Vote Leave

So obviously, campaign staff will be a big part of that.

It's an interesting question because there are strong spending limits in the final run-up to an election, but you can spend basically an unlimited amount of money before that, and you can also sort of backdate some of these things and say, "Well, you know, we're, we're only doing the, the leftover bits later." Dominic Cummings attributed the success of the Vote Leave campaign to the fact that he was spending his money on what he called social media ninjas.

And I do think that might actually give some insight into the mindset here, that they're gonna be looking at sort of under the radar, odd, quirky, not entirely UK's best ways in some cases, [chuckles] um, judging certainly by some of the merchandise at Reform Conference, which wasn't, um, UK, uh, manufactured.

Weirdly enough, if I were Nigel Farage and I were looking at how to spend this most effectively, I'd actually get Reform to invest a lot of it in property Because they probably get more of a return on that.

Uh, after 1997 to 2001, they just ran around in circles for four years, completely delusional, a complete waste of time, didn't get anywhere.

Since then, the quality of the people has massively deteriorated, so why the hell would, w-would the story be different? I think, ironically, that, um, Labor will do a bit more of what me and the Vote Leave team wanted to do on some things.

So I think they'll be, like, a bit better on things like planning law, for example.

It'll become a bit easier to build stuff.

And I don't know whether Nigel Farage is...

It's almost, remember in the Brexit referendum, Chris, you had the Vote Leave, which is supposed to be reaching Middle England, then you had the Leavey, which is the hard alignment.

Maybe he thinks he can do the same in reform and people can get the restored voters back on side and...

Is it strategy, in which case I'm not sure it's the right one, or is it just he hasn't decided quite where he wants to go?

I think part of the reason why Brexit was won was because you had two campaigns.

There was a concern on the Brexit side that the Vote Leave and the Leave EU campaign, the one run by...

Leave.eu, yeah.

They were duplicated, but actually they reached different constituencies.

This is the second of two episodes looking at the vote that led to Brexit, and we're joined by two of the most influential people on each campaign.

On one side, we've got Matthew Elliott, now Lord Elliott, who was chief executive of Vote Leave.

And on the other, we've got Sir Craig Oliver, who was instrumental in Britain Stronger in Europe, which was the official Remain campaign.

And their thoughts are what you'll hear in this second episode of Old Newscast.

We will give the British people a referendum.

We'll be in a kind of twilight zone.

I will be advocating, uh, Vote Leave, uh, or whatever the, the team is called.

And UK is gonna be in the back of the queue.

We'll be in a kind of twilight zone.

I will be advocating, uh, vote leave, uh, or whatever the, the team is called.

And UK is gonna be in the back of the queue.

If we vote to leave, we take back control.

Hello.

Um, remind us what you were doing in this period.

I was the co-founder and CEO of the Vote Leave campaign.

What does that job actually involve?