Insight
How Leave outgunned Remain: The battle of the ‘five Ms’ by Charles Grant 25 June 2016
Remain suffered from unconvincing messengers, too narrow a message, difficulties over migration, a savage media and a ruthless Leave campaign machine. Many people in other parts of the world are shocked that Britain has voted for an option that they believe is bound to damage its economy and diminish its global influence. For Prime Minister David Cameron, winning a referendum on an entity as unpopular as the EU was always going to be an uphill struggle. A month before the vote, thinking it unlikely that Remain would win, I wrote a piece for the CER explaining why. To my regret, the article turned out to be entirely accurate. This piece seeks to explain why Leave won the referendum campaign. Remain suffered from five disadvantages: the messengers, the message, migration, the media and the campaign machine – in short, the five Ms. The messengers No product sells easily without good salesmen, especially when – as is the case with the EU – the product has a chequered track record. Remain’s problem was that Leave had better salesmen. The Leave campaign was led by two eloquent and persuasive messengers, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson (senior Conservatives whom, until February, Cameron had hoped and believed would stand at his side). Opinion polls consistently showed that Gove and Johnson were more trusted on the EU than the leading Remainers, Cameron and George Osborne, his chancellor. This was somewhat surprising, since Cameron and Osborne had been riding high a year earlier, when they won the general election against the odds, and since Cameron is normally an effective salesman. As the campaign progressed, the stock of the prime minister and his chancellor fell. Cameron had a particular problem in that, during his renegotiation of the terms of British membership, he several times said that Britain would do fine outside the EU. He felt that he had to say that in order to persuade his EU partners to take his demands seriously. But then later on, during the campaign, when he found a sudden passion for the benefits of staying in, while predicting dreadful consequences if Britain left, people found him unconvincing. All the more so, since, throughout most of his career, Cameron had seldom had a good word to say about the EU.
CER INSIGHT: How Leave outgunned Remain: The battle of the ‘five Ms’ 25 June 2016
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