Led by Donkeys

How four friends with a ladder took on Brexit

LedByDonkeys, Ben Stewart, James Sadri, Oliver Knowles

• Verlag: Atlantic Books
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838950200
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Civil Rights in Politics

The official account - complete with full-colour illustrations - of how four ordinary people managed to expose the government's hypocrisies through a nationwide guerrilla advertising campaign. Seeking to highlight the hypocrisy of our politicians on Brexit four friends armed with nothing more than ladders, roller brushes and a treasure trove of damning statements from our leaders slapped up the politicians' biggest lies on billboards around the country.This guerrilla operation wasn't easy, but it wasn't long before the British public enabled them to take things into their own hands - and the rest is history. Leave the EU or remain? An apparently simple question divided the nation in historic fashion. Many of us believed the words of these politicians. By putting up their quotes as billboards, self-styled 'Led By Donkeys' had clear intentions - to compare the promises that have been made across the years with the damning reality.

1–17 March 2019

@By Donkeys

As each new fortnightly wave of posters is about to go up, Ben tells the team that this will be his last, that he has to devote himself fully to his daughter and his pregnant girlfriend. He knows he’s been a less-than-perfect partner these past two months, but he tells himself he’s doing it for his kids’ future. Olly tells himself the same thing. He’s struggling to juggle the project with overseas work trips and, when he is at home, he finds he’s glued to his phone. His two daughters note his mental absence and suggest they install a box by the front door, into which Olly would drop his phone when he gets home each evening, but it never happens. One night his partner comes to bed to find him sitting with his laptop open, staring at a picture of Nigel Farage. ‘Research,’ he says feebly. She pulls the duvet up to her chin, rolls over and sighs. Will, meanwhile, is doing much of the design work after midnight, in a vain effort to keep his freelance photography career on the tracks, but that means he’s often exhausted by the time he’s feeding his children breakfast. And James is also sacrificing freelance income, so now his family is dipping deep into the fund set aside to redo the bathroom.

This is not sustainable and it’s not fair on our families, but we’re loath to call time on the project. Our fourth series of posters has just gone up on eighty sites, we’ve raised more than £200k, we have 80k twitter followers and we can see from local media reports that almost every new billboard is sparking a conversation between Leavers and Remainers. We all know how rare it is to have a campaign take off like this. It’s like catching lightning in a jam jar.

The question of Led By Donkeys’ continued existence is finally resolved when Nigel Farage announces an ‘epic protest march’ from Sunderland to Parliament Square. He’s billing the walk as a modern-day incarnation of the Jarrow March, an uprising against the elites, when in reality it’s being bankrolled by multimillionaire property tycoon Richard Tice.

No, we’re not shutting down. Not now. No way.

Farage has registered MarchToLeave.com, but has neglected to buy the more patriotic version of his website. One of our followers jumps on MarchToLeave.co.uk, registers it and messages us to ask if we can do anything with it. We scrape the Brexiters’ website and copy it wholesale onto our own version, then start amending it. The event is renamed MARCH TO LEAVE BRITAIN IF BREXIT IS A DISASTER, in recognition of Farage’s promise to do just that. On the page detailing the route we amend the stops, so that the protesters pass through each of the six constituencies where Farage failed to win election to Westminster. Now leg one is from Brussels to Bexhill, while leg three is from Eastleigh to Salisbury, where the marchers will take in the famous spire of Salisbury Cathedral and later join Nigel for an evening discussion on the geo-politics of Brexit, in which he will elaborate on his assertion that the world leader he most admires is Vladimir Putin. The town is the site of a strong 1997 electoral performance in which Nigel polled 5.7% and kept his deposit.

We launch the site with a new crowdfunder – a target to raise £30k in four days to pay for two digital ad-vans to accompany every mile of the march (it’s something of a surprise when our spoof site and ad-van idea are covered favourably by the Express and the Telegraph). Our plan is to display Farage’s most egregious hypocrisies and fantasies on the vans’ 8 sq/m display boards and have them crawl along the road beside him and his followers. We want to spark a conversation among his supporters about who this man really is, and we’re hoping to influence media coverage of the march. Too often Farage gets a clear run, we think. Even on the BBC.

But will people stump up the cash for us to do it? Once again we’re overwhelmed with donations and humbled by how quickly we raise the money. We book the ad-vans and Will comes over from Sweden to run the launch operation. He grew up in Widdrington, just north of Newcastle, and knows the area well. The march is scheduled to begin on a Saturday morning, but nobody beyond Farage’s top team knows where the starting point is, not even the marchers themselves. It feels like we’ve scored an early victory when a journalist tells us that Farage’s people are saying the secrecy is because they’re worried about our ad-vans.

Will wakes at 4.30 a.m. at his parents’ house near the Scottish border, groggy with the particular anxiety that comes from having a big day ahead but having barely slept. He inhales coffee and cornflakes, then steps out into a snowstorm, goes back inside to put on more layers, then clambers into his car and heads south towards Sunderland.

The A1 is covered in a thick blanket of white, and it feels like he’s going so slowly he might as well be pushing the damn car. Every half-hour the radio news bulletin mentions Farage and the first day of the March to Leave, and Will feels a stab of fear that he won’t get there on time. And even if he does, he won’t know where the march is setting off from.

By the time he passes Newcastle the snow has turned to slush and Will’s nerves are thawing. He’s going to make it. As he pulls into Sunderland the rain is beating on the bonnet of his car. There’s an hour before the march is due to start and he’s hoping to snap some of the Farage billboards we’ve had put up overnight. He’s in the city centre photographing a jacked-up Range Rover under a giant tweet, when his phone pings with a message from a contact in the media.

Ryhope – The Hendon Grange Pub.

So that’s where Farage is starting from.

Will checks his map. It’s by a roundabout less than a hundred metres up the road from a giant 36 sq/m double billboard that’s perfect for Sunderland, home of the Nissan factory. Before long he’s circling the roundabout, craning his neck to read the billboard. On the left side is Farage’s Leave.EU campaign from 2016: Project Fear c...