All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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establishment and the government machine, and win. Most people who were there say their double act was just as important as that of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Without all four of them it is likely that Remain would have won.
Cummings also approached Victoria Woodcock, a former private secretary to Michael Gove, and persuaded her to quit her job. Described as a ‘secret weapon’ in implementing school reform, she had most recently been working in the Cabinet Office, where she had overseen the government’s planning of the VE-Day seventieth-anniversary commemorations in May, a three-day jamboree involving politicians, the royal family and thousands of veterans. On 23 August the Sunday Times revealed that she would become the ‘No’ campaign’s director of operations. Georgiana Bristol, a fundraiser for Boris Johnson’s 2008 London mayoral campaign, was also on board as development director. Even at this stage, Cummings was consciously creating an organisation in which both Gove and Johnson would feel comfortable. He regarded Stephenson and Woodcock as ‘by far the most important people in the whole campaign in terms of the permanent staff’.
It would have been understandable if Matthew Elliott felt a bit surrounded. The two key posts were now filled by Cummings’ hires, and the media was more interested in him than in Elliott. The only person Elliott had hired who Cummings rated was Rob Oxley, who was installed as head of media and quickly grew close to Stephenson.
In the late summer Stephenson had lunch with Nick Timothy, and sought to get him on board as research director. As the right-hand man to Theresa May, the home secretary, Timothy had been one of the best special advisers in the government – fiercely intelligent, with a subtle political brain and (like Cummings) the backbone to stand up to Downing Street and drive through his minister’s policies. Along with Fiona Hill, May’s right-hand woman, he had kept the flame of her leadership ambitions alive throughout the coalition years without ever doing anything overt that would have attracted the ire of his low-key boss. He was also a committed Eurosceptic who wanted to leave the EU. In early July he had left government to become the director of the New Schools Network, a charity that helped establish free schools, and for months he had been cultivating a vast, lustrous beard that made him resemble Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Timothy was a perfect fit for the team of Tory bad boys. He had been kicked off the list of Conservative parliamentary candidates in December 2014 after he and Stephen Parkinson, another of May’s special advisers, refused to campaign in the Rochester by-election, believing they were being asked to break the civil service code of conduct. Coming five months after Fiona Hill had been forced to resign by Downing Street, this had had the air of a vendetta by the Cameroons against May’s team. Nonetheless, Timothy had led the crack team in South Thanet at the general election who prevented Nigel Farage winning a seat in Parliament.
Timothy was interested in a role, but he had just taken his new job. Over lunch he also expressed reservations about becoming too closely associated with some of the hardline Eurosceptics. For Britain assumed that May herself was ‘nervous about it being a totally Eurosceptic clusterfuck’. Team May did seem to want a foothold in the campaign, though, and it quickly became apparent that Stephen Parkinson was willing to join as head of the ground campaign. He was a natural fit. ‘Parky’ had worked for years alongside Stephen Gilbert, the Conservative Party’s ground-game expert on by-elections, and knew the ropes. ‘They pushed Parky quite hard,’ a campaign source said. Fate had another big job in line for Nick Timothy.
When Cummings met Paul Stephenson in his garden he had outlined a stealth plan for the campaign – to downplay issues like immigration until the ‘Out’ gang had won the right to be heard by polite society, and then get more aggressive in the run-up to polling day: ‘Until February, we will only be talking to the bubble.’ With that in mind, he wrote lengthy blog posts on reasons why Europe was bad for democracy, scientific endeavour and the way the civil service operated. For Banks and Farage this was proof that Cummings was a dilettante. But there was method in his intellectual verbosity: ‘That was deliberately done; we were fighting for the right to be heard at the BBC,’ Stephenson remembered. ‘We went into the BBC and Dom went and did exactly that pitch to a load of execs, and I know from the feedback that people thought, “If that’s what he’s about, we quite like that.” They’d have probably voted Remain, but they recognised we were not Nigel Farage or a bunch of racists. That was quite important to us.’
Cummings also wrote a blog suggesting that there could be a second referendum after an ‘Out’ vote, in which the public could give their views on any subsequent deal with Brussels: ‘If you want to say “stop”, vote no and you will get another chance to vote on the new deal.’ The suggestion that Britain might vote ‘No’ to Brussels and then get a better deal and stay was catnip to the Westminster commentariat. To Cummings it was just another way of drumming up support from those who disliked Brussels but were not hardline Brexiteers. Once again, this reinforced the belief of Banks and Farage that Cummings and Elliott were not real outers, and that they would not set up a proper Brexit campaign until Cameron had his deal.
Steve Baker, the head of Conservatives for Britain, said, ‘It was very clear that the government strategy was to create the tallest, steepest cliff-edge possible around the referendum. What Cummings was doing was reducing the height of the cliff. He’s saying, “You can vote to leave now, and then they’ll have to come back and check if you really meant it.” That’s why the PM hated it so much.’ Baker added, ‘Because Ukip didn’t get the political sophistication, we had to drop it. That lack of trust and failure to understand that not everything’s a conspiracy against them meant we couldn’t use that strategy.’
Cummings was shrewd enough to talk about the idea to Boris Johnson, and the London mayor publicly endorsed the plan at the end of June. Johnson believed Cameron was not playing ‘hardball’ with the Europeans, and that floating the double-referendum idea would show them Britain was ‘serious’.11
Cummings was delighted when Craig Oliver’s first major intervention in the Europe debate, at the end of October, was to brief a speech by David Cameron declaring, ‘Leave means leave … That option of “Let’s have another go” is not on the ballot paper.’ Cummings told friends, ‘You could tell from Number 10’s reaction they hated it.’
But by then relations with Banks and Farage had completely ruptured over four issues: the double referendum, who would run the main campaign, who would represent ‘Out’ in the television debates, and immigration.
In July Farage met Cummings and Elliott in the latter’s office in Tufton Street. The Ukip leader called for healthy competition: ‘Look, Arron says you want a go at this, I want a go at this, I believe in competition, we guys have got to have a clean fight.’
Following this olive branch, Cummings was amused and a little horrified as the meeting went on and it became clear that Farage was ‘obsessed’ with being the face of the ‘No’ campaign in the debates. Cummings said, ‘I don’t know who is going to represent the official Leave campaign yet, but what I’m going to do is go through a rigorous process of testing everyone in a scientific way, and I will figure out who the people are who are the most persuasive to the people we need to vote for.
Farage queried this: ‘Does that mean you’re against me?’
‘No. It just means I’m not against you or for you. This is an empirical business, Nigel, and I care about winning. You’re a hero and you’ll play a big part, but can we agree now to have you as our spokesman? No.’
After the meeting, Bruni-Lowe said, ‘We went away realising we had to push Banks even more.’
Cummings’ impression was that Farage and Banks did not believe they could win the referendum, but were already looking ahead to the world beyond, where they hoped to capitalise politically on the number of people voting ‘Out’, just as the SNP had done in Scotland after the independence referendum, where 45 per cent of the vote in 2014 translated into a near clean sweep for the Nationalists at the 2015 election. ‘You run a campaign, raise a lot of money, get of lot of data, you then lose and then do an SNP,’ was how he saw the Ukip strategy.
Another meeting followed in August with Banks, who got Cummings in to meet some