The flaws of narrative: how Brexit became a story, and how we can change it

Photography by Jannes Van den wouwer

In the midst of the fever-dream that is British politics, Angus Colwell examines the dangers of narrative in the newsroom.

History students, at all levels, are told to avoid narration in their work. Narrative — that is, an outpouring of every fact known about a topic — is almost universally considered an essay “faux pas”.

And yet, narrative is something we consume prodigiously. Our love for a plot (and a finale) spills over from literature, film and TV into our understanding of the “arc of history”. It carries through into our enjoyment in recounting the tale of the English Civil War, or the epic battles of the Roman Empire. World War II history sells because, as a narrative, it resembles fiction — the perceived dichotomy of a '“good” and a “bad” side means that it is the most absorbed history because it is the most communicable. When told in pure narrative form, history is inseparable from fiction. The fact that it is not fiction bolsters its power: this really happened.

Of course, indulging in narrative neglects the most important work of the historian: analysis, argument and asking “why did that happen?” We have to recognise how seductive narrative is, and sublimate our urges. The father of modern history, Leopold von Ranke, emphasised the importance of narrative history: there is, of course, a crucial role for narrative — chronology is important — but only if it presented as consequential. We have failed to present Brexit consequentially. We should be looking back as much, if not more, than we look forward. When it comes to Brexit, the media has proven ill-suited at examining the past, instead wrapping itself in the safety blanket of narrative.

The Atlantic's Helen Lewis wrote that Brexit is presented as “a tense drama that will lead to a satisfying end-of-season finale” by the media. The circus perennially parked on College Green backs this up. It has a live audience as well as at home: whether it be Steve Bray, bankrolled to stand from dawn to dusk by the camps screaming “STOP BREXIT”, or the UKIP flags flapping in the wind at all times in the backdrop. This constant media coverage provides politicians with a mouthpiece to the nation. As soon as they step out of Parliament’s front door, they can project their rhetoric immediately. In matches with pulsating crowd atmospheres, footballers make rash decisions; in the same way that the Old Firm in Glasgow often sees red cards, the febrile environment surrounding College Green has led MPs to go straight on TV and proclaim that they wouldn’t vote for the deal “if they put a shotgun in my mouth”. The talking heads on College Green are far more likely to offer impulsive (perhaps emotional) snap reactions to immediate events than considered contextual reflection. This has put Westminster at fever pitch, but more seriously, put MPs on both sides at danger. Pro-Brexit activists followed and intimidated Anna Soubry as she entered her place of work, screaming “Soubry is a Nazi” as she appeared on BBC News. Jacob Rees-Mogg and his son had to receive police protection from an inflamed People’s Vote protest as they walked home from the Saturday parliamentary sitting. The hostility live on College Green is transmitted directly to living rooms across the UK, raising the nation’s collective temperature.

Three and a half years after the vote, the story has been going on for so long that the characters need no introduction. The sheer absurdity of the cast means that it is a tale that is now enjoyably consumed: whether it be the psychedelic John Bercow, the M&S-shopper-cum-guerrilla-commentator Anna Soubry, or, gravy’s Mark Francois. “Brexit fatigue” is not reinforced by statistics — BBC Parliament’s viewing figures have skyrocketed. But over the last couple of months, we have honed our attention into one man more than most. Not Johnson — we had our Boris obsession phase in 2012 — but his chief aide Dominic Cummings. 

Reviewing the film Brexit: The Uncivil War, Vote Leave’s Shahmir Sanni wrote: “This film is not a film about Brexit — it’s a film about Dominic Cummings, for Dominic Cummings”. At points over the past four years, the two have seemed synonymous. If Tim Shipman’s books didn’t give Cummings a sense of his own celebrity, perhaps Benedict Cumberbatch popping round to analyse him before playing him in a film did. Since his appointment as Johnson’s senior aide in July, he has indulged in his own reputation as a Bismarck-loving, military-minded dishevelled genius for the cameras. I may have missed the bit in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War which suggests distracting your enemies by wearing a paperclip on your way into work, but the Downing Street paps have captured a grinning Cummings’ sartorial schizophrenia in all its glory, best described by BuzzFeed’s Alan White as looking “like he covered himself in glue and ran through River Island”.

However, in the case of Cummings, the media is fascinated with more beyond his gilet and artisan tote bag. He represents a wider journalistic (and perhaps public) impulse in focusing on the unelected svengali. In September The Guardian’s Nesrine Malik asked, “why do we cling to the myth of the evil genius?” This instinct is not isolated with Cummings: in Labour we find Seumas Milne, in Europe we find Martin Selmayr, across the Atlantic we find Steve Bannon, and in the past we had Alastair Campbell and Damian McBride. Mystery is enticing, and these aides’ unaccountability only empowers them further. Malik’s conclusion is that we seek comfort in attributing our leaders’ terrible decisions to evil actors forcing them against their will — remember who appointed them, Malik says. All of the subplots, and focus on characters, bolsters the illustrious lure of the “story”, which we must abandon. 

The journalist Ben Gartside tweeted in August, “Can’t believe Boris appointed Dom Cummings just to give a nicely complete ending to Tim Shipman’s trilogy”. At risk of over-analysing (and thus ruining) comedy, there is a point to be made. Are we not expecting a nicely complete ending? The notion of the “ticking clock”, Helen Lewis rightly claims, is one of the most laughable facets of Brexit. 29th March, 31st October, 31st January — none of these have meant the end of Brexit, or will. This is why the Conservative line for the 2019 election is so absurd, “Get Brexit Done”, is disingenuous. On subscribing to Johnson’s maxim, several voters may be disorientated to find us hurtling towards another no-deal cliff-edge at the end of 2020. “I thought it was done”, they would be well within their rights to claim. Even after we do or don’t leave the EU, even after we do or don’t negotiate an FTA before 2021, even after we do or don’t wrap up trade deals with the rest of the world — after all this, Brexit will not go away. “Revoke” may become “rejoin”. The presentation of Brexit, both by politicians and the media, as having an endgame is as misplaced an approach as the teleological view of history: telling a story as if heading for an endpoint. The old saying that it is still “too soon to tell” the consequences of the French Revolution is cheeky, but not wholly irreverent. If we are to recognise a place for narrative history, it cannot be teleological, but it must be consequential. 

While Cummings may have recently fallen foul of LBJ's first rule of politics (knowing how to count), when it comes to the current makeup of the media, Cummings gets it. Aside from his Vote Leave campaign’s use of Facebook in the 2016 referendum, upon arriving in Downing Street in July, he reportedly told aides that long-form, more analytical news outlets, such as Today and Newsnight were completely irrelevant in the eyes of voters. “I never listened to the Today programme for the entire year of the referendum and I intend to repeat this while I am here,” he is said to have told staff. He instead focuses the attention on his bosses getting on “the Six and the Ten” — the main news bulletins voters tune into.

News, is by definition, “new”. By focusing on the bulletins, Cummings’ approach embodies tactical thinking over policy, repeated short-term over strategic long-term. But the makeup of our media, and our prioritisation of bulletin, makes this approach not only feasible, but logical, practical and effective. As such, petulant antics such as Johnson’s writing of three letters to the EU in October emerge favourably on “the Six and the Ten”. With business, international news, sport and weather to cover, there is no time in half an hour to consider things consequentially. Today and Newsnight resemble the role of contemporary historians: they, like historians, consider current events as causal manifestations of a wider process, with discussion, expertise and analysis. Conversely, on the Ten O’Clock News, Huw Edwards is far more likely to ask Laura Kuenssberg “so what happens next?”, rather than “why did this happen?”.

This calmer approach to news is crucial to reconfiguring our journalistic interpretation of Brexit. Take the start-up Tortoise. Their tagline: “building a different type of newsroom”. They claim “news has become noise”, and strive to present it “not as it happens, but when it’s ready”. Outlets like Tortoise demonstrate where our media has gone wrong. What we need to do is hone our practice of concision, and move away from the false dichotomy that news is either “bulletin” or “long read”. The BBC possesses a wealth of trade and policy experts, who are not involved in the Brexit discourse anywhere near as much as they should be. When the BBC gave Brexit reporting responsibility to Millbank (their more acutely political outlet), they prescribed to the false dichotomy and opted for “bulletin”. In an ideal world, Newsnight would be in the Ten O’Clock prime time slot.

We need to present events consequentially and concisely. We need to approach College Green as a supplement to conversation, and not as the divine microphone. We need to reconcile expertise and reaction, and make consequential thinking mainstream. Brexit is, fundamentally, dense and technical — it is the diplomatic unravelling of decades worth of economic union. When we get clogged in a parliamentary logjam, we must not lose sight of why we are here, and where we might be going. Narrative has a place, and a crucial one, but not how it is currently being manifested. Professional historians must try to present their work in an accessible way to avoid less legitimate others presenting history for them; political and economic analysts must do the same, lest we succumb to story, the pitfalls of teleology, and the flaws of pure narrative.