All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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racing, played for time. ‘OK,’ he replied.
Hodson went on, ‘There’s some other people here who want to talk to you about this. And we have a suggestion of the way forward.’
At that point the key Vote Leave directors filed into the room, including Bernard Jenkin. They repeated Hodson’s message: ‘You can’t manage this, Matthew’s got to manage it, we want you to be an adviser, but you are no longer running anything here.’ They offered Cummings a deal: ‘You can have it the easy way or the hard way. If you do it the easy way, we’ll pay you a bunch of money to be a consultant and you just tell everyone your wife’s pregnant and that’s the reason why you’re heading off.’
Cummings looked around the room, read the faces of his opponents and made a judgement that they could be beaten. He couldn’t help recalling several unpleasant experiences in Moscow: ‘I’ve dealt with a lot, lot worse things than a bunch of clowns in a building in SW1.’ He outlined the reasons why he thought the plotters were wrong, and then played what he hoped was his trump card: ‘Have you thought through about what’s going to happen in the office when you announce this?’
‘What do you mean?’ someone asked.
‘Well, I don’t think the senior people there will accept what’s going on, and if they all walk out, then you haven’t got a campaign organisation.’
This created consternation. ‘Well, what do you suggest we do about that?’ came a voice.
Cummings smiled and said, ‘That just about sums you guys up, that you ask me for advice on how to do your own coup! Typical, especially of you, Bernard.’ He then asked, ‘What does Matthew think about this?’
‘He completely agrees with all this.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Back in the office.’
‘You’re asking what’s going to happen to the staff. Why don’t you get the chief executive here to see what he’s going to say about the staff?’
Someone phoned Elliott, and he arrived a short while later with Dan Hannan. Hannan said Elliott asked him to accompany him to see if they could ‘calm things down’.
What happened next is hotly disputed. A member of the board who was present that day is adamant that when ‘Matthew joined the meeting, he initially supported the board line’. This supports the version of events Cummings recounted to colleagues afterwards. According to Cummings’ account Hannan told him, ‘Dominic, it’s your patriotic duty to step aside for Elliott and tell the other staff it was a good idea.’
‘Dan, I don’t think you understand,’ said Cummings. ‘I don’t think you understand that Paul Stephenson and Victoria Woodcock are much more capable than Matthew. And much more capable than you. And much more capable than the people around this table. I’m not going to go along and tell them what to do and they’re going to do it, because they’re not idiots. They know that you can’t run this and they know that Matthew can’t do this, so that’s not going to work.’
‘Well my God, if that happens and they all walk out, that’s going to be a complete disaster,’ came a voice.
‘You should have thought about that before you started this stupid business,’ said Cummings. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’
Hannan admits that he was aware of the coup plans ‘the night before’, but insists his ‘immediate reaction was we shouldn’t lose Dominic’. He says that his role that day, along with Elliott, was to act as honest brokers between Cummings and the board: ‘The two of us went in together, and suggested a compromise solution, which effectively both sides ended up rejecting at the time but ended up happening. I put on the table what I thought would be a compromise where Dom would focus on being the campaign director, but not do any tweeting and the things that were annoying people, which basically is what happened in the end.’
Hannan claims that Cummings said, ‘No, no, I insist on having no conditions put on me,’ while the hardliners on the board said, ‘No, he’s got to go.’ Hannan explains, ‘I was fairly disappointed to see people on both sides making it personal. It seemed to me that the obvious compromise was that Dom could focus on doing the strategy, and not do any of the MP interactions.’
Either way, there was now concern among the board members that the plans were unravelling. Jenkin says he discussed the implications of moving Cummings with Elliott, who had been of the view that two or three other members of staff might quit in protest, but that there would not be a mass exodus. He now believed that Cummings had got wind of the move against him and lined up support in the office to face it down.
Daniel Hodson was increasingly concerned. He had understood that only Paul Stephenson and Victoria Woodcock would resign if Cummings was defenestrated. He regarded both as replaceable. Now it seemed Elliott’s intelligence was wrong. He then intervened, telling Cummings, ‘We’ve got this contract. I want you to look at this contract.’
Cummings replied, ‘You want me to look at this contract and you want me to talk with the staff. I’ll go away and look at this contract.’
The plotters tried to stop him: ‘You can’t do that. The lawyers are all standing next door, and you can’t leave until you’ve signed this contract.’
Cummings laughed again. ‘I don’t think you guys understand anything. The idea that you could hold me hostage in a room and get me to sign a contract. Who do you think you’re dealing with? I’m going to go to the Pret down the road, I’m going to get myself a coffee and I’m going to read this contract. I’m going to suggest that you go to Vote Leave and talk to the staff there.’
He left the Tufton Street office and immediately called his PA Cleo Watson at Westminster Tower, who doubled as the head of outreach, to explain what was happening. She quickly gathered Paul Stephenson, Victoria Woodcock and Stephen Parkinson in Cummings’ office and told them, ‘A bunch of people are coming here now to tell us Dom is going on paternity leave. What are we going to do about that?’
Stephenson said, ‘This sounds like a coup to me. I’ll leave.’ In what became the Leave campaign’s ‘Spartacus moment’, Woodcock said, ‘I’m off as well,’ and Parkinson agreed, ‘Me too.’
They put Cummings on speakerphone. Agitated but not panicking, he said, ‘There’s a fucking coup going on. It’s fucking Elliott. And all this lot are trying to get rid of me. You lot have said to me, you’ll go. If that’s what you’re saying, excellent. This will kill the thing now.’ At Cummings’ request Watson moved his personal possessions into her desk drawers.
Matthew Elliott, accompanied by board member Alan Halsall, who even Cummings’ supporters still see as ‘a good guy’, walked over Lambeth Bridge to Vote Leave and sat down with the three senior figures. Halsall asked them if they would quit. Stephenson said, ‘We’ll be gone within ten minutes.’
‘So how many of your team would resign?’
‘Most of them.’
‘We’re talking about half, two-thirds of the team going,’ Halsall said reflectively, realising that the board’s intelligence had been bad. In the classic outline of a failed coup, the plotters had sought to oust the president without first securing the support of the military and the civil service, and without seizing the headquarters of the state broadcaster.
Elliott, apparently nervous and seeing the way the wind was blowing, told his colleagues, ‘I didn’t want this to happen. Dom’s very stressed. This is bad for the campaign.’ Cummings even claims Elliott was so thrown by the course of events that he began showing Cummings texts from Grayling urging the plotters to ‘press on’. ‘I was dictating Elliott’s replies to Grayling,’ he said.1
While that was going on there was another crucial encounter. Rob Oxley, the head of media who had worked for Elliott at Business for Britain and