Brook Lapping’s two-part BBC Two doc, Brexit: A Very British Civil War, billed as the definitive account of what led to the UK leaving the European Union, airs as we approach 10 years since the ‘Brexit’ vote.
Series director, Max Stern, explains how the doc, featuring interviews from all the major political players involved including Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Alan Johnson, George Osborne, Gordon Brown and more, came together.
The first episode runs 8th June with both episodes available on iPlayer.
In July 2025, I was looking for work. I’m a documentary filmmaker and have long collaborated with Brook Lapping’s celebrated producer Norma Percy. In fact, she gave me my first proper job in television – as a researcher/AP on the 2019 series Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil.
It occurred to me that the following June (2026) would be the 10th anniversary since the Brexit referendum. That first job on Inside Europe had looked at David Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum, and his renegotiation with the EU but it covered the referendum campaign in less than 30 seconds. With everything that has happened in the decade since, surely now was the time to examine the events, conversations and deals that were done behind closed doors, that eventually led to the UK voting to leave the EU?
When I suggested it to Norma, her initial response was something like ‘would anyone really want to watch that?’ But I pushed ahead and wrote a proposal anyway, pitching a one-hour film. Our BBC Commissioner, Simon Young, said he was interested but asked whether we’d be able to fit everything in to just 60 minutes. We’re grateful to him for actually commissioning two hours – it was certainly needed!
Norma’s reputation goes before her and her tenacity and drive to persuade top players to be interviewed, was required in spades. This is the woman who has interviewed everyone from Mikhail Gorbachev to Slobodan Milošević, Jimmy Carter to Barrack Obama, Yasser Arafat to Ismail Haniyeh and all British Prime Ministers from John Major to Rishi Sunak – apart from Gordon Brown, although with this series, we were delighted to fill that gap.
We managed to persuade all the key players and decision makers from both sides to take part; Boris Johnson – who gave us an astonishingly candid interview that lasted three hours – Michael Gove, George Osborne and Nigel Farage to name just a few.
Access is never easy, but for this series, David Cameron was particularly difficult to persuade. He felt he’d told this story before, so we had to enlist the help of some of his closest advisers to convince him to do it. If I’d not been working with Norma on this series, we simply wouldn’t have got him.
Farage rescheduled several times, and for a while we worried we wouldn’t actually get him in the can, particularly after Reform’s reaction to Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC. As it turned out, we interviewed him on the day that Suella Braverman defected to Reform from the Conservatives. What struck me about this interview in particular was that Farage, the only key player in the 2016 referendum that is still in frontline politics today, very much gave off the impression that he was still winning now. Most of the others have been forced out of office or had their reputations tarnished, yet the man who resigned the day after the 2015 general election, when he did not even win a seat in Parliament is the last of the referendum cohort, standing.
Producer/Director Olivia Berndhart Borgan and Researcher Clive Gimson, also worked tirelessly on this documentary. The final interviewee they persuaded to take part was Jeremy Corbyn. We filmed him with just days left of the edit. He’s faced a lot of criticism for his lack of enthusiasm for staying in the EU, but the interview with him revealed to me that he still felt quite irritated that the Brexit saga had dominated his Labour leadership. He’s faced a lot of criticism for his lack of enthusiasm for staying in the EU. But during the campaign, Farage and his team, very early on in the process, decided that winning over voters in the Labour heartlands was key to winning the referendum. Would Corbyn really have won over those voters who Farage had been working on, by singing the praises of the EU? As Corbyn puts it, “A lot of people saw the referendum as a cypher for their own anger at their life in our society. Going around and telling them to vote for the EU, wasn’t going to work and wasn’t going to cut it.” Of course, we now know that ‘Red Wall’ has since become arguably the most important battleground in the UK political landscape.
We always carry out a huge amount of off-the-record research before filming any documentary, and this was no different. In doing so, I noticed just how personal a story it was for all of our contributors – just as it has been for the people of the UK in general. I’ve carried out dozens of interviews with top politicians over the years, but this series was the first time I’ve really felt like people were moved by the subject. Many said the interviews were like therapy sessions. There were a lot more laughs than I expected – there is a levity in the series: I didn’t expect Brexit to be quite so humorous. But the interviews also felt emotional. Three people cried during filming. It just brought home to me how the subject matter remains so important to people; the referendum tore apart friendships and families, made and ruined careers. I’m pleased that we managed to capture that emotion.
I was particularly struck by two moments in Boris Johnson’s interview. The first when he admitted he’d have been Prime Minister regardless of his decision to support Leave, and the second when he said he wished he’d gone round to Dominic Cummings’ house and ‘whacked him’ after Vote Leave had released their Turkey campaign: “This would have saved me a lot of trouble. That would have been a brilliant idea. God, I wish I’d done that. What a fantastic thing to have done!” But overall, I was most interested to learn of the influence his then wife, Marina Wheeler KC, had on his thinking; she gave Johnson a concrete, legal and intellectual reason to go for Leave.
What makes this series different is the level of detail we go into. Whether it’s Marina Wheeler cooking slow-roast lamb for Michael Gove or Rachel Johnson arriving at her brother’s cottage armed with lasagna in a last-gasp effort to persuade Boris Johnson to back Remain; the details show the human side of politics. In this series, tennis matches also play a crucial role: David Cameron offers Boris Johnson a ‘top five’ job, while Rachel Johnson tells her brother supporting Remain will give him the quickest path to No 10 all while hitting balls to each other.
But for me, what I find the most interesting take-out from this documentary, is that the divisions in the Leave camp actually helped them win, while divisions in the Remain camp ensured they lost. There were probably very few people in the country who could actually have been persuaded to change their minds about which way they’d vote. But Vote Leave succeeded where Remain failed; their ‘Take Back Control’ slogan was a simple answer to what continues to be a very complicated question.
Jon Creamer
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