For the Record

by David Cameron

How relevant, then, were the views of a former government adviser who had emigrated to California four years earlier? Probably worth a nib in a newspaper. But because he had been a friend of mine and a controversial figure in government, the press were keen to hear what Steve Hilton had to say on the referendum. Steve Hilton was ready to oblige. He started by saying that if I wasn’t PM I’d want to leave the EU – not true. He claimed that I had been told in 2012 that my migration targets were inaccurate, and impossible to achieve – again, not true: I even checked the paperwork, which showed that while he was director of strategy, net migration was falling. It got down to 150,000, not far off the tens-of-thousands ambition.

  Steve stuck around. He happily joined Boris on the bus, and did several interviews. The BBC cast him as the latest character in the Tory soap opera, running his intervention as big news just two days before the vote.

  The last week would be about using every tool in my armoury. Every supporter summoned. Every argument deployed. Every advantage exploited. I’d spent hours with Bill Knapp ahead of the final TV debate, a special episode of Question Time. It was every bit as brutal as we’d expected. At one point I was asked whether I agreed that I was a ‘twenty-first-century Neville Chamberlain’. But that was exactly the red rag needed to bring out my bullishness: ‘In my office I sit two yards away from the Cabinet Room where Winston Churchill decided in May 1940 to fight on against Hitler – the best and greatest decision perhaps anyone’s ever made in our country, right? Now, he didn’t want to be alone, he wanted to be fighting with the French and with the Poles and the others, but he didn’t quit. He didn’t quit on Europe, he didn’t quit on European democracy, he didn’t quit on European freedom. We want to fight for these things today, and you can’t win, you can’t fight if you’re not in the room. You can’t win a football match if you’re not on the pitch.’ My finest hour of the campaign.

  That’s the thing. It’s the reason I was so sure about Remain. I was prime minister – not justice secretary, the ex-mayor of a city, the leader of a fringe party, or an ambitious spad. I could say with more authority than anyone the importance of the role the EU played in helping me, as leader of the country, keep Britain safer and make it more prosperous.

  On the Tuesday I stood at a lectern outside No. 10 and made my last-ditch case. This was the place I’d gone to tell the British people the biggest, most important things as their PM. Now it was where I was imploring them to listen to me on Europe. To believe me when I said that the EU didn’t diminish Britain’s influence, it amplified it. That there would be no deal on the outside better than the special status we had on the inside. That this was a decision not for now, but for the future – and it was final.

  We began Wednesday, the final day of the campaign, on the road together with Harriet Harman. The battle bus became more of a Noah’s Ark as passengers joined us at each visit. We went to a farm, and picked up two farmers. After a garden centre visit with Paddy Ashdown we gained two veterans. We picked up a handbag designer who had just started exporting to the EU, someone from Jaguar Land Rover, and the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas. A trip to a school with TV historian Dan Snow left us with a schoolboy, a father, a grandparent and a head teacher on board, followed by a midwife and nurses after we briefly called in to Solihull hospital. The day ended with all these people, and many more, at a rally in Birmingham, where we met Gordon Brown. He delivered a powerful speech, an ideal eve-of-poll message.

  After the non-stop speeches, visits, interviews, handshakes and conversations, the day ended, as was so often the case, with just me and Liz. As we sped down the motorway, sipping the beer she had pilfered from Birmingham University, I felt that sense of calm that comes from being able to do no more.

  We got back to Downing Street at 8.30 p.m., and I had some dinner with Sam. It was one of those long, light June evenings, and we sat out in the garden, talking about our hopes and fears.

  On Thursday, polling day, the two of us went to vote at Methodist Central Hall. All eyes were on how many voters would be doing so too, because the result, we calculated, depended on turnout. We reckoned that if it was moderately high – over 55 per cent – Remain would edge it, since our supporters were more numerous and more likely to vote. No one even mentioned how that logic might change if turnout was unusually high. It just wasn’t considered.

  Meanwhile, there were independent surveys coming out from the City – hedge funds that had done big ring-rounds – broadly calling it for Remain. Lynton told me it was going to be OK. Jim Messina told me it was going to be OK. Andrew Cooper reported a ten-point lead for Remain. Craig was charging around in a Stronger In T-shirt saying we’d won.

  My draft victory speech was an ‘open, comprehensive and generous offer’ to the nation for a way forward: a route map for healing our divided country after a brutal campaign, and an assurance that we would heed the message from millions of Leave voters that, while we were staying in the EU, the status quo was no longer acceptable: ‘As far as Britain is concerned, the political project for further integration is over.’ I was looking forward to saying that.

  After spending time working up a defeat speech, I let my mind drift to what was more likely to happen next. A reshuffle was shaping up in my head. George to the Foreign Office, and Jeremy Hunt or David Gauke to the Treasury. Boris to defence, or possibly a mega-housing and planning ministry. A few Leavers to replace Remainers. Gove to stay put.

  Then there was me. I thought how dramatically my political life-expectancy had been reduced by the brutal campaign. I had already confessed to my core team that I’d probably have to go within a couple of years, even if we won. Maybe I could last until the Commonwealth conference in April 2018, or possibly the party conference that year, doing another two years rather than the full Parliament.

  That afternoon Sam and I wandered around the home-cum-workplace we’d come to love. The first-floor and second-floor meeting rooms had been turned into men’s and women’s dormitories lined with camp beds.

  By the evening the state rooms were buzzing with people who had worked on the campaign and a few of Sam’s friends. As they helped themselves to the buffet of moussaka, there were some very nervous faces. I found myself going around reassuring people, telling fraught-looking spads, ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  In the Pillared Room, a widescreen TV had been wheeled in front of rows of chairs. I sat in front of it, George by my side, others buzzing around. Ten p.m. came, and though there are no exit polls in referendums, there was a YouGov poll predicting a 52–48 victory for Remain. ComRes had it as 53–47 to Remain. Gibraltar’s early result of 96 per cent Remain was inevitable, but nonetheless cheering. By 11 p.m. Nigel Farage had conceded.

  We decamped to the Thatcher Room, and sat around the table I’d had made for the G8 leaders three years earlier. Nancy was sitting next to me in her pyjamas. I had one eye on the TV and another on a rather clunky old laptop. On it was a spreadsheet from Jim Messina that set out how many votes were needed from each polling district in order to get a 50–50 result or better. If the real results matched up to or exceeded those figures, we’d be on track.

  The first results I saw came through from Tash, my agent in Witney, and seemed to be all right. They needed to be 60–40 in Eynsham ward, and they were 60–40. I thought, ‘This is going OK.’

  But at midnight Newcastle declared for Remain by just 1,900 votes. It was a worrying deviation from the model – but perhaps it was an aberration.

  Then, twenty minutes later, Sunderland declared for Leave by a huge margin. I noticed too that West Oxfordshire’s other wards were just a little bit worse than they should be. Before I knew it, Leave was in the lead.

  At 2 a.m., results poured in from a cross-section of the country – Brentwood, Flintshire, Middlesbrough, Weymouth and Portland, Merthyr Tydfil, Stockton-on-Tees. They all declared for Leave. Scotland and London’s vast and inevitable Remain votes weren’t enough to offset t
hem, and we were level-pegging. ‘Dad,’ Nancy said, ‘we’re losing.’

  With the declaration of South Buckinghamshire, which voted Leave by 51–49, I knew it was over. From quiet confidence to quiet acceptance of defeat – all within the space of a few hours.

  After a 2.30 a.m. ‘council of war’ in my office with Ed, Kate, George and Andrew Feldman, I asked them to leave. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I lay on the sofa, knowing I wouldn’t sleep, but just needing quiet and calm. The TV was on low, and I tuned back in when the electoral sage John Curtice spoke. Leave were now the favourites. Soon enough, David Dimbleby called it. Britain had reversed its 1975 decision to enter the Common Market, and voted to leave the EU.

  What had I shared with my closest advisers and friends? I had told them I was certain about what I needed to do next if we were to lose. It was as clear to me as it had been in 2010 when I formed the coalition, and in 2013 when I pledged the EU referendum. I would have to resign. I had thought about this from the moment I called the referendum. I knew it would be the end of my political career. Perhaps in months, rather than days or weeks, but the end nevertheless. But it wasn’t until the Friday before polling day, when George came to stay with me at Dean, that the hypothetical suddenly became the potential.

  We had talked through the possible outcomes. First, we knew that a Remain victory, irrespective of how large it was, would still bring big political difficulties, and must be followed by magnanimity. We needed to accept – as I did – the strength of the case about an over-mighty Brussels that our opponents had made.

  Then we looked at the losing options. George made the argument that there is always a case for staying on. Who knows where the negotiations would go, what new opportunities there might be. I could only steer towards them if I was in the seat of power. My view was different: if we lost I would have no credibility. I would have to leave. Staying on would simply be delaying the acceptance of a political death that had already taken place.

  We wondered whether a very narrow loss would be different to a clear loss. Would there be room for a return to Brussels to ask for more elements to our special deal? Maybe. Perhaps there was a ‘triple lock’ we could put in place – a vote of the parliamentary party and a vote of the House of Commons that I should continue in office, followed by a new public vote on a new deal, if one was possible. This fictional future survived in my mind for little more than twenty-four hours.

  Why? Because all the losing scenarios collapsed into the same outcome: I had lost, and I would have to go.

  There was no realistic scenario in which the EU would offer more if I went back to it in the event of a narrow result.

  There was no scenario in which the British public – and the Conservative Party – would accept anything other than a prime minister committed to carrying out the verdict of the referendum result.

  The principal task of the next PM would be to go back to Brussels and secure a deal for the UK’s departure. Personal diplomacy and credibility would be essential. For that, a fresh face would probably be better. As Lord Carrington put it in his memoir, about resigning in 1982, ‘the government was in for a hard time and my presence would make it not easier but harder’.

  Because I was the person who had led the campaign to stay, and had argued passionately for one side of the argument, I would have no credibility in delivering Leave. It wouldn’t just have been hard for me to deliver a policy I didn’t believe in – I wouldn’t have been able to do so. It wasn’t in the national interest for me to stay.

  I believed at the time that that judgement was right, and I haven’t changed my mind since. Indeed, I would argue that events have borne my decision out. Even with all her protestations that ‘Brexit means Brexit and we will make a success of it’ – words that I would have found all but impossible to say – my successor found the task of maintaining credibility while trying to deliver Brexit very hard. For me it would have been impossible.

  I hated walking away from my job having just won an election. I hated the fact that many members of my team of ministers and advisers, who had worked so hard, would lose their jobs too. I hated abandoning our policies and plans. We had a great manifesto we needed to implement. Losing the ‘what might have been’ was more painful for me than anything.

  So why had I promised that I would stay on if we lost? Initially I hadn’t believed that losing would mean an immediate announcement of my departure. But more importantly, I knew that I must do all I could to keep my future separate from the issue of the EU in the public debate. If I had admitted that there was any chance of my stepping down if Remain lost, I would have jeopardised the referendum entirely. (This is what would happen to Matteo Renzi in Italy just six months later, when a referendum about reform became a referendum on his future because he said very publicly that he would quit if he lost.)

  But I accept that resigning meant going back on my word. Just two days earlier I had stood on the steps of Downing Street and announced, ‘Brits don’t quit,’ and now I was doing just that. I knew that some people would be both angry that I left and angry that I had said I wouldn’t – Liz was particularly concerned about the reaction. But I was in absolutely no doubt. Whichever way I looked at it, I couldn’t make it work for me or for my country. I was 100 per cent convinced that Britain needed a new prime minister.

  That is what Craig, Kate and Ed were urging too. It’s what Samantha believed. For them, the main point was that the Tory Party, having largely voted for Brexit and now secured it, would not tolerate me remaining as leader. In that respect the only choice was between leaving at the time of my own choosing, and trying to stay on and being hounded out.

  I went upstairs and lay down on the bed for a bit, had a shower, and came back downstairs just before 6 a.m. Everything had been planned very calmly. Samantha and I would go out into Downing Street together. She said, ‘I just don’t think I can go out there – I feel terrible,’ and had a stiff gin at ten past eight, just before we walked hand-in-hand out into the daylight and a wall of cameras.

  I praised the Remain campaign, and congratulated the winning side. I said the result must be respected, but, seeking to reassure the markets, which had plummeted by 8 per cent, that nothing would change immediately. But ultimately Britain would need to negotiate a new relationship with the EU, from the outside. I turned to my own part in that. In an analogy I’d thought up the weekend before, I said, ‘I will do everything I can as prime minister to steady the ship over the coming weeks and months, but I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination.’ I finished: ‘I love this country’ – I nearly lost it on that word – ‘and I feel honoured to have served it, and I will do everything I can in future to help this great country succeed.’

  Having just held it together, I came back inside No. 10 and gave Sam a kiss. The staff clapped me in, just like a year earlier. And, just like a year earlier, I went upstairs and made us breakfast.

  This time the children had already gone off to school, and I hoped they were all right. Nancy and Elwen had been so engaged in the campaign, and so sweet and supportive to me. I knew they knew I was stressed, because they’d been hugging me more than usual. Nancy had been taking my ‘Conservative In’ campaign badges and giving them to her friends. There had been a contretemps between her and a bigger girl at the school fair, who had asked if she was for ‘out’ or for ‘in’, as in Remain. Nancy replied she was for in. The girl said, ‘Well, fuck you.’ Nancy replied, ‘Well, fuck you too.’ Sam and I had never heard her say the ‘f’ word before she recounted this story. We thought it was a bit shocking, but rather extraordinary.

  Totally by chance, later on in the morning I gave my speech outside No. 10, Elwen was due to take part in a school project where they would act out the United Nations having a debate on human rights. They’d been rehearsing, with a German girl in his class playing Angela Merkel, an Americ
an boy playing Barack Obama, and Elwen playing me. The teachers asked him that morning if he wanted to go ahead, or if it would be too upsetting given what had just happened. ‘I want to do it for my dad,’ he replied. His performance apparently had the watching parents in tears.

  The whole time, I tried to be the one reassuring people. As members of staff cried, I tried to make jokes. As Samantha wept, I poured her another gin. I got stuck into what was ahead as if it were any other day, and I shed no tears. But when I came to watch a recording of Elwen at the pretend United Nations, defiantly declaring that he was Prime Minister Cameron, it all started to sink in. The significance of what had happened. The shock and the sadness. The fact that I had failed: failed to win the referendum, failed in my vital task of trying to keep Britain in the EU on a better footing. It had been right to give the people a choice. I was sure about that – and I still am today. I couldn’t have given the campaign any more. But my regrets about what had happened went deep. I knew then that they would never leave me. And they never have.

  47

  The End

  I had hoped that on Friday, 24 June I would be making a speech confirming Britain’s new settlement within the European Union, and looking ahead to several more years in office. Instead, Britain was leaving the EU and I was leaving the job I loved.

  I gave little thought to my own emotions. Nor did I dwell too much on the reasons behind the result. These things would come later. I knew that the enormity of what had happened, and the consequences for our country, would stay with me for the rest of my life, that I would turn them over in my head again and again.

  But that day my focus was simple. I had to carry on being prime minister, and attend to the responsibilities that accompanied that. I was single-minded in my focus on the task ahead: to muster what dignity I could as I set a sensible course for handing over to a successor.