All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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Middle’ were typically in their thirties, relatively well-educated, middle-class, but not at all interested in politics. They knew almost nothing about the EU, and did not feel it had much to do with their lives. Seven out of ten in this group got their news from Facebook. The final group, who encapsulated the rhetorical challenge the campaign faced, were christened ‘Hearts v Heads’. They were two-thirds female, more likely to be in late middle-age, married or divorced with children, working in a low-paid job or part-time. They were disproportionately likely to have left school aged sixteen, and to be struggling to make ends meet. They read newspapers and were interested in the issue of Europe, but found it very confusing, and felt conflicted. Over 80 per cent of them agreed with the statement ‘My heart says we should leave the EU, but my head says it’s not a good idea.’ In the Scottish referendum, Cooper had had an identical segment which had helped Better Together to victory. In his April 2015 survey, ‘Yes’ led ‘No’ 55–45 among the two groups of key target voters. From that point on ‘we only did focus groups among those two groups,’ Cooper explained. Success depended on holding on to that lead.
The Remain campaign had no name, no strategy and no message, but when David Cameron secured his surprise majority at the general election the handful of people involved did know their target voters, and had enough data to begin constructing a plan. On election night Rudd threw a party at Villandry, a restaurant in London’s clubland. When it became clear that the Tories were on course for victory, Lucy Thomas approached him and said, ‘It’s on. It’s happening.’ They both had another drink. All they needed now was a leader, a headquarters, and a proper organisation.
The outfit Cooper had signed up to was the third effort at creating a Remain campaign. The three driving forces were Peter Mandelson, the former EU Trade Commissioner and one of the founding fathers of New Labour; David Sainsbury, the Blairite peer and former Labour Party donor; and Roland Rudd, a debonair fifty-four-year-old who had founded Finsbury, one of London’s powerhouse PR outfits. He had argued for years that Britain ‘should lead not leave’ the EU.
First Mandelson and Rudd had sought to empower an umbrella group called British Influence, run by Peter Wilding, a veteran of the EU battles of the 1990s. They then shifted resources to the European Movement, run by the former Tory MP Laura Sandys. Mandelson recalled, ‘We had two false starts on the pro-European side funded by David Sainsbury. One was British Influence, of which I was joint president with Ken Clarke and Danny Alexander, which was established long before the 2015 election and was hopelessly run. The other initiative, after the election, was led by the former Tory MP Laura Sandys, which didn’t come together. David then asked me to convene a viable campaign, which I did along with Damian Green and Danny Alexander during the summer of 2015. David paid all the startup costs. It would not have happened without him.’
Green, a Conservative former immigration minister, said the British Influence effort ‘didn’t work because it was basically run by elderly grandees who weren’t going to get their hands dirty. David Sainsbury said, “We need people who’ll actually do things.”’ Mandelson and Rudd recruited Will Straw, the thirty-five-year-old son of the former Labour foreign secretary Jack Straw, to run the operation. He had just fought the Lancashire seat of Rossendale and Darwen at the general election, but lost to Jake Berry, the sitting Conservative MP, by more than 5,000 votes. But Mandelson saw a bright and organised young man with politics in his blood, who was good with people and pleasantly devoid of the ego that afflicts so many in politics. He correctly judged that Straw could build a team. Straw’s experience in Lancashire was also useful, because Ukip had won almost 7,000 votes in the constituency, and he was familiar with the issues that motivated Eurosceptic voters.
Shortly after the election Lucy Thomas recruited David Chaplin, an adviser to Douglas Alexander, the former Labour frontbencher, to help with the media operation. Softly-spoken but fiercely intelligent, Chaplin was one of the sharpest of a group of Labour aides who were now looking for work. With his sardonic sense of humour, he became the campaign’s weary voice of reason when others indulged in flights of fancy.
Mandelson also emailed Ryan Coetzee, a nuggety forty-two-year-old South African political strategist with a closely trimmed goatee beard who had run the Liberal Democrat election campaign. The Lib Dems had been virtually wiped out in May, losing all but eight of their fifty-seven seats, but Coetzee was a tough pro who understood strategy, polling and message development. He was also used to adversity, having masterminded three election campaigns for the liberal South African party the Democratic Alliance, in an even more hostile electoral environment. In early July Coetzee went to Mandelson’s Marylebone offices, where the peer ‘interviewed me and I interviewed him’. After the wounding experience of the general election Coetzee ‘wasn’t particularly sure I wanted to do it’. But by the end of the conversation, he said, ‘We both concluded it would be quite a good idea.’ Mandelson said, ‘Great! Come into the room and meet all the others.’ They walked next door, to find Will Straw, Lucy Thomas and Andrew Cooper waiting.
On Friday, 3 July 2015 Straw organised a meeting at Mandelson’s office with the three politicians – Mandelson, Green and Alexander – plus Rudd, Cooper, Lucy Thomas and Greg Nugent, the marketing expert who had won plaudits for his work on the branding of the London 2012 Olympics, and had also assisted the Better Together campaign in Scotland. The advertising agency Adam and Eve had done some work on what to call the campaign, and some ideas for logos, but Straw did not regard these as ‘up to scratch’, and as a result of the meeting North, another ad agency, was recruited. They devised the iconic red, white and blue Britain Stronger In Europe logo.
‘You’d have these long meetings where you over-intellectualise a small number of words and colours,’ Straw said. The idea had been that they would abbreviate the title to ‘Stronger In’, but the full name was the product of market research. They wanted to appeal to the patriotic vote, so ‘Britain’ was important, along with the red, white and blue colour scheme. ‘Stronger’, the most important word in the name, tested well in Cooper’s focus groups. They considered just calling the campaign ‘Britain Stronger In’, but as Straw explained, ‘If you didn’t mention Europe at all then people might have thought you were for the Leave side, people wouldn’t know what we were for.’
Straw insists he was aware that their opponents would shorten the name to ‘BSE’, the acronym associated with ‘mad cow disease’ in the 1990s, one of the most difficult periods of UK–EU relations: ‘We did discuss the BSE acronym. We went in with our eyes open.’ Cummings, Stephenson and Oxley would regularly refer to Stronger In as ‘the BSE campaign’, but Straw is adamant that the problem was not the acronym, but that ‘in the end control rather than strength was what people wanted’.
In July, conscious he was running a Labour-heavy team, Straw approached Tom Edmonds and Craig Elder, who had run the Conservatives’ digital team during the general election, and asked them to join Stronger In. Another recruit was Stuart Hand, the Tory head of field operations. He was the man who had trained up Tory organisers to fight the so-called 40–40 marginal seats on which the Conservative majority was built. One of those constituencies was Rossendale and Darwen, where Hand’s efforts had helped to stop Straw himself becoming an MP. When Straw interviewed Hand they shared a ‘wry joke’ about his Conservative opponent Jake Berry.
To run the campaign’s outreach work with businesses and celebrities Straw brought in Gabe Winn, an executive from the energy giant Centrica. Winn was a personable and shrewd operator who was well plugged in to the Westminster world through his work and his brother Giles, a political producer with Sky News. The two had long joked about forming a public-affairs agency called ‘Winn Winn’. Gabe hoped his move into politics would be just as successful.
Having got the nucleus of a campaign team together, the former political rivals gathered for an awayday at the Village Hotel in Farnborough. It went well. A sense of camaraderie developed. The only fly in the ointment was that David Cameron and George Osborne did not want the campaign set up at all. Mandelson had seen Osborne at the Treasury after the general election, and had reassured the chancellor that the campaign would be created in ways that were friendly to the government, allowing Cameron to take over its political leadership when the time came. At that stage Osborne had seemed relaxed. He even joked that he expected the campaign to