# All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

Tim Shipman

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2017#1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘The best political book of the year’ Andrew Marr‘A superb work of storytelling and reporting. Sets new benchmark for the writing of contemporary political history’ GuardianThe only book to tell the full story of how and why Britain voted to leave the EU.Based on unrivalled access to all the key politicians and their advisors – including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of Vote Leave – Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller, and offers a gripping, day-by-day account of what really happened behind-the-scenes in Downing Street, both Leave campaigns, the Labour Party, Ukip and Britain Stronger in Europe.Shipman gives his readers a ringside seat on how decisions were made, mistakes justified and betrayals perpetrated. Filled with stories, anecdotes and juicy leaks the book does not seek to address the rights and wrongs of Brexit but to explore how and why David Cameron chose to take the biggest political gamble of his life and explain why he lost.This is a story of calculation, attempted coups, individuals torn between principles and loyalty. All the events are here – from David Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum, through to the campaign itself, his resignation as prime minister, the betrayals and rivalries that occurred during the race to find his successor to the arrival of Theresa May in Downing Street as Britain’s second female prime minister.All Out War is a book about leaders and their closest aides, the decisions they make and how and why they make them, as well as how they feel when they turn out to be wrong. It is about men who make decisions that are intellectually consistent and – by their own measure – morally sound that are simultaneously disastrous for themselves and those closest to them. It is about how doing what you know has worked before doesn’t always work again. Most of all it is about asking the question: how far are you prepared to go to win?

## Copyright

William Collins

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London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Tim Shipman 2016

Tim Shipman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover illustration by Morten Morland/Spectator

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780008215156

Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008215163

Version: 2017-05-04

## Dedication

For my mother, who taught me to read,

and my father, who taught me to think.

Above all, for my wife Charlotte,

who was there and who deserved to win.

By meeting her, I did.

## Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Timeline

Introduction: Demons Unleashed

PART ONE: SKIRMISHES

1 ‘My Lily-Livered Colleagues …’

2 For Britain

3 Dom and Arron

4 Stronger In

5 Cornering Corbyn

6 Guerrilla Warfare

7 The Coup

8 The Deal

9 Boris and Michael

PART TWO: BATTLE IS JOINED

10 Project Fear

11 The IDS of March

12 Designation’s What You Need

13 ‘Back of the Queue’

14 The Economy, Stupid

15 Blue on Blue

16 Turning Points

17 Aunty Beeb

18 Debating Points

19 Labour Isn’t Working

20 Immigration Crisis

21 George’s Monstrous Medicine

22 Breaking Points

23 Wembley

24 The Waterloo Strategy

25 Brexit Night

PART THREE: ALL OUT WAR

26 Fallout Friday

27 Jexit

28 The Dream Team

29 Anyone But Boris

30 Brexecuted

31 Mayniacs v Leadbangers

32 Iron May-den

Conclusion: Why Leave Won

Appendix 1: Boris Johnson’s First ‘Out’ Article

Appendix 2: Boris Johnson’s ‘In’ Article

Appendix 3: David Cameron’s ‘Victory’ Speech

List of Illustrations

Picture Section

Bibliography

Notes

Index

About the Publisher

## Acknowledgements

This book is based on more than one hundred interviews conducted in person and on the telephone during July and August 2016. A number of people have been immeasurably helpful but understandably do not wish to see their names in print, particularly those who work for the civil service, the new prime minister or the Labour Party, whose discretion is a living concern. They know who they are, and I’m grateful. Many of the interviews included ‘on the record’ observations, but most of the time we spoke on the understanding that I would construct a narrative of events without signalling the parentage of every fact and quote. Where I have directly quoted someone, or attributed thoughts or feelings to them, I have spoken to them, the person they were addressing, someone else in the room, or someone to whom they recounted details of the conversation. This means that I have only provided references to quotes or information from published sources and broadcast interviews. Where matters are disputed I have been clear about who is making the claims.

While it is invidious to single anyone out for special thanks, I am immensely grateful to: Iain Anderson, Adam Atashzai, Steve Baker, Arron Banks, Eddie Barnes, Jake Berry, Gabby Bertin, Nick Boles, Peter Bone, Graham Brady, Andrew Bridgen, Chris Bruni-Lowe, Conor Burns, Alistair Burt, Paul Butters, Alastair Campbell, David Campbell Bannerman, Joe Carberry, Douglas Carswell, Max Chambers, David Chaplin, Bill Clare, Ryan Coetzee, Therese Coffey, Henry Cook, Andrew Cooper, Dominic Cummings, Ruth Davidson, Henry de Zoete, Oliver Dowden, Brian Duggan, Sir Alan Duncan, Iain Duncan Smith, Matthew Elliott, Nick Faith, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, Nigel Farage, Liam Fox, Mark Fullbrook, Nusrat Ghani, Ameet Gill, John Glen, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Damian Green, Gerry Gunster, Matthew Hancock, Daniel Hannan, Richard Harrington, Michael Heaver, Patrick Heneghan, Kate Hoey, Richard Howell, Bernard Jenkin, Alan Johnson, Boris Johnson, Hermann Kelly, Daniel Korski, Brandon Lewis, David Lidington, James McGrory, Michael McManus, Lord Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, Katie Martin, Zack Massingham, Nicky Morgan, David Mundell, Jonathan Munro, Henry Newman, Brett O’Donnell, Sir Craig Oliver, George Osborne, Rob Oxley, Mike Penning, Mats Persson, Amy Richards, Lewis Robinson, Lord Rose of Monewden, Josh Simons, Keith Simpson, Anna Soubry, Paul Stephenson, Will Straw, Lucy Thomas, Gawain Towler, Laura Trott, Nick Varley, Will Walden, Ben Wallace, Graeme Wilson and Nick Wood.

I’m also grateful to several lobby colleagues for passing on anecdotes and advice, including James Lyons, Oliver Wright, Sam Coates, James Kirkup, Beth Rigby, Fraser Nelson, Matt Chorley and Rob Hutton. Laura Kuenssberg gave me prior sight of the transcript of her television documentary Brexit: Battle for Britain, which was broadcast on 8 August 2016. Andy Taylor made several helpful suggestions on structure.

A first-time author has more debts than they can possibly repay. Victoria Hobbs, my agent at A.M. Heath, has been a friend and a professional through various abortive projects, and quickly did the deal, mid-holiday, when this one came up.

At HarperCollins, my editor Arabella Pike embraced the project from the off, and was very understanding of a recalcitrant hack’s flexible approach to deadlines. Special thanks to Robert Lacey, the best copy editor in the business, Joseph Zigmond for sorting the pictures, PR supremo Helen Ellis, and Essie Cousins who keeps the ducks in a row.

My greatest debt is to Gabriel Pogrund, without whom this project would never have been completed. When he got in touch to offer his services I envisaged a keen amanuensis, but he was so much more than that. He began by tirelessly transcribing my tapes, but was also quickly introducing me to key sources, conducting some interviews himself, and always fizzing with ideas. He has been an engine of great industry and insight, and does everything with good humour and judgement. Bénédicte Earl, George Greenwood, Hannah McGrath, Oliver Milne and Thomas Seal also provided invaluable assistance in transcribing more than half a million words of interviews. Hannah also shared some notes on one episode. Harriet Marsden gave me access to her Brexit project, including an interview with Andy Wigmore.

At the Sunday Times I’d like to thank the editor Martin Ivens, his deputy Sarah Baxter and Eleanor Mills, the magazine editor, for giving prominence to serious coverage of politics that also revels in the soap opera of SW1.

We are all products of our education, and I was fortunate to have inspirational teachers at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Horncastle, Lincolnshire. None more than my English teachers David and Heather Slater, who taught me to appreciate a good sentence (though not how to write one) while nurturing the subversive aspects of my personality that best prepared me for journalism. At Cambridge, Christopher Andrew, the late Mark Kaplanoff, Joanna Lewis, Peter Clarke and Chris Clark nurtured my love of history. I hope that as a first draft this passes muster.

Whenever there is an election, people ask me who I would like to win. I have a stock answer, which is only partially facetious: ‘My contacts – anyone who answers the phone.’ In general elections your mates can theoretically all win their seats. But the EU referendum was a civil war. I had close friends on both sides. At least one journalist with a loved one on a campaign was banished from the marital bed as a result of something they wrote. By the end of it people I like and admire were looking for work. Others whose careers had been unfairly coasting were returning in glory. The public rarely considers the human cost that accompanies a political realignment. The referendum campaign represented a career-life-or-death situation for many involved. Yet under levels of sleep deprivation that would be regarded as torture if they were inflicted on an enemy combatant, they remained professional and helpful. To everyone who answered the phone, if I could vote for you all, I would.

Most of all I would like to thank my family. My parents raised me in a house of books and have always supported me unconditionally. My sister Hannah has been a rock and a wizard webmistress, despite sharing a nuclear family with a thermonuclear ego. My wife Charlotte makes everything complete, and has endured more absences than any spouse has a right to expect during this project. Memories of our wedding mean that the day this book was first published was only the second proudest of my life.

Tim Shipman

Camogli, Todi, San Niccolo and Blackheath,

May 2017

## Timeline

1973

Ted Heath takes Britain into the EEC, or ‘Common Market’

1975

British public backs EEC membership in referendum with 67 per cent voting to stay

2007

Sep – David Cameron gives a ‘cast-iron guarantee’ to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty if he becomes PM

2009

Jun – Ukip demands a referendum and finishes second in the European elections with 16.5 per cent of the vote

Nov – Cameron rules out a referendum because the Lisbon Treaty has been ratified

2011

Oct – Largest post-war parliamentary rebellion on Europe as eighty-one Tories defy a three-line whip to back an in/out referendum on British membership

Dec – Cameron ‘vetoes’ EU fiscal compact treaty. Other twenty-six EU member states agree their own deal

2013

23 Jan – Cameron makes Bloomberg speech, promising to get ‘fundamental reform’ and then call an in/out referendum

5 Jul – James Wharton brings forward Private Member’s Bill to enshrine referendum pledge in law

2014

15 Mar – In article for the Sunday Telegraph, Cameron outlines seven areas where he wants reform of the EU

22 May – Ukip wins European elections with 26.6 per cent of the vote

28 Aug – Douglas Carswell defects from Tories to Ukip

27 Sep – Mark Reckless becomes second defector to Ukip

28 Nov – Cameron lays out demands for a four-year ban on in-work benefits for EU migrants. He ditches plans for an emergency brake on numbers

2015

7 May – General election. Cameron wins first Tory majority since 1992 and vows to hold a referendum before the end of 2017

8 May – Nigel Farage resigns as Ukip leader after failing to win South Thanet, but returns three days later

6 Jun – Steve Baker and David Campbell Bannerman launch Conservatives for Britain

25 Jun – Cameron outlines his broad-brush proposals at EU summit

9 Sep – Tory rebels and Labour MPs unite to defeat government over purdah rules

25 Sep – Nigel Farage announces Ukip will back Arron Banks’s group Leave.EU, originally called ‘The Know’

9 Oct – Vote Leave is officially launched with a video highlighting the £350 million-a-week cost of EU membership

12 Oct – Britain Stronger In Europe launches with Stuart Rose as chairman

9 Nov – Vote Leave activists disrupt Cameron’s speech to the CBI

10 Nov – In a letter to Donald Tusk, Cameron sets out details of the ‘four baskets’ of reforms. In a speech to Chatham House he details plans for a sovereignty lock demanded by Boris Johnson

1 Dec – Alan Johnson launches Labour In For Britain

6 Dec – Vote Leave calls Cameron ‘toxic’ after he claims he will have to campaign to leave if he is ignored by Brussels

8 Dec – MPs overturn an attempt by Labour peers to lower the voting age to sixteen

17–18 Dec – European Council discusses Cameron’s demands and agrees to push for a deal in February

2016

4 Jan – Cameron agrees that ministers will be allowed to campaign for Leave after Chris Grayling and Theresa Villiers threaten to resign

25 Jan – ‘Coup’ attempt to oust Cummings is repelled when other Vote Leave staff threaten to quit

2 Feb – Donald Tusk publishes draft agreement of a ‘new settlement’ between the EU and the UK

3 Feb – Steve Baker says the deal is ‘polishing poo’

18–19 Feb – Cameron secures a new deal in Brussels, including an emergency brake on migrant benefits. George Galloway attends a Grassroots Out rally in Westminster

20 Feb – Cameron holds historic Saturday cabinet meeting. Michael Gove leads a ‘gang of six’ cabinet ministers to back Brexit

21 Feb – Boris Johnson announces that he too will campaign to leave

22 Feb – In a statement to Parliament Cameron says, ‘I have no other agenda than what is best for our country,’ which is widely interpreted as an attack on Johnson’s motives

12 Mar – ITV does a deal with Downing Street and Ukip to secure Cameron and Farage for a debate

15 Mar – Cameron accuses Johnson of ‘literally making it up’ for suggesting the UK should have a Canada-style trade deal with the EU

18 Mar – Iain Duncan Smith resigns as work and pensions secretary over cuts to disability benefits in the budget

31 Mar – Vote Leave submits its designation document to the Electoral Commission with just twenty minutes to go

13 Apr – Electoral Commission designates Vote Leave and Britain Stronger In Europe as the two official campaigns

18 Apr – First Treasury document claims Brexit will cost families £4,300 a year

22 Apr – On a visit to London, President Barack Obama says Britain will be ‘in the back of the queue’ for a trade deal with the US

26 Apr – During a crunch meeting in George Osborne’s office, Tory chiefs on Stronger In rule out ‘blue-on-blue’ attacks on Johnson and Gove or any moves to tackle the immigration issue

5 May – In local elections Labour suffers the worst result by an opposition since 1982

6 May – Farage visits Vote Leave to discuss the ground campaign and the debates

8 May – Michael Gove tells the BBC’s Andrew Marr that Brexit Britain would be outside the European single market

9 May – Cameron warns that Brexit could lead to war in Europe

15 May – Boris Johnson says the EU is pursuing the same superstate as Hitler, using ‘different methods’

17 May – The Sun splashes on sex smears against Boris Johnson’s wife. Michael Heseltine condemns Johnson’s ‘preposterous’ claims

19 May – Eurosceptic rebels force Cameron to accept amendment to the Queen’s Speech on transatlantic trade deal

21 May – Osborne claims house prices will be 18 per cent lower in the event of Brexit

25 May – Ryan Coetzee reports to Stronger In chiefs that the economic message is not working

26 May – Immigration figures are released showing net migration to the UK rose to 333,000 in 2015

27 May – Purdah period begins, preventing the government from publishing further pro-Remain documents. Downing Street staff move to Stronger In HQ

29 May – Gove and Johnson write to Cameron accusing him of ‘corroding public trust’ with his immigration pledges. Andrew Bridgen says Cameron is ‘finished’ as PM

30 May – In the first of a series of ‘alternative government’ pledges, Vote Leave says a Brexit administration would scrap VAT on household energy bills

1 Jun – Gove and Johnson announce that a Brexit government would introduce an Australian-style points system to control immigration

2 Jun – Boris Johnson auctions a cow, describing it as a ‘beautiful milker’

3 Jun – Vote Leave vows to spend £100 million of the £350 million on the NHS instead of Brussels

5 Jun – John Major denounces Boris Johnson for a ‘squalid’, ‘deceitful’ and ‘depressing’ campaign

7 Jun – Deadline for voter registration crashes government website. Cameron calls out Leave’s ‘six lies’ in an emergency press conference

9 Jun – On a visit to Northern Ireland, Tony Blair and John Major warn that Brexit could break up the UK. Amber Rudd attacks Boris Johnson in first three-way TV debate. Andrew Cooper’s warning about falling Labour support for Remain prompts crisis meeting

12 Jun – In a Downing Street meeting, Cameron decides not to make a ‘vow’ on immigration

13 Jun – Stronger In clears the decks for ‘Labour week’, starting with a speech by Gordon Brown

14 Jun – Cameron thinks he should make an immigration pledge, but is again talked out of it. Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper also demand changes to freedom of movement

15 Jun – Cameron calls Angela Merkel but does not ask her for anything. George Osborne unveils an ‘emergency budget’ to plug a £30 billion black hole in the event of Brexit. Sixty-five Tory MPs vow to vote it down. Vote Leave unveils a ‘Brexit Queen’s Speech’. Flotillas led by Nigel Farage and Sir Bob Geldof clash on the Thames

16 Jun – Farage unveils ‘Breaking Point’ immigration poster. Labour MP Jo Cox murdered. Both campaigns suspended

19 Jun – A passionate Cameron tells Question Time audience Winston Churchill wouldn’t have ‘quit’ on Europe

21 Jun – Final ‘Great Debate’ at Wembley Arena. Boris Johnson says 23 June can be Britain’s ‘Independence Day’

23 Jun – Referendum day

24 Jun – Broadcasters declare Leave victors at 4.39 a.m. Cameron resigns at 8.15 a.m. Johnson and Gove hold a press conference and discuss plans to run a ‘Dream Team’ leadership bid. Labour MPs say they will call a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn

25 Jun – Gove calls Johnson to say he will back him. Johnson plays cricket at Althorp House. Hilary Benn phones shadow cabinet to see if they will resign

26 Jun – Eleven members of the shadow cabinet quit after Benn is fired by Corbyn. Johnson and Gove meet at Thame, Oxfordshire, to discuss Johnson’s campaign

27 Jun – Johnson’s Telegraph article on Brexit is criticised for backing both the single market and free movement

28 Jun – Labour MPs vote by 172 to forty for Jeremy Corbyn to quit. He refuses. Breakfast meeting of Johnson, Gove and aides at Lynton Crosby’s office to settle campaign tensions. Sarah Vine writes an email to Gove telling him to ‘be your stubborn best’

29 Jun – Stephen Crabb launches leadership bid. Johnson pulls out of hustings, struggles to write his launch speech, and tries and fails to recruit Andrea Leadsom. Gove decides he cannot support Johnson

30 Jun – Gove issues statement saying Johnson is not ready to be prime minister and that he will run for the leadership. Theresa May and Liam Fox also launch their campaigns. Johnson withdraws

1 Jul – Gove launches his campaign

4 Jul – Nigel Farage resigns as Ukip leader for the third time

5 Jul – May tops the first Tory leadership ballot with 165 votes, with Leadsom on sixty-six, Gove on forty-eight, Crabb on thirty-four and Fox on sixteen

6 Jul – Chilcot report on Iraq War published. Nick Boles’s text urging MPs to vote tactically against Leadsom leaks, damaging Gove

7 Jul – Leadsom supporters march on Parliament. In second ballot, May wins 199 votes, Leadsom eighty-four and Gove forty-six

9 Jul – In an interview with The Times, Leadsom implies she is better-qualified than May because she is a mother

11 Jul – Leadsom drops out of contest. May becomes Tory Party leader. Angela Eagle launches leadership challenge against Corbyn. Owen Smith says he will also run

12 Jul – After a seven-hour meeting, Labour’s NEC rules that Corbyn is automatically on the ballot paper, ending the attempted coup

13 Jul – Cameron takes final cabinet and PMQs. May visits Buckingham Palace and becomes prime minister. She vows to create ‘a country that works for everyone’

19 Jul – Eagle drops out, leaving Smith to take on Corbyn

24 Sep – Corbyn re-elected Labour leader with 62 per cent of the vote

Introduction

### Demons Unleashed

Not long before David Cameron moved into Downing Street he spent some time with an old friend, a man very successful in his own field but who regarded the prospect of his old mate Dave becoming the head of government with some bewilderment. ‘Isn’t it odd,’ he said, ‘that by the next time I see you, you will be the prime minister?’ The friend asked whether he was ready, whether Cameron felt up to the job. With the insouciance that became his trademark, Cameron replied, ‘How hard can it be?’

By 10 o’clock on the evening of 23 June 2016, a little over six years later, Cameron knew the answer to that question. The polls had just closed on the third major constitutional referendum of his premiership, a vote in which he had placed Britain’s membership of the European Union and his own career on the line. At that point Cameron was still expecting to win. His pollster and friend Andrew Cooper had published a poll that day putting the Remain campaign ten points ahead. Cooper’s internal tracking poll had things closer than that, but most of the twenty-five aides and allies gathered on the first floor of 10 Downing Street, eating moussaka and drinking bottled beer, expected to scrape a win. David Cameron was a winner. He had been in trouble before, but he had emerged triumphant from the 2011 referendum on electoral reform and again in the Scottish independence plebiscite in September 2014. Just 413 days earlier friend and foe alike had doubted him, but at the 2015 general election he had won the first parliamentary majority by a Conservative leader in twenty-three years.

Nevertheless, as Cameron circulated in the Terracotta Room, aides could see he was nervous – the calmest man there, but nervous nonetheless. With several of them he found time to joke ‘I’ve got both of my speeches ready!’ One for victory, one for defeat.

Nerves in the room were eased somewhat at 10 o’clock as the BBC announced that YouGov’s final poll had given Remain a 52–48 lead. Within three minutes the pound had risen on the currency markets and Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party and the man who had done most to force Cameron into calling a referendum, had all but conceded defeat.

At around midnight, as the first results approached, Cameron and a smaller group of friends and aides moved to the Thatcher Room, a book-lined study where the former prime minister had liked to work. Cameron looked as if he was working too, peering down at a laptop. ‘I’d never seen him on a computer before,’ one friend said.

Cameron was poring over a list drawn up by Jim Messina, the US voter-targeting expert who had helped both Barack Obama and Cameron get re-elected. His model showed how well the Remain team would have to do in each area of the country to win. When Newcastle was first to declare at midnight, voters there backed Remain by the slenderest of margins: 50.7 per cent to 49.3 per cent. The Downing Street staff looked at Messina’s model and saw that they needed a 52–48 win. A hoped-for four-point lead had evaporated into a margin of less than two points. Pulses quickened. Twenty minutes later, Sunderland delivered a stunning Leave victory, by 61 per cent to 39. Messina’s model said Remain needed a 60–40 loss there to be on par. Two points short again.

Peering at the laptop like Downing Street’s in-house psephologist, Cameron began commentating on his own downfall. ‘He was comparing the results on Messina model,’ an aide said. ‘He’d say, “Well, that’s three points short,” or “That’s two points short.” He was incredibly calm.’ And that was the story of the evening. At each turn, Remain was falling two to four points below expectations. Cameron’s inner circle pinned their hopes on good results in Scotland and London. When they started to come in, Cameron said, ‘We could still pull this back.’

But while Remain was winning big in its heartlands, turnout was lower than required. In Leave’s strongholds, three million people who never usually voted had turned out. Gradually, and with a minimum of drama, hope began to fade. ‘There was no panic,’ one young adviser remarked, just a strange and creeping realisation that everything was going wrong, that the gamble had failed.

As Cameron sat at the laptop, others in the room thought back to the key moments that had brought them here – the rebellion of eighty-one Tory MPs over a referendum in 2011; the announcement that Cameron would offer one in the Bloomberg speech of 2013; the pledges to deal with migrant benefits; the election victory in May 2015 that made it inevitable; the renegotiations with other EU countries which fell short of his previous pledges; the decisions by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson to put their principles and their ambitions before their loyalty to Cameron; the immigration figures; the debates; the posters; the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox – a reminder that some political lives end much more tragically than in defeat at the ballot box.

For Craig Oliver, the director of communications, the memory that stuck in the mind was of a conversation with Cameron in the back of a car after the general election, when the prime minister had weighed up the pros and cons of the decision to hold a referendum. Cameron laid out the reasons in favour: the public’s democratic right to decide, the need to placate his party, to lance the boil that had spread across British politics since the public were last asked their view on Europe in 1975. Asked for the case against, the prime minister said, ‘You could unleash demons of which ye know not.’[1]

A Cameron confidant with whom Oliver discussed the moment said, ‘I am sure he was thinking of the demons within the Tory universe, and whether they may take control and finish him off. The demons he’d been fighting hard to control all along. The demons that had played a huge role in making the Conservative Party unelectable for a generation.’

The demons were the forces of Euroscepticism that had been growing in the Conservative Party for three decades; they were the Eurosceptics who had forced Cameron to abandon his pledge to stop ‘banging on about Europe’; they were the ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ of Ukip he had once dismissed; perhaps also they were Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, whose decision to oppose him had put the result on a knife edge. Cameron also believed in the demons of economic disaster in the event of a Leave vote, the upsurge in nativist sentiment during the campaign, even the willingness of campaigners on both sides to stretch the truth to make their point during the campaign.

Draped across Cameron’s knees, fast asleep, was his daughter Nancy. Numerous people remarked on her presence that night. Cameron was always a father as well as a politician. However hard he worked – and he worked much harder than his critics liked to pretend – he had always found time to go up to the flat and see the children. His ability to compartmentalise may have led people to label him a ‘chillaxer’, but it also meant that he was that rare species of prime minister not driven slightly mad in office.

Those searching for meaning and significance in the night’s events might have looked down at the table they were sitting around, a beautiful circular piece of elm that was commissioned for the G8 summit in Lough Erne in 2013, a time when Cameron was top dog, playing host to Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and the rest. If he had paused to think of the German leader, did he thank her for the help she had proffered in securing a renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Brussels, or did he think – as several of those present that night did – that he had never asked her for enough, never put her on the spot, never forced her to choose between Britain’s place in Europe and her precious free movement of people?

They might have considered the room they were in, the Thatcher Room, named after the prime minister who fell because her growing scepticism had offended the pro-Brussels establishment within her own cabinet. Cameron was on his way out because he had come to embody that establishment at a time when voters were never more inclined to thumb their noses at it.

For more than one of the people in the Thatcher Room in those small, dark hours, it was the figure who did not sit at the elm table that struck them most. George Osborne, the closest of the prime minister’s allies, sat off to the left, alone and contemplating. Osborne had served Cameron, but he had hoped for a career that would outlive his friend’s. Cameron at least had been prime minister. Still just forty-five, Osborne had every expectation of another decade at the top. Now he might soon be looking for work. Not only had he opposed the referendum as potentially disastrous for the country and the Conservative Party, he had to watch now as the career he had so meticulously constructed over the previous fifteen years turned to ashes. Osborne was usually talkative, quick with a joke, many of them with a razor-sharp edge. Not that night. He sat separately, his eyes fixed on a point ten yards beyond Maggie Thatcher’s bookshelves. As the first result came in he said simply, ‘This is going to be a very long night,’ and returned to his meditations.

When hope, finally, was extinguished, just after 3 a.m., there was no moment of despair or rage. Cameron is nothing if not steady under fire. He had been the ‘essay crisis’ prime minister, never better than with his back to the wall and a short time in which to turn events around. But there would be no turning the referendum around, not five hours after the polls had closed. ‘David Cameron takes good news the exact same way he takes bad news,’ one aide present that night said. ‘He just smiles. In his head he’s made his mind up. But only when you’ve known him a while can you see the telltale signs.’

They all watched, and those of them who knew him well, who could read the eyes and the angle of the smile, knew the time had arrived. But because it had been done subtly, with little fanfare, they only slowly became aware that Cameron was no longer there. They looked around and registered the absences: Cameron, Osborne, Ed Llewellyn and Kate Fall. There was no sign of Samantha Cameron either. The prime minister, the chancellor, the chief of staff and his deputy. The ‘Quad’ which ran the coalition government had become well known. This was the real quad, which ran the Notting Hill set for fifteen years and had commanded a Conservative majority government for just one.

Those who noticed knew what it meant. ‘At about 3 o’clock in the morning I went to the loo, and when I came back he’d gone downstairs just with George, Ed and Kate and we knew it was over,’ one said.

Five hours later Cameron walked out into Downing Street with Samantha – for those who did not know what was coming, her presence was the clincher – and announced that he was resigning. Nineteen days later he left Number 10 for the last time. At just forty-nine he was the youngest man to walk out of the famous black door as an ex-prime minister since the Earl of Rosebery in 1895.

What followed was the most remarkable moment in British politics since May 1940, when Neville Chamberlain was ousted at the point of the nation’s greatest ever peril and replaced by Winston Churchill, its maverick saviour. For a moment it looked as if Churchill’s biographer, the Brexit cheerleader Boris Johnson, would inherit the crown as his hero had done seventy-six years earlier. But in the fashion of previous revolutions the revolutionary leadership began to consume themselves. Driven by admirers who believed him the most significant Conservative thinker of his generation, and the dawning realisation in his own head that he could do the job himself, Michael Gove plunged the knife. He plunged it so hard and so deep that he wounded himself and left Johnson, once more, the recipient of a nation’s good wishes. They were not the first victors in war who conspired to lose the peace.

It all now seems so inevitable. Britain had always been sceptical about Europe; it was now just expressing a historic feeling. Yet through it all, one fact screams loudest above all. Had just 600,000 people changed their vote, David Cameron would be hailed as the political escapologist of his generation. This book would be – even more than it is – about the mistakes and infighting of the Leave campaigns. Cameron would have been able to depart at a time and in the manner of his own choosing.

When the country voted Leave, the political class took it rather more literally than perhaps even some Brexiteers expected. Of the main parties’ leaders who went into the 2015 election – Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Farage – not one remains. Of the six cabinet-level supporters who signed the Vote Leave pledge the morning after Cameron’s deal in Brussels, only Chris Grayling and Priti Patel still have cabinet jobs – and in January 2016 Grayling looked the one least likely to keep his post. Of the four dominant modernising Tories of the last decade – Cameron, Osborne, Gove and Johnson – only one remains at the apex of politics, and even that was a close-run thing. Boris Johnson went from a popular campaign hero, to startled whipping-boy of the furious 48 per cent, to prime minister in waiting, to political oblivion, and then back to one of the four great offices of state, all in the space of a fortnight. Theresa May went from submariner during the campaign to the captain of the ship at its conclusion, then promptly consigned the ruling class of the Conservative Party to the backbenches, and the austerity economics that had dominated political discourse for six years to the dustbin of history.

These were events populated by a cast of characters who might have been created by Wodehouse or Trollope. In these pages you will find a championship-winning basketball player, an adventurer who smuggled himself into rebel-held Benghazi, a millionaire owner of assault weapons, a scholar of Bismarck who idolises James Carville – and more MPs and aides than is healthy who learned their trade from reading classic volumes of military strategy.

I’m not a sociologist or a political scientist. This is not a study of the decline of the post-industrial working class, ‘post-truth’ politics or the psychology of anger. You won’t find a detailed psephological breakdown of which streets backed Brexit in Sunderland. It is not the story of the little guy, the canvassers and doorknockers who man a campaign. If this book in any way goes beyond journalism – and I make no such claims – it is unashamedly elitist history. It is a book about leaders and their closest aides, the decisions they make, how and why they make them, and how they feel when they turn out to be wrong. It is about dilemmas faced and confronted. It is about the battle between self and team. It is about principle and ambition, and how the two are sometimes so indivisible as to make divining motive pointless. It is about men who make decisions that are intellectually consistent and – by their own measure – morally sound, but which are simultaneously disastrous for themselves and those closest to them. It is about how doing what worked before doesn’t always work again. Most of all it is about asking the question: how far are you prepared to go to win? Politics is a results business. There are no hung Parliaments in referendums, only victory or total, irreversible defeat.

There is a good case that four decades of Euroscepticism, coupled with the eurozone crisis and the mass migration from the Middle East, were more important than what happened during the campaign in determining the result. But this is a book that begins from the premise that the actions of key individuals, at hinge moments in history, are magnified out of all proportion. For the thirteen months between the general election and polling day, what David Cameron, George Osborne, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and Dominic Cummings thought and did decided the fate of the rest of us.

Two points of style and taste.

Anyone who has watched The Thick of It – the television comedy which is viewed by some in Westminster as an instruction manual rather than a satire – will know that British politics can be a profane business. Many MPs and their aides swear like troopers, and the rhythms of their speech often require expletival emphasis. I have censored these efforts where the profanity is simply used as punctuation – not least because the spin doctors from both main campaigns asked me to spare their mothers’ blushes – but where it is essential to the emotion of the sentence I have left it in. Be warned.

Secondly, throughout the book I have ignored the prefix ‘Lord’ for political peers. This is not a pointed comment about the honours system, but I know of no one in Westminster who refers to Peter Mandelson, Rodney Leach or David Sainsbury as Lord This, That or the Other. So, if he will forgive me, outside the acknowledgements the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham will be plain old Peter in these pages.

Those looking for a clear delineation of good guys and bad guys have come to the wrong place. I am not here to explore the rights and wrongs of Brexit, or to pass judgement on the questionable claims of the campaigns, but to explain why both sides used them. I hope that by the end, if you think it was moral to support Remain, perhaps you will appreciate that there was also a certain nobility on the Leave side, in doing everything possible to win a battle they regarded as existentially important. If you felt it was moral to vote to Leave, perhaps you will agree that the intensity with which David Cameron and George Osborne fought the campaign was proof of their passion and belief, not of the widespread view that all politicians are lying bastards who will say or do anything to hang on to power.

PART ONE

### SKIRMISHES

FROM BLOOMBERG TO BRUSSELS

October 2011 to February 2016

1

### ‘My Lily-Livered Colleagues …’

It says much about David Cameron’s relationship with George Osborne that they kept a lid on it. The decision to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was the most important Cameron made as prime minister – and his closest political ally, friend and adviser opposed it. Not just a little bit, but profoundly and wholeheartedly – and yet the disagreement did not leak.

It was late May 2012, and Cameron was just back from a NATO summit in Chicago. In a pizza restaurant at O’Hare Airport on the way home he had called a council of war with Ed Llewellyn and William Hague, his chief of staff and his foreign secretary, and decided he had no choice but to go into the 2015 general election with a pledge to hold a nationwide vote on the UK’s relationship with the EU by the middle of the next Parliament.[1] Just before he became prime minister, Cameron had remarked, ‘I don’t want Europe to define my premiership.’2 He had already discovered that was a forlorn hope.

‘The biggest advocate of the referendum was William Hague,’ a senior Downing Street official said. The foreign secretary told Cameron, ‘You need to do this. I got killed by Europe. A Tory leader needs to nail this once and for all.’

George Osborne did not agree at all. The idea that the chancellor was concerned about the prospect of a referendum became known later, but few have appreciated quite how serious was his opposition. Osborne did not just think a referendum was a bad idea, he thought it was a disastrous idea. In successive meetings he was ‘pretty hostile’ to pressing ahead because he feared the vote would be lost. He warned Cameron he was taking a major risk that several uncontrollable forces would combine in a referendum campaign: ‘anti-government sentiment, opportunism, genuine concern – and then you lose’. The picture Osborne painted was stark and prescient.

Strategically, Osborne saw three problems. The first was that the in/out question was an all-or-nothing proposition. This was not a referendum on integration or membership of the euro – Britain’s membership was on the line. There was no way back if it was lost. The second, he told Cameron, was that the campaign would ‘split the Conservative Party down the middle’. A senior Downing Street source recalled, ‘George’s view was that there’s a good chance we’ll lose, and it will destroy the Tory Party.’ Thirdly, the chancellor had what now seems a more parochial political concern, that with Labour’s Ed Balls and Ed Miliband making overtures to business, Tory support for a referendum would undermine business backing for the Conservatives in the run-up to the 2015 general election. A cabinet colleague said, ‘George’s view was, “Don’t allow your entire premiership to be held hostage to this.”’

Osborne’s plan on Europe was to do what they had done for seven years since 2005, and avoid talking about it. When forced to give firm commitments they would say, ‘No more integration, no bailouts,’ and then hold out the idea of securing some extra powers for the UK as and when the eurozone needed a new treaty change. ‘It’s not perfect, but I reckon it’s better than the alternative,’ he argued.

Given the gravity of the decision and its implications, this was the most important political disagreement Cameron and Osborne had during their six years in power. It is a testament to the strength of their political partnership and their friendship that it never became front-page news, as even minor spats between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did. Osborne told friends, ‘My partnership with David Cameron has always been predicated on two things: one, he is the boss and I am number two. Second, that where we disagree, we disagree in private – I don’t flounce off or resign or anything like that.’ In the end Osborne could see the way the wind was blowing, and swallowed his doubts. A Downing Street aide said, ‘George is essentially a real pragmatist, so he understood that that’s where we’d end up.’ But the decision would eventually send Osborne over the top in a fight that would define his career, but which he had opposed from the start.

Cameron was a pragmatist too. In opposition, the most prominent portrait on his wall was of Harold Macmillan, the one-nation Tory who had tried to take Britain into what was then the Common Market, until France’s President Charles de Gaulle – the first and most disputatious in a long line of Gallic protagonists – said ‘Non!’ Most Conservative leaders wanted to be Winston Churchill. Most Tory Eurosceptics wanted David Cameron to be Margaret Thatcher, whose best-known sentence on European integration was ‘No, no, no.’ But Cameron wanted to be Macmillan, a common-sense healer of divisions and manager of the nation’s interests. Famously, when asked what was most dangerous for a politician, Macmillan had replied, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ In his approach to Europe, David Cameron was never more like his hero. Temperamental incrementalism, a propensity to tactically manage rather than strategically plan, and a tendency to be driven by events would all define his response to the issue that now bookends his premiership.

At around ten minutes past eight on 23 January 2013 David Cameron took to the stage at the London head office of Bloomberg, the financial news service, and said to the expectant audience, ‘This morning I want to talk about the future of Europe.’ What followed was the most significant speech given by a British prime minister since Tony Blair made the case for the Iraq War. In its consequences for Britain, it was more far-reaching than that.

In bald, spare words, Cameron sought to confront the issue which more than any other had derailed the careers of Conservative leaders in his adult lifetime. In 1975, when the British public had last been asked its opinion about Europe, Cameron had been too young to vote, and the Tory Party had been broadly united in supporting membership of what was then the Common Market. Yet now, Cameron looked down the lens of the television-pool camera and said, ‘The next Conservative Manifesto in 2015 will ask for a mandate from the British people for a Conservative government to negotiate a new settlement with our European partners … and when we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice. To stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether.’ Cameron made clear that he personally wanted an outcome ‘that keeps us in’. He concluded by saying, ‘It is time to settle this European question in British politics.’

The speech marked the end of a long, hard road for David Cameron which began with his speech to the 2006 party conference, less than a year after he won the Tory leadership, when he urged his parliamentary colleagues to stop ‘banging on about Europe’. Even at the time this was naïvely optimistic, since Cameron had already given ground to the Eurosceptics during the leadership election, matching a pledge from his Eurosceptic rival Liam Fox to take the Conservatives out of the European People’s Party (EPP), the main centre-right (but devoutly federalist) grouping in the European Parliament. The promise helped him beat both Fox and David Davis, the former Europe minister known to colleagues as ‘the Old Knuckleduster’. But in the capitals of Europe, leaving the EPP was Cameron’s ‘original sin’, proof that he was another British leader unwilling to play by the rules of the club. Eleven years later it would be a factor, albeit a minor one, in hampering his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Brussels. At home it was evidence for the Eurosceptics that, if they pushed him hard enough, he would retreat.

Cameron was no EU enthusiast. When seeking selection as the Tory candidate for Witney, the Oxfordshire seat he was to win in 2001, he characterised his views as ‘no to the single currency, no to further transfer of powers from Westminster to Brussels, and yes to renegotiation of areas like Fish where the EU has been a disaster for the UK’, before adding for good measure, ‘If that is being a Europhile, then I’m a banana.’3 But for the Eurosceptics his heart was not in it. To Cameron, Europe was ‘the E word’. In 2006 he described members of the UK Independence Party as ‘a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists’. That not only made a mortal enemy of Ukip’s leader Nigel Farage, but contributed to a belief among the Palaeosceptic – a term I hope describes their longevity without implying that they were old-fashioned – old guard (not unfounded) that he viewed them the same way. Daniel Hannan, the Conservative MEP who was the intellectual godfather of what would become the Leave campaign, first met Cameron when he was running the Conservative Research Department in the early 1990s. ‘I think his view then was that Eurosceptics were like the ancient mariner,’ Hannan said. ‘They were disagreeable bores who would hold you with their skinny hand. I think he approached the European issue through the prism of party management. I don’t think he ever sat down and did a cost–benefit analysis of EU membership. He began from the position, probably true in the 1990s, that a lot of the Eurosceptics were quite difficult and obsessive people.’ Whatever concessions were extracted, the Palaeosceptics came back for more. This was the era when, as the columnist Danny Finkelstein so memorably put it, the Eurosceptics ‘wouldn’t take “Yes” for an answer’.

The issue that calcified Eurosceptic suspicion of Cameron was his ‘cast-iron guarantee’ in September 2007 that he would hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which greatly deepened EU integration. Once the treaty was ratified in every EU country, including by Gordon Brown’s Labour government, Cameron ditched the pledge, arguing that a referendum was pointless. He sought to placate the Eurosceptics with a speech in November 2009 announcing a ‘referendum lock’, ensuring a vote on any future European treaty ‘that transferred areas of power or competences’ from Britain to Brussels. It was a poor substitute for the in/out vote the sceptics craved. More importantly, as the then Tory MP Douglas Carswell observed, Cameron’s original promise, ‘although we reneged on it, established the legitimacy of a referendum’.

Even pro-Europeans look back on Cameron’s decision with regret, since it meant that if there was to be a referendum in future, it would be an all-or-nothing proposition. Tory MP Alistair Burt said, ‘I argued that the first chance the British people were going to get to vote on the EU they’d vote “No”, no matter what the question was. I would far rather have had a question on a constitutional issue than “In” or “Out”.’

With hindsight, the moment a referendum became inevitable occurred in October 2011. When more than 100,000 members of the public signed a petition demanding a nationwide vote, Conservative backbencher David Nuttall – whose name was regarded by Downing Street as eloquently descriptive – proposed a Commons motion calling for a referendum. Instead of letting the sceptics sound off in a vote that was not binding, Cameron unwisely turned the showdown into a trial of strength, ordering his backbenchers to vote it down. ‘We cannot lie down on this,’ he told his closest aides.4 It is understandable that he felt like imposing some order. By that point, seventeen months into the coalition government, Cameron had already endured twenty-two backbench rebellions on Europe, involving a total of sixty MPs.5 He ordered an ‘industrial-scale operation’ to rein in the sceptics.6 Word spread that anyone voting for the motion would be barred from ministerial office for four years, or even face deselection. Despite the threats, and to Cameron’s consternation, eighty-one Conservatives backed the motion, the biggest rebellion on Europe since the Second World War. At John Major’s worst moment during the passage of the Maastricht Bill in 1993 only forty-one Tory MPs had defied the whip. Without the heavy-handed whipping the rebel leaders could have mustered 150 votes against their own government. As young MPs, Cameron and Osborne had seen loyalty as the currency of promotion; now they were confronted by people who put principle first.

One of Cameron’s closest aides said, ‘For me the pivotal moment was the eighty-one rebellion. It was clear after that that the parliamentary party would not stand for anything but a referendum by the next election. I think the PM knew instinctively that was where he was going to end up.’ It would be another nine months before Cameron accepted that logic, and fifteen before he did anything about it.

Cameron may not have wished to focus on Europe, but the eurozone crisis ensured that he had no choice. The Greek economy plunged into chaos shortly after the ‘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 speech finally went ahead on 23 January. Cameron actually struck a notably pro-European tone, praising the EU for helping to raise Europe from the grip of ‘war and tyranny’. But it was an argument couched in Macmillanite practicalities: ‘For us, the European Union is a means to an end – prosperity, stability, the anchor of freedom and democracy both within Europe and beyond her shores – not an end in itself.’ He warned, ‘democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer-thin’.

Cameron spelt out his demands: more competitiveness and the completion of the single market, an end to ‘one size fits all’ integration. He said this would mean Britain abandoning the goal of ‘ever closer union’ written into the Treaty of Rome. He added, ‘Power must be able to flow back to member states, not just away from them,’ and called for ‘a bigger and more significant role for national parliaments’. Finally, he demanded new rules that ‘work fairly for those inside [the euro] and out’. Heeding Merkel’s advice on how to pitch his call for reform, he said, ‘I am not a British isolationist. I don’t just want a better deal for Britain, I want a better deal for Europe too.’

Largely forgotten afterwards, Cameron predicted that ‘in the next few years the EU will need to agree on Treaty change’, gifting him an occasion when Britain could get its new grand bargain. But when Germany cooled to that idea, his leverage was removed. Also forgotten, given how central it became to his deal, the speech included not one reference to immigration or migration.

Coming to the crux of the matter, he declared, ‘I am in favour of a referendum. I believe in confronting this issue – shaping it, leading the debate, not simply hoping a difficult situation will go away.’ Those looking back at the speech after the referendum would have been amused to find this entreaty: ‘It will be a decision we will have to take with cool heads. Proponents of both sides of the argument will need to avoid exaggerating their claims.’ Nevertheless, Cameron vowed that if he got the deal he wanted, ‘I will campaign for it with all my heart and soul’.

The speech was met with a rapturous reception at home, where the sceptics seized on one key phrase: ‘We need fundamental, far-reaching change.’ When he entered the Commons chamber for PMQs later that morning he was met with a barrage of cheers. The Eurosceptics had got what they wanted.

Speaking in 2016, a Cameron aide said his main error was to lay out ‘red lines’, but not to use the speech to level with voters and his MPs that it was a starting point for discussion with Brussels, rather than an inviolable text. ‘The problem was that we didn’t make arguments like “We’re going to have to compromise,”’ a senior figure in Number 10 said. ‘It was a huge error.’ The Palaeosceptics who rejoiced at the speech were like Biblical or Koranic literalists – they planned to hold Cameron to every word of it. Bernard Jenkin seized on the comment that national parliaments were ‘the true source of real democratic legitimacy and accountability in the EU’, and warned Cameron, ‘You’ve really got to deliver on this otherwise the Conservative Party will tear itself to pieces.’ Cameron’s response was to wave his hand dismissively and say, ‘When the referendum comes the party will split, and that’ll just have to be that.’ To Jenkin the prime minister had the air of a man who had made the promise of a referendum that he never thought he would actually have to deliver, since by now few thought the Conservatives could win an overall majority at the 2015 general election and govern without the Lib Dems, who may have sought to veto any referendum. Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said, ‘I have no doubt that the thinking in Downing Street … was that the outcome was likely to be a coalition government and … that this referendum would be traded away.’14

For once, though, Cameron had gone far enough to satisfy the bulk of backbench opinion. He had adopted a position sufficiently robust to prevent the party disintegrating before the general election. For almost two years the Tory troublemakers, to adopt the classic dictum, would direct most of their piss outside the tent, and when they seemed in danger of misplacing the urinal – introducing a Private Member’s Bill to hold a referendum – Cameron ended up adopting the Bill. But he was soon to discover the accuracy of one minister’s theory of parliamentary urinators: ‘Westminster is not divided into people inside the tent pissing out and people outside the tent pissing in, it is divided into people who piss and people who don’t. It doesn’t matter where the pissers stand, the piss always gets into the tent eventually.’ As a description of what Cameron’s Bloomberg speech set in train, it was hard to top.

The key question from this period is: could the referendum have been avoided, and if it could not, did Cameron have to offer an in/out vote by the end of 2017? When the cabinet was informed of the decision it horrified the veteran Europhile Ken Clarke: ‘I was not consulted. I read about it in the newspaper. We had a row about it, but it was a done deal. I think it was the most reckless and irresponsible decision.’15 Yet even a dyed-in-the-wool Europhile like Alistair Burt gave Cameron the benefit of the doubt: ‘I don’t blame the prime minister for calling the referendum, because you can’t keep the people hostage, and it was important, not just for party management but important for the country, that the people had this vote.’ There were practical concerns too. David Lidington, Cameron’s Europe minister, said, ‘Had he not promised the referendum, I think it would have been hugely difficult to win the 2015 general election at all.’

Cameron’s aides believed failure to announce a referendum would have led to a leadership challenge when Ukip won the European elections in 2014. ‘The idea that the PM was going to survive and face down his party is for the birds. We would have had a new leader coming in saying “I’m going to call a referendum,” and probably saying they were going to back Brexit,’ one said. The pollster Andrew Cooper agreed: ‘If he’d taken the party on, I think he would have lost. Ukip was on the rise, the party was in revolt.’

Yet one of Cameron’s closest aides believed that he may have stepped back from the brink if the Bloomberg speech had come after the Scottish referendum in September 2014, which uncorked the uncontrollable passions about which George Osborne had warned: ‘After the Scottish referendum experience we realised you’re unleashing things you can’t control. That’s the one thing I’d say would have changed our mind.’ By the time Tory high command collectively came to recognise the risks, it was too late.

If Cameron had to offer a referendum, he did not have to offer an in/out referendum. A group of Eurosceptics – Bill Cash, Bernard Jenkin and John Redwood – went to see the prime minister before the Bloomberg speech to suggest he lance the boil by holding a ‘mandate referendum’ with the question ‘Do you agree that the United Kingdom should establish a new relationship with our European partners based on trade and cooperation?’ Cameron was at first interested in the idea, but later asked, ‘Who’s going to oppose that?’ Jenkin replied, ‘Exactly!’ But Cameron saw the plan as potentially dangerous. He did not believe Britain’s links to the EU should be confined to trade. Jenkin said, ‘That referendum question, if approved, would have been completely incompatible with our present terms of membership. So he shied away from that and went for the in/out referendum.’

There were other options. Cameron could have devised his own mandate referendum, giving him licence to secure a deal when a treaty was next agreed. He could have defied the Liberal Democrats and begun a process of renegotiation with Merkel over a number of years, blaming his coalition partners for the lack of an immediate vote. He certainly did not have to say that there would be a referendum before the end of 2017. He could even have attempted to face down his party and confront their arguments. But in truth he had set himself on the path of tactical retreat from the moment he agreed to pull the Tories out of the EPP during his leadership campaign.

In calling for ‘fundamental, far-reaching change’ of Britain’s relationship with the EU, the Bloomberg speech raised expectations that would be very difficult to meet. To get what he wanted from the other member states and keep Britain in Europe, Cameron had to persuade them that he was prepared to leave, a posture that was regarded as incredible by the sceptics at home, who demanded that he threaten to lead the UK out, while telling the world that he was only bluffing. As Tony Blair was to remark, ‘David Cameron’s strategy is a bit like the guy in Blazing Saddles who says, “Put your hands up or I’ll blow my brains out!”’16

Rising immigration, fuelling the rise of Ukip, had led to Cameron’s referendum pledge. By mid-2014 it was clear that measures to curb immigration would also have to be the centrepiece of his new deal with Brussels. According to the official statistics, net migration to the UK was 177,000 in 2012, rose to 209,000 in 2013, before soaring to 318,000 in 2014. Those figures would have been politically damaging in their own right, but juxtaposed with Cameron’s long-standing pledge to limit net migration to the ‘tens of thousands’ they were explosive. As the figures rose, so too did support for Ukip. ‘The thing which turbocharged Europe was the massive jump in EU migration,’ a Cameron confidant said. ‘That’s what turned it from a niche Tory issue into a massive popular issue. The biggest problem with renegotiation was that it was absolutely clear we needed to control migration.’

The prime minister recognised the dangers, and used his speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2014 to deliver a bold pledge: ‘Britain, I know you want this sorted so I will go to Brussels, I will not take no for an answer and – when it comes to free movement – I will get what Britain needs.’ The pledge was more than ambitious; as expectation-management went it was reckless, as Cameron would discover. Will Straw, who was to end up running the Remain campaign, said, ‘He promised his grassroots more than he was ever able to achieve.’

The first effort to tackle the issue came a month later, in November 2014, when Cameron made a speech at JCB, the construction-vehicle manufacturer owned by his friend Anthony Bamford. The preparations for that speech led to another psychodrama with Merkel, serious clashes between Cameron’s political aides and the civil service, a showdown with two of his most senior ministers, and did more to shape the final renegotiation deal even than the Bloomberg speech.

At heart, Cameron had two options: limit the number of EU migrants coming to Britain, or reduce the pull factors by cutting the benefits to which they were entitled. Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, and Michael Gove, by now the chief whip, pushed for quotas on the number of EU arrivals. The problem was that this flew in the face of the fundamental EU principle of the free movement of people. On 19 October the Sunday Times revealed that Cameron was considering ‘an annual cap on the number of National Insurance numbers given to low-skilled immigrants from Europe’. Cameron blamed Gove for the leak. But at an EU summit later the same week, Merkel told the paper’s Brussels correspondent Bojan Pancevski, ‘Germany will not tamper with the fundamental principles of free movement in the EU,’ words that killed the idea stone dead when they were splashed on the front page.17 In a confrontation with Cameron in the British delegation’s room, Cameron explained that he needed a quota system or an emergency brake on numbers: ‘If I could deliver clear demonstration of grip with controls even if those were for a temporary period, I think I can crack this. But otherwise this is becoming an unsustainable position.’ But Merkel told the prime minister, ‘No, I’d never agree with that. No. No. No. No way. Never, David.’ A source present said, ‘She was being as unequivocal as I’d ever seen her, completely clear. And that’s what took us to the benefits route.’ Merkel had grown up under communism in East Germany. She was not prepared to compromise on the freedom to cross borders, which she had been denied for the first thirty-five years of her life.

The leak torpedoed a secret plan Oliver Letwin and a small number of Cameron’s political advisers had been working on since July without the knowledge of civil servants. A Cameron adviser said the civil servants ‘went nuts when they found out – but they never understood the view that we would struggle to win a referendum without a very serious immigration answer’. Cameron’s policy staff then devised a time-limited ‘emergency brake’ which Britain could pull in extreme circumstances to halt EU arrivals. But the plan sparked some of the most heated rows between the politicos and the career diplomats and civil servants led by Ivan Rogers, Britain’s ambassador to the EU, Cameron’s civil service EU adviser Tom Scholar, and William Hague’s special adviser Denzil Davidson. ‘There was opposition from the civil service,’ said a Downing Street aide. ‘The FCO’s approach was that this was completely unobtainable: “You’ll get outright rejection.”’

In Brussels, Rogers told senior Commission officials Martin Selmayr and Jonathan Faull, ‘Guys, if we’re going to solve this, we might have to do something that is risky and cavalier.’ But he was met with firm resistance, and bluntly told the politicos back home that an emergency brake was impossible. As a senior civil servant put it, ‘Ivan was the main bonfire pisser.’

Another political aide said, ‘The PM always wanted an emergency brake, he wanted to announce that in his immigration speech, but he couldn’t because EU law wouldn’t allow it. We’d go round endlessly in circles and come back to emergency brake. He’d go, “We must be able to do something about it!” We’d always come back to “It’s not possible, free movement is a fundamental part of the EU.” It was frustrating for the PM. He knew what he wanted to do, he knew what the British people wanted.’ For their part the officials felt they were being asked to approve ideas with little or no chance of success, and that their job was to advise caution.

Ed Llewellyn had kept lines of communication open with the Germans, who wanted to be helpful but consistently made clear that freedom of movement reform – and treaty change – were not doable. But Cameron believed that he might be successful if he said a brake on numbers was the price of Britain staying in the EU. One of those involved in the deliberations said, ‘A number of people in Number 10 – including the PM – suspected deep down that, when it came to it, in the early hours of a European Council meeting, the EU wouldn’t let the UK leave on the basis of a temporary emergency brake. It would be high-risk, so the trick would be to keep any announced plan high-level – one of the reasons why the Gove leak, with all its detail, was so damaging.’

Two days before the speech, the emergency brake was still in the text and the civil servants mutinied. ‘We asked them how it worked, because you can’t just stop people coming into the country. How do you enforce it?’ an official said. ‘It’s not something we can negotiate, and it doesn’t work in practice. Why the hell are we about to put this in the speech?’

At the last moment, Cameron decided to switch to a proposal that had been drawn up by the Eurosceptic think tank Open Europe to ban EU migrants from claiming in-work benefits such as tax credits and social housing until they had been working in Britain and paying into the system for several years. Ivan Rogers’ team in Brussels and Tom Scholar in London said that would not be tolerated by other EU nations either. Believing the Open Europe proposal would need treaty change, Rogers got his legal adviser, Ivan Smith, to examine the plan. He concluded it was illegal. Rogers told Cameron and his political advisers, ‘Clearly this does require treaty change because this will be deliberate discrimination on the grounds of nationality. I don’t think the other countries can go there. Even if they privately think you’ve got a point, I don’t think they can go there with their publics.’ But Cameron had to offer something on migration. A ban on migrants claiming child benefit for dependants living outside the UK and a pledge to remove those who had not found work after six months were also added. The changes happened so fast that Iain Duncan Smith, who had been sent drafts of the speech for his comments, had no idea the emergency brake had been removed until he turned on the television to watch Cameron speak. As man-management of one of the most influential Eurosceptics went, it left much to be desired. ‘Up until two days before the speech, the emergency brake was there in the speech,’ an aide involved in the deliberations said. ‘The removal was so last-minute that the argument for the brake was still essentially running through the speech he delivered.’

Afterwards, rumours abounded that Merkel and her staff had read the speech and excised the migration cap. But a Downing Street source said, ‘It wasn’t blocked by Merkel, it was blocked by us, because we knew we would never get it. She had not seen the speech.’ The Germans did have some input, however. ‘Ed [Llewellyn] got the message from Merkel’s chief of staff that she couldn’t support it,’ a Number 10 source said.

In fact the decisive intervention that killed off an emergency brake on migrant numbers, a policy which many Cameroons later believed might have been enough for them to win the referendum, was made by Theresa May, the home secretary, and Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary. Both were invited to see Cameron after the regular 8.30 a.m. meeting in Downing Street the day before the speech, along with a small number of officials. A week earlier, May had written Cameron a letter urging him to back an emergency brake. Cameron had made it clear that, despite Merkel’s opposition, he was considering demanding the emergency brake on numbers anyway. ‘The PM told them what the Germans had said, and asked for their view on whether we should go ahead and announce in any case,’ a Downing Street source said. ‘Hammond spoke first, and argued that we just couldn’t announce something that would receive an immediate raspberry in Europe. It wouldn’t be seen as credible domestically, and it would set us on the path towards Brexit. Theresa said very, very little, and simply said that we just couldn’t go against Merkel.’

An eyewitness said, ‘The PM was visibly deflated as they left.’ Cameron turned to one of his officials and said, ‘Look, we tried, but I can’t do it without their support. We’ll just have to go with the benefits plan. If it wasn’t for my lily-livered cabinet colleagues …’

This position might seem reasonable, but given that May and Hammond would later be responsible for negotiating Brexit, it was also instructive of their approach. May was to write a second letter to Cameron on 21 May 2015 urging him to adopt tough immigration measures, but the Cameron aide said, ‘It’s true she obviously wanted as good an immigration deal as she could get. It’s true that she wrote a letter. But when the crunch moment came – do we take a risk, do we go for something that is going to be tougher and that Merkel is not going to back, and that will be tougher to negotiate post the election? – her instinct was that if the Germans don’t support it, we can’t do it.’

A senior Downing Street source says, ‘David Cameron was going for the welfare brake, and he said, “I need an emergency brake. I need to sort this out, because I think that’s what will help.” Who were the two people who told him not to do that because it’s undeliverable? Your new prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer: Theresa May and Philip Hammond. So when Theresa talks about “I will not take no for an answer,” she was the one who folded then. Theresa May and Philip Hammond were the ones to say “You won’t get the emergency brake.”’

The benefits plan was toughened from a two-year ban on claims to three years, and then again to four years in the final draft. When Cameron finally gave the speech on 28 November, he said, ‘Immigration benefits Britain, but it needs to be controlled. It needs to be fair.’ He then used language that was to be adopted wholesale by the Leave campaign: ‘People want government to have control over the numbers of people coming here … they want control over who has the right to receive benefits.’

From that point onwards, David Cameron’s renegotiation hung primarily on the success of a deal on migrant benefits, which was a pale imitation of the one he really wanted. But without the support of Merkel, May or Hammond he did not feel able to proceed. One close aide thinks this was a ‘fundamental misjudgement’: ‘We genuinely thought at the time of that immigration speech we could get some significant movement on immigration. It evolved into controls on benefits because those are more achievable.’ One of the civil servants saw the episode as all too typical of Team Cameron’s general approach to Europe: ‘That was the moment he gave up on controlling numbers, and it was almost by accident.’

Others think he should have been prepared to ignore the officials, and was too quickly frightened off by Merkel. She had rejected quotas, but she was never put on the spot in the small hours of a summit about an emergency brake on numbers. Ultimately the renegotiation was a political, not a legal, enterprise, and Cameron could have challenged Merkel to help find a solution. ‘What I genuinely don’t know is whether Merkel in her comments about emergency brakes had really given it any thought as a separate issue,’ a senior minister said, ‘or whether she treated it as the same issue: “quotas and emergency brakes together”. The whole focus of the JCB speech was to shift the debate to benefits. I wonder up to this day whether, if we’d pushed the emergency brake – in terms of numbers, not on benefits – we could have got that. My gut instinct was that the emergency brake was the outer reaches of negotiability.’

After the general election, the Syrian civil war created a fresh migration crisis which put the issue back at the top of the political agenda. In September 2015 Merkel made the rashest decision of her time in power, announcing that refugees were welcome in Germany. The British reaction to Merkel’s extraordinary offer was ‘astonishment’, according to a source who was in touch with the Germans: ‘She would defend it by saying, “What do you expect us to do? We’re not going to shoot people.”’ The result was a vast human tide that prompted several EU countries to reinstate border controls, including Germany. The International Organisation of Migration estimated that one million migrants arrived in Europe in 2015, three to four times as many as the year before, while approaching 4,000 lost their lives while attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Throughout the summer there were almost daily reports from across the Channel in Calais, where migrants gathered seeking passage to Britain. Gradually, but detectably, support for Brexit rose. Andrew Cooper told Cameron the migrant crisis had cost Remain five percentage points.

Merkel was not the only strong woman giving Cameron grief that summer. On 30 August, a week after immigration figures were released showing net migration had hit 330,000, Theresa May wrote a newspaper article announcing that migrants should be banned from entering Britain unless they had a job to go to. She called for EU leaders to tear up the rules on freedom of movement, and even questioned the existence of the Schengen Agreement, saying it had led to the deaths of migrants and placed people at the mercy of people-traffickers. Going much further than Cameron’s renegotiation, she said, ‘When it was first enshrined, free movement meant the freedom to move to a job, not the freedom to cross borders to look for work or claim benefits.’ Five weeks later May put down another marker with an uncompromising speech at the Conservative Party conference which left parts of Downing Street aghast. The speech, written by Nick Timothy, said asylum seekers who entered Britain illegally would be barred from settling permanently in the UK. It led one MP to describe May as ‘Enoch Powell in a dress’.18

May’s intervention was unwelcome, because it was becoming clear that the four-year benefits ban was not going to fly with Britain’s allies (who wanted benefits phasing in much quicker). Europe minister David Lidington approached Llewellyn at the Conservative conference and said, ‘We’re not going to get four years.’ But he added, ‘I am starting to pick up that people are talking about emergency brakes again.’ The negotiators put out feelers. ‘The problem was, at that stage, because we’d spoken so much about migrant benefits, the emergency brake proposal we’d heard from the others and the European Commission was of an emergency brake on welfare, rather than on numbers,’ said Lidington. This new idea sounded good, but it meant watering down the plans outlined in the JCB speech, which were already a poor substitute for a proper limit on the number of new arrivals.

Just before party conference Sajid Javid, the business secretary, also floated an idea in conversation with George Osborne. He suggested free movement should be linked to a country’s GDP, so migrants from richer countries in the EU could travel freely, but those from poorer nations could not. Javid believed something more on immigration was needed, but he was told the idea was ‘not a flier’, and not to put anything in writing to Downing Street in case it leaked. Number 10 banned him from addressing a Eurosceptic fringe meeting at the conference.

The realisation that the offering at the referendum would do nothing meaningful to limit immigrant numbers led to another bout of infighting over the scale of Cameron’s demands. His younger aides – Mats Persson, Ameet Gill, Daniel Korski and Max Chambers – all wanted a bolder gesture than Ivan Rogers and Tom Scholar were prepared to endorse. ‘I can promise you the PM kept coming back to the idea of an emergency brake. That’s what he wanted all the way through,’ one aide said.

Another member of the inner circle said Cameron and Llewellyn later regretted their caution: ‘I know certainly Ed and indeed the PM do look back and think, “We should have probably gone hard and more publicly on the migration.”’ Cameron’s opponents agreed. Daniel Hannan said, ‘I think the huge mistake that he made, tactically and strategically, was to put all his eggs in the baskets of migration and benefits.’

Andrew Cooper, who was constantly polling and focus-grouping each iteration of the migrant plan, warned Cameron, as he was drawing up his formal proposals at the start of November 2015, that the benefits brake would not be enough to neutralise immigration as a referendum issue: ‘It became clear very early on that it was obviously going to be a massive problem. We tested multiple different versions. The conclusion was: all the things that look achievable don’t remotely pass the credibility test with the electorate.’

As Cameron began to finalise his renegotiation demands towards the end of 2015, he was preparing for a referendum that his closest ally George Osborne did not want, by working on a plan to reduce migrant benefits that his chief pollster thought was inadequate because a tougher plan had been rejected as unworkable by Angela Merkel and consequently by Theresa May. And all the while the migration crisis filled television screens, demonstrating the impact of Macmillan’s ‘events’ on politics.

A member of Cameron’s team said, ‘Perhaps the biggest regret of David’s premiership will be not going for the brake back in that speech. In the end, we actually got far-reaching changes to benefits to the surprise of many, even though it contravened every facet of EU law on non-discrimination. The Commission just found a way to bend the rules. But Tom [Scholar] had advised us that any substantial reform on free movement was simply not achievable and that free movement was a holy, inviolable principle. I regret that we trusted Tom too much. Who knows – if we’d gone with our gut, the boss could still be in Number 10 today.’

David Cameron had not yet lost the referendum, but his failure to demand a cap or an emergency brake on migrant numbers left him with a mountain to climb before he had even started. It was a situation the Eurosceptics were straining at the leash to exploit.

2

### For Britain

Bellamy’s restaurant in Westminster is a pretty unglamorous place for a revolution to start. Located in 1 Parliament Street, at the slightly decaying end of the parliamentary estate, it is primarily a haunt for MPs’ researchers flirting with their colleagues rather than an arena for discussing the great issues of the time. Yet it was in Bellamy’s that a meeting occurred in 1993 which would help propel Britain from the European Union twenty-three years later.

Douglas Carswell was twenty-two, and had just finished a history degree at the University of East Anglia before taking a job ‘stuffing envelopes in an MP’s office’. If Carswell was typical of other young men educated at Charterhouse in taking the first steps up the political ladder at a tender age, it is tempting to think that he attracted the attention of Daniel Hannan because there was also something exotic about him. Beyond the intensity of his gaze and the lopsided jawline, so sharp it could slice ham, Carswell spent most of his formative years in Uganda, where his father – a Scottish doctor called Wilson Carswell – had diagnosed some of the first cases of HIV. Wilson’s experiences under the dictatorship of Idi Amin were the inspiration for the character Dr Nicholas Garrigan in Giles Foden’s 1998 novel The Last King of Scotland. Carswell later admitted that his libertarianism owed much to his experiences under Amin’s ‘arbitrary rule’. It also made him susceptible to Daniel Hannan’s views about the European Union.

Born in the Peruvian capital Lima, Hannan also spent part of his childhood abroad and escaped to a top public school, in his case Marlborough, before he arrived at Oxford, where he beat Nicky Morgan, the future education secretary and Remain campaigner, to the presidency of the Oxford Union debating society. Hannan was in his first term at university when the Maastricht Treaty ‘radicalised’ him about leaving the EU: ‘I can date exactly the moment of my activism on this issue which has consumed the last twenty-six years of my life. It was during a very short window between the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher and John Major putting his initials to the first draft of the Maastricht Treaty.’ In that three-week period Hannan and the future Tory MP Mark Reckless founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain. ‘Maastricht was the moment that the EU extended its jurisdiction into foreign affairs, criminal justice, citizenship, the environment, and also the moment where it adopted all the trappings and symbols of nationhood: the flag, the national anthem,’ Hannan said. ‘You couldn’t con yourself any longer that this was a voluntary association of independent states, or a free-trade area.’

Hannan was also inspired by an interview he had seen with the Latvian foreign minister Ģirts Valdis Kristovskis, whose country was newly free from the Soviet yoke. Asked, on a trip to Britain, if Latvia was a properly sovereign country, he said, ‘Yes, Latvia is now more independent than the United Kingdom.’ ‘That really hit home, that remark,’ Hannan recalled. ‘I suddenly thought, “My God, he’s right.” That was when I swore – the old storybooks would call it a terrible oath – that we were going to get out of the European Union, at whatever cost.’

Hannan was one of the most eloquent products of a Eurosceptic movement in the Conservative Party which grew slowly after the 1975 referendum on membership of the Common Market, and found full voice when Margaret Thatcher slammed her handbag on the table and demanded her money back when securing the British rebate in 1984. She would later become the first of three Conservative prime ministers in succession to lose the highest office as a result of the European issue.

The party was bitterly divided by the time John Major took over from Thatcher in November 1990. By the 1997 general election, when Sir James Goldsmith’s single-issue Referendum Party grabbed more than 800,000 votes, the Conservative Party was verging on civil war. If Thatcher’s fall, after the incision of the knife by her former chancellor and foreign secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, was the last gasp of the Conservative Europhiles, so John Major’s six and a half years in Downing Street were disfigured by the emergence of a group of committed and uncompromising Eurosceptics whom he dismissed as ‘bastards’ – a term that implies fringe relevance as well as unpalatable behaviour – but whose views (and briefly under Iain Duncan Smith, the sceptics themselves) came to dominate the party.

These Palaeosceptics earned their spurs during the battles over the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and fought on, limpet-like but in vain, against the subsequent Treaties of Amsterdam (1997) and Lisbon (2007). It is interesting to speculate now about what might have happened if they had been more successful then. Bernard Jenkin said, ‘If John Major had not forced through the Maastricht Treaty, and had not opposed a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, the Maastricht Treaty would never have become ratified. There would have been no euro, no eurozone, no eurozone crisis, no bailout, no European citizenship, no migration crisis, and we would probably still be happily a member of the European Communities.’

When he bumped into Douglas Carswell in Bellamy’s in 1993, Daniel Hannan was director of the European Research Group, a support service for Eurosceptic MPs who had agreed to pay him a salary. ERG held regular breakfast meetings in the Attlee Room in the House of Lords under the chairmanship of Malcolm Pearson, a Tory peer who would later defect to Ukip. Regular attendees included the Palaeosceptics, members of the Bruges Group, the Freedom Association and a certain Times writer called Michael Gove. At this stage most wanted to return to the pre-Maastricht deal, rather than questioning the result of the 1975 referendum. But when Hannan sat down to lunch with Carswell he immediately told him, ‘We need to leave the European Union, and we need a referendum in order to do so.’

Carswell remembered, ‘I said, “No, we need to reform the EU from within, we’ve got to use our influence, we’ve got to make it come our way.” I said absolutely everything that the Cameroonians were saying later. Literally by the time we’re having coffee, I think: “Yeah, we need to leave the EU, and this is the way to do it, this guy is talking sense.” After forty-five minutes, I’m convinced. Dan spends the next twenty-five years trying to persuade the rest of the party. I wish everyone else in the Tory Party had been around that table. It would have meant a lot less grief.’

While the Palaeosceptics waged constitutional war in the Commons, for two decades Hannan became an intellectual driver of the push for a referendum, with Carswell at his side. When Cameron reneged on his ‘cast-iron’ pledge of a referendum over the Lisbon Treaty, Hannan resigned his ‘admittedly very paltry’ frontbench post in the European Parliament. When he called Tory high command in November 2009 to tell them of his decision, Hannan spoke to ‘a very senior aide’ to Cameron, who bears all the characteristics of Ed Llewellyn, and said, ‘Just so you know, this was your last chance to have a referendum on something other than leaving. I’m now devoting myself, full-time, to getting a referendum on “In” or “Out”.’ The response was laughter and a jaunty ‘Good luck with that.’

Just over four years later it was party policy.

In 2011 Hannan wrote a blog suggesting the prime minister hold a renegotiation with Brussels and then a referendum afterwards. Now he was only two years ahead of his time. By then he had helped set up ‘the People’s Pledge’. In 2012 the organisation got the Electoral Reform Society to conduct a complete ballot of every registered voter in the marginal constituencies of Thurrock in Essex, and Cheadle and Hazel Grove in south Manchester, asking whether voters wanted a referendum. On turnouts higher than those seen in local elections, all three voted overwhelmingly in favour. ‘It started becoming obvious to people that a referendum was coming,’ Hannan said. Another of those involved was a young Eurosceptic called Chris Bruni-Lowe, who was to play a pivotal role in future events.

‘Dan put in place many of the key ingredients that would go on to create the Vote Leave team,’ Carswell said. ‘He was one of the guys who put the machine together, and realised what the machine had to look like. He played an absolutely key role.’

Throughout 2011 and 2012 Hannan, Carswell, Reckless and other Eurosceptics met secretly to plot a guerrilla campaign to secure a referendum. They had gone up in the world from Bellamy’s. The clandestine meetings, which included members of the government, met at Tate Britain, half a mile upriver from the Commons. ‘Dan suggested it on the grounds that no MP or journalist would have the aesthetic inclination to ever pop into an art gallery in the afternoon,’ Carswell said. ‘Not once were we ever disturbed.’

The campaign began to bear fruit with the rebellion of the eighty-one. ‘That’s when actually we won the argument within the party,’ Carswell said. ‘From then on they stopped arguing against it from first principles, and it became about practicalities.’

Carswell also held talks in his Commons office with Lynton Crosby, the Australian strategist who masterminded Boris Johnson’s two London mayoral election victories; but no agreement was reached to work together.

When Cameron conceded a referendum in the Bloomberg speech, Hannan told the group, ‘We’ve got it, now let’s win it.’ He had already begun to prepare. Knowing they would be facing the might of the Downing Street machine, he wanted a nascent ‘Out’ campaign in place in good time. In the summer of 2012 he approached Matthew Elliott and said, ‘You are going to need to be the guy to run this thing.’ The conversation took place in a summerhouse in the Norfolk garden of Rodney Leach, a Eurosceptic businessman who funded Open Europe.

Elliott, then thirty-four, had begun his career a dozen years earlier as a press officer for the European Foundation, a Eurosceptic campaign group, but made his name in Westminster as the co-founder in 2004 of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which hounded successive governments about wasting public money. In 2009 he also set up Big Brother Watch, a libertarian outfit that campaigned against state intrusion into citizens’ lives. Both organisations were run out of 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, home to a network of conservative campaigns which acted as incubators for thrusting young Tories and wannabe spin doctors to learn their craft.

Elliott might have gone to work in Downing Street in 2011, but his appointment was blocked by Nick Clegg. The reason he was persona non grata with the Liberal Democrats – and the reason Hannan wanted to hire him – was that Elliott had run the NOtoAV campaign in May that year which crushed Clegg’s hopes of electoral reform. Elliott’s campaign helped to secure nearly 68 per cent of the vote in the first nationwide referendum for a generation.

Hannan had been impressed by Elliott, even though he thought his campaign – making a case that a ‘Yes’ vote would be costly because new voting machines would have to be bought – was ‘a pile of crap’: ‘I knew it had to be Matt, not just in the obvious sense that he won it resoundingly, but he had shown huge sense of character in withstanding friendly fire. The anti-AV press were blaming him personally for what they thought was going to be a defeat. He had the strength of character to stick with what his polls were telling him, to disregard all of that. I thought this was the stupidest campaign ever, but he knew that it was working. He stuck to his guns.’ Elliott’s composure under fire would be seriously tested in the EU referendum campaign as well.

When Hannan approached him, Elliott already ‘saw the EU as the next big thing’, and had an idea about how he would run a campaign. He was a keen follower of American politics, and during Barack Obama’s two election campaigns he had been impressed by the gaggle of groups backing the Democrat candidate which all had the title ‘… for Obama’. Elliott devised a referendum campaign that would feature different groups branded ‘… for Britain’, and began registering dozens of websites, of which businessforbritain.org would be the centrepiece.

Around Christmas 2012, Elliott found himself on a plane to the US with Chris Bruni-Lowe, then at the People’s Pledge. Bruni-Lowe recalled, ‘He said he was thinking of a business campaign. He said he was fascinated by things like “Hispanics for Obama”, “Latinos for Obama”. He said business will be the big one, but we’ll have “Bikers for Britain”, “Women for Britain” and “Muslims for Britain”.’ Bruni-Lowe believed Elliott saw these campaigns as paper tigers, with only the business group as a serious campaigning organisation: ‘He viewed everything as a front campaign.’

Elliott’s other insight was that the best way to mobilise business voices in favour of leaving was to work initially with the grain of Cameron’s renegotiation, rather than declaring immediately for Brexit. In April 2013, three months after the Bloomberg speech, Elliott set up Business for Britain, with the slogan ‘Change or go’: ‘I realised business was the way into it. We did not do it as a hard Brexit campaign but went along the lines of the renegotiation, albeit pushing further what the PM would be thinking.’

The early backers included Eurosceptic stalwarts like Peter Cruddas, the former Conservative Party treasurer, and Daniel Hodson, founder of the People’s Pledge, but also more moderate sceptics like Stuart Rose, the former boss of Marks & Spencer. Some of those invited were also pro-Europeans, like Iain Anderson, the chairman of Cicero Group and a former spokesman for Ken Clarke. He said, ‘I was invited along to talk to Business for Britain just in advance of it launching. It was put to me in that meeting with the BfB team that this was about strengthening the prime minister’s hand in his renegotiation.’ One businessman invited said the pitch was that BfB would ‘put lead in Cameron’s pencil’.

Having a broad base of support gave Business for Britain credibility with the media, and it quickly eclipsed Open Europe as the primary voice on EU matters in Westminster, in part thanks to its campaign director Rob Oxley, who Elliott had plucked from the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Oxley, the product of a Lincolnshire grammar school and family in Zimbabwe, was young, smart, hard-working, and understood the media. He was the perfect front man for Elliott.

Business for Britain’s non-committal stance on Brexit did alienate some, including Bruni-Lowe, who wanted to see a full-bore campaign to leave the EU. Nigel Farage doubted that Elliott himself was committed to Brexit. ‘When I was there, the majority of people were broadly Eurosceptic but not all Leavers,’ said Bruni-Lowe.

The divisions between the Conservative and Ukip wings of Euroscepticism which blew up so spectacularly in the referendum campaign were sown in that period between 2012 and the general election. On the Tory side they were driven by an insight Douglas Carswell had about the role Nigel Farage should play in a referendum campaign, which emerged from polling data in 2012 and 2013. It was neatly captured by Sunder Katwala in a piece for the New Statesman in April 2014, ‘the Farage Paradox’. Stated simply, the more media exposure Farage had, the higher Ukip’s national vote share went – but at the same time the lower national support for leaving the EU fell. ‘The most fervent advocates for leaving the EU were some of Remain’s best chances for winning the referendum,’ Carswell said. When Brussels was bailing out debt-ridden Greece, disapproval of EU membership rose to around 60 per cent. ‘We thought, “We are going to win this.” Then Ukip started to take off in the polls …’

In 2013 YouGov’s tracking poll on support for Brexit showed a sixteen-point lead for ‘Out’. But by April 2014, with Ukip on the march, the two sides were tied, and YouGov’s first poll after Farage trounced Nick Clegg in televised debates on Europe ahead of the EU elections that spring gave ‘In’ a six-point lead.1 ‘You see Ukip taking off, disapproval of the EU going down,’ said Carswell. ‘It’s a direct correlation. This is what really obsesses us. We start to think we’re going to lose [the referendum].’ Carswell could see that to win, Ukip and its army of ground campaigners would be important, but he was worried that the party’s image with the wider public was hurting the chances of Brexit. He could also see that Downing Street would do all they could to promote Farage and Ukip as the face of the ‘Out’ campaign: ‘We understood that there was going to become a symbiotic alliance between the Remainers in Downing Street, and the purple Faragists.’

In the summer of 2014 he decided to do something about it. In great secrecy, and with Hannan’s knowledge, Carswell began secret talks with Farage about defecting from the Conservative Party to Ukip. What Carswell now admits is that he jumped ship with the express goal of changing the image of Ukip and ensuring that it was an asset rather than a liability in the referendum campaign. A desire to ‘do something about’ the Farage paradox, he said, ‘explains my behaviour subsequently’: ‘We wanted to put men in their trench, and to do that, we had to go over the top. And on 28 August 2014, some of us started going over the top, and we talked about a very different type of Ukip. We tried to decontaminate the brand.’

That was the day Carswell walked into 1 Great George Street, a stone’s throw from the House of Commons, and stunned the waiting media, who had been expecting Ukip to unveil a new celebrity donor, by announcing that he was defecting from the Conservatives and calling an immediate by-election. Chris Bruni-Lowe crossed to Ukip with him, and would help run his campaign. In his defection speech, Carswell immediately struck a different tone from his new leader, hailing Britain as ‘open and tolerant’, praising political correctness as ‘straightforward good manners’ and declaring, ‘I am not against immigration.’ He condemned ‘angry nativism’ and said, ‘We must welcome those who come here to contribute.’ The detox was under way.

In the by-election on 9 October, David Cameron’s forty-eighth birthday, Carswell slightly increased his majority to 12,404, with a 44 per cent swing from the Tories. In his acceptance speech he told Ukip, ‘We must be a party for all Britain and all Britons, first and second generation as much as every other.’

He admits now that this was all part of the secret plan to win the referendum: ‘Nigel did a superb job in making sure we got the referendum. One of the two reasons I joined Ukip was because I thought I could give an additional heave. But the other was all about trying to detoxify this brand that was ruining our chances of winning the referendum. I could see where this was going. If it became a choice between being rude about Romanian immigrants versus the economy, we would lose 60–40.’ In April 2014 Farage had said he would be ‘concerned’ if Romanian men moved in next door.

If David Cameron was bewildered by Carswell’s defection, he was incandescent four weeks later when Mark Reckless overshadowed the start of the Tory conference by jumping ship as well. The prime minister openly denounced Reckless for betraying the Tory activists who had helped ‘get his fat arse’ on the Commons benches. Reckless held his Rochester and Strood seat in the subsequent by-election on 20 November, but was to lose it to the Tories at the general election six months later.

The hunt was on for more defectors. Daniel Hannan had considered changing parties during the Tate Gallery talks, but ruled it out after the Bloomberg speech. Carswell said, ‘Two [other MPs] were prepared to do it, but the circumstances slightly changed.’ Shortly after the Rochester and Strood by-election, with panic rife in Downing Street, Cameron announced that he would legislate to hold a referendum within the first hundred days of a Tory government being elected. ‘That closed off the possibility of anyone else coming over,’ Carswell said.

That winter the Tate conspirators’ plan appeared to be working. The huge excitement of the defections and the two by-election wins appeared to have solved the Farage paradox. Ukip were on just under 20 per cent in the polls, but there was no discernible downward shift in Euroscepticism. ‘We looked like winners,’ said Carswell. ‘We thought at that point the Tate strategy had worked. Given what transpired, the battle had barely begun.’

During the 2015 general election campaign, Nigel Farage reasserted himself in the battle for the soul of Ukip. He sought to maximise the party’s core support with his trademark provocative comments. In a radio interview he said breastfeeding mothers should ‘sit in the corner’. During the main televised leaders’ debate he complained about foreigners with HIV coming to Britain for treatment, at a cost to the NHS of £25,000 per year each. Carswell despaired. Despite predictions that Ukip might win between six and ten seats, only Carswell was successful, holding on to Clacton. Farage himself fell nearly 3,000 votes short in South Thanet, the seventh time he had tried and failed to be elected to Parliament.

Carswell breathed a sigh of relief when Farage stood down as leader after the election, fulfilling a promise he had made during the campaign, and handing the reins to Suzanne Evans, the media-savvy author of the party’s manifesto. But there was despair among Ukippers who wanted a new direction when Farage un-resigned just three days later, sparking a coup to force him out again. Patrick O’Flynn, Ukip’s economic spokesman, broke cover to brand Farage a ‘snarling, thin-skinned, aggressive’ figure who made the party look like a ‘personality cult’. But the attempted putsch failed, and O’Flynn resigned. The result was a simmering civil war which played out for months as Farage loyalists went to war with his internal critics, with Carswell at the top of the list.

Chris Bruni-Lowe, who had switched his allegiance from Carswell to Farage, said it was Carswell’s disdain for the leader that encouraged him to return: ‘Nigel had decided he was going to leave, but Douglas Carswell called him that morning and said to him, “Are you planning on coming back?” Nigel said, “Well, I’ve not really given it much thought, but I probably will now there’s going to be a referendum.” And Carswell says, “You cannot do that, you’re toxic. You’ll damage the cause.” And Nigel thought, “Well, fuck this.”’

But Carswell was adamant that the election campaign had undone the good work of the previous autumn: ‘During the campaign we talked about breastfeeding on LBC, we talked about HIV, we ran a general election designed to appeal to the base rather than attract support from beyond the base. It was a disastrous election strategy. After the general election, I thought to myself, “You can’t detoxify the Ukip brand under the current leadership.”’ He resolved to ‘switch my efforts to detoxify the Leave brand’ instead, aligning with Matthew Elliott’s operation to ensure that it became the official ‘Out’ campaign and to prevent Farage being a prominent part of it.

Carswell’s first move was to write an article for The Times urging Farage to ‘take a break’, and arguing that the referendum campaign ahead should focus on the costs of EU membership ‘instead of feeding the idea that EU membership is synonymous with immigration’.2

Farage was baffled: ‘I read that and thought, “Fucking hell! I’ve spent ten years trying to do that!”’

The degree to which immigration should be front and centre of the referendum was a faultline that was to bitterly divide Ukip from Carswell and the Tory campaigners for the next thirteen months.

With the general election approaching, Matthew Elliott was under pressure to step up his campaigning and make explicit that Business for Britain would lead the ‘No’ or ‘Out’ campaign. In February 2015 he was approached by Richard Tice, a millionaire property financier who was a BfB signatory. ‘He was saying, “Come on, why isn’t BfB for Leave?”’ Elliott recalled. ‘I explained “change or go” had to be our position. It was a way we could keep as many business people engaged as possible. And there was always the possibility the PM would go for a more substantial deal than people thought he would, and we should therefore be urging him to push the boundaries of what renegotiation meant, rather than assuming it was a completely lame exercise.’ Tice went away dissatisfied, but would soon find someone willing to run a more aggressive campaign.

In April, the month before the general election, another important meeting took place at the Caistor Hall Hotel in Norwich. David Campbell Bannerman, a Tory MEP who had previously been the chairman and deputy leader of Ukip, was determined to ensure that different branches of the Eurosceptic family worked together if there was a referendum campaign. ‘I knew it was a bit like herding cats, and the real problem we were going to have was going to be fighting amongst ourselves,’ he said.

Campbell Bannerman set up a ‘Contact Group’, and invited Elliott and other prominent sceptics like the businesswoman Ruth Lea and Rory Broomfield of the Freedom Association. The gathering would later be described by the Electoral Commission as a ‘pivotal moment’, and a key reason why Vote Leave was designated as the official ‘Out’ campaign.

Campbell Bannerman was also involved in another development that spring, the creation of Conservatives for Britain, the parliamentary wing of Elliott’s operation. When Cameron won his majority in May, Elliott was shocked: ‘I realised, “Crikey, I’ve actually got to set up this referendum campaign.”’

At a lunch the following day Elliott met Campbell Bannerman, plus Nick Wood from the Westminster PR firm Media Intelligence Partners, a grizzled, chain-smoking former Times and Express political journalist who became Iain Duncan Smith’s communications director when he was Tory leader. Campbell Bannerman recalled Elliott’s shock: ‘Matthew looked horrified at winning his own election. I don’t think he expected it.’ The discussion quickly turned to how to put pressure on the newly elected government. The strategy agreed was to form a group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, MEPs and peers to turn the screws on Cameron during the negotiations. Campbell Bannerman agreed to become co-chairman and run the operation in Brussels.

For the key post of co-chairman in the Commons, Elliott and Daniel Hannan approached Steve Baker, the MP for Wycombe. At forty-four, Baker had only been an MP since 2010 – but he was liked and trusted by all factions on the Conservative benches. An RAF engineer who retrained as a software engineer, Baker was devoutly religious – he was baptised during a full-body immersion in the sea – and had been gifted with the innocent face of a chorister. Behind the smile, Hannan and Elliott also saw a man prepared to take risks: Baker was a keen skydiver, with more than two hundred jumps to his name.

When Hannan approached him, he had just one pitch: ‘There’s no one else to do it.’ Baker himself joked later that he got the job because he was a ‘cleanskin’, untainted by the battles of the past. Hannan remembered, ‘I thought, everyone likes Steve Baker, everyone trusts him, he’s a born-again Christian, he is just incapable of dishonesty.’

Baker was also a resolute Eurosceptic, who like Hannan had come into politics to get Britain out of the EU. Unlike Hannan, his inspiration was not a Latvian foreign minister, but David Cameron himself. Baker had flirted with the idea of joining Ukip, but decided the Tory Party was the vessel that would bring about Brexit: ‘One of the principal reasons I knew the Conservative Party could be relied upon on the EU is that in 2007 David Cameron went to the Czech Republic and made a speech in which he said the EU was the “last gasp of an outdated ideology, a philosophy which has no place in our new world of freedom”. David Cameron inspired me to join the Conservative Party.’

Cameron soon had cause to regret his own powers of persuasion. Friday, 5 June 2015 was the fortieth anniversary of the 1975 EU referendum, and Baker, Campbell Bannerman, Wood and Walsh decided it would be the perfect moment to launch Conservatives for Britain. Matthew Elliott was out of the country at the time, and was nearly as blindsided as the prime minister when the story announcing the creation of the organisation appeared on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph on 7 June. By that point CfB had been meeting in secret for a month, and had already recruited fifty Tory MPs. Cameron admitted to Baker later that he was ‘spooked’ that no intelligence on the operation had reached him. Campbell Bannerman recalled, ‘It wasn’t expected, and we hit the Remain campaign very early and very hard. Steve did an excellent job of getting people on board.’

A week later, Baker had recruited 110 Tory MPs, thirteen peers and twelve MEPs. Sympathetic cabinet ministers privately signed up to the mailing list. Later that week Labour MPs launched a sister group, Labour for Britain, to escalate hostilities. Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Kelvin Hopkins and Gisela Stuart were all on board, along with the leading Labour donor John Mills, a veteran of the 1975 referendum campaign.

But there was a more seismic announcement to come. Elliott flew home and resolved to exercise greater control over the MPs. He had already secretly recruited just the man to do that. On 14 June the Sunday Times revealed that Dominic Cummings had been charged with setting up the ‘Out’ campaign. For Eurosceptics their hour had come. And so, now, had their man.