It wasn’t true. As Boris rode the bus around the country, he left the truth at home. We didn’t send £350 million a week to the EU. Our contributions were reduced by almost a third through our rebate, and the rebate could only be ended through unanimity. A British prime minister would have to agree to give it away. And the Brexiteers were using the gross figure for contributions, not the net figure, which took into account the EU spending, including on science and agriculture, that was sent back to the UK. That would have reduced the figure to something like £160 million a week. More to the point, the boost to GDP, and thus to UK tax revenues, through frictionless trade and investment far outweighed any contributions we made. And, of course, we were already spending more than ever before on the NHS. Its budget was ring-fenced, so it wasn’t affected by our spending on the EU anyway.
So the bus was disingenuous, it was tenuous – but it was also ingenious. The fact that it was inaccurate actually helped the Leave campaign. They wanted the row, because it continually emphasised the fact that we sent money – however much it actually was – to the EU. Post-truth indeed.
The NHS was voters’ top priority, and their top concern was immigration. Since the economy was, the press considered, ‘done’, immigration was the new topic to focus on.
On 20 May, Michael Gove said that EU immigration would mean up to ‘five million extra people coming to Britain’ by 2030, and pointed to the EU’s stated objective of admission for Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey.
The £350 million bent the truth, but this new assertion stretched it to breaking point. There was no prospect of Turkey joining the EU for decades, if ever. It had merely applied, and was in talks. The rationale for this was that it encouraged the country to meet the criteria for membership – a free press, the rule of law, open markets, things that benefit us all. Maybe one day, when the world looked very different, Turkey might join. In any case, like every other EU member, the UK had a veto over any new country joining.
Yet when the armed forces minister Penny Mordaunt went on The Andrew Marr Show the next day, she denied that the UK could veto the accession of Turkey – and when she was challenged, she repeated it. We were no longer in the realms of bending or stretching the truth, but ditching it altogether. Leave were lying.
‘At Turkey’s current rate of progress, it would probably join the EU in the year 3000,’ was my rebuttal. But that was drowned out the following day when Vote Leave launched a poster warning: ‘Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU’, next to a picture of a British passport. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Michael Gove, the liberal-minded, carefully considered Conservative intellectual, had become a foam-flecked Faragist warning that the entire Turkish population was about to come and live in Britain. As for Boris, who proudly trumpeted his Turkish heritage, and who had advocated Turkey’s membership, he was now backing the false claims about its accession.
It didn’t take long to work out Leave’s obsession with Turkey. Five hundred million Europeans had the right to come to Britain already. Germans, Italians, Poles … Why focus on a country that wasn’t a member, and wasn’t likely to become one? The answer was that it was a Muslim country, which piqued fears about Islamism, mass migration and the transformation of communities. It was blatant. They might as well have said: ‘If you want a Muslim for a neighbour, vote Remain.’
I was being urged by Craig, Ameet and others to rule out Turkey ever becoming an EU member while I was PM. But I felt that would be irresponsible – the country was in the EU waiting room for a reason. And by saying a veto was necessary now was tantamount to accepting that it could join shortly.
So paralysis had me in its grip. I was caught between being a campaigner and being a prime minister, and I chose the latter. It truly was asymmetric warfare. I made the wrong choice.
While Leave weren’t telling the truth on Turkey, they did have a broader truth on their side. Immigration was a problem. The numbers remained stubbornly high. What followed was possibly the worst timing of anything in my premiership. On 26 May, with less than a month to go until polling day, the Office for National Statistics released its new immigration figures. In 2015, net migration had hit an all-time high of 333,000. It made our 100,000 target look ridiculous. And there was apparently a very simple way of stopping it: ending free movement by leaving the EU.
The reality was of course more nuanced. Over half of that immigration was from outside the EU, so it was completely irrelevant to the referendum. There we must do better. But the numbers from inside the EU would come down because of the new welfare restrictions. Plus, these were unusual times: we were creating more jobs than the rest of the EU put together. It was no surprise that people were coming here. In any case, wrecking our economy by leaving the single market wasn’t the answer.
That’s how I saw it – and said it – as prime minister. But sitting one evening in a BBC Yorkshire studio after an interview, I saw it from a voter’s perspective, as the channel played a five-minute package on Slovakian travellers in Rotherham. Local people were saying, ‘I’m moving out. These people are taking over our parks and public spaces and the place is a complete mess,’ and, crucially, ‘We never voted for this, it’s not fair.’ Their comments were understandable. That was the moment I realised our argument about the economy was quite complicated, while Leave’s argument about immigration was very simple. I thought my worst nightmares could come true. I thought, we could lose this thing.
In the wake of the ONS figures, Gove and Johnson wrote me an open letter criticising the tens-of-thousands immigration pledge, and Boris spoke out in an interview about ‘the scandal of the promise made by politicians repeatedly that they could cut immigration to the tens of thousands’. It wasn’t ‘politicians’ they were berating; it was me. It wasn’t any old pledge; it was part of the manifesto they had just been elected on. The rules of engagement had been abandoned. This was open warfare.
I was surprised to find new-intake MPs like Suella Braverman striding into the spotlight as raging Brexiteers. But it was the behaviour of the employment minister, Priti Patel, that probably shocked me most. On 28 May she wrote an article for the Telegraph critical of the ‘wealthy’ leaders of Remain, who could never know the downsides of immigration. She explicitly criticised the Conservative manifesto (upon which she had been elected) and the cabinet (of which she was a part). She subsequently used every announcement, interview and speech to hammer the government over immigration, even though she was part of that government. I was stuck, though: unable to fire her because that would make her a Brexit martyr, and would simply fuel the psychodrama in the Conservative Party that we were trying to stop.
By the time we got to June, referendum month, Boris and Gove were pledging to introduce an ‘Australian-style points-based immigration system’ before the next general election if Britain voted Leave. Quite apart from the fact that we already had the equivalent of a points system (clear categories for immigrants, with some channels such as unskilled labour from outside the EU set at zero), our system was tougher than Australia’s, and our level of immigration was much lower. But the real point was that this wasn’t Conservative policy, it was their policy. They were setting themselves up as an alternative government.
I refused to rise to it, and pulled my punches. Again and again the option came to hammer Boris and Gove. ‘These are now your opponents. They’re killing you,’ George said. ‘You’ve got to destroy their credibility.’ Every time I was shown a mocked-up poster like one of Boris in the pocket of Farage (like Ed Miliband and Alex Salmond in 2015), I vetoed it. I was tethered to the responsibility of my roles – passing up the chance to rule out Turkish accession because I was leader of the country, and passing up the chance to savage these ministers because I was leader of the party. Besides, I just didn’t think it would work. Returning fire in ‘blue on blue’ attacks would just make the campaign look like a Conservative spat, and would encourage othe
rs to sit it out. Or so I thought.
I wanted others to fire the weapons in our armoury that we couldn’t. Our cross-party clout relied mostly on Labour, but they were AWOL. During the entire course of the referendum campaign Corbyn delivered a handful of desultory speeches about Remain, and went on holiday for part of it. He criticised George’s ‘fear agenda’ and proposed a (narrowly averted) visit to Turkey, of all places, to talk up free movement. The Remain campaign cleared whole days for Labour in advance, but often they would do nothing. Most voters could spontaneously name me as the chief advocate of Remain, but they thought of Barack Obama and Mark Carney as Remainers long before Jeremy Corbyn came to mind.
Perhaps Corbyn wanted Remain to lose. First, the EU doesn’t fit into his world view. He’s anti-capitalist, and it’s a trading organisation. He voted to leave in 1975, and had opposed every treaty – the single market, Maastricht, Nice, Lisbon – that had come before Parliament over the years. Second, he probably looked at the situation and thought that if he hung back and let Britain leave, it would destroy the Tories as the financial crash had destroyed Labour.
As the campaigning stepped up, I made a speech on a City roof garden calling out Leave’s lies. I even went to a Hare Krishna centre in Hertfordshire to persuade worshippers. I did everything I could, taking every opportunity, deploying every reasonable, rational, persuasive line, speaking from my heart. But it was like one of those bad dreams where you’re trying to shout but no sound is coming out.
At points the dream felt surreal. I found myself at the Oval cricket ground, giving a speech next to a blue Mini. The Lib Dems’ Tim Farron stood next to a yellow one, Harriet Harman next to a red one, and the Greens’ leader Natalie Bennett beside a green Brompton bike. It was the sort of colourful backdrop we would have used in the general election, and a good visual representation of unity. But somehow (note the absence of Corbyn) it just didn’t have the impact we’d hoped for.
Likewise, the appearance of John Major and Tony Blair together on the same platform in Northern Ireland should have been a real ‘moment’. And it was a powerful way of showing the risks Brexit posed to the peace process in the North and the open border on the island of Ireland. One of the key reasons we gave for Britain remaining in the EU was because leaving might demand a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, potentially inflaming tensions and undoing years of hard-won peace. Those who claim it was not raised at the time conveniently forget this.
So what to do? The paralysis, that feeling of not being able to make ourselves heard, came back to immigration. I had no clear answer. At a crunch meeting in the flat on the evening of Sunday, 12 June with my team and George, we talked it through. Those from Stronger In wanted at least an intervention making our full case on immigration. Others, including many of my spads, wanted more: a new pledge on reducing immigration, similar to the last-ditch Vow in the Scottish referendum. Some of the Labour figures were calling for a new fund for areas hit hardest by immigration. And many were saying: can’t we just try again with Merkel and the EU? Can’t we tell them Britain is about to leave the EU if they don’t give us more on immigration? We kept coming back to the importance of maintaining message discipline about the economy, because, as Lynton had put it to me, ‘All Leave has is immigration. We shouldn’t concede that it is the only battle to be fought.’
A few days later I did have a conversation with my friend Mark Rutte, who held the rotating presidency of the European Council. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’re in danger of losing this. The problem is the lack of a brake on numbers. Is it worth talking to Juncker, talking to Merkel, trying to come up with something that says we will address this issue?’
He was helpful but sceptical, and the more I thought about it, the more doubtful I became. I talked to Tony Blair and John Major about it. They both agreed that it would just raise the profile of the issue without actually solving it.
So by the time I talked to Merkel, I told her I was going to push on with the plan we had. ‘But I want you to know,’ I emphasised, ‘that this is the major problem – and if we lose, this is why we’re going to lose.’ She simply said that it would be wrong to change tack on migration, and that those who had done so in the German elections had lost.
Still, we desperately needed to change the conversation. So we decided to recommit to Plan A, and force the agenda back onto the economy. On 15 June, with just over a week to go, George announced that if the UK voted to leave, he would be forced to carry out an emergency budget in order to plug the £30 billion hole Brexit was expected to gouge out of the UK’s finances. He said he would have to raise income tax, petrol and alcohol duties and inheritance tax, and to cut health, defence and education.
That day, fifty-seven Conservative MPs signed a statement saying they would not vote for any emergency budget. Four party grandees – Norman Lamont, Nigel Lawson, Michael Howard and IDS – published a letter in the next morning’s Daily Telegraph accusing Remain of attempting to frighten the electorate.
Looking back, I accept that this ‘punishment budget’ did seem over the top. But the realities of Brexit were OTT, and people needed to know them. What’s more, the atmosphere was febrile. You had to shout to be heard. I respected George for doing so. He threw everything into the emergency budget, even though he knew it could end his career. It was a contrast to others who wouldn’t put their necks on the line and full-throatedly back Remain, in case things went the other way. Those who were hedging their bets in this way simply added to my frustrations.
We were simultaneously trying to make the patriotic, positive case, including plans for a rally in Gibraltar, the overseas territory at the tip of Spain which is proudly, democratically British. Before I departed I was confronted with Leave’s most despicable attempt yet to drag the focus back to immigration. As I briefly described earlier, Nigel Farage stood alongside a poster entitled ‘Breaking Point’ that showed thousands of mainly male, mainly adult, mainly darker-skinned migrants filing across green fields. If Vote Leave’s big Turkish hint was a dog-whistle, this was Leave.EU’s foghorn.
The parallels with Nazi propaganda were being shared online immediately. And yet in these topsy-turvy, post-truth times, all this went in Leave’s favour. If you’re criticising it, you’re still talking about it – that was their rationale throughout the campaign. If the £350 million was disputed, then good – the subject of the cost of the EU was being raised, whether the figure was accurate or not. Suddenly I realised how much of an advantage their side had in being divided and fractious. Different factions could target different audiences. They were guerrillas to our conventional warfare.
But as our plane came into land at the foot of the famous Rock and our phone signals kicked back in, excitement about the rally and rage over the poster were replaced by other emotions. A Labour MP, Jo Cox, had been attacked in the street on the way to her constituency surgery in Birstall, West Yorkshire. Her condition was critical.
Ed, Liz and I remembered meeting her – as Jo Leadbeater – in Darfur back in 2006. She entered Parliament in 2015, and I knew her as a small, punchy person who always sat in the same place in the Commons, and frequently asked me probing questions about the Syrian refugee crisis.
I immediately called Fabian Picardo, the chief minister of Gibraltar, to cancel the rally and send the thousands of people who had gathered in the main square home. Instead we would meet him and some other dignitaries in private.
It didn’t take long for what had happened to become clear. Jo had been on her way to her constituency surgery when a man attacked her with a knife and a gun. I then received a message that she had died of her injuries. The first MP to be murdered since Ian Gow was killed by the IRA in 1990.
Everything else, all the arguments and preoccupations of the past few weeks, suddenly seemed small, distant and irrelevant. A woman had lost her life – a husband his wife, two children their mother, two parents their daughter. Parliamen
t had lost a politician with enormous promise. I felt sick. And I felt even sicker when it became apparent the referendum wasn’t irrelevant. The attacker – the murderer – had been heard to shout ‘Britain first,’ or ‘This is for Britain.’ Jo had been a staunch Remainer.
I was clear in my mind that the deranged actions of one person shouldn’t stop democracy. The referendum would still go ahead, but as a mark of respect to Jo, campaigning should cease for a period. I joined Corbyn in Batley for a moving ceremony to remember Jo, then recalled Parliament after checking with her husband that it was what she would have wanted. The whole House wore the white rose of Yorkshire. ‘We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us’ – words she had used in her maiden speech just a year earlier – echoed through the Chamber. I thought to myself how, in this age of populism, they were needed more than ever.
When the campaign resumed, we were still waking up each morning to the views of the latest expert or industry on the merits of Remain. I thought it was one of our greatest advantages that nearly every voice that mattered backed our case. The voice of major industries: cars, planes, trains, food, pharmaceuticals, farming, fashion, film. The voice of business: the CBI. The voice of many workers: the TUC. Our allies around the world: America, India, Japan, Australia, Canada. The multilateral bodies of the world: the IMF, the WTO, the OECD. Thirteen Nobel Prize winners. The head of the NHS. The former heads of MI5 and MI6. The head of the Church of England. Nine out of ten economists. Stephen Hawking, Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Branson – truly great Britons who so many people admire and respect. ‘Maybe it’s a conspiracy,’ I would say. ‘Or maybe all these people are right.’
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