All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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manoeuvres rather than a long-planned strategy. As one civil servant who watched it up close observed, ‘My big criticism is they only ever worked from point to point to point. They never started with winning a referendum and working back from that. It was always tactical. It became driven by, “We’ve got to give a speech on this day.”’ The polls showed that voters were equally divided between Leave and Remain, but when they were asked ‘Do you want to be in a reformed Europe’ there was a large majority in favour. Cameron’s mistake was believing the public would be happy to accept his definition of ‘reformed’.
The one big strategic decision, made by Cameron and Osborne immediately after the general election, may have been the root of their defeat. They decided to ask only for what they thought the European Commission and the other member states would give them, rather than press them into uncomfortable demands to rewrite the fundamentals of EU law. One of Cameron’s team said, ‘We decided to go for what we can get and get it. That was George and Dave’s decision. That was our first big error.’ Osborne, the ultimate pragmatist, thought there was ‘a gulf’ between what was realistically achievable whilst retaining EU membership and what others thought could be achieved. The chancellor’s position, communicated to his team, was, ‘Britain holds very few of the cards.’ He said privately, ‘We wanted to be in a position where we recommended that we remained in. So you couldn’t set out a list of demands which we had no prospect of achieving.’
Cameron was certainly not short of advice on what to ask for. In September 2011 a group of more than a hundred MPs led by George Eustice, Chris Heaton-Harris and Andrea Leadsom set up the Fresh Start project to draw up proposals for a new relationship with the EU. In July 2012 they released a paper called ‘Options for Change’ which called for a reduction in the EU budget, an overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy and repatriation of European structural funds. In April 2013, after the Bloomberg speech had fired the starting shot, Fresh Start published a ‘Manifesto for Change’ calling for five changes to EU treaties, including powers to halt new legislation affecting financial services, the repatriation of all social and employment legislation, and the abolition of the Strasbourg seat of the European Parliament. William Hague, who wrote the foreword to both documents, privately told Leadsom, ‘If I wasn’t foreign secretary, I could sign up to virtually all of it. As foreign secretary I could probably sign up to 85 per cent of it.’ Cameron had told Leadsom she was doing ‘good work’. Yet by the time he started drawing up his own wish list it fell well short of Fresh Start’s.
In 2015 Cameron did not seem inclined to ask even for what he had already publicly suggested he would demand. In the Bloomberg speech he had promised ‘fundamental’ reform. In March 2014 he wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph in which he said that the police should be free of ‘unnecessary interference from the European institutions’, including the European Court of Human Rights, and made two additional demands relating to immigration: new countries joining the EU should face initial controls ‘to prevent vast migrations across the Continent’, and the EU’s principle of free movement should only apply ‘to take up work, not free benefits’. Once again, Cameron had raised rather than moderated Eurosceptic expectations of what was possible.
Daniel Hannan went to see the prime minister before the general election to make an offer. He told Cameron, ‘We should try and behave patriotically, and get the best deal possible. I don’t want you to come back with a crap deal just because it makes it easier for us to win the referendum.’ Hannan outlined a Eurosceptic wish list for the renegotiation, including repatriation of powers in non-economic areas and more defence of parliamentary supremacy. In short, what he wanted was a trading relationship and little else. By Hannan’s account, Cameron said, ‘Well that is doable, but that’s not the direction I want to go in. I think we get a greatly amplified voice through having a common foreign policy. I think we get more security through common criminal justice policies. I don’t want to do what you are suggesting, which is to opt out.’ The prime minister had a deal of his own to offer: ‘Help me get a Conservative majority, then get a referendum, and then you and I will go on opposite sides.’ Hannan now says, ‘In terms of understanding what is feasible today, the myth shouldn’t be allowed to take root that these things were not on offer; it’s that we didn’t want to ask for them.’
After the general election, Cameron began a diplomatic offensive to secure support from the rest of the EU to include the migration proposals from the JCB speech in the renegotiation package. Cameron, Osborne, David Lidington and the new foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, went on a whistlestop tour of Europe. Craig Oliver recalls, ‘The prime minister visited countries that no British prime minister has visited in a century.’1 The challenge on immigration was that it was Britain’s natural allies in Eastern Europe who were most antagonistic to reform of benefits and migration rules, since it was their citizens living in Britain who would be affected.
Part of the problem was that there was now no prospect of a new treaty which would have given Britain the leverage to demand sweeping change. When Ivan Rogers took over as Britain’s permanent representative in Brussels in 2013, he advised Cameron that any demands for institutional change should be dressed up as ‘some for the eurozone, some for us’, but by the end of 2014 he was warning the prime minister that he was ‘pushing your luck’ to achieve that by 2017. Before the general election he said, ‘They’re all shit scared of their own publics. If you go into a manifesto commitment to get permanent treaty change as a precursor to staying in the EU you’re fucked, mate.’
Lidington met his EU counterparts after the general election, ‘The others were not buying into the idea that this was some opportunity for major European reform,’ he said. ‘When the decision to go ahead with Bloomberg was taken, that had just followed a state of the union speech by [then Commission president José Manuel] Barroso, in which he called for a new treaty. It looked as though eurozone dynamics were going to push France and Germany to some sort of deal straight away. The bandwagon was moving, and if we didn’t latch our ideas for reform onto it, we were in danger of this other negotiation gathering speed without us. During 2013 and 2014, the impetus dropped away. All of a sudden, not because of anything we’d done or not done, this was just a British problem.’ In his discussions with the other twenty-seven countries, Rogers found resentment that proposals for reform of the whole union had narrowed to ‘a load of special pleading’ and demands for ‘British exceptionalism’.
Meanwhile the EU published its so-called ‘Five Presidents Report’, signed in June by Juncker, Tusk, European Parliament president Martin Schulz, Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank, and Jeroen Dijsselbloem of the Eurogroup, which mapped out a blueprint for the future of the EU. Envisaging deeper economic, financial, fiscal and political union in the euro area by 2017, and full union by 2025, it was hardly helpful to Cameron. At the exact moment he wanted a hearing for a less centralised EU, the institutions were mapping out what Eurosceptics saw as a United States of the Eurozone.
Cameron and Osborne’s cautious approach was endorsed by senior figures like chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and the senior diplomats Rogers and Tom Scholar, who were conscious they had to deliver the prime minister’s wish list in a legally binding way. ‘Ivan saw his job as warning of the chasm between perceptions, stressing the legalism of the opposite side.’ That put the civil servants on a collision course with Daniel Korksi and Mats Persson, the leads on EU affairs, Ameet Gill, the director of strategy, and Max Chambers, a special adviser and speechwriter, who all wanted Cameron to ‘go big and not get all of it – get eight out of ten’. Mats Persson says: ‘The biggest mistake we made was that we treated it as an exercise in political management, and a communication exercise, rather than going for proper and fundamental change.’
Korski was bright but passionate; in centuries past he would have been an imperial governor or a great duellist. He had arrived in Number 10 the previous April after an unhappy period working for Cathy Ashton, Britain’s Commissioner in Brussels. His swashbuckling style was honed alongside Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia and in Kabul at the height of the war in Afghanistan, where he was private secretary to a minister in Hamid Karzai’s government. He had also had a spell on secondment to the US State Department, helped set up the Spectator’s Coffee House website, and found himself, Zelig-like, in Tahrir Square