All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
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‘referendum lock’ speech, and attempts to prevent an ‘Acropolis Now’ collapse preoccupied the EU into 2012.
Two months after the Tories’ Commons rebellion, in December 2011, the nations in the eurozone demanded a Fiscal Compact Treaty to prop up their ailing currency. Cameron and Osborne sought protections for the City of London. In a strategy which he was to test to destruction, Cameron focused his negotiating efforts on Angela Merkel. They had a good relationship. The German chancellor had been to Chequers in 2010, when they kicked back watching episodes of Midsomer Murders. ‘Just think, all this could have been yours,’ Cameron had joked.7 After a lunch in Berlin, Cameron thought she was on-side, but she then went behind his back to do a deal with the French. A senior diplomat said, ‘We didn’t know what was happening, not even through covert channels. We were completely screwed over.’ Cameron, realising he had been ambushed, called to warn Merkel, ‘I’ll have to veto.’ She replied, ‘In that case I’ll have to do it without you.’8 On the evening of 8 December Cameron went alone into the summit room with twenty-six other leaders and found himself in a minority of one. At 4 a.m. he walked out.9
‘We renamed it a veto to claim it was a veto,’ one Downing Street aide recalled. Cameron’s refusal vetoed nothing. The other twenty-six nations simply signed a separate treaty outside the EU apparatus. But Cameron was lauded at home as a latterday Thatcher, standing magnificently alone against the tide of integration. A Number 10 source recalled, ‘Firstly, he never thought he was going to veto it. It was initially, “Oh fuck, what have we done?” Then the polls went up. It was a completely accidental triumph. The Foreign Office thought it was the end of the world.’ The veto affair showed all too clearly that, despite her warm words, Merkel would not deliver for Cameron if she thought Germany’s national interest and the good of the EU lay elsewhere. It was a lesson Cameron would have done well to learn there and then.
Cameron’s honeymoon with the sceptics was brief. In June 2012, with Downing Street on the back foot over George Osborne’s so-called ‘omnishambles’ budget, one hundred Tory MPs signed a letter, penned by Basildon MP John Baron, calling for legislation guaranteeing a referendum in the next Parliament. Two days later, at a summit in Brussels, Cameron rejected that plan. The Eurosceptics went into meltdown. ‘The PM and the chancellor looked like they were seriously losing authority over the party,’ a Downing Street source remembered.
In a bid to clean up the mess, Cameron wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph saying he was ‘not against referendums on Europe’, but that the time would not be right for an ‘in/out’ vote until Britain had ‘define[d] with more clarity where we would like to get to’.10 It was the first public expression of his desire for a new deal. Once again he had edged closer to a destination he did not desire, in order to placate people whose support he did not really want. Once again he had neither settled the issue to the satisfaction of his critics, nor properly confronted them. When Cameron told Nick Clegg about the article, the deputy prime minister told him he was ‘crazy’ to think he could buy off his critics. ‘I have to do this,’ Cameron insisted. ‘It is a party management issue.’11 Viewed after the political bloodbath that followed, the notion that holding a referendum might calm Tory divisions was farcically naïve.
It was the rise of the UK Independence Party (Ukip), and growing concern about immigration, that finally forced Cameron’s hand. The eurozone crisis sent unemployment soaring, inspiring hundreds of thousands of people to flock to Britain to find work. Cameron’s pledge to reduce net annual immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’ a year became untenable. The pressure this brought to bear on public services, coupled with the growing public view that yet another politician’s promise was worthless, was deftly exploited by the blokeish but charismatic Ukip leader Nigel Farage, whose ‘people’s army’ combined traditional EU constitutionalist pub bores with an anti-establishment grassroots movement that tapped into broader discontent with the Westminster elite. With the Liberal Democrats as partners in the coalition government, Farage was able to hoover up protest votes which traditionally went to the third party. By the autumn of 2012 Ukip were the third party, consistently above the Lib Dems in the polls. In November Ukip grabbed second place in two by-elections in Rotherham and Middlesbrough. Cameron decided he had to act. He would have to enter the 2015 general election campaign with a pledge to hold a referendum.
Andrew Cooper, the pollster who was a key figure in driving Tory modernisation, said, ‘Ukip, who nearly won the European elections in 2009, were very likely to win the European elections in 2014. We’d have been in meltdown and ended up being forced into a referendum commitment.’ He told Cameron, ‘Since it is a question of when, not if, let’s do it now, let’s do it calmly and set out a proper argument.’ The prime minister saw the logic in this. As another member of his inner circle put it, ‘There is an element where David thinks when the big judgement call needs to be made, “Put your balls on the line, let’s do it.”’
Once again, George Osborne was the most outspoken opponent of the idea. His father-in-law David Howell – a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher – told a Conservative activist that the chancellor ‘implored’ Cameron not to hold a referendum. Once again his objections were dismissed. In secret, Ed Llewellyn, the chief of staff in Downing Street, began work on the most important speech of Cameron’s career.
By now some of Cameron’s closest allies, including Steve Hilton and Oliver Letwin, were flirting with leaving the EU altogether. Most significantly, at the party conference in October, education secretary Michael Gove told journalists from the Mail on Sunday that on the current terms of membership he would vote to leave. Despite his resolute Euroscepticism, Gove, like Osborne, was a firm opponent of a referendum. He had two concerns. Even at this early stage he was worried that he ‘would have to stand on a different side to the prime minister’, which would be ‘painful’. He also felt that Cameron had not worked out what his strategy was, and what Britain wanted out of Europe. Gove saw a pattern where the prime minister sought confrontation with the sceptics, told them ‘You’re all lunatics,’ refused their demands, and then ‘caved in’. A source close to Gove said, ‘Throughout the time, Michael thought this whole thing was a recipe for disaster. What we’re not doing is thinking through what Britain will be outside the EU, we’re adopting a bunch of tactical strategies to stave off either Ukip’s growth or our backbench problems.’
Gove went so far as to put these concerns in writing, emailing Cameron before the speech to tell him, ‘You don’t need to do this, you don’t need to offer a referendum.’
‘Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing,’ came the breezy reply.
Angela Merkel’s views were assiduously sought before the big speech. A Downing Street aide recalled, ‘We were paranoid about this thing going off completely half-cocked, with Merkel and [French President François] Hollande going out the next day to say, “This is a pile of absolute shit, Britain is going to get nothing from this.” A lot of work was going into at least making sure they didn’t blow the idea of negotiations out of the water.’
The prime minister gave Merkel dinner in Downing Street on 7 November, at which he explained, ‘I’ve supported our membership of the EU all my political life, but I am worried that if I don’t get the reform objectives I’m setting out, I won’t be able to keep Britain in.’12 Merkel called Britain Europe’s ‘problem child’,13 and urged him to ‘couch the speech in an argument about Europe having to change’ – in other words, a better deal for everyone. A Number 10 official recalled, ‘The strategy was always: schmooze the pants off Merkel, get that locked down and then everyone else will fall in behind. It was damage limitation with the French. You got the sense that she was never wholeheartedly embracing it. The best you could hope for was that she could accept the political argument for him doing it and not stand in the way.’
After several delays, the