All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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We went to see David Lidington. It was a real Reservoir Dogs moment, because there weren’t enough chairs. I can still vividly picture it in my mind. John Redwood got comfortable by crouching, I was leaning against a door sideways, Bernard was leaning against the door frame. And we were just scattered around the room talking about the way it was and the way we wanted it to be, and then telling him we were going to be rebels. It was like a horror film. All our game faces came out, and all of a sudden it was war. It was horrible.’
During the debate in the Commons that followed, Lidington said the government would amend the Bill in the autumn to prevent ministers paying for campaigning activity in the last four weeks before the poll. But the rebels rejected this as inadequate. In the end the government defeated Cash’s amendment by 288 votes to ninety-seven, a majority of nearly two hundred, because Labour abstained, preferring to let the issue run and run. But Baker had shown his strength. In total, twenty-seven Tories defied the whip, including Liam Fox. The former defence secretary voted against his party for the first time in twenty-three years. ‘I had no choice,’ he said. Baker suddenly understood the power he now exerted as the shop steward of the Eurosceptics: ‘We could have won if Labour hadn’t peeled off.’
Baker, who was a teller for the rebels, made sure he was standing nearest the despatch box when the result was announced. Ostentatiously, he reached over and offered his hand to Lidington. Guerrilla war, but not a scorched-earth policy. ‘The reason I did it was to show we weren’t going to make it personal and nasty. Everyone was afraid we’d go back to a caricature of the Maastricht days. The point of these rebellions was always to win the referendum, it wasn’t to be difficult.’
He made this point when he asked to see Cameron in July. They had a cordial meeting, during which Baker explained, ‘I don’t intend to destroy the Conservative Party. I intend to do this in a civilised way.’ He said later, ‘I’m quite sure he thought I was going to be bravely losing, that he was patting me on the head and that I’d be leading twenty-five Conservatives to a brave defeat.’
Bernard Jenkin led the next stage of the battle. Using his position as chairman of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, Jenkin first set up hearings on the purdah issue, summoning the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to explain his position, and then got unanimous backing from the other committee members to write a letter to Lidington at the start of July warning that the change to the rules made it ‘appear that the government is seeking to circumvent proper processes to enable it to use the machinery of government for campaigning activity’.
When the Bill returned to the Commons on 7 September there was a head of steam for action. Vote Leave had spotted another potential minefield. Richard Howell, a cerebral-looking red-headed young man in his early twenties, was known in the office as ‘Ricardo’. A key figure in the research team, Howell was an expert on EU law, and would be called ‘a genius’ by both Cummings and Michael Gove. He spotted that the government were trying to push through plans for a very short campaign. The Bill called for a designation process to choose the official Leave and Remain campaigns. Everyone had assumed that would take place in February, if that was when Cameron got his deal, with a referendum in June or July. But Howell noticed that the government had given themselves wriggle room to delay the designation process until just four weeks before polling day. It was already clear that Vote Leave might face competition for the designation from Arron Banks. The Bill would allow the government to campaign for several months before the official Leave campaign had even been selected, giving Dominic Cummings just four weeks to take the fight to Cameron. Rob Oxley said, ‘We knew purdah would be a fight, but the four-week thing we were significantly worried about. The one member of staff that no one knows about who was most instrumental in us winning was Ricardo. He was the guy who was reading the parliamentary procedure. He understood it even more than Bill Cash.’
Jenkin tabled an amendment that would force the government to set out the rules four months before polling day, to prevent ministers ‘bouncing’ opponents into a quick referendum. This time, Labour lined up with the rebels and the SNP. Jenkin’s amendment was conceded without a vote. Lidington sought to buy off the Tory backbenches by agreeing to amend the Bill, reinstating purdah to ensure a ‘fair fight’, but allowing ministers and officials to talk about the EU as long as it was not directly related to the referendum. But in the main vote the government lost by 312 votes to 285. It was Cameron’s first Commons defeat since the general election. Thirty-seven Tories defied the whip.
Baker was conflicted but euphoric. ‘We won it, because Labour was with us. That was one of the hideous parts of this process, we had to work with Labour and the SNP. But purdah was a big thing. It might have been enough to win the referendum.’
It is tempting to regard the purdah issue as just the kind of obscure constitutional humbug that the Palaeosceptics had specialised in for decades, but it had a material effect on the campaign. The start of purdah on 27 May 2016 coincided almost exactly with the moment the Leave campaign gained the advantage. It prevented Cameron from using the power of government to grab headlines. Paul Stephenson said: ‘If there was no purdah, we’d have been screwed.’
Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, said, ‘There were battles that were fought which ended up immensely important, and the point when the campaign turned was the point when purdah kicked in, and that thing – which seemed like a slightly dry little tussle in the Commons months before – actually might have been the thing that made the difference by ensuring that at least for part of the campaign it was fair.’
Brady himself was a pivotal figure in the fourth battle.
David Campbell Bannerman, the co-chairman of Conservatives for Britain, wrote a strategy paper before the general election, which he showed to Matthew Elliott, laying out some of the lessons of the Scottish referendum: ‘My main concern was always that we weren’t caught with our pants down. The key lesson was, you’ve got to neutralise the party machine. In Aberdeen, where I was, Labour got their vote out from the Better Together office. I thought, “We are in trouble if we are up against these type of machines.” So part of Conservatives for Britain’s role was to neutralise the Conservative Party.’
Steve Baker recruited Steve Bell, the president of the National Convention of the Conservative Party, as a vice-president of Conservatives for Britain, and urged him to use his influence. Brady, as chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, also went to work on Cameron and the party board, making the case that the party would ‘tear itself apart’ if its activists, two-thirds of whom backed Brexit, were told to side with Remain.
On 21 September the Conservative Party board unanimously agreed that the party and its staff would remain neutral. Cameron himself proposed the solution. The decision had two practical consequences. It meant that the Remain campaign had effectively lost £7 million to spend, the amount the Conservative Party would have been permitted by the Electoral Commission. ‘The equivalent of the entire budget of Vote Leave was taken out of the Remain campaign by keeping the Conservative Party neutral,’ says Baker.
The second consequence of the decision was that Tory MPs would be barred from using their own canvassing data to target voters during the referendum: ‘CCHQ will not supply funds or voter information to either campaign,’ the party said. The decision upset pro-Europeans like Alistair Burt: ‘I felt disappointed that the Conservative Party, the great European party over the years, had to fight this with its hands tied behind its back. I felt ashamed that we weren’t able to say, “We are the Conservative Party, in favour of the European Union.” But I’ve no doubt that had we done so there would have been mass resignations. For the long-term interests of the party those voices were right and I was wrong.’
Conservatives for Britain were not the only ones mounting ambushes in the Commons. On 19 November a combination of Labour and the Liberal Democrats passed an amendment to the Bill in the House of Lords to give sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds the vote, as they had had during the Scottish referendum. The government, this time with the backing of Baker and his supporters, killed off the plan, which Cameron saw as a precedent that would only help Labour in general elections. The sceptics saw it as a chance to prevent an influx of young voters likely to back Remain.
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