All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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happy to join the board, did not want to be chairman. Straw and Coetzee visited him in late September, and he said ‘definitely, categorically’ that he would not do it. Rudd received the same message. But Rose was finally persuaded by a barrage of calls virtually on the eve of the launch in early October, including one from George Osborne. Rose said, ‘My first judgement was no, my second judgement was no, my third judgement was no – and then I failed to listen to my judgement. I was a square peg in a round hole.’ ‘On the Friday before the Monday launch, they didn’t have a chairman,’ a senior Tory said. ‘George got him to do it. But that was very late in the day, and it meant he had almost no time to prepare or be briefed, which is why he didn’t perform brilliantly at the launch.’
That was putting things mildly. Even before he spoke, Vote Leave’s researchers had dug up comments Rose had made in April dismissing fears that leaving the EU would cause companies to quit the UK as ‘scaremongering’. The night before the launch, the campaign briefed Westminster journalists that Rose would use his speech to dismiss those backing Leave as ‘the Quitters’. But when he spoke on Monday, 12 October he refused to use the phrase, rendering every morning newspaper’s story inaccurate. Rose recalls: ‘I let myself down. I’m not used to being given a very closely drafted brief. I’m used to interpreting things in my own way.’ If the press pack was unimpressed by that, their ire was greatly increased when Rose refused to take any media questions. The location of the launch, a former east London brewery, made the job of the parliamentary sketch writers too easy. References to Stronger In’s failure to organise a piss-up in such an establishment abounded in the following day’s papers.
To compound the problem, Rose then gave an interview to Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson of The Times in which he admitted, ‘Nothing is going to happen if we come out of Europe in the first five years, probably. There will be absolutely no change.’ Steve Baker emailed the Eurosceptic MPs to say, ‘We should make Lord Rose an honorary vice president of Conservatives for Britain. There is no truth in the rumour that the noble lord is a CfB infiltrator, notwithstanding the evidence to the contrary.’ Rose’s reputation as a gaffemeister supreme was set, and he enhanced it in January 2016 when he did a pre-interview soundcheck for Sky News and forgot the name of the campaign. Footage emerged of him saying, ‘I’m chairman of Stay in Britain … Better in Britain campaign … Right, start again. I’m Stuart Rose and I’m the chairman of the Better in Britain campaign … the Better Stay in Britain campaign.’ During the campaign he would tell a Commons Select Committee that Brexit would cause wages to rise. Afterwards, he felt ‘battered and bruised’ by the experience.
Lucy Thomas did not feel the Stronger In team could criticise Rose, who had had no yearning for the limelight, and was only doing the job ‘as a favour’: ‘As with any successful business person doing political campaigning, it’s really hard. You’re used to answering factual questions about your business, not tricky political issues. So you answer what you’ve been asked directly, but don’t realise that how it is interpreted might trip you up.’ A politician involved with the campaign was less understanding: ‘You hear business people say things like, “Why aren’t politicians like us?” Well, business people discover that politicians have craft skills as well, like not saying stupid things while on public platforms.’ Rose was a good chairman, however – ‘consensual and encouraging’, according to Mandelson.
Nevertheless, to have the front man neutralised so quickly made it difficult for Stronger In to build public momentum.
Lining up Tory board members was no simpler than locating a chairman. In the summer Mandelson called Ruth Davidson, the Tory leader in Scotland and one of the party’s brightest hopes, to see if she would join. As someone who wanted to be as good at politics as she could be, Davidson saw the opportunity to learn from Mandelson as great ‘career development’. But after the Better Together campaign, she realised she could not both campaign for Stronger In and fight the Scottish elections in May. She told Mandelson, ‘I’m really sorry, mate. I’ve got a really big election coming up. This could be a breakthrough election for the Conservatives in Scotland.’ She said later, ‘Having been part of Better Together, having seen how much it saps out of you, I just didn’t have the capacity for it.’ In the event, Davidson would secure a breakthrough, beating Labour into third place. Her chance to play a role in the referendum would come later.
The full membership of the Stronger In board was designed to show breadth and experience, bringing together the political, business, education, culture and military establishments. At its furthest extremes it included General Sir Peter Wall, the former chief of the General Staff, and June Sarpong, the former MTV and T4 presenter who is now a panellist on ITV’s Loose Women. Both Karren Brady and Richard Reed agreed to serve. In addition it was announced that the three living former prime ministers – Sir John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – plus Sir Richard Branson, Britain’s best-known businessman, were also supporting the campaign.
The Rose débâcle suggested a need for a stronger media operation. In the autumn David Chaplin, who had been handling most of the story briefing with the lobby journalists, wrote a memo recommending that Straw bring in a heavy hitter to be the campaign’s mouthpiece, allowing Chaplin himself to step back and do what he was best at, planning coverage over a longer period. From the beginning the campaign had one person in mind who was battle-ready to take on Vote Leave’s Paul Stephenson.
James McGrory was educated at an independent school, but you would never know it. A rake-thin, ginger-haired mockney bruiser, he loved playing football and deploying sporting analogies in his attack quotes. He combined acute news judgement with an irrepressible thirst for placing stories (and not a little ability at the bar), plus the respect of Westminster journalists. For five years as Nick Clegg’s spokesman he had ably fought the Liberal Democrat corner against newspapers which preferred to ridicule his boss. He never took anything personally, despite caring more than most about his cause. While others dealt with the Lib Dem wipeout at the election with alcohol and new careers in public affairs, McGrory disappeared to lick his wounds. Lucy Thomas first tried to sign him up in May. ‘I was not in a frame of mind to get back into a campaign,’ he said. But when Will Straw called later that summer he realised, ‘This is the fight of your life – it was quite an easy decision in the end.’
McGrory’s return to SW1 was greeted with mouthwatering expectation by those who had dealt with him before. The referendum would pitch two of the best spin doctors of their generation against each other. Both McGrory and Stephenson went into the tackle with their studs showing. To use an analogy about the Premier League’s two greatest hardmen, which McGrory himself had sometimes deployed when discussing alpha-male journalists, it was ‘a case of Keane against Vieira’.
McGrory joined at the start of December 2015. ‘James added a huge amount of professionalism and energy,’ says Chaplin. ‘He was not willing to let anything go, he had fire in his belly for the smallest story, and was exactly what the campaign needed. For James it was personal and professional. He wanted to win, and he believed in it.’ Lucy Thomas called him a man ‘with the mouth of a football fan and the heart of a true sandal-wearing liberal’. McGrory saw his brief as to ‘dial it up a couple of notches’. He soon did. They noticed at Vote Leave: ‘We thought their press operation improved dramatically,’ said Rob Oxley. ‘Suddenly we started taking a bit of fire.’
McGrory’s appointment meant Stronger In were ready to go into battle. Downing Street now had to decide whether they wanted to share a trench with them.
During the autumn Cameron remained ‘very nervous about any contact with the campaign’, Straw recalled, but clandestine meetings had begun with senior figures from Downing Street. The most important came on 26 October 2015, since it decided whether there would be a campaign at all. Straw, Coetzee, Thomas and Mandelson met Stephen Gilbert at Mandelson’s offices in Marylebone. Gilbert was joined after a while by Craig Oliver, Cameron’s spin doctor. ‘They were coming to check us out,’ says Coetzee.
Straw took the Tories through the organisational structure of the campaign and the relationship with the board. Coetzee gave a presentation on strategy, messaging and the progress made with building a predictive model for targeting voters. Thomas ran through the media plans. Straw said,