by Owen Bennet
Based in Bristol, Banks exploded on to the political scene in October 2014 when he announced he was donating £1 million to UKIP to help fund the party’s general election campaign.
The insurance tycoon, who also owned shares in a South African diamond mine, was originally going to hand over £100,000, but after Tory grandee William Hague said he had ‘never heard of him’, he upped the donation to a cool million.
Speaking in front of journalists and TV cameras who had been invited to his country estate just outside Bristol, Banks said he hoped Hague would ‘now know who I am’, thanks to the sizeable donation.
He seemed to like the attention he received that day, and the businessman quickly became a fixture on the UKIP campaign circuit.
On the night of the general election, Banks was sat in the lounge area of the Walpole Bay Hotel in Margate with a horde of journalists, watching the results come in. Farage, who was staying in the same hotel, was upstairs with his wife, Kirsten, getting some sleep ahead of a declaration which ultimately wouldn’t take place until gone 9.30 the next morning.
Farage’s failure to win the seat of South Thanet was a huge disappointment to Banks. He was a fan of the UKIP leader – perhaps more so personally than politically – and identified with his ‘anti-establishment’ rhetoric.
He was supremely disappointed with Farage’s decision to quit as party leader the following day, and felt UKIP needed a fundamental shake-up if it was to have any success in the future. In an email sent to then party treasurer Andrew Reid at 11.17 p.m. on Sunday 10 May, Banks offered his services as chief executive and spelt out exactly how he would reform the party.
‘I agreed to help you with the organisation in the run-up to the election but the current structure is appalling and we did well in the election despite it. There was no point because it’s chaos,’ he wrote, before adding: ‘We all got carried away and Nigel in fairness rode it until it bucked him! He’s a genius.’
Banks went on to explain how he would split the party up into different administrative and campaigning branches, and offered himself as chief executive.
‘I’m happy to spend time in London and get stuck into this – I’m currently paid a million pounds a year from my insurance businesses. So you get a million-a-year CEO for free – the aim is to have it running so smoothly I just oversee it.’
It is clear from the email that he expected Farage to return as UKIP leader, saying that the defeated candidate ‘needs a smooth machine behind him’.
UKIP did not take up Banks’s offer, but Farage was not going to turn him away. Well aware that Hannan and Carswell would be working on establishing their own Out organisation for the referendum campaign, the UKIP leader knew Banks’s money and enthusiasm could help create a powerful rival group which would put him front and centre.
‘We contacted Banks and we said to him not to put the money in UKIP, but set up something else – Banks, I think, had wanted to do this anyway – to give Nigel the voice which we knew he wouldn’t get,’ said Bruni-Lowe.
Banks needed no second invitation, and immediately set to work on his own Out campaign – one that would frustrate, bamboozle, annoy and baffle the ‘posh boys’ right up until referendum day.
CHAPTER 2
Matthew Elliott had a lot on his plate – and not just the one in front of him as he ate his lunch. That morning, the Conservatives had won the 2015 general election, and a promise he had made to his friend Daniel Hannan three years earlier was about to become reality.
But first, there was the small matter of his honeymoon to New Zealand. The political lobbyist had actually got married in August 2014, but the celebratory holiday had been delayed until after the May vote. The trip would only be short, but before he could start packing he knew he needed to set the wheels in motion on the Out campaign for the EU referendum.
Elliott was dining with Tory MEP David Campbell Bannerman and two media relations workers – Nick Wood and Matthew Walsh – to discuss the plan of action. There was much they didn’t know. David Cameron had promised to hold the referendum before the end of 2017, so it was feasible there could be a long, drawn-out campaign. Alternatively, Cameron might want to capitalise on his own political honeymoon and go to the country sooner rather than later. But there was of course the renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with the EU to consider. The Conservative Party’s general election manifesto had set out some vague commitments to reducing bureaucracy and red tape, but nothing concrete enough to suggest the Prime Minister would seek fundamental reform of the EU’s key treaties.
Either way, an Out campaign would need to be formed – and quickly.
The Leeds-born Elliott had already been identified three years earlier as the man to run the campaign, by Daniel Hannan. The pair had known each other for more than fifteen years, with Elliott working in the European Parliament at the same time Hannan was first elected as an MEP in 1999.
Elliott had studied government at the London School of Economics in the late 1990s and after graduating he worked for Tory MEP Timothy Kirkhope. When he was in his mid-twenties, he formed the TaxPayers’ Alliance pressure group and quickly garnered a reputation as one of Westminster’s most effective lobbyists. After starting another pressure group – Big Brother Watch – in 2009, Elliott was chosen to run the No to AV campaign in the 2011 referendum on the UK’s voting system.
It was his success in this role – No secured 68 per cent of the vote – which made Hannan sure Elliott should be the man to run the Out campaign if the UK ever had a referendum on the EU.
Hannan said:
In summer 2012 I approached Matthew Elliott and said: ‘Would you be ready to run the campaign when it comes?’ He had distinguished himself in the AV referendum, and the way he had distinguished himself was [in] his ability to withstand friendly fire. In politics, you can sustain an almost unlimited amount of ordnance from the other side: it bounces off, you barely notice. But there was a time in that AV referendum where it looked as though it was going badly. All of the anti-AV papers were blaming him and that’s very, very hard to withstand, but he stuck to his numbers, he stuckto what his focus groups were telling him and stuck to what he knew was going to be a winning strategy.
The No to AV campaign’s main tactic was to focus on the cost of a change to the electoral system. Billboard posters showing a battle-ready soldier with the words ‘He needs bulletproof vests NOT an alternative voting system’ were plastered in key areas.
Elliott’s tactics were constantly called into question by those in Westminster, and privately even Hannan thought his strategy was ‘crazy … I thought his arguments were stupid.’
Yet, despite all the criticism, Elliott delivered the victory.
‘Every MP, every right-wing journalist thought he had the way of winning if only Matt would do what he said. Matt politely and patiently did his own thing and was completely vindicated. It was an amazing achievement,’ said Hannan.
The MEP approached Elliott in the garden of Eurosceptic campaigner Lord Leach’s holiday home in Norfolk in 2012 and asked him to run the Out campaign, should the situation arise.
Six months later, and the notion of an in/out referendum on the UK’s EU membership stopped being a discussion point for just Eurosceptics on the fringe of political influence and went mainstream. In January 2013, David Cameron stood up at Bloomberg’s London headquarters 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 in the next parliament. It will be a relationship with the Single Market at its heart 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. It will be an in/out referendum.
The referendum was now on the table, and even though there was no guarantee Cameron would win the 2015 election, Hannan and others could not run the risk of being
unprepared for the battle.
Looking at the 1975 referendum, in which a business-led Yes campaign helped convince 67 per cent of voters to back the UK staying in the European Community, Hannan and Elliott realised they needed to get as many business voices as possible to back, at the very least, reforming the EU if they were to have a chance of winning.
In April 2013, Business for Britain (BfB) was launched, with Elliott as its chief executive, and the organisation signed up more than 500 businesspeople to support fundamental reform of the EU – or Britain’s exit from it.
BfB quickly became the pre-eminent Eurosceptic pressure group, and much of its infrastructure and staff would go on to be part of Elliott’s Out campaign.
But the battle could not be won just by business groups alone, and, over lunch on the day after the Conservatives’ surprise election victory, Elliott and Campbell Bannerman discussed how to create an outlet for all those Members of Parliament – Tory or otherwise – who would back leaving the EU.
Campbell Bannerman had already produced a strategy document in February 2015, which had been circulated to Elliott, explaining how he felt any Out campaign could reach out to target voters. At the lunch, the idea of a Conservatives for Britain (Cf B) group, which had already been mooted before the election, was given the green light by Elliott. The group would bring together Tory MPs and MEPs under a banner of supporting Cameron’s renegotiation, but be prepared to call for an Out vote if the PM failed to reform the EU. Like Business for Britain, its line was ‘Change or Go’.
Despite the agreement, there was a problem: as effective as Campbell Bannerman could be with strategy documents and the like, he was an MEP not an MP, and so didn’t have the reach, influence or access to bring together Tories in Westminster.
The pair knew they needed someone on the inside to act as a point man for Tory MPs – but who? There was no shortage of candidates. Longstanding Eurosceptics such as John Redwood, Sir Bill Cash and Bernard Jenkin could all do the job, but it was felt that a fresher face was needed. That person was the little-known Wycombe MP Steve Baker.
Baker had barely registered on the radar of all but the most plugged-in of political journalists since his election as a Conservative MP in 2010. The former RAF Flight Lieutenant had seemed to be just another Eurosceptic Tory backbencher – a true believer in the anti-EU cause but not in the same league as stalwarts such as Jenkin, Cash and Redwood. After leaving the RAF in 1999, Baker retrained as a software engineer and ended up working for Lehman Brothers in 2008 – just as the global economic crash kicked in. But it was not what he saw while working for Lehmans that made him want to get into Parliament and change the country, but what he heard from David Cameron in 2007. In a speech in Prague that year, the then Leader of the Opposition spoke these words on the European Union: ‘It is the last gasp of an outdated ideology, a philosophy that has no place in our new world of freedom, a world which demands that we fight this bureaucratic over-reach and lead Europe into the hope and potential of a new, post-bureaucratic age.’
Baker later claimed that it was this that inspired him to enter politics, and in Westminster in 2015 said: ‘I agreed with David Cameron so strongly that at that time, when I was very upset about the handling of the Lisbon Treaty, I joined the Conservative Party and sought election. So here I am.’ After successfully defending his seat in 2015 – increasing his majority by 5,000 on the way – he returned to the Commons determined to put pressure on Cameron ahead of the renegotiation.
Matthew Elliott was a fan of Baker. His speeches on radical financial reform, such as denationalising money, were attractive to Elliott, a self-described classical liberal. ‘Baker’s very much on the anarcho-capitalist scale. So there’s a natural overlap with our philosophies,’ he said. The Wycombe MP had made all the right moves in Parliament since 2010, including being one of the eighty-one Tory MPs to rebel against the government and back a motion calling for an EU referendum in 2011. Elliott was confident Baker would be an acceptable leader to the established Eurosceptics, as he ‘had been working very closely with them for a number of years and meeting with them, he was well trusted by them so he had their confidence’. It was agreed that Baker and Campbell Bannerman would co-chair Conservatives for Britain. But there was one more person Elliott wanted as part of his team: Dominic Cummings.
Cummings was widely regarded as fiercely intelligent and full of self-belief, but somewhat lacking in people skills. Douglas Carswell considered him ‘an absolute genius’ and ‘one of the most astute, intelligent and perceptive people, who has a great appreciation of intellectual rigour’.
‘If people can’t get on with him, sometimes that says more about them,’ he added.
To Nigel Farage, Cummings was an ‘interesting bloke but clearly a bit domineering – or attempts to be domineering – of every situation that he’s in’.
‘You can be too clever and at the same time be extremely stupid. Dominic Cummings very certainly came into that category,’ said Arron Banks, while David Campbell Bannerman felt he ‘didn’t really take people with him. It was a sort of contempt.’
One lobby journalist who had dealings with Cummings likened him to The Joker in The Dark Knight: ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn, and he is one of those men.’
Cummings had been around the political scene for more than fifteen years, and was best-known for serving as a special advisor to Michael Gove in the Department for Education. The Durham-born, boarding school-educated Cummings graduated from Oxford University in 1994 with a First in ancient and modern history. He then moved to Russia for three years, becoming fluent in the native tongue. After returning to England, he became involved with the anti-euro group Business for Sterling in 1999, first as director of research and then as campaign director. It was while working for Business for Sterling that he became friends with Michael Gove, who at the time was working as the leader writer for The Times. The pair recognised in each other a love of historical analogies, a sizeable intellect and a zeal for change.
Cummings first became officially involved in the Conservative Party in 2002, when the then leader Iain Duncan Smith appointed him as director of strategy in a bid to modernise the Tories. While Cummings was ready for the Conservatives, the Conservatives were not ready for him, and in his mere eight months in post, he riled up many of the old guard.
One notable clash came after Cummings claimed the Tories were so unpopular that the party should not take a leading role in the battle to save the pound. His comments infuriated then Conservative chairman David Davis, who was subsequently demoted by IDS as he sought to stamp his authority on the party. Lord Tebbit called for Cummings to be sacked just a month before he eventually resigned, saying the party needed to get rid of the ‘squabbling children’ and ‘spotty youths’ in Tory HQ.
A year later, Cummings penned an article for the Telegraph in which he said IDS was ‘incompetent, would be a worse Prime Minister than Tony Blair, and must be replaced’, adding: ‘The party is a joke – around the country, people increasingly laugh at “the Conservative Party”.’
In 2004, Cummings signed up for another campaign – this time on whether the north-east – his home part of the country – should have a regional assembly. He campaigned against the move and helped deliver a decisive victory in the referendum: 78 per cent against, just 22 per cent in favour. It was here that he first got to know Bernard Jenkin, who was then the Tories’ shadow Minister for the Regions.
It was also in 2004 that he first met Matthew Elliott. The TaxPayers’ Alliance headquarters were located in the same office block as the New Frontiers Foundation – the think tank that emerged from Business for Sterling once it became obvious the UK was not going to join the euro.
In 2005, Cummings’s good friend Michael Gove was elected to Parliament as MP for Surrey Heath. After serving as shadow Housing spokesman, Gove was promoted to shadow Secretary of State for Education, and allowed a special advisor. The call went in to Cummings – the man who just four
years earlier had publicly called the Tories ‘a joke’.
When the Conservatives entered government in May 2010, Gove tried to bring Cummings with him as his official special advisor. Yet, so worried were the Prime Minister’s team that Cummings would be more of a liability than an asset, Downing Street’s director of communications Andy Coulson blocked the move. After Coulson resigned to face phone-hacking charges relating to his time as editor of News of the World, Gove was able to manoeuvre Cummings into the Department for Education.
Cummings left the position in January 2014 and launched a full-nuclear attack on the government and Whitehall shortly after departing. He described David Cameron as a ‘sphinx without a riddle’, the PM’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn as ‘a classic third-rate suck-up-kick-down sycophant presiding over a shambolic court’ and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg as ‘self-obsessed, sanctimonious and so dishonest he finds the words truth and lies have ceased to have any objective meaning’. (For his part, Clegg responded by calling him ‘some loopy individual who used to be a backroom advisor’.)
Cummings then set up his own company, North Wood (it ‘tries to solve problems – management, political, communication’, according to Cummings’s blog), and one of its first pieces of work was for Business for Britain in June 2014, on what swing voters think about arguments over the EU.
‘The official OUT campaign does not need to focus on immigration. The main thing it needs to say on immigration is “if you are happy with the status quo on immigration, then vote to stay IN”,’ was one of Cummings’s conclusions.
When Elliott had originally suggested Cummings as Out campaign leader to Daniel Hannan, the MEP replied: ‘Matt, you’re in charge. You know what you’re doing, you’ve already shown you know what you’re doing. If you think he is the best guy to deliver – maybe not to deliver elegantly but to deliver a victory – do it.’