All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
Читать онлайн книгу.
stressed the positives: ‘The EU’s single market offers the best hope of cooperating across borders to support workers’ and to ‘protect consumers’, and ‘enhances the UK’s influence in the world’ – straight out of the JIGSI playbook. The Milne-Corbyn version, which was published, stressed the ‘widely shared feeling that Europe is something of an exclusive club, rather than a democratic forum for social progress’, condemned the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and observed, ‘The treatment of Greece has appalled many who consider themselves pro-European internationalists.’ Benn was ‘horrified’ when he saw the article. A Labour official said, ‘They wanted to argue Europe was shit but let’s stay in it. Jeremy didn’t win his campaign by saying, “I’m old and disgusting and I look like a hobo that’s pissed himself.” He said, “I’m great, look at me, I’m Jesus Christ.”’
Alan Johnson wanted a reassurance that he would still be leading the campaign. He met Corbyn the Thursday after his election. Johnson found him vague, unfocused and keen to talk about almost anything other than the matter in hand: ‘We had a conversation more about books. He was very interested in my books, he’s tried to write five or six himself. He never actually said, “I want you to carry on with this job,” or anything about Europe at all really. We just had a natter, and I was happy coming out that he hadn’t sacked me! I wasn’t really trying to get anything from it, I was trying to get a feel for getting him into a position where he’d come out and say “I’m for remaining in the EU.”’
If Johnson had known how difficult it would be to get Corbyn to say that – or even to get another meeting with him, he might have tried a little harder to pin the leader down.
One reason why Corbyn had been prepared to bow to the overwhelming pressure in the party to approve official support for Remain was that the trade unions were firm supporters of the EU. Over the summer Brian Duggan put Alan Johnson, a former postman who rose to be general secretary of the Communication Workers Union, in front of as many union bosses as he could. Since he was running an independent campaign, Johnson was able to reassure them that they would not have to ‘hold hands with David Cameron and George Osborne’. A campaign source said, ‘We needed to get as many of the unions as possible on the side of Remain, both from a political point of view, because they could talk to their members, but also from a financial point of view, so they could make active financial contributions and donations to the campaign.’
Johnson’s key phone call was to Len McCluskey, the boss of Unite, Britain’s biggest union and Labour’s biggest donor. Unite would eventually contribute around a quarter of the campaign’s £4 million budget.
One reason why most unions got on board is that a secret operation had been under way over the summer to ensure that David Cameron dropped from his renegotiation any attempt to repatriate control of social and employment legislation. In January there had been reports that the prime minister intended to demand an opt-out from EU employment social protection laws such as the working-time directive and the agency workers’ directive. By August the idea was dead. Senior figures in Labour and the trade union movement, including Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, made private representations to Downing Street making it clear that they would not support the campaign if social and employment legislation was thrown into doubt. Eventually Ivan Rogers, the UK’s permanent representative in Brussels, sent word that ‘they weren’t going to be part of the renegotiation’. A Labour source confirmed, ‘We said, “We cannot guarantee Labour’s political support for a remain campaign or for a remain vote if you do this.” Cameron wasn’t going to go near it, because we put sufficient pressure on him. That allowed us to go back to the trade unions and say, “You need to front up for Remain.”’
The final piece in the Labour jigsaw was to reaffirm Labour’s policy at Corbyn’s first party conference in charge, to bind his hands going into the campaign. First they had to kill off a motion tabled by the GMB union that would have delayed Labour from making any decision until after Cameron had his deal – the same argument John McDonnell had been making. That would have been followed by a special conference to determine Labour’s position. ‘That would have been an absolute disaster,’ says Alan Johnson. ‘That would have meant the Labour Party had nothing to say on this issue on a timetable determined by the PM until he came back in February, then we’d have had to scramble around just as the campaign was beginning. It was a nonsense.’
Johnson spoke to Paul Kenny, the outgoing general secretary of the GMB, who said, ‘Don’t worry, Alan, we’ll sort it out.’ Kenny went to work with Pat McFadden and agreed that the GMB would work to pass a differently-worded motion which summarised Labour’s existing pro-EU policy. It ended up passing without a vote, and established two important principles. The key section read: ‘Conference supports the membership of the EU as a strategic as well as an economic asset to Britain and the Labour Party approves of UK membership of the EU.’ Secondly, it made clear that Labour would not share a platform with the Tories, and reinforced the support for EU employment rights: ‘Conference opposes working with any campaign or faction in the forthcoming Referendum which supports or advocates cutting employment or social rights for people working in the United Kingdom.’
The Europhile faction was amazed that they had got the motion through without meddling from Corbyn’s advisers, particularly Seumas Milne, his director of communications, and Andrew Fisher, his director of policy. ‘It pulled one over on his advisers,’ said Johnson, ‘because Jeremy’s advisers – Seumas Milne, Andy Fisher – absolutely wanted to leave. They might be leaders of the Labour Party, but they’ve got the hammer and sickle tattooed somewhere.’
Another source said Corbyn’s office was too busy enjoying his leadership lap of honour to understand the significance of what had happened: ‘They hadn’t realised that we had locked in Labour to a pro-European remain position.’
Labour In for Britain finally launched at the start of December. Alan Johnson was satisfied with where he had got to: ‘We’ve got the leader – who’s not in favour of the EU – saying he’ll campaign for it. And we’ve got a unanimous decision on a very good motion.’ When the launch occurred, though, ‘Jeremy didn’t come anywhere near it.’
That was only the start of Johnson’s problems, but as David Cameron watched from afar that autumn he had every hope of having the Labour Party on-side when he completed his renegotiation. The prime minister’s bigger problem was that he was facing a well-coordinated campaign of attacks from his own benches to water down the Referendum Bill.
6
Steve Baker does not look like a military commander. In a decade as a Royal Air Force aerospace engineer he had never fired a shot in anger. As a devout Christian he hated war, and helped set up an educational charity called the Cobden Centre to ‘promote social progress through honest money, free trade and peace’.
Yet when he was appointed commanding officer of the Conservative Eurosceptics in June 2015, it was as if Baker had been waiting for the opportunity to lead men into battle all his life. Politics is one of those arenas of conflict where armchair generals are just as effective as the physically brave, but no one could doubt Baker’s bravery either. One of the reasons for his success at Conservatives for Britain (CfB) was his willingness, politically, to put himself in harm’s way. Like all the best infantry officers he realised he should never ask anyone to do anything he was not prepared to do himself. Initially at least, it was a lonely business. ‘When I launched myself out early over the top of the parapet, in a government with quite a slim majority, my colleagues were actually quite happy to hold my coat,’ he observed later.
On assuming control of CfB, Baker did what any general worth their salt has done for the last millennium – he read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. He then picked up a book called The Thirty-Three Strategies of War, by Robert Greene, which explains how to adapt the strategies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Carl von Clausewitz, Erwin Rommel and Hannibal to life and politics. From