EU Referendum


EU Referendum: in the absence of a plan


29/10/2015



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Under the scintillating genius of the Second Cummings, Vote Leave Limited has decided that its only real plan is not to have a plan, and instead rely on a series of incoherent and often contradictory statements from its supporters, while ignoring Flexcit, the only one on the block.

Predictably, that gives the equally incoherent "BSE" campaign the opportunity to exploit the balls dropped by Cummings and his supporters, producing a pastiche that purports to be serious criticism of something that isn't even worth criticising.

But that's what happens when you have no strategy, and no exit plan. Cummings, the man who sneeringly decides that no one understands politics, except him – even though some of us were trudging the corridors of Whitehall while he was still in nappies.

This is the man who, as campaign director of Vote Leave Ltd, has made sequential tactical blunders – a gift that never stops giving, to the opposition. Falling for the misdirection emanating from No.10, he was spooked into launching the campaign prematurely, on the flawed belief that there would be a referendum in the Spring of 2016.

Having launched with a train-wreck website – giving new meaning to the word "unreadable" - he then chose to focus on the cost of EU contributions, ignoring warnings that this would quickly deteriorate into a noisy and ultimately unwinnable squabble over details, getting the campaign precisely nowhere.

Not content with that, he rejected the offer of a coherent exit plan and instead fixated on the idea of the government deciding on the plan. He then wanted a referendum on the outcome of the Government negotiating its own plan, on the basis that this would somehow give us what we wanted.

Even as that "brainchild" was being humiliatingly rejected by No.10, he diverted his resources on a further series of aimless squabbles with the "BSE" campaign, not realising that its very purpose was to keep the "leave" campaign occupied and distracted, away from the real opposition – Mr Cameron and his officials.

And when the real opposition emerged, in the form of Mr Cameron attacking one of the few available mechanisms for managing an orderly exit from the EU – the Norway Option – the genius Cummings misinterpreted the reason for the attack.

Even though Mr Cameron has many times attacked the Norway Option, including during his Bloomberg Speech, Cumming concocted the bizarre conspiratorial thesis that the Prime Minister was attacking it because he wanted the "leave" campaign to support it.

Aligning himself and his troops with the Prime Minister, he then joined in the attempt to demolish one of our most powerful weapons against the "remains". Then, for his finale (so far), having rejected the idea of producing a plan, he now promises a "roadmap" for exit which – gets this - would have a "new credible Gvt team" negotiating a "new UK-EU deal based on free trade, friendly cooperation, no supremacy of EU law".

With this cascade of errors rendering his business empire, Vote Leave Ltd, wide open to attack (and his business partner mysteriously missing), many of us are wondering whether we can afford the genius of the Second Cummings and his brilliant "understanding" of politics.