Despite this, it felt very much – at this stage – as if Remain was on top.
There were two distractions from the campaign, however.
The first related to our replacement of the unassessed Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which would be assessed. The costs had been getting out of control. Some PIP claims were assessed on the need for mobility assistance, and some court judgements had taken the widest and most lenient interpretation of that – even down to whether someone needed to sit down to put their socks on. I sent George to agree a package of changes with IDS that would ensure the benefit reached those who needed it, and bring the cost down. We announced changes in the Budget on 16 March that would see thousands of people lose PIP or receive it at a reduced rate. A backlash from MPs and disability campaigners followed. Instead of standing by and explaining the decision, IDS distanced himself from it. Such was the reaction that we agreed to look at the proposals again – they weren’t set in stone.
Two days later I was on my way back from a European Council when Ed called to say Iain had written me a letter saying he was resigning. I called him immediately: ‘You don’t need to resign. We can sort all this out. If you don’t want to go ahead with any of these changes, we won’t go ahead with them.’ There were two things at play. I had already agreed to reconsider the plans. And at this precarious time in the campaign his part in the government, that crucial left–right balance, was more important.
Over the next few hours there were several calls between us. I said he couldn’t resign without coming to see me first. He maintained that he couldn’t go on as things were. He did seem to soften, but then it happened – again. I was talking to him, making the case for him to stay, when my phone buzzed with a Sky News alert: ‘IDS resigns’. It was the second time I’d found out from the media that a minister had resigned at the same moment that I was on the phone to them. I was furious with IDS, but determined not to let it throw us off course.
The second distraction came on 3 April, when news outlets began reporting details of a huge leak of documents from the Panamanian law firm and corporate services provider Mossack Fonseca, which had helped many with tax avoidance. While this was a huge story, it seemed irrelevant to the campaign until it was revealed that an investment trust set up by my father, Blairmore Holdings, had used Mossack Fonseca, and that I had held some shares in it before becoming prime minister.
I knew that any accusations that this investment vehicle was established to enable my father or me to avoid tax were unfounded. It was a unit trust, registered with the Inland Revenue, whose price was quoted in the Financial Times. There are thousands of these funds, and they are not set up to avoid tax, nor do they help UK citizens to avoid tax. They tend to be registered outside the UK in order to encourage non-UK citizens to invest in them, but there was nothing secretive or underhand about this fund, or its use of a foreign law firm for some advice.
That said, the Mossack Fonseca leak was a landmark moment in the fight against corruption. It showed where some extremely wealthy people, including high-profile politicians, had been hiding their money. Leaders as far afield as Pakistan and Iceland would be prosecuted or would resign. The fact that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin had been named in the leak, I thought, made my late father’s above-board unit trust a non-story. But I felt defensive because he was my dad, and furious about any allegations over his integrity.
My anger made me blind to the obvious point – the British press were going to have a field day, and would not let this lie until every question had been answered and every detail revealed. I was far too slow to act. It took the intervention of my brother Alex to make me see sense. He came to No. 10, told me we needed to rebut every accusation, and sat in one of the offices helping to get all the expert advice together, including from our father’s stockbrokers, lawyers and accountants. For once I saw my brother the QC close-up, using his forensic skills and getting the job done. It was impressive. Combined with my answering over an hour of questions in the Commons on the subject – proving that I had nothing to hide and there was nothing to see – it worked. But we had lost a week.
One advantage we had in the referendum campaign was that we were the government, and the government had a position. I was determined that people should have the facts when they made this momentous decision – including the point that the government they had elected wasn’t neutral on this. A precedent was set in 1975, when a leaflet had been sent to every household setting out the choice on remaining in or leaving what was then the EC, and making the government’s position clear. After several drafts over several months, ‘Why the Government Believes that Voting to Remain in the European Union is the Best Decision for the UK’ began to drop on twenty-seven million doormats on 11 April.
I would argue that the points it made have aged well. One of its key arguments was how deep we were into the EU, and how hard it would be to extract ourselves from it: ‘The government judges it could result in ten years or more of uncertainty as the UK unpicks our relationship with the EU and renegotiates new arrangements with the EU and over fifty other countries around the world.’
Another point was the imbalance in the relationship, and therefore the difficulties of negotiations: ‘Some argue that we could strike a good deal quickly with the EU because they want to keep access to our market. But the government’s judgement is that it would be much harder than that – less than 8 per cent of EU exports come to the UK while 44 per cent of UK exports go to the EU.’
On 18 April George carried the economic case further, announcing the findings of a study which showed just how much worse off we’d be outside the EU. Due to the lost trade and investment in the event of Brexit, by 2030 Britain’s economy would be an estimated 6 per cent smaller than it would have been, working out as a loss to the average household of £4,300 per year.
This led to uproar that we were being too negative and scaremongering. As in the Scottish referendum, our campaign was branded ‘Project Fear’. I believed it was Project Clear. The flipside to ‘better-off in’ was ‘worse-off out’, and we should leave people in no doubt about what that would look like.
People who saw this as unhelpfully negative fundamentally misunderstood the battlefield we were fighting on. As with the Scottish referendum, there were those almost certain to vote Leave and those almost certain to vote Remain. It was the undecided voters we needed to focus on, and all the evidence pointed to the conclusion that they would be persuaded by arguments of the head, not the heart. Hence our focus on the benefits of a stable economy, opportunities for their children, good jobs and shared security.
Another advantage of our position was the international support for our continued membership. Our friends wanted us to stay. And, impeccably on cue, the leader of the free world arrived in Britain for a visit. He made a very good point, saying that while it wasn’t for him to tell the British people how to vote, he could take a guess at how the rest of the world would respond, including on trade deals. George seized on it. ‘Why don’t you say that?’ he asked. After all, who was better placed to say what America would do in the event of Brexit: Boris Johnson or Barack Obama?
That afternoon, in the FCO’s Locarno Room, we stood side by side on a podium as we’d done so many times before, at a press conference. In answer to a question about the referendum he said: ‘I think it’s fair to say that maybe some point down the line, there might be a UK–US trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon, because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc – the European Union – to get a trade agreement done, and the UK is going to be in the back of the queue – not because we don’t have a special relationship, but because, given the heavy lift on any trade agreement, us having access to a big market with a lot of countries rather than trying to do piecemeal trade agreements, which is hugely inefficient.’ I was delighted with the intervention. Obama was basically saying that all the
‘It’ll be OK’ assumptions from Leave were false. It stood to reason that of course a big country like America would focus on big blocs like the EU.
As Remain were rallying support, Leave were having difficulties setting out what life would look like for Britain outside the EU. Every time they cited examples of other countries that had relationships with the organisation, we shot them down. One day it was Canada – but its trade agreement had taken seven years to negotiate so far, wasn’t completed yet and didn’t cover services. Plus, Canada sent only 10 per cent of its exports to the EU anyway. Then it was Norway – but Norway paid roughly the same into the EU per capita as us, adopted EU legislation without having any say on how it was formulated, and took in nearly double the number of EU migrants per head that we did. Michael Gove suggested that Britain organise a European free-trade zone with countries like Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina and Ukraine. Even the Albanian prime minister described the idea as ‘weird’.
At the end of April, with just two months to go, I took stock. Here we were with near-unanimous cross-party support, and the majority of parliamentarians on-side. We had the resources of government and the endorsements of experts to an extent that had never been seen before. We were deploying six years’ experience in office, including two referendum wins and a majority at the general election, to great effect. Above all, we had the economic case nailed down, unanswerable, unquestionable. It felt that we’d captured the high ground.
And yet every position of advantage was undermined.
Our status and resources as a government were tainted by the fact that we were the establishment. We had hoped that putting something out with the badge of Her Majesty’s Treasury or the backdrop of Downing Street would give it weight. Instead, it was treated with suspicion and derision. That £4,300 figure came in for particular attack. I would defend it. It was based on British GDP being 6 per cent lower than it would have been after fifteen years, which was not an unreasonable estimate, given how much trade we do with Europe. It was a neat way to demonstrate the real, tangible impact on families’ finances. As for the argument about it being too specific, if you don’t put down a figure, you’ll be asked to name one. And as George reminds me to this day, the Treasury medium-term forecast was correct.
Our voices of support, despite all their expertise, were seen as remote, biased and therefore untrustworthy. Michael Gove even declared, in a defining moment of the campaign: ‘I think the people in this country have had enough of experts.’ It was an appalling thing to say. Yet it spoke to a deeper problem in our politics. We were living – and campaigning – in an age when feelings were prioritised over facts, where ‘experts’ could be dismissed as vested interests, elites, the establishment. Michael, one of the most learned, empirical people I knew, had suddenly become an ambassador for the post-truth age.
Our enthusiasm for the Remain case could easily be questioned. After all, we had shifted very quickly from ‘big, bossy and interfering’ negativity to ‘stronger, safer and better-off’ positivity. We were asking a lot of people to believe such a handbrake turn. And frankly, we hadn’t done enough to trumpet the achievements of the EU, such as ending outrageous mobile-data roaming charges, cheaper flights and reciprocal access to other countries’ healthcare systems.
This had a longer gestation than my time in office: British politics has had a strongly Eurosceptic undertone ever since the late 1980s. And there can be no doubt that parts of the press helped to feed this. That said, I accept my share of responsibility for not doing enough to balance the narrative. We should have done more – I should have done more – to mix criticisms of the EU with talking about its very real achievements; not least the two longstanding British objectives of creating the single market and enlarging the EU to take in countries that had emerged from decades of state socialism. In my defence, I would make the point that the EU did not make this easy. Yes, some stories about straight bananas and outlawing British sausages were inflated or invented by over-enthusiastic (or over-pressured) British journalists, but others were not.
More to the point, there was a big-picture ‘diet of Brussels’ narrative that had helped to shape British politics. In the years I spent leading the Conservative Party, treaty followed treaty, with power after power passing from Westminster to Brussels. More political union, fewer vetoes for individual nations, more money for Brussels, proposals for a European army, cash grabs for Eurozone bailouts – these weren’t phantoms made up by the Sun or the Telegraph, they were real.
And the referendum sent the Eurosceptic press into overdrive. Much of it was predictable – some proprietors and editors were strongly Eurosceptic – but the scale of the onslaught was ferocious. They were also still extremely angry about Leveson, and for some this was a chance for revenge. Over six weeks the Daily Mail – circulation 1.5 million – ran eighteen immigration-related front-page stories.
I was particularly frustrated by the Mail, because it had never previously argued for leaving the EU. I asked its editor Paul Dacre to come for a drink in the Downing Street flat shortly before the referendum, and asked him why it was now doing so. He said, ‘We have always been a pretty Eurosceptic paper.’ I replied that I was a pretty Eurosceptic prime minister – it didn’t mean I automatically had to argue to leave. ‘If you are such a strong and long-standing Eurosceptic, why did you back Ken Clarke to be leader of the Conservative Party?’ I teased.
The odd thing about my relationship with the Mail and Dacre is that in spite of the fact that he had railed against me as a candidate for the Tory leadership, and frequently ranted about things I did – from gay marriage to green energy – there was some mutual respect. He used to tell me that he admired what was clearly a ruthless streak in me. And although I hated some of what he put in his paper, I knew that he had a brilliance at reaching out and talking to middle England.
I ran through all the arguments with him about how leaving would diminish Britain rather than enhance our position in the world. There were moments when I thought I was getting somewhere. He even admitted that he had in the past flirted with the idea of a European army because he worried about our excessive reliance on the US. But I could tell that ultimately none of it would work: he was on a mission for Brexit.
Instead I tried the Mail’s owner, Lord Rothermere. The Leveson Inquiry had put our friendly relationship in the freezer, yet we kept in touch. Over a cup of coffee one morning in my office in No. 10, I simply asked what he thought about the Europe issue. Before he answered, I joked, ‘I expect you’re a bit like me – the EU drives you mad, but you know we have to be around the table.’
‘No, my view is much stronger than that,’ he replied. I waited for the diatribe against Brussels. But instead he said, ‘I think it will be a disaster if we leave. I may even have to relocate some of my businesses to be inside the EU.’
It has been reported that I went on to ask him to sack Paul Dacre. Frankly, I wish I had – and I wish it had happened. I suspect he does too: two years after the referendum he replaced Dacre with the pro-Remain Geordie Greig. The closest I got was saying, ‘Well, if that’s your view, why on earth have you got someone editing the Daily Mail who is determined to drive us out of the EU?’ There was a lot of harrumphing about not instructing editors, and we left it at that. The Mail had made its choice.
My difficulties with the media didn’t end there. I knew we would not have the support of the Sun and probably the Telegraph, but I was hopeful that there would be some compensating support from left-leaning papers like the Guardian and the Mirror. That was indeed the case.
Ironically, almost the biggest problem I had was with the BBC. Of course it maintained its impartiality. And of course its reach and influence remained strong. The problem was, I felt, that it lost its way in terms of understanding the difference between balance and impartiality. The result was, for example, the voices of thousands of businesses arguing for Remain being given equal treatment to just two pr
ominent businesses, Dyson and JCB, coming out for Leave. There were thousands of Remain economists, and a tiny number of Brexiteers, yet the BBC pretended they were equal, giving Economists for Free Trade the same weight as Nobel Prize winners arguing for Remain.
There was an opinion poll at the time purdah kicked in, meaning that the government could play no part in the campaign, that showed Leave ahead. Sterling reacted very clearly, falling immediately. The BBC failed to properly draw the link, even though almost every independent analyst did so. As the old saying goes, the job of impartial media is not to report one person saying it’s raining with another person saying it isn’t – it is to ‘open the bloody window and see who is telling the truth’.
Another weakness of our campaign was that it seemed we were relying excessively on technical arguments, whereas the Leave campaign had the emotional arguments. I tried to put this right by speaking about how the EU had helped to entrench peace in Europe: the ‘safer’ part of our ‘stronger, safer, better-off’ triptych. So in the bright, domed atrium of the British Museum I spoke of ‘the serried rows of white headstones in lovingly-tended Commonwealth war cemeteries [that] stand as silent testament to the price that this country has paid to help restore peace and order in Europe’. I then asked the question: ‘Can we be so sure that peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking?’ The press turned it into ‘Cameron Predicts World War Three’.
Leave meanwhile concocted their very own answer to ‘better-off’. While we were saying membership was worth £4,300 to each family, they were saying that Britain spent £350 million a week on it. On 11 May, they unveiled their liveried battle bus, emblazoned with the words ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.’
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