All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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frank in return, admitting that the MPs had had discussions about gutting Vote Leave and bringing ‘our own people’ in to run the campaign. Oxley said, ‘If you do that, you’ll lose the designation process and you’ll lose the race.’ He felt as if he was in ‘nuclear disarmament talks’. When the meeting was over, Oxley called Stephenson and told him to go to see Baker. Stephenson took Stephen Parkinson with him, and they talked for more than an hour, clearing the air about everything since the CBI stunt and coming to ‘a good understanding’. Baker said, ‘I wore the UN blue helmet that week. It’s me who patched it up.’
Jenkin was ‘very scarred’ by the experience: ‘For me, it was one of the most horrid weeks in politics. I agonised about it and I am convinced I had to do what I did, and then I was rather appalled when the rest of the board just backed down.’ He objects to Cummings’ depiction of the events as a coup: ‘“Coup” is the wrong word. The board was completely united that he should be moved but he browbeat the board into submission by threatening to blow up the whole campaign.’
Daniel Hodson uses Cummings’ terminology, but thinks it was essential to give him ‘one hell of a shock’. He said, ‘The force may well have been with us but it was only just with us. If we hadn’t at that point clipped Dominic’s wings we might well not have got the nomination and the campaign would have been lost.’
The battle also hardened the core team at Westminster Tower. Stephenson often thought back to that moment at difficult moments during the campaign: ‘When things were bad, we’d be like, “Hang on a minute, we’ve been within a minute of walking out this office.” When you’re taking a shellacking from your government, at least you’re not taking it from your own side. It helped road-test us.’
What occurred in that last week of January was pivotal to the success of the Leave campaign. Even if you believe that Cummings was out of control, ousting him would have created further chaos and rendered the Leave cause a public laughing stock. It may have deterred some ministers from signing up, or handed control of the campaign to Arron Banks, who most neutral observers believe would have repelled more voters than he attracted.
Steve Baker sums up what happened best: ‘Dominic Cummings is like political special forces. If you don’t care about what collateral damage you sustain, he’s the weapon of choice. He operates with the minimum of civilised restraint. He is a barbarian. Dominic has undoubted mastery of leadership and strategy and political warfare. But he will not let himself be held to account by anybody. And that is basically what that attempt to sack him was about.’
Cummings may not have been the perfect campaign manager, but he was the best available to Vote Leave. The surest proof of this is that when his colleagues were asked to choose between him and the alternatives, every campaign official of note backed him. The failure of the coup meant that when David Cameron finally went to Brussels to sign his deal, Vote Leave were ready to eviscerate the prime minister rather than each other.
8
David Cameron was twenty-seven hours into negotiating a new deal for Britain within the European Union when he snapped. It was late afternoon on Friday, 19 February, and Andrew Cooper, back in Britain, was surprised to receive an email from the PM in Brussels asking for some information. Cooper replied, not expecting to get a response, as he knew Cameron was up to his neck in a diplomatic negotiation that would define his premiership. What came back was a cri de coeur: ‘Frankly, after a day and a half of talks with these people, even I want to leave the EU. I’m getting nowhere, I might have to walk away.’
Cameron had arrived in Brussels at lunchtime the previous day hopeful of securing agreement on the deal he had spent nine months negotiating with the other twenty-seven member states. Ever since early November, he and his officials had spent weeks discussing the small print with their partners and Commission officials. The summit was supposed to set a final seal on everything Cameron had set in motion with the Bloomberg speech three years earlier. But, after more than a day of negotiating, things had not turned out that way. The French, of course, had found fault with proposals that they believed would unfairly advantage the City of London. Britain’s Eastern European allies were fighting a fearsome rearguard action against benefit cuts which would affect their citizens.
Cameron sat disconsolately in the Justus Lipsius Building where the European Council meets. At the best of times it was an unlovely pile of pink granite and glass, where politicians and journalists felt whole days of their lives slip away. On that damp and chill Friday the drab British delegation room was brightened only by the piles of Haribo sweets Cameron’s team were chain-chewing. This raised their blood-sugar levels, but nothing seemed to raise their spirits. It was time to call on the big guns to sort out the mess. He said, ‘I’d better make one last suggestion to Juncker and Tusk, but if that doesn’t work the Poles won’t accept this, then I’m going home and we’ll come back to this in November.’ After three years of building up to this moment, Cameron’s gamble was close to failure.
The two EU officials charged with solving the British problem were Jean-Claude Juncker, the arch-federalist former prime minister of Luxembourg who had become Commission president in June 2014 despite Cameron’s outspoken opposition, and Donald Tusk, the former prime minister of Poland who became president of the European Council – the shop steward for the twenty-eight heads of government – in December 2014, with Britain’s backing. A senior figure at the summit concluded that Cameron had made a ‘strategic error’ with both appointments which made his renegotiation all the harder.
When he had decided to block Juncker’s appointment Cameron had sought Angela Merkel’s backing, thought he had it, only to see her bow to domestic political pressure to back down. Juncker was in pole position because he had been chosen by the EPP, the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, from which Cameron had withdrawn the Tories. Downing Street had failed to understand the attraction in Germany of the new spitzenkandidaten system, whereby the main blocs in the Parliament nominated their preferred candidates on the understanding that whichever grouping got most votes in the European elections that year would get the presidency. The senior mandarins Ivan Rogers and Tom Scholar, who thought the idea as stupid as Cameron, nevertheless both warned him that Merkel might betray him again. ‘This may become unstoppable,’ said Rogers. ‘Even though you think Juncker is a clown, it could end up being him.’ He was right. While Downing Street spin doctors briefed stories about Juncker drinking whisky for breakfast, Peter Altmaier, Merkel’s chief of staff at the German Chancellery, was doing a deal with Martin Selmayr, the German Commission insider who would become Juncker’s all-powerful chief of staff, to ensure that Juncker got the job. When Cameron demanded a show of hands at the summit, just one rose alongside his own: that of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban.
One of Cameron’s aides thinks it would have been better for his referendum prospects if he had accepted Juncker, rather than drawn attention to Britain’s isolation: ‘We introduced Juncker to the nation in a way that people saw the EU as a place which would go against British wishes. I don’t think we suffered because he was in that role. I think we suffered because we were seen to fail to prevent him from taking that role.’
The same aide believes Cameron should not have backed Tusk, who was given Downing Street’s support in an attempt to woo the Poles, who were crucial to any deal on migrant benefits. The alternative front-runner was Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Danish prime minister and model for the main character in Borgen, the Scandi political drama series which was popular on British television, and who is married to Labour MP Stephen Kinnock. ‘We vastly overestimated Tusk’s capabilities,’ the aide said. ‘Helle Thorning-Schmidt has lots of flaws but she is very telegenic and articulate. She’d have been a persuasive, congenial, attractive spokesperson for a proposition that Brits generally tend not to like. Instead, we got a stuttering Polish prime minister whose command of the English language was not great and who struggled with the job.’ The final problem was that Tusk’s appointment led to a general election in Poland, which his Civic Platform party lost. ‘That