All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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with their lives. In life, you get people who are so clever they’re stupid. Dominic Cummings certainly falls into that category.’
Cummings did not know Banks, but he knew the type – cleverer than a lot of MPs but out of his depth in terms of politics, a man who ‘didn’t understand what he didn’t understand’. He had dealt with self-made men before. They believed in ‘my way or the highway’. Banks was the kind of bullish character who would create division rather than bring people together. He also made it clear at the meeting that he was a great admirer of Nigel Farage, and believed he should be the front man for the campaign. Cummings concluded that judgement was a ‘massive strategic error’. Thanks to the work he had done in 2014, he believed that no campaign run and fronted by Farage could win. Banks could be useful, but Cummings had no intention of working closely with him.
Following the meeting, Banks ‘blew hot and cold’. First, he tried to peel Cummings away from Elliott to work for him instead: ‘You should come with me, I’ll pay you loads of money.’ Over the summer Banks texted Cummings and offered him a salary of £200,000 and a win bonus of the same amount. He claimed later that this was ‘psychological warfare’: ‘It was definitely intended to destabilise them and also to show power, to show we could buy whoever we wanted.’
Banks also looked at Business for Britain’s ‘reform or leave’ stance, and tried to convince Cummings that Elliott was ‘not really committed to Out’. His mistake, though, was to assume that Cummings and Elliott were two peas in a pod. On one occasion he said to Elliott, ‘All you guys are doing is trying to stay close with Cameron and get a job at Number 10.’ No one with any knowledge of Cummings’ contemptuous view of Cameron could have made such a comment.
Initially, Cummings found Banks’s activities helpful because he could use him as leverage to ‘bounce’ other people into helping For Britain. He would tell them, ‘If you don’t set something up, Ukip will do it and we’ll lose the referendum 65–35.’ Cummings said, ‘The fact that Farage was trying to get control of it was definitely useful to me in the early stage up until the end of July.’ Quite soon, though, Banks became a nuisance.
A second effort was made to patch up relations a month later when Banks hosted Elliott at his club, 5 Hertford Street. ‘Nigel and I were plotting the revolution from Mayfair,’ Banks laughed. The meeting was called to discuss funding for the campaign. Banks says Elliott had questioned where he was going to raise the £20 million he had promised. ‘If I have to write the cheque myself, I’ll do it,’ he replied. The distrust remained.
Daniel Hannan kept hearing from senior Tories and donors who could not understand why Elliott was refusing to cooperate with the energetic Banks: ‘I spent most of that summer explaining to people why it would end badly. Every single one of them came back soon afterwards, saying, “God this man is impossible.”’
What Banks and Farage ignored about Business for Britain and Conservatives for Britain was that by initially backing the renegotiation, the campaign was able to help define what it ought to look like. Throughout the post-election period, BfB briefed stories to the newspapers setting the bar higher and higher, culminating in a colossal thousand-page report called ‘Change or Go: How Britain would gain influence and prosper outside an unreformed EU’, which was serialised by the Telegraph from 21 June, ahead of the key European summit at which Cameron was due to offer a broad outline of his demands. It called for the return of the British veto and the right of national parliaments to overturn EU laws, as well as the repatriation of all social and employment laws.9
Rob Oxley, Elliott’s spin doctor, said, ‘The government were desperately trying to bring down the bar; we were trying to put it up there. There were loads of people who were saying, “You’re traitors, you’re just going to back Cameron.” But I have no doubt that the work we did there was hugely instrumental in how the negotiations were perceived in February.’
The ‘Out’ campaign got fresh impetus when Cameron gave an overview of his demands at the European Council in Brussels in June. Much of the content of the Bloomberg speech and some of Cameron’s other public pledges was missing. Cummings saw it as an ‘important’ moment. He called donors to say, ‘Even if he comes back with what he’s asking for, it is less than what you guys wanted, so you have an excuse to jump ship before the process has finished.’
A story which the Guardian published just before Cameron’s summit press conference helped to turn the tide. It revealed that Cameron’s plan was to run a referendum campaign based on the risks of Brexit. The paper reported a leaked account of a private meeting between the prime minister and a fellow EU leader which stated, ‘He believes that people will ultimately vote for the status quo if the alternatives can be made to appear risky.’10 The Italian embassy was suspected of the leak. It was the first proof that Cameron would re-enact the ‘Project Fear’ approach he had deployed in the Scottish referendum.
Rob Oxley made sure the story was distributed to key MPs: ‘All the Eurosceptics read it. After that point we were able to start moving the Tory backbenchers.’
The summit also persuaded Elliott to act: ‘That’s when we started the process of moving BfB from “change or go” to being Leave.’ By the end of July the board of Business for Britain had agreed that they should switch their allegiance fully to the ‘Out’ camp. A friend of Cummings said, ‘Although Elliott was nervy about going out so fast, he essentially realised that if he didn’t, then Dom would go home and Arron would take over the thing.’
There were already tensions between the two campaign leaders. MPs warned Elliott, ‘You’re going to be airbrushed out. Cummings is going to get the credit.’ The seeds were sown of divisions not just between For Britain and Ukip, but within the campaign itself, which would explode a few months later. The issue grew more pronounced as Cummings hired the two members of staff he most needed to win the referendum.
Cummings’ top priority was finding a director of communications. Initially he had only one person in mind – his old colleague from the Department for Education, Henry de Zoete. ‘Zoot’, as he was known, had been Gove’s media spad throughout the battles with the educational establishment of the coalition years, but had left government to start his own company. Tall with a wispy ginger beard, de Zoete was the yang to Cummings’ yin – calm when he was aggressive, softly-spoken when he was raising his voice, polite when Cummings was blunt to the point of rudeness. But the gentlemanly manner concealed the same steel will as Cummings. De Zoete wanted to make a go of his company and declined the offer, but he provided the perfect alternative solution: ‘I think Stephenson will be interested.’
Paul Stephenson was the communications director for the British Bankers Association, where he was highly thought of, highly effective and highly remunerated. He was also highly bored. He had previously been a special adviser to Philip Hammond at the Department of Transport and to Andrew Lansley at the Department of Health, where he was drafted in to sort out the communications mess of Lansley’s reforms. A fast-talking lover of good stories and a good lunch, he was one of the most effective Conservative media operators, respected and liked by journalists, who delighted in the staccato burst of his machine-gun laugh. Stephenson had been a diehard Eurosceptic for years, having worked on numerous anti-Brussels campaigns.
As significant meetings in the history of Leave’s referendum win go, few can top that when Dominic Cummings sat in Paul Stephenson’s garden in north London in July 2015 and, over bottles of beer, offered him the job. In truth, Cummings had not found a new yang to replace de Zoete. Stephenson was another yin. Like Cummings, he was a brilliant strategist, and inclined to choose the more aggressive of any two options. They hit it off straight away.
Stephenson had recently married, but he signed up at once, starting work in early September. His new wife said, ‘Let me get this straight: you’ve just got married, you’re taking a huge pay cut and you’re about to annoy the prime minister and every other senior Conservative.’
A somewhat bashful Stephenson replied, ‘That’s about the size of it.’