All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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‘The votes-at-sixteen decision in retrospect was a big mistake,’ Will Straw said after the referendum, when Stronger In had lost by 1.2 million votes. Had there been a 75 per cent turnout among sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, which would have been consistent with what happened during the Scottish independence referendum, and had three-quarters of them voted Remain, which would be consistent with what eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds did in the EU referendum, it would have represented a net gain of 650,000 votes for Stronger In. That would not, in itself, have been enough to get them over the finish line, but Straw believed ‘it would have changed the atmospherics of the campaign’. If one in four of those young people had persuaded their parents to vote a different way, Remain would have won.
The fifth and final battle which Baker had mapped out months before came to a head in January 2016. Throughout 2015 David Cameron had insisted that ministers were bound by collective responsibility, and would have to resign if they wanted to campaign against him in the referendum. This position provoked fury among the Eurosceptics, and Graham Brady repeatedly raised the issue. Cameron knew it would be a problem. When he appointed John Whittingdale culture secretary just after the general election, Whittingdale told him, ‘You do know I would probably campaign for Brexit.’ The same message was conveyed by Iain Duncan Smith.
Chris Grayling, the leader of the Commons, and Theresa Villiers, the Northern Ireland secretary, forced a change of heart. Grayling said, ‘I decided a long time ago that once we’d won the election and knew we were going to get the referendum I was never in any doubt I was going to campaign to leave.’ At party conference in October he deliberately ‘sailed close to the wind’ when addressing a Business for Britain and Conservatives for Britain event. In the summer he had sat down with Daniel Hannan at a bar in Brussels to discuss how they were going to get involved in the campaign. ‘I expected to have to resign to do it,’ said Grayling. He also met Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott in November to let them know he would be on board. He had a further discussion with Elliott in December about his intention to tell Cameron after Christmas that he was going to declare for the Leave campaign. Rumours swept the lobby that Grayling was going to quit as leader of the Commons in January, and he discussed the prospect of an exit interview with at least one journalist. Downing Street briefed that he might be fired before he had the chance to jump ship. Paradoxically, that strengthened his position.
Grayling went to see Cameron in early November and said, ‘My worry about where we are is that we are powerless to resist a decision that will cost jobs in the United Kingdom, that we have no ability to set limits on how many people come and work here, and we have little to do with the decisions of the EU.’ Cameron replied that he hoped to keep his ministerial team together, and vowed to ‘do my best’ to get what he wanted. Grayling said he would support him as prime minister even if he failed, and they parted on cordial terms.
When the details of Cameron’s preliminary deal were published Grayling decided the prime minister clearly had no chance of satisfying him, and that it was ‘only a question of when’ he would have to pay Cameron another visit. Grayling had been told by a ministerial colleague that Theresa Villiers was also considering her position. They talked over the Christmas break: ‘I told her what I was going to do, and she agreed that she was going to put in a call to the prime minister on the same day.’
Shortly after the regular 8.30 a.m. planning meeting in Number 10 on Monday, 4 January 2016, Grayling saw Cameron and Ed Llewellyn in the prime minister’s study and told them, ‘I’m going to declare for Leave, and campaign for Leave. If you want me to resign I will.’ He was expecting to have to go: ‘David Cameron had always said up until that point that ministers will be expected to toe the line. So I expected to have to resign to do it.’ But Cameron replied, ‘Please don’t. I’m going to let you campaign anyway, but in a few weeks’ time.’ Grayling pressed him: ‘I’m really keen to get involved now, because I want to add a bit of weight to the campaign, there are things that I want to get going and doing.’
After two meetings they reached an accommodation. Cameron agreed to make a statement the following day that cabinet collective responsibility would be suspended for the duration of the campaign, in exchange for which Grayling agreed that he would not formally declare for Leave until after the Brussels summit more than six weeks later, at which Cameron hoped to finalise his renegotiation. Instead, Grayling would signal his intent by writing a piece for the Telegraph, and would be able to get involved informally in campaign preparations. Later the same day Villiers spoke to the prime minister, who told her she would be free to campaign after the summit. She said she was content to comply as well. Announcing the change to the Commons, Cameron said, ‘There will be a clear government position, but it will be open to individual ministers to take a different personal position while remaining part of the government.’
Steve Baker, who had been a confidant for Grayling through the autumn, saw this commitment as key, because it liberated ministers, particularly those outside the cabinet, to back Brexit. Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Penny Mordaunt and Andrea Leadsom were all relieved when they no longer had to choose between their beliefs and their careers. A Leadsom aide said, ‘Those ministers wouldn’t have been available to the campaign if Chris Grayling hadn’t worked to do it.’
Daniel Hannan sees Villiers as an unsung heroine of Brexit: ‘She doesn’t get a scintilla of the credit she deserves. Her first act as transport secretary was to take down the EU flag from all of the buildings that she was responsible for. I only know this because a civil servant told me. Can you imagine any male politician making that decision then not telling anybody?’
A friend of Grayling believes Cameron should have called his bluff: ‘The PM could have been completely bloody-minded. The gambler in me would have said, “Take a chance, see what happens, sack him, and if in two weeks on from this, if nobody else has gone, you get an even freer run.”’ Cameron at that stage believed that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove would support him, and that the only cabinet ministers who would back Brexit would be easy to dismiss as right-wingers with little public profile. Cameron felt the risks of giving ministers freedom were lower than the cost of enraging the party if he stuck to his guns. Once again the prime minister had done what was best for the Tory Party, rather than for the Remain cause. Ryan Coetzee, the head of strategy for Stronger In, believed Cameron was too ready to give ground to the rebels: ‘If a stray dog comes to your campsite, you don’t make it go away by giving it some food.’
In just six months, Conservatives for Britain had ruthlessly executed Steve Baker’s guerrilla war plan. They had helped change the referendum question, the date and the campaign lead time, saved purdah, and ensured the Conservative Party was neutral and cabinet ministers could take sides. None of those things was sufficient to win the referendum on its own, but each of them was necessary, and together they may have been decisive. ‘The war really was won in many ways in the preparation,’ said Baker. ‘The question might have been worth 4 per cent. The Conservative Party’s neutrality took the entire Leave budget out of the Remain campaign. Neutrality made the superstars available. The principal purpose of CfB was making it possible to win the referendum and marshalling the MPs to do that.’ By remaining polite, Baker also maximised the number of Tory MPs who joined the Leave campaign. As one MP put it, ‘Steve’s an aerospace engineer who doesn’t much like conflict, but he held the government by the bollocks on this journey.’
It was just as well that Baker was blooded. As the New Year dawned his powers of negotiation would be put to the ultimate test as MPs, donors and his colleagues turned on Dominic Cummings, the man who held the entire Leave campaign by the bollocks.
7
Rob Oxley thought he had done pretty well. He’d been in a television debate with Lucy Thomas, and he knew he’d wiped the floor with her. Oxley had teased Thomas by referring to Stronger In as ‘the BSE campaign’. The two were friends, but the taunt was as effective as it was childish. Normally highly composed, Thomas lost her temper, and a video of their exchange was quickly posted on the Guido Fawkes website. Oxley returned to the Vote