All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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He argued that net migration to Britain of over 300,000 a year ‘is not sustainable’, and demanded assurances that ‘free movement will not apply to new members until their economies have converged much more closely with existing Member States’. In a section inserted at the instigation of Theresa May, the home secretary, he called for a ‘crackdown on the abuse of free movement’, with ‘longer re-entry bans for fraudsters and people who collude in sham marriages’. He went on, ‘It means addressing the fact that it is easier for an EU citizen to bring a non-EU spouse to Britain than it is for a British citizen to do the same.’
Finally, arriving at the most controversial part of the letter, Cameron turned to the ‘pull factors’: ‘We have proposed that people coming to Britain from the EU must live here and contribute for four years before they qualify for in-work benefits or social housing. And that we should end the practice of sending child benefit overseas.’
The only real surprise came not in the letter to Tusk, but in Cameron’s Chatham House speech. There he proposed new arrangements to emulate Germany’s constitutional court, which can ‘review legal acts by European institutions and courts to check that they remain within the scope of the EU’s powers. We will consider how this could be done in the UK.’ In this obscure paragraph Cameron had planted a colourful lure to land the biggest fish in the Tory Party. The week before, he had discussed the need to devise a means of asserting British sovereignty with none other than Boris Johnson, the mayor of London.
Cameron knew he needed reinforcements. When MPs debated the Tusk letter in the Commons later that day, Bernard Jenkin got to his feet and asked, ‘Is that it?’ The following morning the Sun’s splash headline was ‘ARE EU KIDDING?’ The Mail went with ‘IS THAT IT, MR CAMERON?’, describing the prime minister as ‘in retreat over plans to strip benefits from EU migrant workers’.3
In Brussels, Nigel Farage met officials who were perplexed that Cameron’s demands were so modest: ‘There was general surprise, laughter in the Hack, which is the boozer I go to. A lot of very senior Commission figures drink there after work, and really they thought it was laughable he’d asked for so little.’
The demand to axe ‘ever closer union’ was symbolic of the problem Cameron faced – a red rag to Europhiles but all too easily dismissed by Eurosceptics. Guy Verhofstadt, the federalist Belgian MEP, told Ivan Rogers, ‘This is completely poisonous, you’re trying to destroy the European Union.’ Yet Rogers himself told colleagues there ‘wasn’t much in it’, and that he had ‘wasted months of my life’ trying to explain Britain’s position.
Cameron had ditched many of the ideas he himself had floated in the preceding three years. Conspicuous by their absence were any attempt to repatriate social and employment legislation – ditched at the behest of Labour and the unions – or to demand smaller EU budgets or assert UK judicial control over justice and home-affairs laws. Korski’s efforts to put reform of the European Court of Justice on the table had been rejected, along with proposals to demand a ‘one in, three out’ rule for EU regulations, advanced by Sajid Javid, the business secretary.
During this period there had been no effort to talk to the Eurosceptics to get their ideas. Daniel Hannan says, ‘When Philip Hammond was in Brussels, I went to speak to the guys who were with him and said, “Just out of interest, why have you not come to us, and found out what our bottom line is? It might have helped you get something that will be more sellable.” The answer was, “Nothing would be good enough for you guys.”’ For Hannan that was certainly true, but his ideas would have improved the deal, and that could have helped Cameron to win over wavering MPs. One of his proposals was to ditch EU passports and return to the iconic navy-blue documents of the past. Hannan said, ‘It would have been a visible symbol that we were outside the political union. I’m not saying that would have swung the issue, but I’m giving that as an example of the easiest imaginable thing that wasn’t asked for.’
When the European Council opened on 17 December, Tusk declared it a ‘make-or-break summit’. Cameron laid out his plans in a passionate forty-minute address to his fellow leaders over dinner. The benefits plans were the most controversial. Beata Szydło, the new Polish prime minister, said that stripping migrants of welfare would not be ‘acceptable’ because her citizens were ‘building the GDP of Great Britain’. It was clear that the flat four-year ban on in-work benefits was a non-starter. Juncker proposed a compromise, combining the old idea of an ‘emergency brake’ with the benefits ban so payments could be temporarily halted. After the meeting concluded Cameron said ‘We are well on our way to a deal,’ and confirmed for the first time that the referendum would take place in 2016. But having not ‘gone big’ with his renegotiation, the measures to tackle immigration were growing both thinner and more difficult to explain to voters.
On 2 February Donald Tusk published the detailed draft plans for the renegotiation, and tweeted a little Shakespeare: ‘To be, or not to be together, that is the question.’
Then all hell broke loose.
The publication of the Tusk draft was seen in Downing Street as simply a step on the path to the February European Council, at which the final deal would be done. In fact it was the first major media showdown between Number 10 and the Leave campaign. This confrontation shaped public views of the deal for good, and it was one that Cummings, Baker, Stephenson and Banks won hands down.
Tusk’s sixteen-page paper confirmed that in the six weeks since the December council, Cameron’s benefits plans had been watered down in two ways. Gone was the standing four-year ban for new arrivals, replaced with a proposal for a temporary restriction activated by an emergency brake. Instead of a total ban on welfare handouts for the four years, benefits would be slowly ‘tapered’ in. For a month media coverage had focused on what rabbit Cameron might pull from his hat to boost the deal. In the event, it emerged sick with myxomatosis.
Downing Street could not have stopped Tusk from writing the document, since it was usual practice for the Council president to circulate papers for discussion ahead of a summit, but they could have tried to prevent it being formally published. Tusk assumed the draft would leak, and decided it was better to put it in the public domain himself. Yet that gave it an official status that left Cameron less room for manoeuvre. As a minister said, ‘When Tusk took the decision to formally publish we couldn’t say, “We don’t comment on leaked drafts, it’s an ongoing negotiation.”’ Number 10 could also have pointed out where the document was lacking, if nothing else to show that they were fighting for more. ‘We didn’t give it such a warm reception,’ one Downing Street official said.
The reception in the House of Commons was far from warm. Steve Baker, the head of Conservatives for Britain, saw an opportunity for another act of guerrilla warfare, even if it involved putting his reputation as one of Parliament’s gentlemen at risk: ‘The deal came out and we immediately rubbished it successfully. That was a purposeful strategy.’ That morning Baker sat down with Paul Stephenson and said, ‘I’ve got this idea, and it’s a bit coarse, but what if I was to say, “It’s like the prime minister’s polishing poo”?’ Stephenson, less delicate by nature, suggested a refinement: ‘It’s not good enough – you need to say something like “It’s shiny on the outside and soft in the middle.”’ Baker recalled, ‘It was breathtakingly crude, but also not out of order. I sat there in the chamber of the Commons that day, thinking, “Do I want to win this referendum or not?” I realised that if I stood up and made yet another tedious point of EU law it would be completely forgotten.’
Around 1 p.m. Baker got to his feet in the Commons and said to David Lidington, ‘This in-at-all-costs deal looks and smells funny. It might be superficially shiny on the outside, but poke it and it is soft in the middle. Will my right hon. friend admit to the House that he has been reduced to polishing poo?’ To his credit Lidington came back, quick as a flash, to say, ‘I rather suspect … my hon. friend was polishing that particular question many days ago.’ But Baker’s gambit worked: ‘It got me coverage everywhere. It was coarse, it was crude, my members didn’t like me doing it, I’ll probably never do anything like it again. But we had to make sure