All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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party policy.
In 2011 Hannan wrote a blog suggesting the prime minister hold a renegotiation with Brussels and then a referendum afterwards. Now he was only two years ahead of his time. By then he had helped set up ‘the People’s Pledge’. In 2012 the organisation got the Electoral Reform Society to conduct a complete ballot of every registered voter in the marginal constituencies of Thurrock in Essex, and Cheadle and Hazel Grove in south Manchester, asking whether voters wanted a referendum. On turnouts higher than those seen in local elections, all three voted overwhelmingly in favour. ‘It started becoming obvious to people that a referendum was coming,’ Hannan said. Another of those involved was a young Eurosceptic called Chris Bruni-Lowe, who was to play a pivotal role in future events.
‘Dan put in place many of the key ingredients that would go on to create the Vote Leave team,’ Carswell said. ‘He was one of the guys who put the machine together, and realised what the machine had to look like. He played an absolutely key role.’
Throughout 2011 and 2012 Hannan, Carswell, Reckless and other Eurosceptics met secretly to plot a guerrilla campaign to secure a referendum. They had gone up in the world from Bellamy’s. The clandestine meetings, which included members of the government, met at Tate Britain, half a mile upriver from the Commons. ‘Dan suggested it on the grounds that no MP or journalist would have the aesthetic inclination to ever pop into an art gallery in the afternoon,’ Carswell said. ‘Not once were we ever disturbed.’
The campaign began to bear fruit with the rebellion of the eighty-one. ‘That’s when actually we won the argument within the party,’ Carswell said. ‘From then on they stopped arguing against it from first principles, and it became about practicalities.’
Carswell also held talks in his Commons office with Lynton Crosby, the Australian strategist who masterminded Boris Johnson’s two London mayoral election victories; but no agreement was reached to work together.
When Cameron conceded a referendum in the Bloomberg speech, Hannan told the group, ‘We’ve got it, now let’s win it.’ He had already begun to prepare. Knowing they would be facing the might of the Downing Street machine, he wanted a nascent ‘Out’ campaign in place in good time. In the summer of 2012 he approached Matthew Elliott and said, ‘You are going to need to be the guy to run this thing.’ The conversation took place in a summerhouse in the Norfolk garden of Rodney Leach, a Eurosceptic businessman who funded Open Europe.
Elliott, then thirty-four, had begun his career a dozen years earlier as a press officer for the European Foundation, a Eurosceptic campaign group, but made his name in Westminster as the co-founder in 2004 of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which hounded successive governments about wasting public money. In 2009 he also set up Big Brother Watch, a libertarian outfit that campaigned against state intrusion into citizens’ lives. Both organisations were run out of 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, home to a network of conservative campaigns which acted as incubators for thrusting young Tories and wannabe spin doctors to learn their craft.
Elliott might have gone to work in Downing Street in 2011, but his appointment was blocked by Nick Clegg. The reason he was persona non grata with the Liberal Democrats – and the reason Hannan wanted to hire him – was that Elliott had run the NOtoAV campaign in May that year which crushed Clegg’s hopes of electoral reform. Elliott’s campaign helped to secure nearly 68 per cent of the vote in the first nationwide referendum for a generation.
Hannan had been impressed by Elliott, even though he thought his campaign – making a case that a ‘Yes’ vote would be costly because new voting machines would have to be bought – was ‘a pile of crap’: ‘I knew it had to be Matt, not just in the obvious sense that he won it resoundingly, but he had shown huge sense of character in withstanding friendly fire. The anti-AV press were blaming him personally for what they thought was going to be a defeat. He had the strength of character to stick with what his polls were telling him, to disregard all of that. I thought this was the stupidest campaign ever, but he knew that it was working. He stuck to his guns.’ Elliott’s composure under fire would be seriously tested in the EU referendum campaign as well.
When Hannan approached him, Elliott already ‘saw the EU as the next big thing’, and had an idea about how he would run a campaign. He was a keen follower of American politics, and during Barack Obama’s two election campaigns he had been impressed by the gaggle of groups backing the Democrat candidate which all had the title ‘… for Obama’. Elliott devised a referendum campaign that would feature different groups branded ‘… for Britain’, and began registering dozens of websites, of which businessforbritain.org would be the centrepiece.
Around Christmas 2012, Elliott found himself on a plane to the US with Chris Bruni-Lowe, then at the People’s Pledge. Bruni-Lowe recalled, ‘He said he was thinking of a business campaign. He said he was fascinated by things like “Hispanics for Obama”, “Latinos for Obama”. He said business will be the big one, but we’ll have “Bikers for Britain”, “Women for Britain” and “Muslims for Britain”.’ Bruni-Lowe believed Elliott saw these campaigns as paper tigers, with only the business group as a serious campaigning organisation: ‘He viewed everything as a front campaign.’
Elliott’s other insight was that the best way to mobilise business voices in favour of leaving was to work initially with the grain of Cameron’s renegotiation, rather than declaring immediately for Brexit. In April 2013, three months after the Bloomberg speech, Elliott set up Business for Britain, with the slogan ‘Change or go’: ‘I realised business was the way into it. We did not do it as a hard Brexit campaign but went along the lines of the renegotiation, albeit pushing further what the PM would be thinking.’
The early backers included Eurosceptic stalwarts like Peter Cruddas, the former Conservative Party treasurer, and Daniel Hodson, founder of the People’s Pledge, but also more moderate sceptics like Stuart Rose, the former boss of Marks & Spencer. Some of those invited were also pro-Europeans, like Iain Anderson, the chairman of Cicero Group and a former spokesman for Ken Clarke. He said, ‘I was invited along to talk to Business for Britain just in advance of it launching. It was put to me in that meeting with the BfB team that this was about strengthening the prime minister’s hand in his renegotiation.’ One businessman invited said the pitch was that BfB would ‘put lead in Cameron’s pencil’.
Having a broad base of support gave Business for Britain credibility with the media, and it quickly eclipsed Open Europe as the primary voice on EU matters in Westminster, in part thanks to its campaign director Rob Oxley, who Elliott had plucked from the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Oxley, the product of a Lincolnshire grammar school and family in Zimbabwe, was young, smart, hard-working, and understood the media. He was the perfect front man for Elliott.
Business for Britain’s non-committal stance on Brexit did alienate some, including Bruni-Lowe, who wanted to see a full-bore campaign to leave the EU. Nigel Farage doubted that Elliott himself was committed to Brexit. ‘When I was there, the majority of people were broadly Eurosceptic but not all Leavers,’ said Bruni-Lowe.
The divisions between the Conservative and Ukip wings of Euroscepticism which blew up so spectacularly in the referendum campaign were sown in that period between 2012 and the general election. On the Tory side they were driven by an insight Douglas Carswell had about the role Nigel Farage should play in a referendum campaign, which emerged from polling data in 2012 and 2013. It was neatly captured by Sunder Katwala in a piece for the New Statesman in April 2014, ‘the Farage Paradox’. Stated simply, the more media exposure Farage had, the higher Ukip’s national vote share went – but at the same time the lower national support for leaving the EU fell. ‘The most fervent advocates for leaving the EU were some of Remain’s best chances for winning the referendum,’ Carswell said. When Brussels was bailing out debt-ridden Greece, disapproval of EU membership rose to around 60 per cent. ‘We thought, “We are going to win this.” Then Ukip started to take off in the polls …’
In 2013 YouGov’s tracking poll on support for Brexit showed a sixteen-point lead for ‘Out’. But by April 2014, with Ukip on the march, the two sides were tied, and YouGov’s