Brexit: The Uncivil War

On 23 June 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union, and hardly anyone outside Westminster had heard of Dominic Cummings. 'Brexit: The Uncivil War' tells the story of that campaign from his corner: the strategist who ran Vote Leave, played by Benedict Cumberbatch with a receding hairline, a northern accent and very little patience. It's a Channel 4 and HBO film written by playwright James Graham and directed by Toby Haynes.

In 2015 Matthew Elliott (John Heffernan) and MP Douglas Carswell ask him to lead the campaign to leave. Cummings can't stand Westminster politics and only says yes once he's promised total control. He's not interested in posters or leaflets: he wants data, social media and tailored messages, and hires AggregateIQ's Zack Massingham (Kyle Soller), who promises to find voters nobody else is paying attention to.

On the other side is Craig Oliver (Rory Kinnear), the Remain campaign's strategist, who's betting on the economic argument and on old-fashioned focus groups. But the trouble isn't only coming from the other camp. Cummings clashes with the MPs and donors in his own campaign and refuses to join forces with Nigel Farage and businessman Arron Banks (Lee Boardman), sure they'd lose him more votes than they'd win.

Richard Goulding and Oliver Maltman play Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, with Liz White as Mary Wakefield, Cummings's wife. Haynes had directed episodes of 'Sherlock' and 'Black Mirror', and plenty of critics compared this Cummings to Cumberbatch's own Sherlock Holmes, which was a bit of a twist for an actor who'd backed Remain. Channel 4 aired it on 7 January 2019, and HBO showed it in the US twelve days later.

It was nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie and for the BAFTA for Best Single Drama, and it averages 77 out of 100 across the 21 reviews collected on the site. Not everyone was won over, though: some said it came too soon, and that it turned Farage and Banks into cartoons.

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