If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people make mistakes and how some people, institutions, and systems cope with mistakes and thereby perform much better than most.

Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus) and authority (e.g 'witch doctor') to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).

The audience for facts, evidence and research about microtargeting, Facebook and Brexit is tiny.

We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful.

Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.

If you look back at history, most important PR and propaganda was invented by the Communist Party.

Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism.

As I've said many times, Vote Leave could only win because the Establishment's OODA loops are broken - as the Brexit negotiations painfully demonstrate daily - and they are systematically bad at decisions, and this created just enough space for us to win.

If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is - hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about 'data' unless you can independently verify it.