All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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Shortly after Murphy left, MPs began getting calls from people spreading rumours that ‘Cummings is a psychopath who bullies people in the office, threatens to beat people up.’ Cummings was initially dismissive of this smear campaign. He had been the subject of false rumours before, when he was upsetting people in Whitehall, that he was ‘a heroin addict or gay’. He assumed the MPs would not believe that he was actually threatening to kill people. Afterwards he realised this insouciance was ‘an error’. Murphy’s view that Vote Leave had no ground game caught hold with MPs. While Cummings had no background in field campaigning, Nick Varley, who was brought in by Murphy to be head of ground operations, said this was unfair: ‘Dom never ignored the ground campaign, and knew it was vitally important.’
Murphy’s departure enraged Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove, two Brexit-backing Conservative MPs from the Midlands who were experts in running field operations and believed that Cummings was not doing enough to prioritise the ground war. Bone was sixty-three, and a dead ringer for Sven-Göran Eriksson, the former England football manager. He often raised a smile at PMQs by asking Cameron questions from his wife, ‘Mrs Bone’. If he was in the mood, Cameron would reply that he was doing his best to ‘satisfy her’. Pursglove, who had just turned twenty-seven, was known as ‘Mini-Bone’ at Westminster because the two were virtually inseparable. He had begun his political career working on Bone’s election taskforce.
‘The Bones’ believed they had the blueprint for success because they had got Pursglove elected in the marginal seat of Corby, overturning a Labour majority of nearly 8,000. They knocked on every door in the constituency twice and campaigned hard on immigration, encouraging Tory voters tempted by Ukip to back the resolutely sceptic Pursglove while urging tribally Labour voters who would never vote Tory to support Ukip. In this successful endeavour the pair got no help from Tory HQ. ‘They cut us off completely,’ Bone said. ‘We had a huge bloody row with them; they told us banging on about Europe won’t win us the seat.’
Baker asked Bone and Pursglove to go to Vote Leave in October and give advice on the ground war. Bone believed in ‘endless amounts of canvassing’, since he had found knocking on doors was three times as effective in turning out votes as delivering literature. But he did not believe he got a commitment from Vote Leave to a proper get-out-the-vote effort. His mood darkened when Vote Leave sent him 130,000 leaflets suggesting that some of the £350 million-a-week cost of the EU could be spent on the NHS. He refused to deliver them, because he saw them as an attack on the government. Then Richard Murphy resigned.
If the MPs were angry about the CBI stunt and the Murphy defection, they were incandescent when a week later Vote Leave made its first overt attack on David Cameron. On Saturday, 5 December the Daily Telegraph splashed on claims that the prime minister had ‘made clear to his close allies that he will lead the “Out” campaign if he considers the result of his renegotiation with Brussels to be unsuccessful’.
At Vote Leave the story was interpreted as an attempt by Craig Oliver to encourage Eurosceptic MPs who might have backed Leave to remain loyal to the prime minister. He told Cummings, ‘We need to get him off this pedestal. It’s not true. Let’s provoke him.’ Stephenson texted a couple of Sunday newspaper journalists, including Glen Owen of the Mail on Sunday. The following day the paper carried a quote from a senior source at Vote Leave saying, ‘If Cameron thinks we’d want him leading the “Leave” campaign he’s deluded. He’s toxic on this issue. If there was a choice between who to put up in a television debate between Cameron and Boris, you’d want Boris every time.’
The quote caused uproar among Tory MPs, many of whom had pledged to avoid attacking the PM until the renegotiation was concluded. Cummings was blamed for the briefing, but in Westminster Tower it was Stephenson who was nicknamed ‘Toxic’ for the rest of the campaign. Explaining the rationale for the attack later, he said, ‘The PM never again tried to lead the Leave campaign. And it was also a signal that “We’re not scared. We’re in for a fight.”’
But the first people to pick a fight were Vote Leave’s own MPs. Cummings had established a Monday-morning meeting at which they could sound off. That Monday, Bone and Pursglove joined the usual cast of Steve Baker, Bernard Jenkin and co. Baker complained about the Mail on Sunday story: ‘While we’re briefing that Cameron’s toxic, it’s going to be very hard to sign up colleagues.’
Tempers frayed further when Bone got into an argument with Cummings. First, he took issue with the campaign’s messaging, saying, ‘You’re doing all this NHS stuff, £350 million, we don’t think it’s a winner.’ Cummings explained that he had data showing that the messages worked, but that if MPs wanted to use different messages in their patch they were free to do so: ‘With respect, this is an empirical question and I’ve got an empirical answer, and if you say your local area’s different, fine. Do something different.’
Bone then raised Richard Murphy’s complaints about the lack of a ground campaign. Cummings felt Bone had a point about the slow speed of the ground campaign, but blamed Murphy. Then Bone said Vote Leave should be trying to encourage Cameron to lead the campaign rather than alienating him: ‘You can’t say he’s toxic, this is outrageous. The PM could have led the campaign!’ Bone believed that if Cameron supported Leave they would ‘win by a mile’, and did not like the fact that their potential saviour had been ‘insulted’. He saw Cummings and Stephenson’s approach as ‘West Wing behaviour’, after the grandstanding aides in the US television series. He told a friend, ‘They really slagged the PM off, and that was clearly silly.’
Cummings regarded Bone as absurdly naïve about Cameron’s intentions. Biting his tongue, he was relatively gracious at first, but eventually said, ‘We think you’re wrong, and if you don’t like it, you don’t need to be involved in the campaign.’
One observer described the putdown as ‘brutal’. Bone stormed out of the meeting. After it broke up, Pursglove complained that Stephenson’s briefing was ‘very short-sighted’. But even Baker, who was annoyed by the ‘toxic’ quote, sided with Stephenson, saying, ‘Tom, if the PM’s going to lead the Out campaign, he’s not going to decide against it because someone briefed against him.’
The upshot of the Bone–Cummings bust-up was that Bone and Pursglove, with the support of the Labour donor John Mills, set up a new organisation called Grassroots Out to help MPs create a ground game in their constituencies. The group’s name was abbreviated to ‘GO’, and Bone had livid lime-green ties made up sporting the logo. GO quickly became a place where MPs annoyed by Cummings could find a home. Arron Banks targeted Kate Hoey and John Mills, urging them to help bring the two wings of the Eurosceptic movement together. By Christmas, Mills was openly calling for a merger with Banks.
Turning the screw, Banks began writing to Matthew Elliott suggesting a merger. Chris Bruni-Lowe remembers, ‘We said to Banks, “You must write to Elliott as many times as possible because he’s looking for the designation.” So Banks said, “We’re replicating each other on so many things, we’re spending so much money, millions. Why don’t we just spend it all on the same campaign?” Elliott would tell people, “We’re not doing that. We don’t trust this madman Banks.”’
Cummings’ biggest problem, though, was a growing view among Conservative MPs that he was not the right man to run the campaign – they were. ‘People like Bernard [Jenkin] and Bill [Cash], who didn’t like what we were doing, didn’t like the fact they weren’t on the news every day, were causing trouble for us,’ said one Vote Leave official. Jenkin says it is ‘absolute rubbish’ that they wanted more media attention, and that he was ‘very happy to take more of a back seat’.
Cash, the MP for the Staffordshire seat of Stone, was respected as an authority on the minutiae of EU procedure, but was regarded by many colleagues as the last man with whom they would wish to be trapped in a lift. Even his friends admit that he had to be kept away from the public: ‘Although he’s absolutely right, he wasn’t the face of Brexit we wanted to put on TV all the time,’ another Eurosceptic MP said. ‘Bill took it a bit hard. You can’t put Bill out to sell Brexit to the people.’
Cash