All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
Читать онлайн книгу.
cooler, and complained that Mandelson’s actions were premature, that the creation of the campaign would annoy the Tory Party, appear to pre-empt his negotiations in Europe, and even undermine them. He made clear his concern that a campaign run by all the pro-European ‘usual suspects’ would be counterproductive. In September he sent the same message to Mandelson via a mutual friend, urging him and the others to ‘back off’.
In further conversations Osborne explained that the government, which was holding open the at least theoretical possibility that it might campaign to leave, couldn’t just sign up to a pro-European campaign. Privately he thought Mandelson and co. were ‘unrealistic’ because they wanted ‘full government involvement’ even at this early stage.
Mandelson stuck to his guns, explaining to both the prime minister and the chancellor, ‘I have directed or chaired three general election campaigns, ’87, ’97 and 2010, and I know what’s involved. You cannot create a national campaign from a standing start a couple of months before polling day, especially when you are having to counter twenty years of relentless anti-European propaganda in Britain.’
Damian Green also went to see Cameron after the election, but told colleagues ‘it wasn’t a meeting of minds’. Green argued that there would be a need for a ‘pro-European Conservative voice in this debate’, but felt the prime minister had only seen him ‘out of politeness’, and nothing came of the meeting.
Straw tried to smooth things over, going for a pint with Daniel Korski, the deputy head of the Number 10 policy unit, who advised Cameron on EU affairs. ‘They felt that it wasn’t inevitable that we would become the designated campaign,’ Straw recalled. Indeed, Korski was arguing internally that the Tories should set up their own, separate, campaign. As late as November 2015 he and Mats Persson, the former head of the Open Europe think tank who had been recruited by Number 10, offered to leave and set one up. They suggested that Open Europe itself might be converted into a campaign vehicle.
‘The problem was that Cameron did not accept that an all-party campaign was needed,’ said Mandelson. ‘Early on he let it be known to people like Ken Clarke that he didn’t intend to run it that way. But Cameron had not thought this through. He was thinking in Tory Party terms, assuming that the voters would follow him as prime minister and party leader when the time came. He also didn’t appear to understand his own legislation, which required a designated campaign on the Remain side to reflect cross-party opinion.’
The prime minister’s attitude would shape his approach to Stronger In throughout the short campaign, when key decisions continued to be made in Downing Street, rather than at the campaign’s headquarters in Cannon Street. The most serious immediate impact of Cameron’s disapproval was that donors and businesses were deterred from signing up. A senior figure in the campaign said, ‘They very actively told businesses not to cooperate, saying it would be regarded as a hostile act inside Number 10, so the campaign didn’t have the ability to get people lined up.’
In accounts of this period in the press, the finger of blame has been pointed at Korski, the point man in Number 10 for many businesses. Korski says this claim is ‘a total fantasy’, and denies that he was proactively calling anyone. Instead, businesses called him after Sajid Javid, the business secretary, addressed the CBI on 29 June 2015 and rebuked the organisation for its pro-EU stance. Korski told those who rang him, ‘It’s not for me to tell you what to do. You’ve got responsibilities to shareholders, to staff.’ He did not tell business leaders to say nothing. But he did advise some of them, ‘If you’re a very rich oil company with most operations outside the UK, or a tax base that’s structured in a way that means you’re not domiciled, think carefully about whether you have a legitimate voice in this debate.’ To those who wanted to help Cameron he suggested, ‘It’s obviously better to say that you want to reform Europe, because if you say you want to stay in, then you’re going to expose yourself to people who say, “You don’t have a legitimate voice because you’re a billionaire.”’ It is easy to see how this friendly advice might have deterred some from putting their heads above the parapet.
Roland Rudd, who ran the initial fundraising operation, achieved a breakthrough when he began approaching investment banks. He managed to get donations from Goldman Sachs, and that opened doors at JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Citibank. Rudd raised £1.5 million that way, and another half a million from ‘big chunky donors’ like Ian Taylor, Lloyd Dorfman and Andrew Law. Andrew Feldman, the Conservative Party chairman, got David Harding, a billionaire financier, on board. He became the treasurer. In the end, most of the financial support came from Conservative donors.
Over the summer and into the autumn, Ryan Coetzee worked with Andrew Cooper to draw up Stronger In’s strategy. By the end of November he had completed the campaign ‘war book’ and ‘messaging bible’. ‘If you’ve not written it down, it’s not a strategy,’ Cooper said. ‘The war book is everything we know: the segmentation, our strongest messages, “This is our message in a sentence”, “This is our message in a paragraph”, “This is our message in a page”, media strategy, campaign grid. That’s the Bible.’
The goal was to target the two persuadable groups, the ‘Hearts v Heads’ and the ‘Disengaged Middle’. Cooper conducted regression analysis, a statistical device to estimate the relationship between variables, and discovered that both groups were susceptible to arguments about economic risk. Coetzee said, ‘The two in-play segments in the middle believed it was riskier to leave than it was to stay. And when you look to the regressions, you found that the risk question was really driving the voting intention responses.’ That appeared to be proof that Remain’s target voters were not just concerned about economic risk, they were prepared to change their vote as a result.
Coetzee also accurately predicted what they would be up against. Even before Vote Leave had published its ‘Take Back Control’ slogan, Straw said, ‘Ryan put together what he thought their script would be, and control was right at the heart of it.’ Coetzee also spotted where Cummings would hit them hardest: ‘Immigration, sovereignty and cost – those were the three we identified as our biggest weaknesses,’ said Straw.
To help draw up responses, Cooper and Coetzee conducted big ‘deliberative’ focus-group sessions, with six tables of ten people being quizzed simultaneously on every aspect of the campaign. The sessions, effectively six focus groups at once, lasted seven hours. ‘We did that in October and again in February,’ said Cooper. ‘You take them through: we say “this”, they say “that”. Say what our rebuttal of that point is. “What do you say now?” We’re playing clips of people, to test precise messages. We’re giving them new material, campaigning literature, graphics. That hugely enriched the campaign planning.’
The campaign had also acquired a base, though not an ideal one. Straw rented offices at 14 Dowgate Hill, fifty yards from Cannon Street station. The rather poky suite featured a main meeting room so small that only eight people could sit comfortably around the table, and a spillover basement room known as ‘the bunker’, situated incongruously between an agency for film extras and a Botox clinic, whose facilities were used by at least one campaign staffer.
Before Stronger In could launch, it needed a board and a chairman to front the campaign. Mandelson and Rudd wanted someone with a business background – ideally a Tory woman. Damian Green recalled, ‘The fear was it would look like a New Labour rump, and we were very keen that shouldn’t happen.’ Karren Brady, the West Ham United vice-chairman and star of The Apprentice, was approached, but she declined. Carolyn McCall, the boss of EasyJet, also turned the job down. ‘Serving CEOs found it much harder to take on an additional task,’ Straw recalled. The leading contenders were Richard Reed, the founder of Innocent smoothies, and Stuart Rose, the former chairman of Marks & Spencer, who Cameron had let it be known was his preferred option. The main attraction of Rose was that he had previously been a supporter of Matthew Elliott’s Business for Britain, and that meant his recruitment could be presented as a defection.
Lucy Thomas said, ‘Stuart was exactly what we needed as chair to make the pragmatic, reasonable and patriotic case. He’d run one of the best-loved British brands, and had a reputation for being a highly successful businessman as well as a nice, decent bloke.