by Craig Oliver
It feels like a crunching gear change as the PM moves to the main discussion. I have a good look round the table – everyone still as a statue, recognising this could be an awkward moment. The PM sets out his argument for collective responsibility, before concluding: ‘We can’t look like a rabble that’s attacking each other in Parliament … If we can’t do it by being civilised, we’ll be letting ourselves down.’
At that point, the series of ministers pile in. The quietly authoritative Patrick McLoughlin, the Secretary of State for Transport, gives a stern lecture on how the party owes a huge amount to the PM, dragging it back to electability.
After a few others have chipped in, Chris Grayling says what the PM has set out is ‘perfectly reasonable and sensible’. Iain Duncan Smith is cooperative, too, saying that having been leader at a time when the party was more interested in tearing chunks out of itself, he thought it important we do not allow ourselves to get personal: ‘It’ll be a ferocious debate. The idea we can finesse that is ludicrous. It’ll be a little bit about the head – and a lot about the heart.’ I find myself thinking that is precisely the wrong way round, but he’s probably right. He then tries to push for the referendum to be later than June, suggesting it will get in the way of some really important local elections.
Only Michael Gove seems to misstep, making a Pollyanna-ish, but oxymoronic speech about allowing ourselves to be a truly national party, because we will have people arguing both sides of the case. One of my team leans over to me and whispers, ‘Try schizophrenic.’
In a way, the meeting is more interesting for the people who did not speak – Theresa May and Sajid Javid, both of whom are playing their cards very close to their chests.
After it, some of the team want to discuss Theresa May. Her sphinx-like approach is becoming difficult, with the press really questioning which way she will jump. I suspect anything we do to try and bounce her could prove counterproductive. We go for a cup of tea in the No. 10 canteen. I am trying to have a healthy new year and ask for peppermint tea. Marge and Alison, who run the tiny canteen, look in a cupboard under the urn and come out with an old shoebox full of herbal teas from God knows when. No peppermint. I have camomile and ginger, which tastes like diluted dust. The conversation turns around this being the biggest thing the PM has faced and him not even knowing if the Home Secretary is backing him or not.
Apparently DC is worried that she does not realise she would be a central figure in any future Government of his – and wants to communicate that to her.
Theresa isn’t the only cause for concern. The next day an obscure report, buried on page two of the Daily Express, sets the cat among the pigeons. ‘Friends of Boris’ (journalistic code for him or someone very close to him) are reported as saying he has no intention of leading the Out campaign. The PM asks to see a copy, hoping he can spot any telling Boris phrases. He suspects ‘The trouble is I’m not an outer’ is one of them. If he isn’t up for it, it’s a major blow for those who want to Leave, and a boost for us.
But there’s a swift counter-briefing from Boris’ team, this time hinting he might be Out.
The day turns into another rolling Europe meeting, culminating in a big session with the PM and Chancellor. The big debate is if we should push for 23 June. Normally, Parliament’s ‘statutory instruments’ would have to be put in place around now. The problem is it will look like the whole renegotiation is a stitch-up and we’re going for a big bounce.
The conversation turns to how Parliament would react. The working assumption is there would be well over a hundred Out MPs. What is striking is how lukewarm Jeremy Corbyn is on remaining in the EU. The suspicion is that the only thing stopping him going for Out is that he doesn’t want to completely split his party. He is vital to the Remain cause, because he is capable of mobilising an army of supporters to our side – supporters who are not well-disposed to David Cameron.
The PM says he doesn’t think too many people would object to June. Stephen Gilbert says the campaign’s preferred date for a referendum would be November – so that they could have plenty of time to do their segmentation of the electorate and to target it properly.
From an ‘air war’ (the term given to the media side of the campaign) perspective we want this done quickly. I believe the debate will be out of control from the moment we come back from Brussels with a deal – the best approach in that circumstance is complete shock and awe, which there is no way we can sustain until November.
The conversation concludes there are three options: June, September or November. June might not work. November would mean we had to go through the nightmare Tory conference with all the Europe posturing that would involve. September could be after a summer of migration problems. We settle on a clear order of preference: June, November, September.
News comes through from Brussels that is extremely significant. Tom Scholar, our super-bright and worldly wise negotiator, warns that the Commission ‘will issue a draft proposal at the very beginning of February’, with ‘sherpa meetings’ (involving top civil servants representing each Government) on 5 and 11 February. He wants to complain in the strongest possible terms, as it will look like we are being bounced.
The reason he’s so concerned is that the renegotiation is supposed to be coming to a head in mid-February. If a text is out there from the beginning of February, it risks the Outers being able to shred it, without us being able to defend it, attack it, or sign up to it. It’ll merely have the status of a proposal, but not in the eyes of the media. Moreover, it’s perfectly possible that what they issue could be the high-water mark, with the final document even worse than what was originally published.
Liz Sugg, Ameet Gill and I walk over to the Conrad Hotel opposite St James’s Park Tube station. It’s been picked for our first official meeting with Will Straw, who is leading the Remain campaign, by Stephen Gilbert, who says, ‘It’s nearby and full of American tourists.’ In other words, we won’t be spotted, although he urges us to go in through the lobby and not the main entrance. Stephen has now resigned from the Conservative party and set himself up as a consultant.
We go down into a basement filled with windowless meeting rooms. In ours, sandwiches, salads and cake that look like they have emerged from a 3D printer await us.
Will is bright and amiable, eager to be collegiate. I recognise him from a press photo of him leading a march in the pouring rain. He is tall, lean and smartly dressed. I wonder what it must be like for him, having set up the campaign as a bright young thing in the Labour party – only for the Tory government machine to heave into view.
On the way over, I tell everyone it’s important for us to be helpful and diplomatic, but the truth is, we hold all the cards here. If the meeting goes badly, the recommendation will be to revisit the assumption that we are backing them and reconsider setting up our own campaign.
We talk about when the referendum should be held. Will explains that November would be best for them. I make arguments for June – and am surprised when Stephen says, ‘So my understanding is that it’s the strong view it should be June.’ I couldn’t work out if he was being heavy-handed, or if he hadn’t really understood what Will was saying.
We run through our thinking – about how a deal in February is more likely than not now, but by no means certain. Also, how when the deal is done, we need a blitzkrieg of activity. Will offers up a series of thoughts, including a suggestion that Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson should go out and sell the case. I make a mental note that this should not happen. Not because they aren’t talented politicians, but because they were ultra Europhiles, having both wanted to join the Euro – and that would not help our cause.
I hang back at the end to talk with Will about the best way to ensure we dock with the campaign in terms of communications staff. They need a Tory now, finding they are struggling to get any traction with the newspapers. I see the point, but again we’re trapped. If someone from No. 10 is arguing the case for the EU before the renegotiation is compl
ete, it will look bad.
Later I sit down with Stephen Gilbert to discuss our view. Despite it all, I am impressed by Will, who comes across as someone we can do business with, setting aside party differences in a common cause. The inevitability of my involvement in the campaign feels hideously real. I comforted myself after the general election that I’d never have to go through the torment of a full-scale campaign again. Last May looks fun compared to this – a relentless slog, with the added complication of the blood and guts of an all-out Tory war. None of it seems appealing.
By mid-January, the papers are full of theories about the shape of any deal we’d do with Europe. One is about the German redefinition of the concept of the worker. They have it wrong – claiming Brits will be affected, too. I call the PM to talk about it as he is on his way to the constituency. He says I should leave it: ‘There’s a lot of crap out there … It’s not bad if people are confused.’
I ask him how his chat with Theresa May went. The line is crackly, but I can tell he is frustrated. It sounds like she refused to come off the fence. I feel irritation on his behalf. Of course, looking at it purely from her point of view, it’s a smart strategy – allowing her to have her cake and eat it – but it doesn’t seem fair on David Cameron, who has treated her well. I notice the Outers are equally frustrated by her, claiming in newspaper briefings that she has ‘marched them to the top of the hill’ and left them waiting.
But if our problems seem bad, they are nothing compared to Labour’s. Watching Jeremy Corbyn’s interview on Marr is a strange experience. With the sound turned down, he looks reasonable enough, but what he’s saying is electorally disastrous. He starts by wanting to open talks with Argentina about the Falklands, before moving on to putting Trident submarines to sea without nuclear warheads, and then concluding he’d like to reintroduce secondary picketing. It’s as if he will jump willingly into all the elephant traps being laid out for him.
Janan Ganesh tweets: ‘Imagine giving a TV interview in which your proposal to bring back secondary strikes was not the worst or second-worst idea.’
The next day, DC’s inner circle has dinner with Lynton Crosby, his 2015 election campaign director, in the dining room at No. 11. The table is set for seven, with the PM sitting at the top. Lynton sits to his right. George says he’s done everything to warm the place up – with portable heaters dotted around the walls.
The food is pretty basic – a watery beef stew with rice, and a bowl full of overcooked carrots and peas. The stew is tasteless and everyone adds a lot of salt. It is all made worse by the fact I’m having a dry January.
Lynton has made it plain he is going to be studiously neutral in this referendum, but he’s happy to talk, as he regularly has done since the election.
Top of the agenda is whether we are right to push for June. Everyone agrees it is the right date. George wonders what the SNP will do. Most believe they’ll say overtly they are all for In, while doing little to campaign for it. They’ve already refused any attempts to have cross-party working.
The next item is: What do we need to bring home on welfare/immigration? George says that in his conversation with Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, it was clear they were alive to the politics of this, with Juncker saying, ‘DC must have something with four years in it, because that was what he argued for in his manifesto.’
The next subject is ‘key messages’. There’s been a bit of a question about whether we were wise to emphasise security. When we did, the journalist Dominic Lawson pointed out that the EU isn’t about security; that’s down to NATO, etc. Lynton says we need to make a bigger argument: ‘Now is not the time for the West to divide … strength in numbers, etc.’
He’s also sure that the PM should not race ahead with making pro-EU arguments – he needs to demonstrate just how hard he is working for a deal. He adds that we shouldn’t be going for a big-bang budget either: ‘Nothing that will scare the voters.’ The Chancellor says that should be a principle at all times.
Much of the discussion is about getting our heads around how different all of this is going to be. George sums it up best: ‘We’re fighting our own here. Hopefully with the end result we won’t destroy each other.’
All through the evening, DC seems a little distant. He lets us know what’s distracting him at the end of the meal with the joke, ‘Remind me whose idea this was?’
The screw is turning as we approach the now crucial beginning of February, needing to explain what we can expect from the renegotiation. Reports from the frontline in Brussels are concerning. The crucial issue of what would happen on curbing benefits to stop migration appears to be getting nowhere.
The feeling is, if a document is leaked without satisfactory progress in this area at the beginning of February, we will be promptly torn to shreds – even though the renegotiation is not over. We needed to ensure that whatever is sent out looks credible.
During this period, I have regular meetings with Andrew Cooper, the pollster for Remain. Andrew and I struck up a firm friendship while he was Director of Strategy at No. 10 and I could always rely on him to tell it to me straight. I tell him things are looking superficially good for us in the media. There are two Leave campaigns tearing lumps out of each other as they fight to get the official stamp of approval, with all the funding and recognition that comes with that. The Times has a spread lamenting the chaos on the Out side – with it really appearing like Monty Python’s ‘People’s Front of Judea’ versus the ‘Judean People’s Front’. The expectation is that on our side the Government will dock neatly with Britain Stronger In Europe, with everyone appearing grown-up. I warn him that this sense of calm is likely to be shattered after the renegotiation.
Andrew tells me the online polls, which haven’t had their methodology changed much since the disaster of the general election, put us ahead 51–49 (with the odd outlier putting Leave ahead). However, ‘more reliable’ phone polls put us ahead 60–40.
He has done some work that is vital to understanding the electorate – and therefore how the campaign will be fought. There are three groups who will essentially vote to Remain in the EU come what may:
Ardent internationalists: 10% of the population
Comfortable Europhiles: 22%
Engaged Metropolitans: 4%
Then there are two groups who won’t do anything other than vote to Leave:
Strong Sceptics: 19%
EU hostiles: 10%
That leaves just over a third of people in the middle:
Hearts vs Heads (people wanting to leave in their hearts, but having intellectual doubts about it): 14%
Disengaged Middle (people who struggle to care one way or another): 21%
Andrew says that the last two groups are ‘in play’ and could go either way. They will be targeted by Remain and Leave. It is common to hear from Europhiles that we should sing the praises of the EU. But Andrew is clear this is a mistake. These people are vociferous in their dislike of the EU, but what will sway them is if their pocket is likely to be hit.
Perhaps the most interesting debate in these groups is on the issue of security. I’ve heard a number of people in No. 10 egg each other on to the view that the national security argument is central. According to Andrew’s research, it holds little sway. I’ve always felt it sounds a bit bogus to suggest we’d be less safe if we left; surely we’d be cooperating on this stuff anyway? This is not the view of the recent heads of the security services, who believe it’s vital we are in the room when things are decided.
It seems that I was right to be worried by how complicated some of our messages are.
We have called the referendum on a complex subject and given ourselves only four short months to educate people on the crucial link between Europe and the economy – amid the white noise of a frenzied argument.
Chapter 4
She Could Be PM in Six Months
THE NEXT BIG moment on Europe is Davos – that annual networking jamboree in the S
wiss mountains. Our convoy races out of the Parliamentary estate immediately after Prime Minister’s Questions. My car gets stuck behind a laundry lorry moving incredibly slowly. There then follows a chaotic chase for the next couple of miles as Sean, the driver, attempts to catch up with the PM’s car carving its way through London traffic with the aid of motorbike outriders. He flicks on his blue light and starts madly overtaking people while honking his horn. Finally we catch up.
We arrive in Davos in darkness. The town is coated in a thick layer of snow and has a real holiday feel, with tourist-brochure buildings, and forests of giant pine trees stretching towards the mountains.
I take a few minutes to go for a walk after dumping my bags and run into Christine Lagarde, the Head of the International Monetary Fund, and her entourage. It’s the classic Davos cliché – encountering some of the biggest hitters on the planet as you wander down the street.
I find myself lugging the PM’s red box out into the snow as we head to a restaurant called Pot au Feu, which has animal skins draped all over the walls. It’s roasting inside, the temperature pumped up to an absurdly high level. The dinner starts on a low note. It’s become evident that tomorrow’s papers will be full of Europe suggesting an end to the Dublin agreement, which says asylum seekers can be returned to the first country they arrive in. It’s been a crucial line of defence for us. If we can’t say they can be sent back, it will create another stick with which to beat us for the Brexiteers.
DC looks at me and says, ‘They are not making it easy for us …’
The next morning I wake up dehydrated, despite having a dry January. The moment I open my eyes, the phone goes. It’s the BBC’s Norman Smith – he’s only doing his job, but I yearn for the time when answering difficult political questions cold and at an ungodly hour is not the first task of every day. Apparently, anonymous Cabinet ministers have been briefing that they fear the PM will be in campaign mode from the moment the renegotiation is done, while they will be held to collective responsibility. They want a Cabinet meeting the weekend he arrives back with a deal so they can be free to speak out. They show no recognition of the fact that the PM is already doing something extraordinary by allowing some ministers to take an opposing view to the Government, while still remaining in the Cabinet.