This week in Brexitland Extra: "How Brexit Will Be Reversed", Chapter Three

How Brexit Will Be Reversed: A Guide to the Inevitable

Chapter 3: How and Why Leave Won in 2016

After the 2015 general election had been and gone and the Conservatives emerged from it with a majority, the referendum was going to happen and happen soon. The question was how quickly Cameron would call it. Obviously, he first had to go through with his “negotiations” with the EU to get a “better deal” - which was all pretty much a sham to try and make Cameron look like he’d won some great prize, but also to partly justify having a referendum in the first place.

What isn’t talked about enough is how odd whole idea of the EU referendum was in the first place. When governments generally call nationwide referendums, it’s because of something they explicitly want to do but feel they need a larger mandate for. The SNP and the independence referendum is a great example of this. What Cameron was doing was calling a referendum for something he explicitly did not want to do. So much of the constitutional headaches that would follow the referendum stemmed from this one, central issue.

Cameron decided to go early, which was mistake number one (although thinking about it, having the referendum in the first place should probably be designated as mistake number one, but I digress). He should have given the whole thing space to breathe. Particularly given what Dominic Cummings has written about the fact that the timing of Cameron’s referendum was extremely fortuitous for the Leave campaign: