All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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so they could reclaim sovereignty and battle over whether the UK could avoid the jurisdiction of the European Court or repatriate entire areas of competence from Brussels. Now, as one report later put it, ‘Britain’s place in Europe was resting on whether or not 34,000 children of East European migrants could carry on receiving full child benefit, at a cost of £25 million a year to the taxpayer – about 0.2 per cent of Britain’s £11 billion annual payment to the EU.’16 David Lidington said, ‘It really boiled down to stuff which cost nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.’ But Downing Street knew Szydło ‘could not be seen to cave’, and ‘probably had quite restrictive riding instructions from Kaczyński back in Warsaw’.
While Tom Scholar and Ivan Rogers worked on the Polish officials in Brussels, Daniel Korski, whose parents were both refugees from Poland, began talking to contacts in Warsaw around Kaczyński, urging them to remind Szydło that ‘Cameron is our friend and we need to help him.’
By 5 p.m. there was still no agreement, and Cameron lost heart, sending his text to Andrew Cooper about wanting to leave the EU and announcing that he would give Juncker and Tusk one last chance to sort out the benefits issue: ‘The Council now needs to act this out, I’m not doing any more.’ A source in the room said, ‘We were very close to saying, “There’s no deal now, we’ll come back to it in November and see what happens then.” It wasn’t done in any sort of grandstanding fashion.’ Would Cameron ever have walked away? Another delegation source said, ‘It’s hard to tell with David. It was quite fluid at times. I think in the wrong circumstances he would have walked away from it.’ Another official who was present disagrees: ‘I think the PM said it knowing enough that it would drive them to sort it out.’
Rogers and Scholar sent Martin Selmayr, Juncker’s right-hand man, a message: ‘We’re pretty much at our limit now, we need you to help if there’s going to be a deal.’ Selmayr was regarded as a slippery customer about whom the best that could be said was that he hated the French as much as the English. He was also the most formidable official in the Commission, a man who loved making deals. The big guns wanted the issue resolved – a Number 10 source said, ‘Tusk and Juncker were being helpful, saying, “For God’s sake, we don’t want this hanging over us for the next six months.” Merkel wasn’t fired up, but she said, “Let’s do this.”’
Suddenly word came via the Czechs that the V4 were shifting. The threat of Cameron walking away was sobering for those in Eastern Europe. ‘They were thinking about Putin the whole time,’ one of Cameron’s team said. ‘The Law and Justice government knew we had supported a very tough line on sanctions on Ukraine, that we’d been supporting NATO’s persistent presence in the Baltic region. They were also pretty scared about the interests of the remaining non-euro countries in the EU in the absence of the UK.’
But they still needed a ladder to climb down on benefits. Around 6 p.m. Tusk proposed a compromise. There would be one seven-year-long emergency brake, two years longer than the Poles wanted. Britain wanted the payments cut to the same level at which they were paid in the immigrants’ home country. To the V4 this was unacceptable. The Poles then agreed to the principle of indexing child benefit based on each country’s living standards. The situation was complicated by the fact that the Polish government had won the election on a pledge to raise rates of child benefit at home. Which rate would apply, and how would it be indexed? Ivan Rogers saw that the negotiations were descending into the weeds, and advised Cameron not to engage on the micro detail. The Poles’ final issue was that they were not prepared to allow a cut for anyone already getting the payment. Cameron said ‘No.’ That would mean full child benefit still being sent abroad in 2031. Tusk suggested another compromise: a ‘transitional period’ during which migrant workers could carry on claiming child benefit until 2020. Cameron agreed. In the end, there was a fudge that allowed both sides to claim victory. A Number 10 source said, ‘It allowed them to show you’d have some kind of rate that was proportionate to income without us committing to the rate of actual benefit.’
Around 8.30 p.m. the leaders finally sat down to an ‘English dinner’ of artichoke with goat’s cheese and rocket, fillet of veal with tarragon jus and passionfruit bavarois for pudding. The V4 finally agreed terms. But there was a final crisis. As the dessert was served, the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras spoke up. His country was still suffering from the debt crisis; now it was on the front line of the migration crisis, its islands overwhelmed in places with refugees, he said, and here was the British prime minister having his concerns dealt with by Brussels with more urgency than Greece’s. Cameron thought Tsipras was about to veto the whole deal. Emboldened by this intervention, the Portuguese prime minister António Costa also spoke up. He demanded to see the full text of the agreement before even considering giving his approval. Then Stefan Löfven, the Swedish premier, announced that he would have to consult with his coalition partners at home. The deal required the unanimous support of all twenty-eight member states. One of Cameron’s aides described it as a ‘cliffhanger moment’.
In the event, the darkest hour was just before the dawn. After another half an hour of horse-trading the deal was done. The doughty Dalia Grybauskaitė of Lithuania was the first to announce, ‘Drama over.’ Tusk then tweeted, ‘Deal. Unanimous support for new settlement for #UKinEU.’ Jonathan Faull, the British director general of the European Commission – Jean-Claude Juncker’s chief negotiator – and other EU officials met in the press bar and clinked glasses. ‘It shows Europe listened and responded,’ he said. ‘I hope people in Britain understand that.’17
At 11.10 p.m. in Brussels, just into the evening news at home as Craig Oliver had wanted, a tired but triumphant Cameron emerged to announce that he had his deal: ‘I believe we are stronger, safer and better off inside a reformed EU, and that is why I will be campaigning with all my heart and soul to persuade the British people to remain.’ For Labour’s David Chaplin, watching the 10 o’clock news in London, it was ‘the most surreal moment’ to see a Conservative leader taking this step. Chaplin had worked with Coetzee, Straw and Cooper on the ‘Stronger, Safer, Better Off’ slogan. ‘Suddenly the prime minister stood up and read out our script almost word for word. My jaw dropped. It was like watching the prime minister read out your homework on national television.’
But did Cameron’s own homework deserve a good grade? To this day, Cameron’s closest aides say he and Ed Llewellyn believed he had got substantive reforms that would have made a material difference to Britain’s EU membership. ‘They put everything into it,’ Andrew Cooper said. ‘Endless sleepless nights and difficult conversations. David and Ed genuinely feel that if one is dealing with the realities of the European Union, they got something quite significant – and many other EU countries would agree. But to any observer with a little more distance from the process, it looks much less substantive. And from the considerable distance of a voter, even if you had the chance to explain it to them, it was totally inadequate, given what we knew they hoped for.’
The problem, as Cooper’s polling showed, was that ‘What most voters clearly wanted was a big reduction in the numbers of people coming here – rather than a time-limit on benefit entitlement.’
Cameron deserves credit for getting his fellow leaders to accept reforms they initially opposed. ‘That’s the thing that frustrates me in all of this: even to get what the PM got was really hard work,’ one official said. ‘They salami-sliced us the whole way.’ A senior civil servant said the negotiators delivered what Cameron asked of them: ‘Ivan and Tom did a bloody good job of getting the text. The problem was the manifesto and the selection of the four baskets.’ Ultimately it was Cameron’s own public pronouncements that had helped create expectations he could not meet. As Cooper puts it, ‘The problem was not that David Cameron wasn’t tough enough or shrewd enough in his negotiating stance, but that it was a mistake to suggest in the first place that very significant control over free movement was achievable. It created a massive expectation problem, which turned out to be a hole below the waterline of the campaign to stay in the EU.’ Cameron’s most reckless pledge was the one he made at the 2014 party conference, when he said he would ‘get what you need’ on immigration. One close friend said, ‘I was astonished