pondering the uncivil war that was probably illegal?

I can understand that the Brexit: An Uncivil War had to be made in a way that distils many months of activity into a 90 minute drama.

That it used humour to portray certain buffoons and cartoonish political figures, whilst centring the story around strategy influencer Dominic Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

This had a side-effect to me. Cumberbatch played the role extremely well, but made it look as if strategy rather than dastardly deeds had the greatest impact on outcome. It also meant that the clownish portrayals of Bojo, Gove and the UKIPsters really looked like clowns instead of scheming and rather unpleasant pieces of work.

The scripted moments like ‘listening to the ground’ rebadged Cummings as savant polymath seer rather than a lucky bandit who got hold of some extreme data.

I suppose the amount to be packed in to the available script created some challenges too. No sign of Corbyn - an almost entirely white posh-boys led debate from both the In and Out camps.

Cutting past the detail, the simplicity of a single message 'Take Back Control' and a daily hand grenade topic proved effective and kept the conference-call hacked Remainers on their back foot.
In pre-GDPR days the hoovering of data with a shonky football raffle might not have been completely illegal.

But not declaring its purpose related to the Referendum surely was?

It's the old school PTA raffle idea of an 'in your dreams' offer. This time a £50 million prize, but take out insurance against the chance that anyone would actually win it.

Meantime collect all the socially engineered data to use for targeting adverts.
What hasn't come through is any subsequent consequences from the lies and fixing.

It turns out that one of Mrs May's special advisors, SPAD Stephen Parkinson was in charge of the leave funding.

His enchanted Cambridge educated life seems to have wriggled through all of this without blemish, other than ratting out one of his erstwhile friends. Heck, I'm expecting him to turn up as a new MP sooner or later.

Then there's the wily whistle blower.
Christopher Wiley worked for Cambridge Analytica before setting up another 'off book' company to run CA style data analysis in places where it could otherwise prove awkward.

The whole of 'his' plan appears to be an extension of the use of the 'marketing' tools already available in Facebook. Data file custom audiences, website custom audiences and lookalike audiences. The difference was being able to run this on absolutely huge data sets and to augment the data from the dubious socially engineered clickbait.

We know that the lad who fronted the extra donations to Leave so they could pay AggregateIQ's fees was eventually fined £20,000, although that's now on appeal.

Curious that these actions and the money to tilt UK democracy get such light treatment. The BeLeave campaign got about 2 seconds as a cutaway in the dramatisation. They're the ones in the blue tee shirts.

But then there's other wheels within wheels. Mercer's empire involved in the discussions related to both Brexit and Trump. The pugly tinny swilling version of Aaron Banks in the dramatisation might hide altogether cleverer financial routings towards Leave.

Even Farage's early declaration that they might lose the referendum has a curious side effect. He has friends with hedge funds. Now what would happen after his 10pm 'oops - it looks like remain' statement? There'd be a drop in markets.

Ideal for the hedge funders that shorted the Brexit outcome. A barrier knock-in. His friend Damian Lyons-Lowe, ran the hedge-funders private Survation poll. Some hedge funders were very happy with that evening's positions. Ker-ching.

I suppose much of this is leverage. Play in a big enough game and the numbers can be vast. That's what has happened. Nothing to do with what the people want. Much more about what the posh boys can grab.

So it's good that the programme was made. It can surface some more for debate. The kind of stuff that Carole Cadwalladr has been exposing for ages. But the drama is one line of a more complex situation. A simplified version that can accidentally bury much of what happened and make the lies and deceit less awkward to handle.

Unless May makes a final gesture to call the Referendum outcome illegally obtained. What's that? another flying pig?