All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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who had been treasurer for the People’s Pledge and then Business for Britain. At Vote Leave he took charge of compliance and governance issues, believing that if the campaign did things ‘by the book’ it was more likely to get the designation than Leave.EU. He had been a friend of Elliott’s for two years, but recognised that when it came to the ‘all out war’ of a campaign, ‘Cummings delivers.’ Over oriental food in the Park Plaza Riverbank hotel, up the Embankment from Westminster Tower, Elliott explained his frustrations: the ‘toxic’ slur against Cameron, the way Cummings had ‘pissed off MPs’, and the pressure they were subsequently putting on him to change the way Cummings was managed. Hodson told him, ‘You really have to get in a room and sit down with Dominic and talk about it. You need to rehash the relationship.’ Hodson then received a series of calls from board members who wanted Cummings restrained or removed.
In the final week of January, things came to a head. Bernard Jenkin, who as chairman of ExCom had borne the brunt of complaints from MPs, said he got a phone call. ‘It was Matthew Elliott who rang me up after some kind of summit which was held in Chilham Castle in January and said to me, “Everybody agrees that Dominic’s got to be moved to an advisory position.” Dominic was never going to be removed totally. We wanted access to his expertise but we didn’t feel he was right to be in a leadership role, running the entire organisation. He had a very autocratic management style. Some people hero-worshipped him, other people were terrified of him. And anyway, he had initially said to ExCom that he only wanted to set up the campaign, and had not wanted to run it.’ Elliot flatly denied that this conversation took place: ‘What Bernard says is complete rubbish, and he’s obviously trying to displace the blame and throw the bloody knives in my direction.’
As chairman of the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, Jenkin had presided over a report into mismanagement at the children’s charity Kids Company, run by the colourful and controversial Camila Batmanghelidjh, which was critical of the trustees. He worried that if the campaign disintegrated there would be similar questions for Vote Leave’s board. ‘My concern, shared with the other directors, was that Dominic represented a considerable risk to designation because you know you have to be a fit and proper person, you have to be pukka to get designation. Some of the things he did and wanted to do were not things that respectable companies did. Business people who were thinking about where to place their money could see that the way Vote Leave carried on was a bit of a risk, so they wanted to hedge their bets.’
The trouble with this approach is that political campaigns are not democracies. Nothing presages defeat like decision-making by committee. Campaigns are best operated as dictatorships.
Matthew Elliott vehemently denies that he orchestrated what became known as the coup. Friends say he recruited Cummings because he thought he was the best man for the job. But they admit that Cummings’ rivalry with Arron Banks drove donors and MPs to approach Elliott to express concern about the way the campaign was being run. ‘Vote Leave’s USP was that they were the nice cross-party campaign, positive, forward-looking, internationalist, more based on the economics than immigration, competent campaigners,’ a source close to Elliott said. ‘Banks was the nasty campaign, Ukip-based and unprofessional. That was the narrative between the two groups. But you got to a situation in January where it was quite difficult to sustain that. People were saying, “Hang on, you’re saying these guys are unprofessional, but they’ve got six-figure numbers on their Facebook likes. You say they play dirty, but what about the CBI stunt?”’
Elliott’s advocates say that MPs like Jenkin and Chris Grayling, newly liberated by David Cameron, began to question how the campaign was being run and why more money had not been raised. ‘Matthew listened to them rather than shouting at them,’ a friend said pointedly. ‘He engaged with them, but he did not want to have anything to do with Ukip or Arron Banks.’ From Hodson’s perspective, the decisive intervention was Grayling’s. A senior figure in the campaign told him, ‘The message has come across: Grayling says Cummings has to go.’ Hodson was concerned by this, as at that moment he was ‘the first great hope’, the most senior cabinet minister expected to commit to Leave at a time when the loyalties of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Theresa May were unknown.
Grayling himself denies knifing Cummings. He said, ‘I met two of the board members, including John Mills the chairman, and I simply expressed a worry that the rift between the different camps was actually putting people off at Westminster. The decision to go after Dominic Cummings and to remove him from his position was one taken by the board, and could only be taken by the board. I don’t think they ever intended to remove Dominic altogether, they just intended to try and take him out of the front line. I think the board were generally worried the whole thing was going to fall apart.’
Banks sought to persuade Mills and other members of the Vote Leave board that the best solution was to sideline Cummings and have Elliott take charge of a merged campaign. ‘The idea was that Elliott would be the chair of the combined organisation with Mills and Banks,’ says Chris Bruni-Lowe. ‘That was the plan, but it never happened.’ Matthew Elliott remembers, ‘I think in around November I was the nasty one, the one that Banks couldn’t have anything to do with. Then it changed to being “They’re both as bad as each other.” Then it became Dom who was the one in his bad books.’
Banks also worked on Kate Hoey and other members of the Labour Leave organisation, who had also tired of Cummings. Banks said, ‘Labour Leave were very discontented with Cummings. There was a Hertford Street lunch I had with Peter Bone, Tom Pursglove, Kate Hoey, John Mills and Matthew Elliott, where Kate Hoey just said to Matthew Elliott’s face, “You’ve got to get rid of Dominic Cummings or we’ll be walking.” The feelings were very high. We tried to merge four times with them. It was always a different thing. First “Our donors won’t allow this.” Then “Our MPs won’t allow it.” Then “The cabinet ministers won’t allow it.” There was always an excuse why it couldn’t be done.’
If the Vote Leave board remained divided about a merger with Banks, they did now agree that they wanted shot of Cummings. Daniel Hodson called a meeting with Cummings at 9 o’clock on the morning of Monday, 25 January to discuss Bill Cash’s concerns about his contract. Cummings duly turned up at Westminster Tower, but there was no sign of Hodson. Then his phone rang and an ‘agitated’ Hodson said, ‘You’re not here for the meeting.’ He was at 55 Tufton Street. Cummings explained that he was at the Vote Leave offices. Minutes later Hodson called back and said the meeting was definitely supposed to be at Tufton Street. Cummings, who was as usual rushed off his feet, said, ‘I’ve got umpteen different problems going on. The meeting was meant to be twenty minutes ago. If you want to have this meeting, it’s a trivial issue, come over here or let’s do it another time.’ Hodson blurted out, ‘No, no, no, Dominic, I’ve sacrificed a lot for this campaign and I want to do this today.’ Cummings thought, ‘Fine, I don’t want another argument, let’s pop on a bike and go over there.’
While he headed off, Paul Stephenson and the other senior staff were waiting for a meeting with the leading Vote Leave politicians. Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan were present, but no one else was. Stephenson thought, ‘That’s weird.’ A short while later, Stephenson took calls from Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC and Chris Hope of the Telegraph, who had fresh intelligence. Kuenssberg told him, ‘I’ve got this from someone who’s never been wrong before – Dom’s going to resign today.’ Stephenson said, ‘I haven’t heard anything of that.’ But he was seriously worried. Both journalists were well connected in the Eurosceptic world. At around the same time, Nigel Farage took a call from ‘someone very senior on the board of Vote Leave’, who told him, ‘Cummings will be gone by half past ten.’
After a cycle ride of five minutes, Cummings sat down with Hodson, described by one Vote Leave source as ‘a very sweet, old guy, an English gentleman eccentric’. Cummings could tell at once that something was wrong. Hodson said, ‘I’m very sorry Dominic, but I’m afraid to tell you this meeting is not exactly what you thought it was.’
Immediately suspicious, Cummings remembered his time in Moscow and thought to himself, ‘Where’s the plastic sheeting?’
Hodson went on, ‘The board’s lost confidence in you,