Halloween has passed without us leaving the EU (thank goodness) and appropriately enough I finished Tim Shipman’s ‘All Out War’ today.
It’s a compelling and meticulous account of the Brexit Referendum that’s extremely readable despite the complexity of the events being relayed. It’s a fascinating book and achieved for me the author’s intended aim of giving readers on either side of the debate a better understanding and appreciation of the motives of the other side.
Perhaps unsurprisingly (given that the author is political editor of The Sunday Times) it does a much better job of explaining the Tory side of the story than it does the Labour one. The Conservative players are fully formed characters with motivations and personalities, whilst Labour is more or less portrayed as a big dysfunctional blob. Not sure if this is bias on the part of the author or just a result of Labour players being less willing to talk to him, but it cost the book a star for me.
Nevertheless, it’s a book I throughly recommend and I’ll be diving into the sequel very soon.

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads (hence the reference to lots of others giving it 4-5 stars): If you'd rather stick pins in your eyes than plough through 600 pages, I've summarised what I thought were the most interesting points in a review here: http://paulsamael.com/blog/all-out-war

But why 3 stars rather than the 4 or 5 that everyone else seems to be giving it here? Well, on the positive side, it's a very interesting and detailed (if overly long) account of what went wrong for Remain and what went right for Leave. But it falls down on the bigger picture.

In particular, I think the author is far too quick to credit people such as Dominic Cummings, Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks with stunning tactical genius. What the book really demonstrates, it seems to me, is that although both Leave campaigns were undeniably more ruthless than Remain, they also got lucky.

Cummings & Co were convinced that Farage & Co were toxic and tried to run a more high-minded campaign: this helped in the sense that it made people who were put off by the UKIP brigade feel that they could vote Leave without being labelled as racist fruitcakes. Meanwhile Farage & Co thought that Cummings & Co's strategy was hopeless and concentrated instead on populist anti-immigration rhetoric: this helped in the sense that it persuaded quite a lot of people to vote who hardly ever vote in elections.

So although this should have been a recipe for mixed messages and disaster, it worked extremely well for Leave as it allowed them to appeal to different sections of the voting public - but in no way can it be said to have been a conscious strategy because clearly, both wings of the Leave campaign despised each other (even though in reality, in order to win, they needed each other).

And where else did Leave get lucky? Well, Remain ran a crap campaign based on crap polling (the book is quite good on pointing out all the flaws in Remain's approach). Although Leavers are apt to claim that this was the biggest vote ever in favour of anything, the fact is that it would only have taken 700,000 people out of 33.5 million to put their cross in the Remain box for the result to have been different. To my mind, that is a close result in a national referendum - and it is certainly not the basis for the kind of sweeping mandate that Brexiters now claim they have for a hard Brexit.

But what really made my blood boil was the conclusion, where the author basically says we need to stop making a fuss about brazenly false claims like spending £350 a million a week on the EU. I can't remember a previous campaign where the lies were quite so brazen, particularly from Leave (the book makes clear that this was a deliberate strategy by both Leave campaigns, influenced in the case of Farage & Co by Trump).

In most other campaigns, these would have been called out by the media - but the BBC was so obsessed with balance and afraid of offending Leavers that it never really got to grips with the lies and much of the rest of the media was happy not to take issue with dodgy claims unless they were made by Remain (and I accept that Remain was not blameless either). The trouble is, the author is a journalist for the Sunday Times, so he was hardly going to point the finger at his own kind. Anyway, read it for the fascinating detail but don't expect much in the way of proper analysis. ( )

It is now almost two years since the referendum on whether or not Britain should remain in the European Union. The resultant decision to leave has proved to be the single most significant political event in Britain throughout most of our lifetime’s, and its reverberations are still being felt.

From the outside it might seem simply to have been a fairly straightforward binary option, with followers of either side campaigning against adherents of the other. Oh, if only it had been that straightforward! Tim Shipman’s comprehensive, and admirably non-partisan, account shows how seriously divided both sides, but particularly those advocating that Britain should leave, really were.

Indeed, for the various Brexiteers, simple discussions about the relative merits of staying or leaving were the easy part. Their own side was bitterly riven apart, with four or five different organisations fighting tooth and nail to secure formal designation as the official campaign for leaving. This was not just a matter of ideological purity, although Shipman has great fun involving the bitter schism between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea from The Life of Brian. Securing the formal designation brought with it access to substantial public funding, and entitlement to subsidised campaign broadcasts on terrestrial television. It also carried significant implications for the leading individual campaigners, and any positions that they might hope to occupy following a successful outcome.

Things were slightly easier for those advocating that Britain should remain in the EU, although it proved far from plain sailing. Although individual members of the government were given autonomy to campaign for whichever side they preferred, staying in the EU remained official government policy. Personal gripes still manifested themselves during the remain campaign, even though there was only one central organising body. Perhaps the Remainers simply weren’t hungry enough. Campaigning to maintain a status quo is always likely to be less energising that pushing for significant change, and it seems as if the Brexiteers simply wanted their outcome more.

Shipman has drawn on a vast selection of sources, including an impressive journalistic archive and his own (often unattributed) conversations with most of the leading participants. Even though we all know the outcome, the book is gripping throughout, presented almost like a Shakespearean tragedy. At times hilarious, there are also episodes that provoke fury at the utter incompetence of leading figures on both sides of the issue, who frequently displayed emotional illiteracy or an utter incapacity for empathy.

The bitterness and personal enmity (not to mention the Shakespearean similarities) continued after the referendum, as manifested in the bizarre machinations within the struggle to secure the Conservative leadership. Machiavelli, Iago and Bosola would have been in their element within that farrago of pledges and sleights of hand, as one by one the challengers to Theresa May fell by the wayside.

The ‘what if’ counterfactual novel has become very popular over recent years, with works such as Robert Harris’s Fatherland or the late Philip Roth’s the Plot Against America exploring alternative historical outcomes. I feel sure that within a few years we will start seeing novels considering alternative outcomes of the Brexit.

Tim Shipman’s book is both informative and entertaining, proving once again how much stranger fact can be than fiction. ( )

All Out War is an utterly gripping, supremely well-researched account of the tumultuous Brexit campaign and it's immediate fallout in British Politics. It is the essence of 2016. ( )