s Brexit film that show why Remain lost

As soon as Channel 4 announced Benedict Cumberbatch had been cast as Dominic Cummings in its Brexit film, a hatchet job was expected. Some might still see it this way. I found it balanced, gripping, and at times funny, even moving. Plenty will be written about which parts were accurate and which not, but this was drama, not documentary. The story it tells is perhaps the most important story of our times: how politicians had become stuck in a late-90s time warp using a Clinton-era playbook, and thought Remain would easily win the referendum. But they lost because politics changes and the new energy was coming from forgotten voters who saw a chance to be counted. And Dominic Cummings, an outsider with contempt for the establishment, spotted this.

Cummings is shown as driven not by ideology, but research – much of which is talking to Wetherspoon’s punters. “We’re going to follow algorithmic statistical analysis, we don’t need to put up with any prima donna MPs,” he says. He tells his team that the Remainers will “run a campaign the way that campaigns have pretty much been run for the last 70 years: they’ll fight from the centre, make it about jobs and the economy.” We see a eureka moment for Cummings: a meeting with an American data scientist who offers to identify “three million voters who the other side don’t know exist”. By fair means, not foul. The data leads them to new people. Three scenes in the film tell this story:

The couple in Southend-on-Sea

We see the Leave chiefs – Cummings, Matthew Elliott and Douglas Carswell – turning up to a run-down housing estate. “I don’t know this place,” says Carswell. “Well, it’s in your constituency,” replies Cummings. “You’ve just ignored it for years.” An unfair point on Carswell, who never stopped talking about such people, but it’s meant to show MPs’ general disinterest in forgotten voters who are the implicit heroes of this Channel 4 drama.