Originally Posted by Chris

You’re right, they didn’t have a plan, they had a 600-page wish list dressed up as a White Paper - terminology deliberately chosen to imply detailed proposals only one step removed from a bill to be presented in parliament.

However they presented it as a plan, and it undid them. The wild promises of free money for all won them majorities in Glasgow and Dundee but thoroughly alienated everyone else. They failed to win Yes majorities even in districts where they had held parliamentary seats for decades (they have since lost several of those seats as well, mostly to Tories).

Vote Leave played a very canny game. They had aspirations and they presented them as such. They never once made a concrete claim of what would happen after the vote, though they did make many claims about what could happen. The £350 million NHS bus was one of those, and I think the fact that it wasn’t presented as a campaign promise is the reason why it has resisted all attempts to weaponise it, despite many furious attempts to do so by continuity remainers. They easily get themselves riled up over it, but it has never become the talisman of broken pledges that they have wanted it to be.

Of course this was not just canny campaigning by Vote Leave. It was never their remit to publish a manifesto because Vote Leave was never going to be in a position to implement anything.