All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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knew the deal would be a big media moment. Craig Oliver asked the Stronger In digital team of Tom Edmonds and Craig Elder to map out a plan for a ‘Twitter war room’ to leap into action when it was signed, with MPs, business leaders and other influential supporters declaring that Cameron had got a good deal. ‘Craig was very focused on how social media played out in the Westminster bubble,’ said David Chaplin. ‘This was about creating a tidal wave of sentiment on social media, from people that politicians and journalists would recognise.’
The paper prepared by Oliver goes into meticulous detail: ‘Twitter Warroom to be set up in Nick Herbert’s Conservatives for Reform in Europe Office … Many supportive MPs are out of the country, so we will give those a set time to tweet remotely.’ It detailed how Edmonds was ‘working on paid push’ for Cameron’s Facebook page and an email to supporters on the day of the deal. Oliver himself planned to lead the tweeting from the prime minister’s @David_Cameron account. In the Cabinet Office, a new unit was set up under Matthew Gould, returning to London after a spell as ambassador to Israel. Gould would run the civil service team who would prepare official government documents on the referendum. They would also have responsibility for rapid rebuttal to the media.
The only problem with all this planning was that it was built around the weekend of 20–21 February. On 2 February Gould’s unit had not got off the ground, and Oliver’s Twitter war room was no more than an idea on a piece of paper. Ivan Rogers had tried to warn the political team: ‘The key moment is not February 18th or 19th, it’s when Tusk produces the text. That’s where the shit hits the fan.’ But Stronger In’s David Chaplin says, ‘In all the conversations that we’d had with [Number 10] I don’t remember that Tusk paper or that moment ever really being signposted. Everything’s easier in hindsight, but that was the moment the world reacted to the deal, because that was when they saw the parameters of what the EU was willing to offer us. We had not been asked to prepare any kind of reaction to that.’ Will Straw is blunter still: ‘We’d been told by Number 10 it wasn’t going to be a big deal. The leave side just piled in at that point.’
By the time Cameron got to Brussels and Oliver’s media plan cranked into action, the deal he had spent nine months negotiating was already a dead duck. A member of his team admitted later that the lack of preparedness was one of the signal strategic mistakes of the entire referendum campaign: ‘The opportunity was lost in those two weeks, between the publication of the draft and the council meetings. And by then, the public’s mind had been set.’
The following day’s newspapers were merciless, with even sympathetic publications focusing on what had been traded away. The most damaging attack was the splash in the Sun, whose graphics department had done up Cameron and his team as the hapless platoon from Dad’s Army with the headline ‘Who do EU think you are kidding Mr Cameron?’ The paper branded the deal a ‘steaming pile of manure’. Cameron and the Sun’s editor, Tony Gallagher, had a ‘face-to-face row’ in Downing Street. A poll by ComRes shortly afterwards found that only 21 per cent of voters thought the deal was a good one; 58 per cent thought it was bad. One minister said, ‘What genuinely surprised Number 10 was not that the Mail, the Sun, the Express were supporting Leave, but that the tone of the criticism was so venomous.’
A jubilant Steve Baker texted his Conservatives for Britain supporters, ‘spectacular omnishambles renegotiation; PM should campaign to leave.’ In a follow-up email he added, ‘The EU referendum battle has now been joined in earnest. We are getting the best of it.’ It concluded by predicting, ‘The cavalry are coming.’
The media response to the Tusk document revealed one of the greatest strategic problems for the Remain campaign. The Tories at the top of Stronger In were about to run a referendum campaign based on a playbook devised by Lynton Crosby for winning general elections in an environment where the print media was sympathetic. But this time their natural allies were hostile. The Sun and the Daily Mail campaigned aggressively for Brexit from the off. Rupert Murdoch, the Sun’s proprietor, was a Brexit sympathiser, and pushing 70 per cent of the paper’s readers agreed. Sources at the Mail say the editor, Paul Dacre, believed passionately in leaving the EU, and felt that Cameron had never acknowledged the assistance the paper had given in propelling him to his majority the year before. The Daily Telegraph gave Cameron a fair hearing, but its proprietors, the Barclay brothers, had links to Ukip, and it too backed Brexit. The Times and the Sunday Times took a neutral approach and eventually split, The Times for Remain, while the Sunday Times called for a Leave vote as a way of getting a better deal from Brussels. Oliver could expect good shows in the Guardian and the Independent, but both were papers with dwindling circulation which did not speak to the kind of voters the ‘In’ campaign would need to convert. Only the Mirror papers and the Mail on Sunday went into what Oliver called ‘campaign mode’ on behalf of Remain. ‘It pains me to say it,’ a member of Cameron’s team said, ‘but if the Mail, Sun and the Telegraph had been for “In” we would have romped home.’
For Oliver a hostile press was unfamiliar terrain, both because he was used to supportive newspapers and because his core skillset since he moved to Downing Street from the BBC in 2011 was shaping broadcast coverage. Oliver, forty-seven at the time of the campaign, had been a reporter with a small Scottish TV station before rising through the ranks to become a senior executive at ITV News, from which he was poached by the BBC in 2006. There he boosted the ratings of The Ten O’Clock News and met his (now ex-) wife, the news presenter Joanna Gosling, with whom he had three daughters. John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, judged him ‘undoubtedly the best editor I ever worked for’.4 It is little wonder that Oliver’s view during the campaign was that what mattered was what led ‘the six and the ten’, the two main evening BBC television bulletins at 6 and 10 p.m. In this he was hugely successful. No one in government knew the BBC better, and a well-timed call to the right editor or correspondent could alter the tone of the coverage or the running order, winning him plaudits in Number 10.
Relations with the print press did not begin well, when Oliver initially refused to hand out his mobile phone number. The papers retaliated by ridiculing him for wearing a pair of Beats headphones by the American rapper Dr. Dre as he made his way up Downing Street for the first time – Dominic Cummings, for years an antagonist, referred to Oliver dismissively as ‘Dre’ ever after. In time Oliver came to understand the value of the papers in shaping the broadcast coverage, and he developed strong relationships with several newspaper political editors, his reputation growing in tandem with his influence in Downing Street. But he remained suspicious of print journalists, who he saw as a different species. They, in turn, swapped stories about his regular texts of complaint when their tweets did not meet with his approval. ‘Craig was obsessed with what’s happening now on social media, what’s happening on the six and ten and who is going on the Today programme,’ says a campaign source. ‘Those are the four parts of Craig’s brain.’ By the time of the referendum Oliver’s teething troubles with the newspapers were long in the past, but for the first time he was confronted with a campaign that was an away fixture. As a non-Tory working for Stronger In said, ‘It turned out the emperor has no clothes. When the press are not supporting Cameron, the Tories didn’t quite know what to do.’
Oliver did not believe there was anything he could have done to make the coverage of the Tusk draft more congenial. A Downing Street source familiar with his thinking says, ‘You have to ask yourself about the fairness of the coverage of what Tusk was doing. It was part of a Brexit campaign – and very noisy. Would anything have been good enough?’ Oliver would have plenty of good moments during the campaign, when his broadcasting expertise was invaluable to Stronger In. But the weekend of Donald Tusk’s draft was not one of them – and it was to cost Cameron.
The one bit of good news for the prime minister that week was the emergence of Theresa May as a supporter of the Remain campaign. The home secretary had helped shape Cameron’s letter to Tusk in November, but Downing Street’s worst fear was that she would announce that she had concluded, as the minister in charge of immigration, that it could not be controlled within the EU – a move that could have swung public opinion decisively