All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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understand public communication. In this campaign, Cummings would be driven by the data.
Towards the end of August, relations with Banks broke down again. On the 23rd the Sunday Times reported that Elliott would be chief executive of a new ‘No’ campaign and would re-use the striking logo that had been employed in the battle against the single currency, a white ‘No’ on a circular red background. The story also revealed that he had acquired office space in Westminster for fifty staff. Banks ‘went mental’ at the news that Elliott and Cummings had begun without consulting him. He protested to Cummings, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this,’ and complained about the ‘air of entitlement’ of the men from Westminster. Cummings replied, ‘Arron, you’ve spent the last three months saying we’re not committed to being outers and you’re going to do this, and I kept telling you I was going to do it, and now we’ve done it, so why are you surprised?’
In early September, as a means of corralling more MPs from across the political spectrum, Bernard Jenkin set up ‘ExCom’, an exploratory committee that would form the parliamentary wing of the nascent Leave campaign. Dreamt up over dinner at the Jenkin family home in Kennington, south London, it subsequently met once a week on Wednesday after PMQs at 12.45 p.m., often in Owen Paterson’s room. Regular attendees included Jenkin, Steve Baker and Paterson for the Tories, Kelvin Hopkins, Graham Stringer and Kate Hoey from Labour, Nigel Dodds from the DUP, and Ukip’s sole MP Douglas Carswell. Hoey remembered ‘a useful meeting with very, very nice coffee’.
Yet it remained a struggle to get those beyond the hardcore Eurosceptics to join up. Jenkin said, ‘It was quite difficult to get people to engage with us at that stage because most people not unreasonably insisted, “I want to wait and see until the prime minister comes back from his renegotiation.”’ He told them, ‘If we wait until he’s done the renegotiation, and then try and set up a Leave campaign, there won’t be much of a campaign.’
Elliott and Cummings had no more success when they asked Kate Hoey to join the board: ‘They were very keen for me to go on that, mainly because “We must have a woman.” I don’t really go along with that kind of crap.’ Graham Stringer represented Labour instead. Hoey also pushed for Daniel Hannan to join the board: ‘I felt Dan was our most credible Tory. He was just so brilliant at speaking, but for some reason they didn’t want him on the board.’ These tensions would resurface with a bang in the New Year.
Farage and Bruni-Lowe waited in vain for Elliott to formally launch his campaign. Throughout August and into September nothing happened. Part of the delay was because on 1 September the Electoral Commission announced that the wording of the referendum question would be changed, so that instead of a ‘Yes/No’ answer people would vote ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’ instead. The change necessitated costly and time-consuming rebranding. Banks, who had launched his campaign in July as ‘the KNOW’, renamed it ‘Leave.EU’.
Elliott also needed to rethink: ‘We were going to be called the “No” campaign. Then we had to rapidly book new websites and get a new logo, so that was a practical reason for delaying.’ He also wanted to hold off because Steve Baker was drumming up support in the House of Commons for amendments to the Referendum Bill: ‘They were doing very good work to make sure it was a more level referendum. Had CfB been a Leave organisation at that point, they wouldn’t have got so many supporters as they did.’
None of these reasons washed with Farage, Bruni-Lowe and Banks, who saw only Conservative foot-dragging. They resolved to act as the provisional wing of Euroscepticism and force Elliott’s hand. Chris Bruni-Lowe said: ‘Our view was that Business for Britain would still be going about a week before the referendum if it hadn’t been for Banks. We needed to smoke them out. Our view was that Banks wasn’t going to get designation [as the official Leave campaign], but we wanted to get them off the fence. Banks liked the idea of making Elliott competitive. We decided to fully endorse Banks, as a party, knowing that it would piss off Carswell. And then force Carswell to go back to Elliott and say, “Look, you’re leaving me in an impossible position.”’
On 25 September Farage took to the stage at Ukip’s annual conference in Doncaster and said the party would back Banks and Leave.EU. ‘I basically held his hand up on the platform and said, “This is the team I’m backing,”’ Farage said. When journalists asked why he was not supporting Elliott, who most of the media expected to run the official campaign, Farage said, ‘Well, they haven’t declared. This is the only game in town.’ In his speech, Farage condemned Elliott and Cummings as ‘soft Eurosceptics’, and dismissed the ‘For Britain’ campaign as a ‘talking shop in Tufton Street’.
The desired row with Carswell was immediate and explosive. Banks briefed the media that Ukip’s only MP would also have to back Leave.EU or face deselection; when Carswell confronted him in a corridor, Banks dismissed him as ‘borderline autistic with mental illness wrapped in’.
The comments were to damage Banks’s chances of running the lead ‘Out’ campaign, but Farage’s coup de théâtre had put Elliott and Cummings on the back foot. If they had assumed they were on course to win designation as the main Leave campaign, they had a fight on their hands. Fortunately, they did now have a name.
The first suggestion was not a success. Cummings and Stephenson went drinking and came up with the idea of ‘Democrats’. They liked its American political overtones. But what had looked clever late at night did not look so smart the next morning. Stephenson recalled, ‘We both went back to our wives that night and told them and they said, “We don’t understand it.” We came back the next morning and realised we agreed with them.’
In mid-September Cummings held a team meeting in what would become their office in the Westminster Tower by Lambeth Bridge, across the river from the House of Commons. ‘It was still a building site,’ Stephenson said. Cummings invited everyone to put possible campaign names into the middle of the table. Flicking through them later he suddenly said, ‘“Vote Leave”, because it’s an action.’
The pair then worked on a slogan, and came up with ‘Get change’. They called in Elliott, who said, ‘That’s genius!’ Cummings took a picture of the three of them to mark the historic moment that ‘Vote Leave. Get Change’ was established.
The following morning Cummings came into work and announced it was actually going to be ‘Vote Leave. Take Control’ instead. He said, ‘I thought about it last night. I’ve done focus groups on this for years. I know this works.’ Indeed, his Times article from June 2014 had identified ‘Let’s take back control’ as a killer argument. The phrase had also been used on Ukip adverts.
‘It goes back to the euro campaign,’ he explained later, ‘because we focus-grouped all sorts of different things for the euro and we never came up with something which beat “keep control”. So I thought, let’s play with that idea.’ Stephenson led a rebellion in the office for an hour in favour of ‘Get change’, but Cummings was insistent: ‘No, this is right.’
Vote Leave finally launched a couple of days after the Conservative Party conference. Both Stephenson and Rob Oxley wanted to make the announcement in a Sunday paper on the day David Cameron was due to do his conference interview with Andrew Marr, but it was decided that disrupting the prime minister’s big moment would be seen by MPs and potential donors as ‘too aggressive’. ‘That was an underlying tension throughout the campaign: how aggressive can we be to Cameron without everything kicking off?’ Stephenson said. It would not be long before Vote Leave was kicking very hard at the prime minister.
The launch was a low-key moment. Cummings had decreed that there would be no event or press conference. He knew Vote Leave could not compete with the ‘In’ campaign for major political and business endorsements. Many donors and MPs were not yet ready to commit, and a room full of Palaeosceptics was not the image he wanted to convey.
Instead of an event, an online video was posted which told viewers, ‘Every week, the United Kingdom sends £350 million of taxpayers’ money to the EU. That’s the cost of a fully staffed, brand-new hospital, or looked at another way, that’s £20 billion per year.’ It concluded with the slogan, ‘Vote