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Few television dramas have been as eagerly awaited or as much hyped as Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War. We had already been told that the star actor Benedict Cumberbatch, accompanied by

the writer James Graham, had visited Dominic Cummings at home in order to portray him sympathetically. The mere fact that the mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign had been cast as the main

protagonist had already elicited protests from the Remain camp. We had been led to expect a bold, counter-intuitive, novel interpretation of the referendum that would shock us to the core.

Was that what we got? Not a bit of it. The acting was first class; the dialogue was (mostly) convincing. It was entertaining. But the narrative was familiar, the subliminal messages

one-sided, the conclusion the purest Remainer Project Fear. Brexit was a swindle and the mad genius who made it happen was far too intelligent to believe a word of his own propaganda.

Only at the end, when the credits went up, did we discover that Cummings’s counterpart Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s communications director who ran the Remain campaign, was also the

political consultant. In other words, Oliver wasn’t just a major character, played by Rory Kinnear, but had helped to shape the narrative. No wonder Brexit was seen through his eyes: he

helped Graham to write the script.

Indeed, it was striking that all the Leavers, apart from Cummings, were depicted as frivolous or reckless. Of course, like the Cavaliers in 1066 And All That, the Brexiteers were Wrong but

Wromantic, yet the Remainers were certainly not Right but Repulsive Roundheads. Craig Oliver was shown giving his daughters supper while fielding a conference call with Cameron and Peter

Mandelson: clearly they were the grown-ups and the leading Brexiteers, Cummings apart, squabbling children. Boris Johnson was singled out as acting in bad faith throughout. “It’s just a game

for them,” says Oliver crushingly.

As for the Leave voters: they were primarily depicted as hysterical, weeping women. Not once but twice, we had scenes in which middle-aged Leavers burst into tears because they felt

themselves ignored and belittled. They were all driven by emotion; the Remainers were the sensible, rational, responsible citizens. But it was the daemonic Cummings whose endlessly

reiterated message cut through to the people Hillary Clinton dismissed as “deplorables”: take back control, the NHS and Turkey, take back control.

Brexit’s dramatic irony, of which Graham is doubtless proud, was that the Leave campaign was secretly controlled by sinister foreigners. With Cummings as our sorcerer’s apprentice, we were

initiated into the dark arts of data mining. And the American billionaire Robert Mercer was depicted as using the UK as a test lab for his real purpose, achieved later that year: the

election of Donald Trump.

Just in case we hadn’t got the message that Brexit was just a colossal con-trick, we had the death of Jo Cox MP to remind us that this was a matter of life and death. The furies that

Cummings & co had summoned up were now demanding human flesh. At this point Graham brought the star duo of Cumberbatch and Kinnear together for a showdown over a pint of beer.

Cummings, whose public humiliation by Cameron gives him a revenge motive and whom the playwright tellingly compares to Richard III, jeers at Oliver for having lost control of events. Oliver

shoots back that Cummings, too, cannot control the demons he has unleashed. It is a dramatic motif as old as Faust and Frankenstein, but it still works.

The drama begins and ends with a reckoning: years later Cummings appears before a committee of inquiry. He is given a long speech to account for himself: “There’s a systems failure in this

country and across the West,” he declares, looking ever more manic and unhinged. The Brexit vote was his way of pressing the “reset button” — but it hadn’t worked. The politicians had

“rebooted the same operating system, the same tired old politics of short-termism and self-serving small-thinking bullshit”. All passion spent, Cummings creeps back into the obscurity whence

he came. And we are left to pick up the pieces.

There is no denying that Brexit: The Uncivil War is a slick, sophisticated and elegant piece of theatre. But is it the last word on its subject? By no means. The premise on which it is based

— that Britain has become an utterly different, divided and intolerant country even before we actually exit the EU — is not borne out by facts. Only seen through a Remain prism is the

referendum result evidence of rising racism. Polling evidence suggests that Britons have become more positive about immigration since 2016 and are the least xenophobic nation in Europe.

This does not prove that Brexit is a good idea, of course. But the myth-making has continued ever since June 2016 and both sides are equally guilty. Interestingly, Brexit: The Uncivil War

never bothers to engage with the main argument deployed by Vote Leave: take back control. Sovereignty is, it seems, too complex an idea to tackle on TV. Immigration, by contrast, is easy to

depict. Better to denigrate the — admittedly flawed — individuals who articulated it than to refute their arguments. But that is hardly a civil way to debate matters of such cardinal

importance.

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