All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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most senior figures in the campaign, were all paid £96,000 per year. The standoff resembled a spat between two sets of groupies for a band called Euroscepticism. The Palaeosceptics had identified the act when it was just playing gigs in local pubs, always preferred their early stuff and resented the producer who had turned their minority pursuit into a stadium act even if that meant playing some different tunes.
Cummings’ main beef, according to one of his closest collaborators, was that ‘Conservative MPs have been in charge of Euroscepticism for the last twenty years, and it’s been defeat after defeat for the period. I turn up and the group of MPs who are responsible for all those defeats tell me that they know how to win. I know if I let them run this campaign we’ll lose. I don’t have time to be diplomatic to them, I just have to get on with it and run it.’
That was certainly how Bernard Jenkin felt: ‘Dominic was very down on anyone who’d been a Maastricht rebel. His narrative was that the Eurosceptics were completely incompetent and their image was hopeless. John Redwood, Peter Lilley, Bernard Jenkin, Iain Duncan Smith, Owen Paterson, all these people were toxic and therefore not the face of the campaign.’ But Jenkin added, ‘Sometimes, I did feel that people rather green on the subject weren’t answering the questions as capably as some of us who’d been doing it for thirty years.’
Daniel Hannan could see faults on both sides: ‘Although Dom was very brilliant, did the job for which he was contracted and carried it out superbly, he doesn’t see the point of MPs. He’s not a patient man if he thinks people are being foolish. A lot of MPs have big egos. They think they are terribly important, expect deference, and get huffy when they don’t get it. A lot of MPs are thin-skinned creatures, and felt that they should have been in control, and I think they took it badly that the campaign was being run by someone who didn’t pretend to defer to them. Leave.EU scented the opportunity of targeting Dom as the weak point, so they were constantly briefing against him.’
When MPs and donors complained that Arron Banks was bad-mouthing the campaign to other Tories in order to peel them off into GO, Cummings would reply, ‘If you stop having meetings and talking about it, it will stop being a problem.’
But for Bernard Jenkin it was Cummings’ manner, not his arguments, that was at fault: ‘Some people think he made the situation worse, other people think he was a genius, and the fact is it probably was a combination of the two. Dominic was right in principle about not merging, it was just the tone with which it was being done which was so destructive.’
The MPs were right to think they had no power. Paul Stephenson said, ‘Where did power sit in the campaign? Not really anywhere other than wandering in to have a chat with Dom.’
Everything acquired greater urgency in December, when it became clear that Cameron intended to do his deal in February. The day the Referendum Bill got royal assent, Cummings’ favourite researcher, ‘Ricardo’ Howell, correctly predicted that the referendum would be held on 23 June. A countdown clock was put up on Vote Leave’s wall. At the board meeting before Christmas Cummings said, ‘I think these guys are going to go early. We have to start spending money and planning on this basis.’
Eurosceptic donors were also on the warpath. David Wall, the influential secretary of the Midlands Industrial Council, was concerned by Richard Murphy’s departure. The two had worked together during the general election, when Murphy was responsible for checking that MIC money donated to Tory marginal seats was well spent. Chris Bruni-Lowe said, ‘David Wall and lots of other donors who’d given a lot of money were just really unhappy – Patrick Barbour, Richard Smith, who owned Tufton Street.’ The declared donors were unimpressed that Vote Leave was struggling to land new big-name backers and their cash. Conservative donors were under huge pressure from Downing Street to keep their wallets zipped. Rodney Leach of Open Europe phoned Tory donors to say, ‘Give the PM a chance, he’ll come back with more than people think, trust me. This will be a deal worth having.’ This charm offensive frustrated Elliott: ‘I had some quite senior Eurosceptic party people and donors who were quite convinced until the PM came back with his deal that it was going to be much more radical than it was. They literally thought the PM would come back with a trade-based relationship, and said we were being much too hasty in coming out for Leave.’
In early January 2016 a group of Leave donors gathered at Stuart Wheeler’s home, Chilham Castle in Kent, to discuss merging Vote Leave and Leave.EU. Patrick Barbour and others were keen on the two groups coming together. Arron Banks was pushing the idea too, though he was not at the meeting. Paul Stephenson believed Banks deliberately ‘started trying to make Dom public enemy number one with donors because Dom was the only thing stopping the merger’. Chris Bruni-Lowe, a Banks ally, said, ‘The donors weren’t giving any money because of Cummings. He is portrayed as some sort of genius, but most people saw him as completely mad.’ During the meeting, which he attended, Cummings emailed Stephenson to tell him that some of the donors were discussing getting rid of him. ‘It’s a bit touch and go,’ he said. Stephenson replied that if it would help he could tell people there, ‘If you’re off, I’m off,’ and sent him a resignation statement that he could show them if necessary: ‘If you need this, have it in your locker.’ Cummings did not need the pledge on that occasion, but it was to come in useful soon.
Cummings also had his ear bent at the retreat by Daniel Hannan about who would represent the Out camp in the television debates. According to a Vote Leave official Hannan said, ‘We don’t just need the people who are the biggest personalities. We need the best debaters. People have been debating this for twenty years.’ No one was in any doubt that he considered himself the pick of the bunch. In the Vote Leave offices Hannan was quickly dubbed ‘the world’s greatest debater’.
Hannan was in fact a very gifted speaker, and was deployed all around the country during the campaign in local debates. Stronger In officials regarded him as their most formidable foe in these encounters. But Cummings did not want Hannan fronting the campaign on television, and said to him what he had said to Nigel Farage, that he would test all the possible debate spokesmen and put up the one most likely to win over target voters. ‘Dan, who basically helped get the thing off the ground, was then pushed out, because they were waiting for Gove,’ said Bruni-Lowe.
The final straw for Cummings’ critics came on 21 January, when The Economist published a cover interview with him. Bursting with his eclectic knowledge of everything from the EU to Soviet propaganda, it seemed calculated to offend the Palaeosceptics. Cummings argued for a simple campaign message about cost and control that could be digested by ordinary voters, rather than constitutional abstractions: ‘The Eurosceptic world has thousands of books and zillions of pamphlets and has been talking about this for many decades. The challenge is not to say more things. The challenge is to focus, to simplify things.’
It may seem odd that an article in a low-circulation publication aimed at high minds could cause uproar, but it did. Cummings was not just running the campaign: a respectable part of the media had now made him the face of it too – and for many who had been campaigning on the issue for decades that was too much to bear. According to one senior figure at Vote Leave, Bernard Jenkin phoned him and said, ‘We’re going to lose the campaign because of Dom.’ Hannan was also ‘in a tailspin’ about it. Another campaign official is clear that the article directly gave rise to an attempt to remove Cummings: ‘The trigger for the coup was the interview Dom gave with The Economist, which caused various MPs to think, “Why aren’t I on the front cover of The Economist?”’
In this toxic environment, tensions between Cummings and Elliott were amplified. Everyone at Vote Leave praised Elliott for creating the organisation and getting Cummings on board, but they also felt he was status-conscious. Cummings believed Elliott was ‘discombobulated’ by media rumours that Michael Gove would back Brexit, a development that would make him immovable and immeasurably more powerful. Looking back, Cummings said, ‘Everyone’s thinking at this point, “How do I get into controlling position?” And a lot of them, unfortunately for me, are thinking, “The clock’s ticking and if Gove comes in then Cummings is locked in. He’s going to run it for good or evil. So you’ve got to get rid of Cummings before Gove moves.”’ Elliott says his fear was that Gove would not join the campaign, not that he