All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
Читать онлайн книгу.
together if there was a referendum campaign. ‘I knew it was a bit like herding cats, and the real problem we were going to have was going to be fighting amongst ourselves,’ he said.
Campbell Bannerman set up a ‘Contact Group’, and invited Elliott and other prominent sceptics like the businesswoman Ruth Lea and Rory Broomfield of the Freedom Association. The gathering would later be described by the Electoral Commission as a ‘pivotal moment’, and a key reason why Vote Leave was designated as the official ‘Out’ campaign.
Campbell Bannerman was also involved in another development that spring, the creation of Conservatives for Britain, the parliamentary wing of Elliott’s operation. When Cameron won his majority in May, Elliott was shocked: ‘I realised, “Crikey, I’ve actually got to set up this referendum campaign.”’
At a lunch the following day Elliott met Campbell Bannerman, plus Nick Wood from the Westminster PR firm Media Intelligence Partners, a grizzled, chain-smoking former Times and Express political journalist who became Iain Duncan Smith’s communications director when he was Tory leader. Campbell Bannerman recalled Elliott’s shock: ‘Matthew looked horrified at winning his own election. I don’t think he expected it.’ The discussion quickly turned to how to put pressure on the newly elected government. The strategy agreed was to form a group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, MEPs and peers to turn the screws on Cameron during the negotiations. Campbell Bannerman agreed to become co-chairman and run the operation in Brussels.
For the key post of co-chairman in the Commons, Elliott and Daniel Hannan approached Steve Baker, the MP for Wycombe. At forty-four, Baker had only been an MP since 2010 – but he was liked and trusted by all factions on the Conservative benches. An RAF engineer who retrained as a software engineer, Baker was devoutly religious – he was baptised during a full-body immersion in the sea – and had been gifted with the innocent face of a chorister. Behind the smile, Hannan and Elliott also saw a man prepared to take risks: Baker was a keen skydiver, with more than two hundred jumps to his name.
When Hannan approached him, he had just one pitch: ‘There’s no one else to do it.’ Baker himself joked later that he got the job because he was a ‘cleanskin’, untainted by the battles of the past. Hannan remembered, ‘I thought, everyone likes Steve Baker, everyone trusts him, he’s a born-again Christian, he is just incapable of dishonesty.’
Baker was also a resolute Eurosceptic, who like Hannan had come into politics to get Britain out of the EU. Unlike Hannan, his inspiration was not a Latvian foreign minister, but David Cameron himself. Baker had flirted with the idea of joining Ukip, but decided the Tory Party was the vessel that would bring about Brexit: ‘One of the principal reasons I knew the Conservative Party could be relied upon on the EU is that in 2007 David Cameron went to the Czech Republic and made a speech in which he said the EU was the “last gasp of an outdated ideology, a philosophy which has no place in our new world of freedom”. David Cameron inspired me to join the Conservative Party.’
Cameron soon had cause to regret his own powers of persuasion. Friday, 5 June 2015 was the fortieth anniversary of the 1975 EU referendum, and Baker, Campbell Bannerman, Wood and Walsh decided it would be the perfect moment to launch Conservatives for Britain. Matthew Elliott was out of the country at the time, and was nearly as blindsided as the prime minister when the story announcing the creation of the organisation appeared on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph on 7 June. By that point CfB had been meeting in secret for a month, and had already recruited fifty Tory MPs. Cameron admitted to Baker later that he was ‘spooked’ that no intelligence on the operation had reached him. Campbell Bannerman recalled, ‘It wasn’t expected, and we hit the Remain campaign very early and very hard. Steve did an excellent job of getting people on board.’
A week later, Baker had recruited 110 Tory MPs, thirteen peers and twelve MEPs. Sympathetic cabinet ministers privately signed up to the mailing list. Later that week Labour MPs launched a sister group, Labour for Britain, to escalate hostilities. Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Kelvin Hopkins and Gisela Stuart were all on board, along with the leading Labour donor John Mills, a veteran of the 1975 referendum campaign.
But there was a more seismic announcement to come. Elliott flew home and resolved to exercise greater control over the MPs. He had already secretly recruited just the man to do that. On 14 June the Sunday Times revealed that Dominic Cummings had been charged with setting up the ‘Out’ campaign. For Eurosceptics their hour had come. And so, now, had their man.
3
Few people would have given the scruffily-dressed man on the bicycle a second glance as he pedalled between offices and coffee shops in Westminster during May 2015. Dominic Cummings never wore a tie, preferred Converse trainers to work shoes, and with his high forehead and wire-rimmed spectacles had the air of a middle-ranking civil servant on an awayday – if your idea of a civil servant is of a hedge dragged through a man backwards. The impression of dishevelled provincial mediocrity was hardly dispelled by the flat vowels of his native Durham or his preference for conducting business meetings in Pret a Manger. Only his penetrating eyes hinted that this was one of Britain’s most shrewd – and feared – political operators.
A former special adviser to Michael Gove, Cummings left the government in early 2014 after waging war on the educational establishment, the Liberal Democrats and the Downing Street machine in equal measure. He sat out the general election, not even bothering to watch the leaders’ debates on television. But as Parliament reconvened ten days after the election, his phone began to ring. He received a series of calls from Matthew Elliott, Bernard Jenkin and Stuart Wheeler, the former Tory donor who had defected to Ukip, asking him to set up the ‘Out’ campaign.
Cummings had form where Europe and referendums were concerned. He was campaign director at Business for Sterling, which helped to keep Britain out of the euro. In November 2004 he led the ‘No’ campaign in a referendum on whether to set up a north-east regional assembly, winning a crushing 78 per cent of the vote, a result so emphatic it persuaded John Prescott to abandon the idea altogether.
With Elliott’s success running the NOtoAV campaign, he and Cummings could muster three major campaign victories between them, but Elliott’s experience during the 2011 referendum had convinced him that he was not the right man to take day-to-day charge of the campaign: ‘I know my skillset is raising funds, organisation-building, gladhanding – which are very useful; it’s part of the campaign. But one of the things I learnt during NOtoAV is I didn’t really like and I’m not very good at running a war room. We needed somebody in there who was fearless, who was a warrior, who had a great strategic mind, who frankly had the appetite to take something on at a time when no one else thought it could be done. And Dom was the man to do that.’
Cummings is a Marmite figure, viewed by his allies as one of the most talented public policy professionals of his generation, a thinker with a Stakhanovite work ethic and a ruthless desire to promote his ideas, someone equipped with a rare ability to see around corners. For his enemies – who are legion – he is a raging menace, a Tory bastard love-child of Damian McBride and Alastair Campbell, a practitioner of the dark arts. Like all caricatures, there is some truth in both these portraits.
Those Cummings had angered in the past included David Cameron, most of his aides and Iain Duncan Smith, to whom he was briefly director of strategy before quitting and labelling IDS ‘incompetent’ as the Tory leader. When the coalition government was formed in 2010 Andy Coulson, Cameron’s director of communications, barred Cummings from any job in Whitehall. He continued to advise Michael Gove, for whom he had worked since 2007, from afar, but only became his special adviser once Coulson had fallen from grace as a result of the phone-hacking scandal. Craig Oliver, Coulson’s successor, was frequently infuriated to learn of Gove’s planned education reforms from the media, and developed a heartfelt detestation of Cummings which dulled his judgement. When it emerged that Cummings would run the ‘Out’ campaign, Oliver texted a journalist, ‘Quaking in our boots about Dominic Cummings.