Victory is possible

The news that Leave.EU has apparently endorsed Flexcit is encouraging, but I'm not going to be putting up any Leave.EU banners just yet. It really all hinges on their staff understanding it. If Messers Banks and Wigmore are tweeting nonsense counter to the content of it, then it's a waste of everybody's time.

Flexcit maps out the process of leaving the EU, and what can be achieved by doing so, and that naturally dictates the content of the campaign. Every last sentence in it is engineered and debated. It's a blueprint - not a eurosceptic trivia handbook that can be plundered at will.

The point of Flexcit is to de-risk Brexit and to incentivise it. It is very careful to acknowledge the constraints of Brexit. Any promises the campaign makes that fall outside of what can be achieved implies a totally different kind of Brexit, one with liabilities that cannot secure a win. That's why Bannerman and Ruth Lea get such visceral treatment from me. They can't even get their own rhetoric right.

Brass tacks: You can't be selling a moderate and progressive message to one cohort and a Ukippy message to another. We have one message and we have to sell it to everyone. Unless Arron Banks can shake off the salesman mentality and focus on the one strategic message then all he a has done is bought himself a temporary ceasefire. There is room for a bit of leeway in how concepts are sold but the concepts of Flexcit themselves are fairly fixed. Deviation in any significant way is as good as binning the whole thing.

The opposition is now sophisticated enough to notice that the cheap memery that we have seen thus far from Leave.EU is counter to the strategic message of Flexcit - and without message discipline, Banks et al can only further embarrass their own campaign. In this, we can't afford the mistakes we have seen from Banks and Wigmore previously in retweeting any old tosh - especially the poisonous Breitbart trash and the careless tweets of Kipper headbangers.

I understand that it takes time to turn a supertanker, and that Leave.EU has some learning to do, but already we have seen some tweets that have raised eyebrows among our team - at a time when the likes of Will Straw will be watching very closely indeed (if they are halfway competent). Straw is a dishonest and smug man - but he is not stupid.

Unless Arron Banks can break from his comfort zone and ditch some bad habits then we shouldn't get our hopes up. In general he should be mindful of the fact that the bickering from the wreckage of Ukip is no longer his concern - and tweeting the spats between Carswell, Farage and Kassam are entirely self-serving and bare no relevance to our struggle. Ukip must be left behind.

This is a tall order for Banks to accept but if he wants to win he must focus - and shape up fast. Not least because if he doesn't this will be a very short lived alliance. In this I am not minded to be as patient as Richard North perhaps is. Unless we see a substantial shift in tone very soon then I don't see much chance of success. Winning will then depend on what our Flexciteer bloggers can scrape together with the minimal resources they have.

We can't rely on the Vote Leave bunch because they are basically a bunch of classic Tories - Parasitic, lazy and just as asinine as Ukip. The blether of Hannan and Bannerman et al is as intellectually bankrupt as anything Farage might say - and Carswell isn't that far behind. Frankly if I didn't think leaving the EU was such a pivotal thing for Britain I would gladly wash my hands of this whole show.

We have one shot in this to unite - and from there we demolish the dangerously inept Vote Leave Ltd effort. If we can do that then we CAN win. But that, most of all, depends on Arron Banks putting the chimpanzee into rehab and letting some adults run his online operation. I would also like a unicorn.