June 29, 2016
Project Fact – comes after the fact
I’ve just been re-reading my previous blog post. I think I underplayed my concerns about the absence of facts in the campaigning that has led to Brexit. Project Fear was a disastrous strategic and tactical miscalculation. The effect of engaging a scare-mongering tone was (for Cameron and others) to become the Boys Who Cried Wolf. Not enough people took the Remain Camp seriously, because they were not rigorous enough in their own case-making. They sounded shrill rather than factual. Tone matters.
And now (now – when it is too late), Project Fact begins. Suddenly, social media is awash with useful articles about legal facts and precedents that turn out to matter, and which pretty much prove that the case for Remaining was very, very badly presented. Where was Alastair Campbell when you needed him? Where were the communications professionals? Where indeed.
To misquote Churchill: never before has so much communication been so badly managed by so few to create so much mess. Fingers crossed for a way out of all this.