This is a Brexit drama in 7 acts, with each day bringing a new chapter. Follow the link to read acts if you missed it and want to catch up:
Prelude & Act 1: I'm gonna wait 'till the midnight hour
Act 2: Game of chicken on the White Cliffs of Dover
Act 3: The Rockefeller way: turning disaster into opportunity
Act 4: Mad King Boris
Otherwise, read on. Brexit packs enough drama for each chapter to be self-sustaining. Unlike, I might add, the UK come 2021.
Act 5: The Bad Boys of Brexit
Alright, I teased a reveal about the owner of the Boris Johnson soul, but it’s traded in shares and I don’t actually know the majority owner; I do have ideas as to likely shareholders. Reporting yields names of Brexit money men such as financial tycoons Peter Cruddas and Peter Hargreaves who invested heavily in the Boris Leave campaign. Then there are the press barons. The Brexit-backing billionaire Barclay twins who turned the Daily Telegraph into a Boris-backing bastion. Or the pro-Brexit Daily Mail of Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, whose name says it all. And last but not least, the Brexit-loving Rupert Murdoch of The Sun. The man who gifted the world Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump and Brexit (with Tony Blair as side-course). Last February when Britain formally left the EU Peter Hargreaves summed up the prevailing mood for this lot:
I haven’t really got what I wanted. I wanted a complete exit.
In other words, no-deal or bust.
But Boris is also beholden to a rougher gang, the one that got Brexit over the top – the self-styled “Bad Boys of Brexit”, with entrepreneur Arron Banks leading the pack. In 2014 Banks was the one who dropped one million pounds on UKIP (UK Independence Party) turning Nigel Farage into a household name and Brexit into a political movement. This in turn caused PM David Cameron to make the fatal chess-move when he agreed to a Brexit vote to stop UKIP poaching Tory votes. Without the Bad Boys, there is no Brexit. And they did it by turning Brexit into cultural warfare. Ed Caesar writing in The New Yorker has a particularly good account:
“We played the media like a Stradivarius,” noting that “if we spent eight million in the referendum, we got thirty-five, forty million in free publicity” by outraging liberal commentators. This tactic had an obvious model across the Atlantic. “We are going to be blunt, edgy, and controversial, Donald Trump-style,” Banks wrote in “The Bad Boys of Brexit,” adding, “If BBC Producers aren’t spluttering organic muesli over their breakfast tables every morning, we won’t be doing our job.”
With days to go before the referendum, Farage unveiled a new ukip poster. The words “breaking point,” in giant red letters, were superimposed on a photograph of a snaking line of dark-skinned immigrants waiting to enter the E.U. Many observers denounced the poster as racist. A few hours after the launch, the Labour M.P. Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right nationalist, Thomas Mair, who shouted “Britain First” as he shot and stabbed her. Farage was pilloried.
Banks told me that Farage wanted to shelve the new campaign, but that he and [Banks sidekick Andy] Wigmore urged him to “hold his nerve.” Even after Cox’s death, he said, polls indicated that immigration remained “the No. 1 issue, by a runaway margin.” Banks told me that there was nothing wrong with the image or with its message. “It was a war,” he said. “Anything goes.”
Other names cluster around this Banks-Wigmore-Farage core in a black hole of dark motives and money. Headlining the list: populist provocateur Steve Bannon, Johnson consigliere Dominic Cummings, the American billionaire Robert Mercer and of course Donald Trump. Others are integral to the plot even if their role is muddy, such as man-about-town pro-Brexit gadfly Lord Ashcroft who conveniently lives in the tax-haven of Belize. I’ll give Lord Ashcroft the reveal of the oddest member of the Bad Boys of Brexit band: Governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi. Here’s the tweet:
Up tomorrow: Act 6: Down the rabbit hole: Mississippi adventures of the Brexit Bad Boys
tease: Can you name all the members of this band — The Bad Boys of Brexit?
I’ll be publishing The Ballyhooed Bigly British Brexit Bust-up in 7 installments on DailyKos, a new act each day. Don’t want to wait? The complete Ballyhooed Bigly British Brexit Bust-up is available now on Medium.