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the launch phase of Conservatives for Britain was a very deliberated guerrilla operation. You have to keep people frightened. That’s the guerrilla strategy: frighten them, use overwhelming force, disguise purpose.’
The launch of Conservatives for Britain was a piece of ambush marketing which left Downing Street and the Tory whips’ office in a spin. Baker gathered support in secret, and on Sunday, 7 June 2015 he announced that Conservatives for Britain was in business and already had fifty MPs backing it. A week later the number had more than doubled. The victims of his ‘frighten them’ strategy were his own party leadership. ‘They had to know they really were going to deliver fundamental change,’ he said.
Like any guerrilla commander, Baker set out to harry the enemy, beginning a daily drip-feed of information to the media as more and more MPs signed up: ‘How many have you got?’ ‘Oh, sixty-five, seventy-five, eighty … I’m not doing any more numbers until I hit a big number … now it’s a hundred!’ Baker was careful never to lie. Only that first weekend did he take a chance, telling journalists, ‘We’ve got fifty and I’m confident that next week it will be one hundred.’ He recalled, ‘It bloody well was as well. I took a gamble that I’d get another fifty, and I did.’
When news of Conservatives for Britain broke, the whips, under their new chief Mark Harper, launched a frantic effort to assess the scale of the problem. ‘To be honest, I think they’re a bit frightened,’ one MP said that weekend.
Baker realised that he could not employ a totally scorched-earth strategy. The referendum was a civil war within the Conservative Party. Baker wanted to win, but he also wanted there to be a Tory Party left standing at the end of the process. He resolved to act with politeness and decency throughout the battles ahead. ‘The central point was to not break the Conservative Party,’ he said. Baker led by example. When he launched Conservatives for Britain he had not told his whip, George Hollingbery, who was away: ‘I bought him a bottle of whisky to say sorry.’ He continued to shower the whips with gifts: ‘I bought them flowers and chocolates, and I’ve tried to be nice to the whips whilst making their lives miserable.’ On 13 June he emailed all members of the CfB mailing list, ‘Above all, please remain respectful to other colleagues, come what may.’
Downing Street initially dismissed the group as a mere talking shop, and pointed out that many of those signing up would probably not back Brexit. Like Business for Britain, Baker’s outfit was ostensibly trying to stiffen Cameron’s spine in the renegotiation rather than oppose him outright. But having built his army, the general intended to use it. He believed time was tight: ‘We kept hearing the government’s intention was to move to a referendum extremely fast, before we had any chance to organise.’
The Referendum Bill had been published in May, and the Eurosceptics were concerned that it stacked the campaign against them. Baker planned his military campaign. ‘There were five early battles we had to win,’ he said. The first battle seemed esoteric at the time, but may have been crucial. Following the Scottish referendum, Cameron’s team believed that the SNP had derived a great deal of benefit from owning the ‘Yes’ side of the question on the ballot paper. Voting positively for independence seemed a more attractive thing to do than voting ‘No’ for the status quo. They resolved not to make the same mistake again. When the Referendum Bill was published at the end of May the EU question read: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?’ David Cameron would own the ‘Yes’ vote this time.
The sceptics protested. It would ultimately be for the Electoral Commission, the watchdog that oversees such issues, to decide the wording. There was precedent for the approach the government had taken. In 1975 the public had been asked, ‘Do you think the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community?’ That had delivered a 67 per cent share of the vote for ‘Yes’.
The importance of the question was highlighted by polling from ICM, published in early June. It found that if voters were asked, ‘Should the UK remain a member of the EU?’ 59 per cent said yes. But if the question was, ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ only 55 per cent opted to remain. The Eurosceptics seized on this evidence. ‘It seemed to reveal there was 4 per cent in what the question was, whether it was a “yes/no” question or a “remain/leave” question,’ said Baker. ‘We put forward a number of colleagues together to write to the Commission saying we strongly believe it should be “remain/leave”, not “yes/no”.’
On 1 September the Electoral Commission announced that it was changing the question to ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ The watchdog had commissioned its own research, and found that while the original question was ‘not significantly leading’ it was doubly unbalanced, since only the ‘Remain’ option was explained in the question, and the ‘Yes’ response was for the status quo. Baker’s guerrillas had won an important victory, the significance of which was only understood nine months later. ‘Bearing in mind ICM thought there was 4 per cent in that question, that battle alone could have won the campaign,’ Baker said.
The second battle concerned the timing of the referendum. Cameron was expected to call it for spring 2016, and ministers saw the advantages of holding it on the same day as the local elections in England on 5 May. Elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly were also due on the same day. Prior to the publication of the Bill, the Electoral Commission had recommended that the referendum not be held on that date. But the wording of the Bill allowed the government to combine the vote with ‘any election’. In early June Cameron said, ‘I think the British public are quite capable of going to a polling booth and making two important decisions rather than just one.’
The Eurosceptics envisaged Conservative activists being asked to deliver double-sided campaign literature, urging a Tory vote in council elections and a Remain vote in the other. On this, crucially, they had the support of the Labour Party, which feared the referendum would boost turnout in Tory areas and damage their local election effort. In a bid to avoid a rebellion and a Commons defeat, the government performed a U-turn, and ruled out a referendum on 5 May. It was another morale-boosting win for Baker’s team, setting them up nicely for the first real Commons showdown on the second reading of the Bill.
Baker’s third battle, and perhaps the most important, was over the issue of purdah. ‘Purdah’ is the civil service term for the time between the formal start of an election campaign and the announcement of the results. During that period, government officials are forbidden from doing anything that might influence the vote one way or another. In pretty well all British elections there is a purdah period, usually of twenty-eight days. But buried in the small print of the Bill was a plan to scrap purdah altogether. When this was spotted by the Eurosceptics they immediately smelt a rat. They believed there was nothing to stop Cameron enlisting the Whitehall machine to pump out Remain propaganda until polling day. Owen Paterson accused the government of ‘seeking to bend the rules to leave it free to fix the vote in its favour, right up until polling day’.1
Ministers argued that applying strict purdah rules during the EU referendum campaign would make government dealings with Brussels ‘unworkable’, and would open the door to legal action if a minister so much as made a statement on the EU. But the sceptics were unmoved, and when the Bill had its second reading in the Commons on the evening of 16 June they decided the time had come for a show of strength. They met in Baker’s office in Portcullis House and agreed that they would mount the first major rebellion against a majority Tory government in twenty-three years. In an email to his MPs, Baker joked that they ‘will be enjoying the tender pastoral attention of the whips’, but urged them to avoid ‘prevarication’, and to ‘tell them directly that you will be voting for [the] amendment’.
‘I will never forget the night of the first purdah rebellion,’ says Baker. He walked with John Redwood, Owen Paterson, Bernard Jenkin and Bill Cash to the office of David Lidington, a ‘little cell underneath the House of Commons’. It was a big moment for Baker. Lidington had helped get his name onto the Conservative candidates list, and Baker considered him ‘my neighbour and friend’. Now he was there to tell him the Eurosceptics planned to