‘There’s a systems failure in this country and across the West,” says Dominic Cummings at the end of last night’s Channel 4 drama Brexit: The Uncivil War. “We’re languishing, we’re drifting without a vision or a purpose.” According to the Vote Leave campaign director, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, the EU referendum result was the equivalent of pressing the “reset button”, but the political class just “rebooted the same operating system, the same tired old politics of short-termism and self-serving small-thinking bullshit”.
As MPs return to parliament after their Christmas break, still discussing the Northern Irish backstop, they have lost sight of what matters. The Brexit vote was, more than anything, a protest against an elite that had for too long ignored ordinary people. It