by Owen Bennet
Three days after revealing his campaign to the public via the Telegraph interview, Banks and Tice invited their Tory and BfB opponents to a special presentation. A boardroom was booked at the Corinthia Hotel on the Embankment, and Tice and Banks brought along the ad agency they had hired to set out their project in glorious technicolour. Owen Paterson and Bernard Jenkin were in attendance, as were Elliott and Cummings, to see how the businessmen envisaged running an Out campaign. Both Tice and Banks were confident the watching MPs and lobbyists would be impressed.
‘We had stuff on the side of buses, beer mats, all this stuff. We made this presentation, of course then it was still “In the Know”, but it was great – great slogan, with a globe, it was very global, very constructive, forward-looking,’ said Tice.
Banks felt his group had stolen a march on Elliott and Cummings – who seemed to him to be doing not much more than giving the Prime Minister a free pass to frame the referendum debate in his own terms. ‘We hired an ad agency and we were looking at it from a business point of view. It was clear they hadn’t even started,’ he said.
While Banks and Tice felt they had presented a winning strategy, those watching were not as enthusiastic. Elliott described the presentation as ‘slightly sort of amateur hour’, and said:
I remember the ad agency outlining how they would be doing their campaign, they were saying: ‘All these TV ads, they will look great.’ I said: ‘You do realise you can’t do TV ads in the UK?’ Similarly they said: ‘These are our ideas for ads, they are going to work really well.’ Well, what market research has gone into this? What voters is this going to attract?
To Bernard Jenkin, it was ‘quite clear they were on a completely different page to us’, mainly because they ‘didn’t understand how toxic to 70 per cent of voters the Farage tone and UKIP tone was’.
Tice was left bemused by the response from Elliott’s group: ‘We made that presentation and all they were interested in talking about was “Are you going to run for designation?” That’s all they wanted to know. Frankly, at that time, we didn’t really know much about designation.’
Tice may not have been thinking about designation, but all the other key players involved in setting up an Out campaign certainly were.
In the run-up to the referendum, the Electoral Commission would designate one organisation as the lead campaign group for each side of the argument. As well as the prestige of being the ‘official’ campaign group, the designated organisation would be entitled to a range of other benefits: a spending limit of £7 million (compared to just £700,000 for any non-lead campaigns); one free distribution of information to voters; referendum campaign broadcasts; and a grant of up to £600,000. It was a sizeable prize, and one which the many Out groups would spend as much time and energy on winning as they did on fighting the referendum itself.
It was at the mention of the word ‘designation’ that the penny started to drop for Tice about what was really going on – Elliott had no intention of merging his group with The Know. As a businessman used to pooling resources and assets, Tice was shocked. ‘It never occurred to us it would be anything else [than a merger]. We’re kicking on, they were scrabbling around looking for sixty grand, we had plenty of pledges, we knew we had a quarter of a million.’
Tice added: ‘The inference from the politicians who left that room was: “There, there, dear boy, leave it to us. You really don’t understand.” The patronising exit of the politicians from that meeting was quite a shock.’
Banks felt the response was ‘very much “leave the politics to us grown-ups, you don’t know what you’re doing – you’re a businessman’”.
The next day, David Cameron was giving his own presentation in Brussels, which was followed by the leak of the diplomatic note to The Guardian outlining his renegotiation plans. With Cameron’s seemingly paltry demands now out in the public domain, Farage fully expected Elliott to switch BfB from ‘Change or Go’ to just ‘Go’.
On Monday 13 July, less than three weeks after the Corinthia presentation, Bruni-Lowe and Farage found themselves once again sitting in 55 Tufton Street opposite Elliott and Cummings. Ahead of the meeting, the UKIP duo were feeling confident that BfB was now ready to join the Brexit battle. Once again, they were disappointed.
‘Elliott text and said, “We need to meet you urgently,”’ remembers Bruni-Lowe. ‘Nigel said, “Alright, something’s going down.” We got there and Elliott said nothing. He just sat there staring at us and saying absolutely nothing. Nigel and I were like, “This guy’s fucking weird.”’
Farage tried to convince the duo to work with Banks – ‘He will make your life a nightmare if you don’t,’ warned Bruni-Lowe – but Elliott and Cummings would not be bounced, on any issue. They would wait for the renegotiation, they would not make immigration the sole focus of the campaign and Farage would not be a spokesman. Not even the results of the 10,000-strong poll would change their minds; Elliott described the polling as ‘bullshit’.
‘We came away thinking, what the fuck was that meeting? It was a two-hour meeting about nothing. And that’s when Nigel thought, “He’s a prick, don’t bother, he’s a waste of time.” We then rang Banks and said, “You’ve got to go for it, they’re doing nothing,”’ said Bruni-Lowe.
By the end of July, Farage had had enough. It had been more than a month since Cameron’s summit in Brussels, and as far as he could see there was simply no movement from the Tory Eurosceptics. He started to seriously wonder whether they even wanted to win the referendum. During a holiday in Belize with Banks after the 13 July meeting in Tufton Street, Farage spelt out exactly how much money, time and effort would be needed if the campaign was going to be successful. This was effectively Banks’s last chance to back out. ‘He said, “In for a penny in for a pound, we’ve got this referendum, I want to have a real go,”’ recalled Farage. The pair looked over some of the ‘In the Know’ advertising that had already been produced, but Farage felt it was nowhere near up to the standard required. ‘I’m sure the marketing teams did well out of it, but it didn’t quite tick the box,’ said the UKIP leader later.
While the pair were in Central America, Bruni-Lowe decided they needed to ‘steal the clothes from Elliott’ and launch an Out campaign as soon as possible, focused on immigration. He arranged a press conference in the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster for 30 July.
Banks met with Elliott once more ahead of Farage’s big launch – a lunch at the private member’s club 5 Hertford Street on Wednesday 22 July – where once again the pair failed to see eye to eye. Tice remembers Banks being a bit upset after the meeting: ‘Matthew said to Arron, “I’ll take your money but I have total control.”’
Elliott claims Banks has ‘a different interpretation of the meeting than I do’, and all he was actually doing was setting out how the organisation would be run.
I saw various emails afterwards where it was ‘the arrogant Elliott came along and blah blah and demanded he and Dom have sole right to rule the roost over the campaign blah blah with no accountability’, whereas in fact what I felt I was saying to him was that basically in any campaign you’ve got to have a situation where the people running the campaign – the chief exec, campaign director – have control over the day-to-day decision-making. Yes, they can be accountable to a board but basically it shouldn’t be the case where somehow the chairman of the board is involved in the day-to-day decision-making.
In any case, Elliott was just going through the motions by attending the meeting: ‘That lunch was actually more so I could say to other people that I’ve been to see him,’ he said.
Eight days later, Farage formally announced his intention to tour the country promoting Brexit. Standing in front of a projected image with the slogan ‘Say No – Believe in Britain’ at a press conference in the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, he let rip at the inertia of the No to the EU campaign.
After saying there was ‘no doubt at all the Yes side are in the lead’ – and name-checking the pro
-EU boo boys of Richard Branson, Ken Clarke, Tony Blair and even Barack Obama – Farage said:
Given all of this, what of the No side? Well, they’ve gone to ground. Those who in some cases have been calling for twenty years for a fundamental change in Britain’s relationship with the European Union have decided to stand aside, to wait and see, not to snipe at the Prime Minister and to wish him well with his renegotiations.
He added: ‘Quite why these Eurosceptics in the Tory Party have decided to say and do nothing, I don’t know.’
Reflecting the result of his mass polling, Farage claimed that ‘the overwhelming, major point that the British public want to see renegotiated is of course the question of open borders’.
And then came the kicker – the announcement Elliott, Cummings, Hannan and Carswell were dreading:
In the absence of anybody else, UKIP is going to take the lead in this country and we are going to launch in September a major ground campaign. We are going to launch in the first week of September the biggest public outreach programme this party has ever attempted.
I want to make this clear: I will, and we will, share platforms, work and campaign with anybody out there in the Eurosceptic movement. You’ll hear no negativity from us once they’ve got off their backsides and decided to join this fight.
Farage followed it up by stating that the ground campaign was not ‘some dramatic bid by me or others in this room to think that UKIP will get the official designation for the No campaign … We won’t, and we won’t be applying. What we will do is play our part in this campaign.’
It didn’t matter whether UKIP would applying as an independent entity to get the designation – it would be almost impossible for a political party on its own to meet the Electoral Commission criteria – but what was more concerning to those in Tufton Street was whether Farage and UKIP would formally throw their lot in with Banks’s The Know campaign – and who else they would be able to persuade to join them.
CHAPTER 11
Harriet Harman was bruised. All summer, her decision to order Labour MPs to abstain on the Second Reading of government’s Welfare Bill had been used as a stick to beat her with. It even hung over the Labour leadership contest, with party members using hustings to demand to know why three of the four candidates – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall – had not voted against a Bill which would cut tax credits and reduce the welfare cap. For Harman, one of the lessons from Labour’s general election defeat was that the public wanted to see a much tighter control on welfare payments. Refusing to vote against the proposals would, Harman felt, show the electorate the party was listening. The decision provoked uproar on Labour benches, and forty-eight Labour MPs, including the fourth leadership candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, defied the whip and voted against the government on 20 July 2015.
Within a month, Harman had told The Guardian she ‘probably would’ oppose it if she had the chance again, but the damage was done. Burnham, who started out as the favourite to win that summer’s Labour leadership contest, went on to claim that his decision to stick by collective responsibility and abstain was the ‘turning point’ in his campaign.
‘If I had resigned, I might have won the contest there and then,’ he told The Independent on 2 September.
As it was, by the time the Third Reading of the EU Referendum Bill came around on 7 September, Harman was desperate to get a win under her belt – and the purdah row would give it to her.
In the run-up to the vote, David Cameron and his team were in desperate negotiations with the Tory Eurosceptic rebels to try to avoid a defeat. On Wednesday 2 September, Europe Minister David Lidington spent the day negotiating with Tory rebels and Labour over what changes could be made to the Bill. There had already been one retreat, with Cameron agreeing to change the referendum question from ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?’ to the form recommended by the Electoral Commission: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ Polling showed the alteration favoured the Out/Leave side. Another compromise then came when Cameron agreed there would be a period of purdah, albeit a watered-down version. This was a huge change from his position in June. Yet, while this new version of purdah would stop the government using taxpayers’ money to pump out pro-EU propaganda, it wouldn’t completely bar ministers from speaking out in favour of the UK’s membership in certain areas. This was soon dubbed the ‘skimmed’ version of purdah, not the ‘full-fat’ provision normally used before votes.
Despite having had the whole summer to come to an agreement, the government left it to the eleventh hour – only tabling the new amendments to the Bill fifteen minutes before the deadline. Speaking to the Telegraph, Steve Baker said:
The exceptionally late tabling of these amendments has created a wholly unnecessary period of high political drama. We would have liked to see these amendments hours, days, or weeks ago but their tabling at 16.15 – just fifteen minutes before the deadline – left us with little option but to work in the dark.
On Monday 7 September, having had the weekend to go through the amendments with a fine-tooth comb, the Conservatives for Britain high guard – Baker, Owen Paterson and Bernard Jenkin – gathered in a meeting room on the first floor of Portcullis House. They had already won some concessions, but as far as they were concerned the government was still trying to pull a fast one. ‘I am absolutely clear – we want purdah,’ said Paterson after the meeting. Baker, along with 1922 chairman Graham Brady, went off to meet Lidington to inform him the rebellion was still on.
As the Tory rebels were pressing Lidington to give more ground, the Labour leadership were also working on defeating the government. One of Harman’s closest advisors, Ayesha Hazarika, was determined to see the reputation of her boss restored after the Welfare Bill debacle, and pushed for Labour to team up with the Eurosceptics to defeat the government. But instead of supporting a Tory rebel amendment, Labour would table its own change to the Bill, calling for the reintroduction of full-fat purdah. Labour would beat the government on its own terms.
At just before 6.30 p.m., after holding meetings with the rebels right up to the wire, Lidington took to the Despatch Box in the Commons. He set out the main concession: no pro-Remain government spending in the last twenty-eight days of the campaign. ‘There should be no question of the government undertaking any paid advertising or promotion, such as billboards, door drops, leafleting, or newspaper or digital advertising during that period,’ he said.
Jenkin was on his feet almost immediately. ‘What is the exact meaning of what the Minister is saying?’ he asked, before setting out the full-fat version of purdah. ‘Do the government accept that position?’ Jenkin asked.
Lidington was hardly allowed to give his answer, explaining exactly what definition of purdah the government was looking for, before pro-Brexit Tory backbencher Cheryl Gillan intervened. ‘Why are the government changing the playing field and insisting on modifications to something that has worked well and that they have used in the past?’ she asked.
The interventions kept on coming: Sir Bill Cash, Sir Edward Leigh, Peter Bone, Philip Davies, Steve Baker and others all took to their feet to grill the Minister for Europe – who politely and with great patience took all their interventions.
After nearly forty-five minutes of arguing with his own backbenchers about what the government could and could not do during skimmed purdah, Lidington offered up another compromise. One of the amendments tabled by Jenkin required the government to give four months’ notice before the date of a referendum. This would stop Cameron from being able to call a snap vote amid any honeymoon period after securing a deal with Brussels.
Lidington announced:
Having thought long and hard about the matter and discussed it with colleagues, I have concluded that, largely in the interests of trying to secure as great a consensus as possible, we will accept Amendment (a). As I have said, I think that a firm time limit of that type has drawbacks, bu
t, in the interests of bridge-building – and paying due respect to the recommendation of a cross-party Select Committee – I am prepared to accept the amendment on the government’s behalf.
It was another huge victory for the rebels. The question change, an assurance the government wouldn’t produce pro-EU propaganda twenty-eight days ahead of a vote and a snap election ruled out – all achieved by Conservatives for Britain.
But the MPs wanted more. After thanking Lidington for accepting the four-month rule, Jenkin urged his colleagues to vote down the government’s purdah amendment, and back Labour’s instead. ‘While I think the government have conceded the principle that there should be purdah, they have not accepted the fact of how it will apply,’ he said, after claiming he was ‘very reluctantly’ calling for his own party’s defeat.
At 9.18 p.m. – after almost three hours of debate – the vote was called on the government’s skimmed purdah amendment. Boris Johnson, who had been lurking behind the Speaker’s Chair during the end of the debate, joined a tie-less David Cameron in the Aye lobby, while an equally tie-less Jeremy Corbyn filed into the No lobby with his Labour colleagues.
After the MPs had voted, they took their places on the green leather benches, the smell of beer emanating from some of them who had chosen to socialise in Strangers’ Bar instead of attend the debate. At 9.32 p.m., Speaker John Bercow called the noisy Commons to order, and the four MPs acting as tellers – Labour MPs Tom Blenkinsop and Nic Dakin for the Noes, Tory MPs George Hollingbery and Margot James for Ayes – approached the bench to reveal whether the government had been defeated.
Reading from a piece of paper, Dakin said: ‘The Ayes to the right: 285. The Noes to left: 312.’ Defeat. The rebels had won by twenty-seven votes. A muted cheer went up from the MPs. They had defeated their own Prime Minister, but didn’t want to appear too ungracious in the process. While skimmed purdah was dead, Labour’s full-fat amendment still needed to be voted on. Pat McFadden formally moved the amendment for Labour, but when Bercow asked for objections from the government – someone needed to shout ‘no’ to trigger a proper vote – there was silence. Lidington, seated just along from Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, stayed quiet. There was no point contesting the inevitable – and why allow Labour MPs to have the glory of cheering yet another lost vote by the government? With no challenge, the amendment passed. MPs on Labour’s front bench looked round at each other, not quite believing the government had given in so easily.