LONDON — 10 years (and six prime ministers) ago, Britain was on the brink of deciding whether to leave the European Union.
POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast went back to the people who lived through that campaign up close for a special episode.
It revealed that much of British politics today — the targeted digital campaigning, the collapsing party loyalties, the distrust of institutions — was there in embryonic form during the Brexit referendum.
For Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of Vote Leave, the referendum was the “forerunner” for a new kind of campaigning.
Working alongside Dominic Cummings in Westminster Tower, Elliott believes Vote Leave pioneered tactics that are now standard across politics.
“Up until that point,” he told Westminster Insider, “most traditional political campaigns spent some money on social media advertising but also spent a lot of money on billboards and newspaper ads.”
Instead, Vote Leave held money back for a concentrated digital assault in the final fortnight of the campaign, “really focusing it then directly into their phones and their computers through social media advertising.”
Listening back now, what is striking is how un-radical this sounds. Techniques that once felt disruptive are now an everyday part of modern political campaigning.
That sense that we were all right in the middle of a seismic shift came up repeatedly in my conversation with Kate Fall, David Cameron’s deputy chief of staff during the referendum.
Fall still vividly remembers sitting in the Foreign Office’s grand Locarno Room as Barack Obama warned Britain it would be at the “back of the queue” for a U.S. trade deal if it voted to leave.
At the time, the intervention was meant to demonstrate the strength of the international consensus against Brexit. A decade later, it feels more like the last flourish of a disappearing political world, as well as the beginning of the current era of tit-for-tat trade wars.
Yet few in that room would have imagined that Britain would vote for Brexit and America would go on to elect Donald Trump — twice.
“That was a time that has passed,” Fall reflected. “We’re in a different global order.”
Fall believes Brexit was about much more than the EU. It was, in her view, about many people in the UK asking questions of their leaders that she says remain unanswered, even 10 years on.
“It was about… are people listening to me? Do they understand how I feel? Am I part of globalization? Do I benefit? Are my communities stronger and better? What do I feel about immigration?”
For Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP who became one of the most prominent left-wing voices for Leave, Brexit was the “culmination of an unease.”
Looking back, her campaigning and debate appearances alongside Boris Johnson feel like an early glimpse of the Brexit-fuelled political realignment that would redraw British politics.
By the time of the 2019 general election, Stuart found herself back campaigning with Johnson and Michael Gove to break the Brexit deadlock.
“It was very much like a political version of ‘Friends Reunited,’” she said.
Here was a staunch Blairite Labour politician on stage with a Conservative prime minister, united not by traditional party loyalty but by Brexit.
That collapse of old political identities may ultimately prove Brexit’s longest legacy.
And then there was the Thames flotilla.
Boris Johnson’s sister — and ardent Remain campaigner — Rachel Johnson still sounds half-amused, half-horrified recalling the moment she boarded a boat with the rock star Bob Geldof to protest against Nigel Farage’s flotilla of pro-Brexit fishermen.
The image of celebrities and metropolitan figures shouting at fishermen from a luxury boat became, in miniature, the accusation Brexit campaigners had leveled all along: that an establishment elite was sneering at people whose lives it neither understood nor respected.
At the time, the spectacle felt absurd. Looking back, it captured something deeper about the referendum campaign’s cultural divide.
“It seemed to crystallize,” Johnson said, “what many people really hated about the Remain campaign.”
What strikes me going back over these moments 10 years later is how little of Brexit now feels self-contained. The referendum was not just a vote about Europe. It was the moment Britain’s political system, media culture and party loyalties began mutating into the form we now recognize.
The arguments unleashed in 2016 were never really resolved. In many ways, we are still living inside them.