On The Brexit Buses

In the news today Nigel Farage has labelled Dominic Cummings as untrustworthy and not a "true believer" in Brexit. This is something I find quite interesting. During the run up to the 2016 referendum. When Cummings was leading the Vote Leave campaign in parallel to the Farage led Leave.EU campaign. I remember just assuming that the Vote Leave campaign, with Boris and Gove in tow, was something of a "controlled opposition" type thing.

I should say to contextualise this that a) I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist, and b) I wasn't really following the day to day politics back then the way I'm doing now. In fact, I had no idea who Dominic Cummings was at the time and I've only became aware of him retrospectively.

I'm now not so sure what to think, and I'm very sympathetic to the idea that my instincts were completely off. Even at the time it was more just a gut feeling. Never something I fully believed or stated out loud. Or that I had any evidence for it must be said. My suspicions generally just deriving from my vague appraisal of the campaign - the Boris "350m for the NHS" bus just seemed weak to me at the time. It's just not the sort of argument a genuine leaver would naturally make. It looked like a very underwhelming bribe. Then on top of this my general belief that that's just what they would do. It makes sense to control both sides of the argument on such an important issue. It's a fairly standard tactic.

Anyway, like I said, I'm now not sure what to make of it all. I've since watched Dominic Cummings explain the thinking behind the campaign in talks he's given and it makes sense. He's clearly a very intelligent guy. Plus, leave did win after all. So it's another thing where I may have been being unfair. Or simply not appreciating the complexity of the situation. Or just acting on a natural bias, leading me to a faulty opinion.

It'll be fascinating to watch what happens now though. If the Tories and the Brexit Party are unable to work together at any forthcoming general election then that means the vote will be split. Which makes leaving even less likely should it fail to occur before Hallows' Eve.

Will we be seeing two campaigns yet again?

I should really Photoshop up an image of Farage and Cummings in some type of On The Buses situation, but my eyes are still aching from yesterday's Jeremy Corbyn. So I'll leave it

..for now.