All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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their help recruiting Conservatives.’
Top of the list of Stronger In ‘asks’ was help in hiring Jim Messina, the wizard of target-voter modelling in both Barack Obama and David Cameron’s re-election efforts. Roland Rudd had been briefing journalists since June that he wanted to recruit the American, but Messina had played hard to get. Coetzee had approached another set of US strategists, Civis Analytics, a New York firm founded by Dan Wagner, a Messina protégé from Obama’s 2012 campaign. The talks had got as far as a draft contract.
Coetzee had spoken to Cooper and said, ‘Andrew, the clock is ticking, because it takes time to put this stuff together.’ To get maximum value from voter-targeting data the campaign wanted to use it to send out leaflets and emails before the regulated spending period kicked in on 15 April. After that they would only be allowed to spend £7 million on their campaign. The trigger for the meeting was a warning from Cooper to Downing Street that the campaign had been ‘freaked out’ by Messina’s refusal to engage. Straw said, ‘We basically got to the stage where if Messina wasn’t going to work with us, then we needed to crack on with someone else.’
Gilbert and Oliver both began the meeting sceptical about joining forces with Stronger In. They both left believing they could do business together. Crucial to winning over the Conservatives was Coetzee’s description of the target voter as someone who was a persuadable Eurosceptic, rather than an enthusiast for Brussels. ‘I think their anxiety was, “Are these guys a bunch of Euronuts?”’ Coetzee said. ‘We understood that the marginal voter was concerned about the economy and immigration, and needed a “hardheaded case”. It was immediately apparent to everybody that we were all speaking the same language.’
Gilbert told Coetzee months later, ‘Our default position was “No”. Our default was “Yes” after the meeting.’ Craig Oliver’s view was that there were benefits to the cross-party effort. ‘Serious consideration was given to setting up another campaign,’ a senior Downing Street source said. ‘The danger would be that we would lose any contact with the other political groups that wanted to remain – and it would be seen as a Tory-only Remain vehicle.’
Straw recalled, ‘I think what they realised from those meetings was that we were serious, professional, we had a proper plan in place and we were in a position to fight a referendum.’ Crucially, the Tories were prepared to put the call in to Messina. Coetzee said, ‘We got the Messina show on the road, but frankly months later than it should have been.’
Relations were cemented shortly afterwards when Gilbert joined Populus, Cooper’s polling company, as a consultant so he could work more overtly for the campaign. In December and January there were also clandestine meetings between Straw, Gilbert, Oliver and Ameet Gill in the basement of the Conrad Hotel, next to St James’s Park tube station.
Despite some hiccups, Stronger In had put together a talented team, and had won the trust of Downing Street. Now they needed the third leg of the Remain stool to step up – the Labour Party.
5
The moment Jeremy Corbyn revealed what he really thought about the European Union came at a hustings during the Labour leadership contest in Warrington – the final such event organised by the party. It was Saturday, 25 July 2015, and the battle to succeed Ed Miliband was entering a crucial phase. The Blairite Liz Kendall, after an early flurry of media attention, had faded. Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper were locked in an ever more bitter battle to be the flagwaver of the party moderates, the volume increasing as the contested ideological space narrowed. To the incredulity of the party’s power-brokers, Corbyn, a sixty-six-year-old veteran from the hard left who had spent his career in exile on the backbenches, had emerged as the favourite to win.
Corbyn was a very unlikely leader. A rebellious backbencher, to the point of parody, for thirty years, he had only run because other members of the hard left like John McDonnell and Diane Abbott had already tried and failed. He only made the ballot paper because grandees like Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan had loaned him their nominations in order to ‘widen the debate’. Now he was barrelling to victory on a wave of support from enthusiastic young leftists who admired his plain speaking and apparent personal decency – a sort of ageing Forrest Gump – backed up by Bennites who learned how to fight procedural battles in the 1980s and entryists from Trotskyite fringe groups. Having found no candidate they thought could win a general election, Labour activists resolved to elect the one who made them feel best about themselves in defeat.
Much ink has been spilled about Corbyn’s true views on Europe, but no one seriously disputes that for much of his career he was a dedicated and consistent opponent of British membership of the European Union. In the 1975 referendum Corbyn voted to leave. Labour’s attitude to Europe changed when Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission, made a keynote speech at the 1988 Trades Union Congress and outlined plans for ‘social Europe’, where workers’ rights were enshrined in international law and social benefits were provided across the Continent. But Corbyn remained a Eurosceptic. Indeed, he became a close friend of the Tory Palaeosceptics campaigning against the Maastricht Treaty. ‘Jeremy is a rigidly stuck in the seventies politician,’ says the then shadow lord chancellor Charlie Falconer. ‘That had made him – and he was quite proud of this – quite a pal of the Maastricht rebels. They had always counted Jeremy in as part of their calculations. Jeremy is somebody who almost prides himself on his good relations with obstreperous right-wing Tory rebels.’
At the Warrington hustings, Burnham, Cooper, Kendall and Corbyn were all asked directly if they would ‘rule out voting “No” or campaigning for “No”’ ahead of the referendum. The first three all ruled it out; Corbyn did not: ‘No I wouldn’t rule it out … Because Cameron quite clearly follows an agenda which is about trading away workers’ rights, is about trading away environmental protection, is about trading away much of what is in the social chapter.’
If that part of his answer was at least sympathetic to notions of a social Europe, he went on to make clear that his objection to the EU stemmed from a belief that it was too friendly to big companies, the ‘capitalist club’ that other left-wingers had criticised before Delors came along: ‘The EU also knowingly, deliberately maintains a number of tax havens and tax-evasion posts around the Continent – Luxembourg, Monaco and a number of others. I think we should be making demands: universal workers’ rights, universal environmental protection, end the race to the bottom on corporate taxation, end the race to the bottom in working wage protection.’ He concluded, ‘We should be negotiating on those demands rather than saying blanketly we’re going to support whatever Cameron comes out with in one, two years’ time, whenever he finally decides to hold this referendum.’
Corbyn’s views caused a crisis at the top of the party because they were at odds with Labour policy, confirmed by the acting leader Harriet Harman after the general election, in two key regards. Harman, backed up by Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, and Charlie Falconer, had ditched Labour’s opposition to holding a referendum, which some saw as a contributory factor in Ed Miliband’s defeat. She had also confirmed that the party supported Cameron’s plan to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with Brussels and the Referendum Bill to set up the process. Most importantly, she had confirmed that in all circumstances Labour would campaign to stay in.
‘We did that on the basis that we’d lost a general election, and the Tories had got an overall majority,’ said Falconer. ‘Therefore the right thing to do was to accept that. But we did it explicitly on the basis that we were very pro-Europe.’ There was no opposition in the shadow cabinet.
Harman’s other key decision was that she wanted to set up a Labour campaign separate from the umbrella Remain effort which became Stronger In. Many Labour politicians believed it had been a mistake to campaign alongside the Conservatives during the Scottish independence referendum. Labour’s involvement in Better Together had led to them being branded ‘tartan Tories’ by Nationalists, and was blamed for the party losing all but one