All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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she had been willing to frustrate Eurosceptics by pushing through moves to opt back in to the European Arrest Warrant and thirty-four other EU-wide justice measures in 2014. Coupled with her innate caution and concerns about the economy, her security instincts were enough to keep May in Cameron’s camp. ‘She weighed the decision quite broadly,’ a close aide said. ‘For economic reasons she thought the risk was too great.’
May did not sell herself cheap. She insisted to Cameron that any deal included measures cracking down on ‘sham marriages’ which enabled non-EU nationals to stay in member states. She also demanded that residency restrictions imposed on the non-EU spouses and other family members of Britons should also apply to European citizens seeking to settle their families in the UK. May’s importance was clear to Donald Tusk. As those elements made their way from proposals into the Council president’s draft document, he repeatedly asked Cameron’s aides, ‘Will this be enough for Theresa May?’ When the draft was published, Cameron, frustrated by weeks of evasions from May about her intentions, called to pin her down and she announced, ‘This is a basis for a deal.’ In Number 10, where May was seen as an at times truculent enigma, there was relief. One Downing Street official said, ‘She said what she wanted, she helped us get it, and then she stuck to her side of the bargain.’ Another Number 10 aide said, ‘I think we overdelivered on what she wanted. Although I don’t know how she could have ever credibly gone “Out”, having read everything she’d said on Europe and security. She’d basically said, “If we leave the EU, paedophiles roam free.”’
May’s decision did disappoint some of her closest associates, who did not know which way she would go until the last minute, and would have preferred her to campaign to leave. Stephen Parkinson was already working for Vote Leave, and Nick Timothy was also a Brexiteer. ‘Nick and Parky hoped she’d be for Out,’ a senior Vote Leave source said. It is possible that if May had been inclined to back Vote Leave, she would have been put off by the chaos of the coup against Dominic Cummings just a week earlier. As it unfolded, Parkinson remarked to a colleague, ‘She’s not going to join this kind of organisation.’
Timothy was ‘depressed’ about May’s decision when he saw Paul Stephenson later that day, believing she could have been the key to victory for Vote Leave. Stephenson said, ‘Don’t worry, the cavalry’s on its way.’ Vote Leave were growing in confidence that Michael Gove, and possibly even Boris Johnson, would be joining them.
With May on board, Cameron turned his attention to the preparations for the final summit and a last-minute burst of diplomacy. Of his four baskets, two were straightforward. British demands for the EU to become more ‘competitive’ were largely agreed. Belgium’s objections to the rejection of ‘ever closer union’ were also easily resolved – the UK would get an opt-out while others continued down the path of centralisation. That left just two baskets in play. The first was the need to secure protections for non-euro countries, which George Osborne had made his responsibility.
Osborne told aides that sorting out rules that would allow the single-currency bloc to integrate further without letting them run roughshod over the nine countries outside the eurozone was ‘the most important part of the deal in terms of Britain’s actual position in the EU’, even if the immigration measures were the ‘most politically important’. Without action, every other country was expected to eventually adopt the euro, leaving Britain in ever less splendid isolation. The chancellor made a series of trips to European capitals – Berlin, Paris, Rome – and gave a speech to the German equivalent of the CBI, the BDI, calling for a set of principles which would be written into the European treaty ensuring that Britain would not be liable for future eurozone bailouts.
Two relationships were key to Osborne securing support for his proposals. He became close to the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, and also wooed Emmanuel Macron, the young French minister of the economy, like Osborne a reformer and a risk-taker. When the summit began, just one sentence in the draft remained in dispute. It would prove to be quite a sticking point.
Cameron prepared for the summit in the usual way, by lobbying Angela Merkel. On 12 February the two leaders talked tactics over dinner in Hamburg at the city’s annual St Matthew’s Feast. Merkel publicly declared Cameron’s reforms ‘justified and necessary’, and said it was in Germany’s ‘national interest’ for the UK to remain in the EU. His next stop, on the Monday of summit week, was in Paris, where he lobbied François Hollande. Their relationship, initially frosty, had improved after Cameron was quick to offer support when France was subjected to a series of terrorist attacks, first on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then at the Bataclan theatre in Paris that November. Nonetheless, the French continued to point out that free movement was one of the founding principles of the single market, and criticised anything that smacked of an ‘à la carte’ EU.
Cameron also tried to curry favour with the Belgian prime minister Charles Michel, the leader most implacably opposed to greater powers for national parliaments, by sending him a collection of Beatrix Potter books for his newborn daughter, and with the Poles by backing an increase in NATO forces in Poland.
On Tuesday, Cameron met Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, an institution for which the prime minister had made little effort to hide his contempt over the years. The previous June, Cameron had put aside his distaste for Schulz’s federalist views and invited him to Downing Street, taking him to the service at St Paul’s Cathedral commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Unfortunately, this meeting did not go as well as hoped. Cameron arrived half an hour late. ‘Hi Martin,’ he beamed. ‘Good morning. All well?’ With acid irritation Schulz replied, ‘Technical problems?’ The substance of the meeting with senior MEPs was not much better, as Schulz said there was ‘no guarantee’ they would not seek to amend any deal agreed by the Council after the fact – a gift to Eurosceptics, who did not believe the renegotiation would be legally binding.
Cameron was not the only one comparing notes. The so-called ‘Visegrad Four’ – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – met together to discuss how they would thwart his benefits reforms. In one-on-ones, British officials were confident that the four countries were prepared to do business. But collectively the ‘V4’ gave each other the confidence to take a tougher line.
Shortly before the summit Cameron and Osborne had a sobering conversation with Lynton Crosby. The strategist had been using the back door of 10 Downing Street for several weeks to slip in for weekly meetings with the prime minister and chancellor. The three had been close since the 2005 general election, when Crosby had run Michael Howard’s campaign and identified Cameron and Osborne as the party’s stars of the future. Having overseen that gruelling campaign, Crosby had no interest in running Cameron’s referendum war room, but ‘he was providing weekly advice and his own polling’, said a senior Tory. ‘He was actually contracted to the Conservative Party, so he couldn’t take sides.’
Crosby was attributed with near-mythical status after the general election, which makes it stranger that Cameron and Osborne chose, in February 2016, to ignore his very firm view that they should not rush into a deal or a referendum until the end of 2017. ‘Don’t go so soon,’ he told them, and repeated that view to cabinet ministers. One of those who discussed the referendum with Crosby said, ‘His argument was to play the referendum late, to run it into 2017, on the grounds that the more people were exposed to the argument, the more they’d likely want to remain in.’ Another source said Crosby envisaged an even more dramatic gesture: ‘One thing he did advise was to rip up the deal live on the steps of Downing Street. I’m not convinced that would have worked. It would have bought ourselves another year. We’d have got a bit more on immigration. But not enough.’
Crosby did not tell Cameron he would lose if his advice was not heeded. ‘His judgement right up to – and including – the week of the referendum was that we were going to win,’ says a Cameron confidant. Crosby’s position was complicated by his close friendship with Johnson. ‘We all knew he was talking to Boris too,’ a Downing Street aide says. ‘He treated us both with respect and equal distance. He must have been in a difficult position, actually.’
Cameron and Osborne decided to