All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman

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All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class - Tim  Shipman


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the media, and that involved downplaying immigration.

      As Cummings moved to build a campaign team, he was quickly reminded of why he had stepped away from Planet Eurosceptic. He told Elliott that Business for Britain would have to become a full Brexit outfit, or he would leave. A source close to Cummings said he despaired at ‘dealing with a whole bunch of Tory MPs who were totally and utterly clueless about organisation, strategy, management and a whole lot of donors who were very reluctant to do anything’. Others told him, ‘There’s no way we can win.’

      However, Cummings did develop a good relationship with Steve Baker – whom he judged ‘one of the very few honest MPs’ – which would prove useful in the months ahead. Though the two had a series of run-ins, Cummings never resorted to his most objectionable behaviour with Baker. Early in their relationship he said his approach would follow Bismarck’s ‘With a gentleman, a gentleman and a half; with a pirate, a pirate and a half.’

      While Baker was a gentleman, Cummings was very soon butting heads with a fellow pirate.

      On first inspection, Arron Banks does not have much in common with the man who would become his mortal foe. Short where Cummings is tall, brash where Cummings is cerebral, a fervent critic of ‘failed special advisers’ where Cummings was a serial creature of Westminster, a devotee of Mammon where Cummings is driven by the values of an Odyssean education. But look closer and the two might be cousins. Both share a fervent Euroscepticism, a loathing of most MPs, an ability to put other people’s backs up, an absolute conviction that they are right, and an utter refusal to back down.

      Banks, who spent his early childhood in South Africa – where he owns part of a diamond mine – was a successful businessman who had made around £100 million from insurance firms like GoSkippy.com and Southern Rock, but was largely unknown outside politics until October 2014, when he abandoned the Tory Party and offered £100,000 to Ukip instead. When William Hague declared that he was ‘someone we have never heard of’, Banks promptly raised the donation to £1 million. To complete the portrait of an eccentric political berserker, he boasted about his stash of assault weapons in South Africa and about being expelled from school for what he called an ‘accumulation of offences’, including selling stolen communion wine to other boys.8 He married a Russian model, had five children and bought a mansion north of Bristol previously occupied by musician Mike Oldfield, of Tubular Bells fame.

      After the general election, Banks went to Farage and Chris Bruni-Lowe and offered to make another major donation to turn Ukip into a more professional outfit. In the midst of the leadership coup, and convinced the party was unreformable, they sought to divert his enthusiasm and cash towards Europe instead. They were driven by a growing belief that Elliott and Business for Britain would not commit to campaign for Brexit. Bruni-Lowe said to Banks, ‘Why don’t you think about setting up a referendum campaign?’

      Banks did not need much persuading. His views had been shaped by Maastricht – ‘I couldn’t believe John Major sold out the country in the way he did.’ Now he came to regard the Elliott operation as a similar establishment stitch-up. ‘We got started because Nigel asked us to,’ Banks said. ‘His opinion was that if the organisation didn’t get started quickly, we wouldn’t have the time to match what the Remain camp was going to do. It was apparent that Business for Britain had no intention of getting the campaign started until Cameron came back with his deal, and they had a lot of people who didn’t even want to leave Europe. Didn’t take us too long to work out!’

      Divisions with Elliott hardened when Farage and Bruni-Lowe were invited on a cruise in June 2015 organised by the Midlands Industrial Council, a group of influential donors of whom the businessman David Wall was the prime mover. ‘Matthew was there to talk about his strategy,’ said Bruni-Lowe. He said, “I’m planning to do this big campaign, we don’t know what we’re going to name it yet, we don’t know when we’re going launch it yet.”’ Elliott’s hands were tied because some of the businessmen on the cruise were Business for Britain signatories, so he had to be careful not to exceed the terms of the campaign they had signed up to.

      Bruni-Lowe said to Elliott, ‘If you’re going to do this campaign, why don’t you get Nigel and every other person in a room and divvy up what they can and can’t do? If you don’t do that and you let Nigel out into the wild, then you lose control.’

      When the ship docked at Jersey Farage asked to see Elliott, and they went to a pub with Bruni-Lowe. Elliott talked about the people he was trying to hire, but the Ukip pair regarded his answers as ‘ill-defined’, and shared a concern that ‘there was no strategy’. They disagreed with him about the role of immigration and Farage in the campaign. Afterwards Farage turned to Bruni-Lowe and said, ‘Shit, we’ve got a problem. We need to get Banks going as quickly as possible.’

      On 21 June Banks briefed a story to the Sunday Telegraph announcing that he was going to raise £20 million to fund a campaign to leave, provisionally called ‘No thanks, we’re going global’, the first of several incarnations of his ‘Out’ campaign. ‘He went before Elliott,’ said Bruni-Lowe. ‘Banks basically gatecrashed it.’

      From the beginning Banks had a brash role model in mind for winning votes and antagonising his opponents. He told Bruni-Lowe: ‘The only way I’m going to do this is by being slightly Trump-esque, which is attack everyone to the point where I can get parity with them – and then try and compete with them on quality. I’ve got call centres, I’m ten times better than them.’

      The second ‘No’ campaign was up and running even before the first had got properly organised. Its goal was not, initially at least, to usurp the Elliott–Cummings effort, but to chivvy them along and give a platform for Farage. ‘Nigel and I effectively got Banks to set this up in order to give Nigel a voice,’ Bruni-Lowe remembered, ‘because it became clear when we sat down with Elliott that he didn’t want to touch Nigel with a barge pole.’

      Once unleashed, however, Banks was not the sort of man to play second violin to anyone else. He quickly showed he was not messing about by offering Lynton Crosby £2 million to run the campaign. Banks had stood for election as a Conservative council candidate back in the early 1990s, and his first campaign had been run by Mark Fullbrook, now the ‘F’ in Crosby’s CTF Partners. Now he called Fullbrook to dangle the cash. ‘They thought about it for a week but then declined it,’ Banks recalled. ‘Said they couldn’t do that to Dave.’ Banks shopped around and hired Gerry Gunster, a US political consultant who had won more than thirty referendums across the pond.

      In July the rival campaign chiefs held peace talks in Elliott’s office at 55 Tufton Street. Banks brought along Richard Tice, the property investor who had tried to get Elliott to declare for ‘Out’ in February. It was not a meeting of minds. As Cummings remembers the discussion, Banks announced, ‘Me and Richard have been thinking about this for a few months and we are going to set up the campaign for the Leave side. The MPs don’t know what they’re doing.’

      With this, at least, Cummings could agree. But then Banks also attacked the men sitting on the other side of the table, who he saw as products of the SW1 establishment: ‘You guys don’t know what you’re doing, all these Westminster institutions are crap.’ This was particularly cutting for Elliott, since he ran several of the groups from the office in which they were sitting.

      Elliott says, ‘Banks’s approach to that meeting was very much “I’m going to be doing this, I know what I’m doing, you guys are Tories in the pocket of Number 10 who have no intention of setting up a campaign, I’m going to get on and do this. Either come with me or you’ll be blown away.”’

      Cummings recalls Banks saying, ‘I’ve got more money than any of you and I’m much more clued-up than any of you, so it’s really a question for you guys of, do you want to be part of what we’re doing or not?’

      Banks looked at Cummings and Elliott, but all he could were the faces of two Westminster lifers. ‘They just looked at us across the table and said “You don’t understand politics,”’ Banks recalled, ‘We just said, “All right, let’s get going then. We’ll show


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