FROM the blog of Dominic Cummings, it is clear that he believes that two particular campaigning strategies won the 2016 referendum for Vote Leave.

He says: “Would we have won without immigration? No. Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result suggests No.”

So first he claimed we could “take back control” of our immigration policy, with specific warnings that Turkey might soon join the EU. This suggestion was amplified by the pro-Brexit tabloids, claiming that thousands of Turkish people could flood the country, with the added insinuation that Islamist terrorist might be among them.

The Daily Mail front page, on the eve of the referendum, claimed that talks on Turkey’s membership were set to resume within days.

Any responsible journalist would have known that Turkey, with its abysmal human rights record, had little chance of being allowed to join, and that President Erdogan was taking the country further away from the standards required by the EU.

His other strategy was to claim that we pay £350m a week to the EU which could be better spent on the NHS.

But Cummings knew this wasn’t the case, admitting that “we get back roughly half”.

However, he says that, “Some of this is spent in absurd ways like subsidies for very rich landowners to do stupid things.”

So, he and his family, as “very rich landowners”, have received £235,000 (Echo, Aug 12) “to do stupid things”

Can we assume that he will be donating this sum to charities providing equipment to NHS hospitals?

Pete Winstanley, Durham