Brexit was YOUR victory

Rory Broomfield and me at the gates of Downing Street on 24 June 2016

As the old saying, once used by John F. Kennedy, goes, 'victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan'. Inevitably, the stream of accounts of the referendum campaign from those on the victorious Leave side is becoming a flood. Tom Waterhouse, Deputy Head of Ground Campaign for Vote Leave, was quick off the mark, on Conservative Home, writing, 'A bunch of 30-somethings had beaten the Establishment, creating a political shockwave that was felt across the world'.

I don't blame Tom, or anybody else, for letting people know his side of an important story, and I don't doubt that he and his team did a good job. However, in my experience, in any campaign, there is often much good and bad on both the winning and losing sides. Margaret Thatcher won a landslide general victory in 1987, but not before the famous 'wobbly Thursday', when she feared that she might be about to face defeat. Although she won, there is no doubt that Labour had done a good job of trying to make Neil Kinnock appear electable. Any ad man who could make Kinnock appear attractive deserves nothing but praise.

All too often, victory is attributed, after the event, to whoever shouts the loudest. I well recall Saatchi & Saatchi's clever 'Labour isn't working' poster. It was effective, but it was not the main reason for Mrs. Thatcher's historic victory many months later, in May 1979. Naturally, however, as you would expect of any advertising agency worth its salt, Saatchis did not hold back from taking the lion's share of the credit for that historic victory.

It is well known that 'the fog of war' causes confusion in any battle. Politics is no different. Later this month I shall visit the D-Day beaches for the first time since I was a five-year-old. Despite the most meticulous planning, much went wrong on D-Day, not least on Omaha Beach. The brave men who fought in a just cause in Normandy will forever deserve our gratitude, but none of them would claim that everything went to plan. Directly opposite Downing Street, where my colleague, Rory Broomfield and I celebrated Brexit victory (see photograph, above) with a Churchillian v-sign, is a statue of Monty, Field Marshal Montgomery, the commander of all allied ground forces on D-Day. My visit to Normandy will be paying particular tribute to Monty's right hand man, General Sir Miles Dempsey. Most people have never heard of him, even though he commanded all British and Canadian land forces on D-Day. A brilliant and highly regarded soldier, he was also a modest, self-effacing man. He believed that it was the men he commanded that deserved the glory, not their commander. How right he was! He deliberately wrote no memoirs and ordered that, when he died, all of his papers were to be destroyed.

I think that the same was true of Brexit. Of course leading Brexiteers played an important part, but, above all, I think that it is the 17,410,742 (the largest vote for anything in British history) who put a cross in the Leave box, who deserve the credit. Although he was born in a palace, Winston Churchill had the same sure feel for the views of his fellow countrymen as did Margaret Thatcher, born above a corner shop. Churchill was magnanimous and generous enough to appreciate that, despite the epic scale of his own contribution, it was the ordinary British people who had secured victory. His words, spoken from the balcony of the old Ministry of Health building in Whitehall on VE Day, should remind Brexiteers that Brexit was won by the many, not by the few: 'This is your victory! It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried. Neither the long years, nor the dangers, nor the fierce attacks of the enemy, have in any way weakened the unbending resolve of the British nation. God bless you all.'