by Owen Bennet
The tour moved on to Belfast, and then to Essex, and it was there, in the town of Grays, on 17 September, that Farage learned Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had confirmed his party would be campaigning to remain in the EU regardless of Cameron’s renegotiation.
‘The man of principle appears to have been bullied within a few days of winning the Labour leadership,’ said Farage on the day. He added: ‘It’s an abject surrender. It might do him a lot more harm than he realises.’
With the tour ticking over nicely, the party’s civil war seemingly over and even new offices being lined up in Westminster, thoughts turned to the annual conference scheduled to be held in Doncaster at the end of the month. With the date of the referendum still unknown – and it therefore being entirely possible that it could be called within a year – it was conceivable that this could be the last mass gathering of UKIP foot soldiers ahead of the most important vote in the party’s history. For Farage, there was just one problem – what should his speech focus on? It would of course be about the referendum, and contain morale-boosting sentiments to inspire and motivate the UKIP membership, but that wouldn’t be enough. It needed to have something that would move the campaign on a notch, and further highlight that while Farage was actively campaigning, Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings were dragging their feet.
‘The UKIP conference was coming up and Nigel and I were saying we’ve got literally nothing to say. What’s the story?’ his advisor Chris Bruni-Lowe remembers.
Salvation came in the form of Dominic Cummings. Ever since he had posted a blog on 23 June floating the idea of a second referendum, it had been publicly mulled over by many sitting on the EU fence – including Boris Johnson.
Farage felt the plan was ludicrous. His strategy was to get a high turnout in as many places as possible, and talk of a second referendum could provoke apathy. Farage wanted people to think this would be the only chance they would get to take Britain out of the EU, as that would drive up turnout. Shooting down the two-referendum strategy would be the first focal point of the speech.
The second was for UKIP to finally endorse Banks’s Leave.EU campaign. Not only that, a range of other Eurosceptic outfits, from the Bruges Group to the Democracy Movement, would also break cover and back Leave.EU. The combination of UKIP’s 40,000-strong activist base and the backing of Eurosceptic groups that drew support from across the political spectrum – the Bruges Group was chaired by former Tory MP and Maastricht rebel Barry Legg – would seriously strengthen the chances of Banks’s organisation winning the official designation.
With the decision made, Farage decided to tell hardly anyone of his plans: not even the most trusted of UKIP’s MEPs knew. UKIP may be an unconventional political party in many respects, but when it came to leaking to the media, it was right up there with the Tories and Labour. ‘I’ve learnt. I can keep my own secrets,’ said Farage.
The conference was booked in for 25–26 September at the Doncaster Racecourse, the same venue where, a year earlier, Farage had unveiled Tory defector Mark Reckless. Douglas Carswell was due to speak on the second day of the conference, but arrived in the South Yorkshire town to hear his leader’s speech at noon on the opening day.
Also in attendance was Robert Oxley, a former TaxPayers’ Alliance spokesman who had followed Elliott across to Business for Britain. He had been invited to the conference by UKIP, as had Elliott, who – despite being invited to address delegates from the stage – declined to make an appearance.
Farage says now: ‘God, what a torturous process that was, toing and froing for a fortnight with Elliott and with Business for Britain. They refused. Why? Because they weren’t even committed to leaving the European Union and they weren’t challenging Dave on the renegotiation, so I thought “Let’s move this along.”’
Gawain Towler, UKIP’s head of press, remembered being put under pressure from Elliott and Hannan – two people he had known since the late ’90s through working in the European Parliament – to persuade Farage not to set the Leave campaign going at the conference:
At that point I was having Hannan, I was having Matt, I was having others, saying, ‘Gawain, Gawain, Gawain, what are you doing? Why are you forcing us to make a decision?’ I will tell you why we’re forcing you to make a bloody decision, because on the front page of your website you say you don’t know. We have to start fighting this. Our attitude was that we’re going to have to bounce the buggers because if they waited until a time of Cameron’s choosing, we would lose. We knew that would be an interesting decision and we knew that Arron was going to say and do things that we wouldn’t necessarily approve of.
UKIP activists were in good spirits. Farage’s unresignation was in the past, the infighting at the top of the party seemed to have died down and the disappointment at not having an electoral breakthrough in the general election was replaced with a fervent desire to get cracking on the referendum campaign. Farage even met for the first time the woman who had got a picture of his face tattooed on her arm, which he duly signed. Farage told Breitbart London: ‘I’m stunned, and somewhat flattered, that anyone would defile their body for me.’
Moments before his keynote speech, Farage met with Carswell – the party’s only MP since Reckless had lost his seat in May – and had a brief conversation. However, the UKIP leader did not reveal what he was planning to announce.
Farage took to the stage, located inside the racecourse’s main stand, to rapturous applause. After spending fifteen minutes talking about his unresignation, Cameron’s renegotiation and Corbyn’s about-turn on the EU, he moved on to the second referendum.
He started by attacking the ‘soft Eurosceptic posh Tories who think they should lead the referendum campaign’, then went on:
There are some, as I would call them, ‘soft Eurosceptics’ who have suggested our best policy is to stand still and let Dave do his negotiation and see what he comes back with, and then to make our minds up.
There are even some soft Eurosceptics who think we should be pushing for a two-referendum strategy, that we should vote to Leave in order to renegotiate a better deal. My message to those people is: you are fundamentally wrong.
Farage then went on to make his big reveal. After praising Banks and his colleagues for ‘putting their hands in their pockets’, embracing social media and having ‘absolutely no personal political ambitions of their own at all’, he set out UKIP’s endorsement:
There has been speculation about which group will get the official designation for the ‘leave the EU’ campaign. But as I see it at the moment there is only one group that has set up an umbrella and is absolutely clear what it stands for. UKIP will now stand hand in hand with Leave.EU. We will work together as a united force of all the Eurosceptic groups that want to leave the EU. We are together, we are united and I believe that the tide has turned.
Watching from the back of the room, Carswell was taken aback. ‘At no point had anyone discussed this with me,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking: “That’s nice to know!”’
This was a serious problem for Carswell. He had hoped to make the party adopt a neutral position until the Electoral Commission ruled on who would be the official campaign, and then fall in behind whichever group received the designation. For him, that had to be Elliott’s group.
Worse still, Banks had already been briefing journalists that Carswell could be kicked out of the party if he didn’t switch his backing from Business for Britain to Leave.EU.
‘Whoever UKIP decide to endorse, it will be hard for the Electoral Commission to say no to that and Carswell will either have to leave or do the same,’ he told The Guardian. ‘If it comes to the crunch, the whip will be removed from him or something else will happen.’
Minutes after Farage’s speech finished, Carswell was giving an interview to Lucy Fisher of The Times in a corridor on the second floor of the racecourse stand when Banks brushed past him. Carswell took his opportunity to confront him: ‘Who do you think you are, trying to encourage the party to dese
lect me if I don’t support you?’ Banks snapped back: ‘Why are you attacking me?’ before storming off. Within minutes, the conference was awash with talk of the confrontation between UKIP’s only MP and its biggest donor.
In a press briefing later that afternoon, Farage dismissed Carswell’s support for Business for Britain as being a result of his ‘residual loyalty to his old friends in the Conservative Party’. He said Banks had no ‘official position’ within UKIP, and so the talk of deselecting the Clacton MP was nonsense. ‘If Banks has no official position in UKIP, why is he standing behind you in this press conference?’ asked Buzzfeed’s Jim Waterson. When asked why he wasn’t giving his support to Elliott and the Business for Britain campaign, Farage was blunt. After describing them as running a ‘talking shop in Tufton Street’, he said:
The fact is Mr Elliott’s group do not advocate leaving the European Union. They might do one day. It’s a bit like John Redwood, who has been a Eurosceptic for twenty-five years, who says we must wait to see what Dave comes back with. Our view is that is absolutely hopeless and allows the Prime Minister to set his agenda. It is wholly unacceptable.
After the press conference, Banks decided to get the last word in with regards to his row with Carswell. Speaking to the author and Waterson once Farage and the rest of the press pack had made their way downstairs, Banks let rip: ‘He is borderline autistic with mental illness wrapped in.’ Standing next to him, his advisor Andy Wigmore urged Banks to say the comments were off the record, but Banks refused. Waterson and the author sprinted down to the press room to file the copy, knowing Banks’s comments would cause huge controversy. Yet, before either journalist could hit publish, Banks appeared in the press room, walked over to reporters from Sky and ITV, and repeated the insult without the slightest provocation. He was clearly not backing away.
By 5.30 p.m., the comments were out on Twitter and published on the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed sites. Farage was furious. Just five hours earlier he had been talking up Banks, telling his party and the country that Banks was someone he could do business with. Now, he had made a comment that would potentially overshadow the whole conference. The parallel with UKIP’s 2013 conference – in which then MEP Godfrey Bloom branded a roomful of women ‘sluts’ and then hit reporter Michael Crick with a copy of the event’s programme – were stark.
The UKIP leader summoned Banks into a room and tore into him. ‘Nigel gave me a forty-minute lecture about how you shouldn’t insult people personally in politics – he gave me an absolute bollocking,’ said Banks. The businessman did try to point out that earlier that day Farage had lambasted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as ‘a vegetarian teetotaller who rides a bicycle, has got a beard and comes from north London’.
‘What about not making personal comments?’ said Banks.
‘Not the same, not the same,’ replied Farage.
‘Jeremy Corbyn’s not in my party,’ Farage said later, remembering the exchange. ‘What I said about him was absolutely factually right. Whether what he said about Carswell was factually right is, I would suggest, a matter of conjecture.’
At just after 6 p.m., an apology was issued by Banks: ‘Douglas Carswell was appallingly rude and provocative towards me today, which does not justify my comments, for which I apologise.’
Carswell was understandably shocked, but stuck to his upbeat persona. ‘I feel there’s a tremendous place for me in UKIP,’ he said when asked if the day’s events would lead to him quitting the party. ‘I have never had such fun as I have had [in UKIP].’
The Carswell/Banks row may have grabbed the headlines, but another article posted online that day did just as much damage to the relations between UKIP and Business for Britain. Michael White, The Guardian’s former political editor who now acted as an associate editor for the paper, was at the conference, on sketch-writing duties. At 5.46 p.m. – the same moment Banks was getting a ‘bollocking’ from Farage – he posted his take on the day’s events online. It was the article’s third paragraph which caused fury in the UKIP ranks: ‘In the conference corridors UKIP’s Eurosceptic rivals in Business for Britain were quietly badmouthing Toxic Nigel as the kind of overambitious, political egomaniac who had weakened the Brexit movement in the past and might do so again.’
It was that phrase again: ‘Toxic Nigel’. The phrase Farage had spent vast sums of money trying to prove wrong with extensive polling. The phrase nearly four million votes at a general election couldn’t nullify. The phrase that, if repeated often enough, might convince donors and high-profile Eurosceptics not to back Leave.EU due to its association with the UKIP leader.
Gawain Towler was particularly angry, and pointed the finger squarely at Robert Oxley. He was, thanks to Elliott’s no-show, the only person from Business for Britain at the conference.
‘Lie. Total lie,’ said Oxley later. ‘[That accusation] always annoyed me as I’ve never spoken to Michael White about UKIP.’
Towler was not convinced, and later said: ‘Sorry, Michael White doesn’t make shit up. There they were, invited to our conference, drinking our free wine, doing this, that and the other, going to journalists, telling them we were toxic.’
Bruni-Lowe was equally shocked by the article. ‘That was the moment when we turned nuclear on the other side,’ he said.
On the second day of the conference, Carswell was set to deliver a speech on electoral reform. Although he had sent advance copies of his address to the UKIP top brass, there was a genuine fear he might use his platform to attack Banks. UKIP press officers watched nervously as Carswell spoke for about twenty minutes from the podium, but the fears proved unwarranted as the Clacton MP stuck rigidly to his script.
He ended with a rallying call for togetherness:
We must put our country first. This isn’t a case of who’s going to win democratic elections; this is about whether we remain a self-governing democracy at all.
We must be prepared to work with anyone: left or right, politician or undecided, all backgrounds, all faiths, all colours, all people. There are good, honourable, patriotic members of all parties: we must work with them all.
It’s not enough to win by offering opposition to Brussels; our challenge is to show how Britain can prosper outside the EU. It’s an enormous honour to have joined UKIP a year ago. I made many friends and have been incredibly warmly welcomed.
Together we have got an enormous referendum battle ahead; let everything that we do be about winning it, let’s do it.
Carswell’s focus had always been on winning the referendum. Everyone in the room, including Farage, believed that was why he had joined UKIP from the Tories in 2014. While they were right about Carswell’s ultimate goal, none of them knew the real reason he had defected to the party. It was all part of a plan concocted by the Tory ‘posh boys’ so hated by Farage in an art gallery on the banks of the Thames, with roots stretching back to before David Cameron ever agreed to hold a referendum.
CHAPTER 14
Among the Constables, Turners and Blakes hanging in the Tate Britain art gallery next to the River Thames in London is a painting by William Holman Hunt titled ‘The Awakening Conscience’.
It depicts a young woman lifting herself up from the lap of a gentleman, and gazing, with a hopeful expression on her face, out of a window to a sunlit garden. She seems much more excited by the possibilities in the outside world than by the man and the paraphernalia in the shadowy room.
It was fitting that a group of people who saw leaving the EU in the same way should choose the home of this painting to plot the UK’s escape.
Sitting in one of the poky corners the museum offered, drinking a cup of tea, was Daniel Hannan. He was waiting for his Conservative colleague and friend of twenty-five years Douglas Carswell to arrive from Parliament – located a ten-minute walk away, up Millbank.
The pair had first met in 1993 in London. Both were decidedly Eurosceptic, but Hannan was more radical in his approach to the European project. Over lunch in Westminster that year,
he explained to Carswell – who was four months his senior – why the UK should not seek to reform the EU, but quit it altogether. Carswell’s conversion took less than an hour. With this newfound purpose, Carswell immediately set about trying to find a way to make Britain’s exit from the EU a reality. He was living in London at the time, completing his Master’s degree at King’s College, when he heard of a new party that had been formed – the United Kingdom Independence Party. Carswell considered signing up, but calculated that it would be easier to try to bend the will of an existing party than to help build up a new one. He joined the Conservatives.
It wasn’t until 2001 that Carswell got his chance to enter Parliament for the first time. As a thirty-year-old first-time candidate, the Tories gave him an unwinnable seat to contest so he could earn his campaigning stripes. Carswell gave it his all, and achieved a swing to the Tories of 4.7 per cent from his Labour rival. Unfortunately for him, his Labour rival just happened to be the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who romped home with a majority of 17,713.
Leading up to the 2005 general election, Carswell was working in the Conservative Policy Unit – overseen by the up-and-coming David Cameron – when he was selected to fight the Labour-held seat of Harwich in north Essex. This time, he did beat his Labour rival, winning by 920 votes.
Carswell was in the Westminster Parliament, Hannan was in the European Parliament, and together the pair began chipping away at the UK’s relationship with the EU. The first chink in the wall rather fell into their laps. As part of his leadership bid, Cameron vowed to take the Conservative MEPs out of the European People’s Party/European Democrats grouping if elected. Pledging to cut the Tories’ formal links with avowed federalists across the Continent earned Cameron the support of Carswell and Hannan.
Following boundary changes in 2010, Carswell won the new constituency of Clacton, which covered much of his old seat. Having spent five years as one of the most outspoken anti-EU Members of Parliament, Carswell saw his thumping majority of 12,068 as proof that he had tapped into the growing Euroscepticism in the country. With the Conservatives now in power – albeit in coalition with the decidedly pro-European Liberal Democrats – Carswell sensed this was the time to ramp up his Eurosceptic activity. Within weeks he was calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and by the following October he was one of the key backbenchers drumming up support among his colleagues when it came to backing a motion calling for a referendum on whether the UK should quit the EU entirely. Despite eighty-one Tories rebelling against the government, there was no sign that Cameron would give in and grant the UK the vote Carswell so desperately wanted.