by Owen Bennet
And so it was, in 2012, that Carswell, Hannan and fellow Tory Eurosceptic Mark Reckless began meeting in secret at the Tate Britain, to discuss how to force Cameron’s hand. The Tate Britain was chosen as they rightly believed no journalist, or party whip for that matter, would suspect any political plotters would convene in an art gallery.
The trio would meet regularly to discuss a plan of action. One option was to continue with a barrage of amendments and motions in the Commons and try to bring the matter to a head that way. However, the October 2011 motion had already been watered down from an in/out referendum to an in/out/renegotiate plan in order to gain support from Tories who were nervous about backing too stark a proposal. But the Tate plotters knew amendments and motions wouldn’t work. To really bring the issue of an EU referendum to a head, they needed to do something more dramatic – something that would be noticed by the public as well by those in SW1. The plotters decided there was only one course open to them: trigger a wave of by-elections.
‘We would leave the Conservative Party, but I and others were contemplating, “Do we re-stand as independents?” We were talking about how that would work. We started going to look at the small print of how by-elections are called,’ said Carswell.
The Tate plotters believed that a staggered series of by-elections would consistently ramp up the pressure on Cameron to a point where, just for sheer party management reasons, he would have to pledge a referendum.
‘I was quite prepared to sacrifice my career in politics and lose a by-election if necessary if it pushed this forward. I made the calculation, even if I lose, if you’ve got that happening on your back benches, he’ll realise these guys mean it,’ said Carswell.
But it was not just the leader of the Conservatives the Tate plotters had in their sights. It was the leader of UKIP too.
Throughout 2012, UKIP’s poll ratings were slowly increasing. By the end of the year, an Opinium poll for The Observer had them on 15 per cent, an increase from 9 per cent twelve months earlier. Yet, far from the success of an avowedly anti-EU party giving the Tate plotters cause for celebration, it provoked concern. While support for UKIP was rising, support for leaving the EU was falling. It was labelled ‘The Farage Paradox’.
Carswell said: ‘The better that UKIP did, paradoxically the less support there was for leaving the EU. We could see this very clearly and we’re worrying about this in 2012.’
The Tate plotters were in a conundrum. They had a plan to force Cameron into giving them their long-desired EU referendum, but faced the real risk that it would be lost by the very people – or perhaps the very person – most associated with leaving the EU.
In January 2013, Cameron delivered his Bloomberg speech, promising an EU referendum if the Tories won a majority at the next election. The Tate plotters were delighted.
‘I listened to Bloomberg and I’m over the moon. I’m thinking, “Thank goodness, I’m not going to have to do what we were contemplating,”’ said Carswell. The Tate plotters were feeling confident. Hannan had already approached Matthew Elliott to ask him to run the No campaign and within six weeks of the Bloomberg speech, For Britain – the company always planned to turn into the official No campaign – was registered with Companies House.
With the referendum pledge made, the Tate plotters waited for the country’s Eurosceptic voters to switch from UKIP to the Tories. As the only party that could practically offer a route out of the EU, the Farage Paradox would be solved by support melting away from UKIP and towards the Conservatives. Yet, as 2013 turned into 2014, UKIP was going from strength to strength. The party was increasing in the polls despite a series of gaffes that would have scuppered most organisations seeking public office. UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom calling for foreign aid to stop being sent to ‘Bongo-Bongo Land’; Gerard Batten, another MEP, suggesting all Muslims should sign a document promising to renounce religious violence; UKIP councillor David Silvester claiming the UK was experiencing flooding because gay marriage had been legalised; and, of course, Bloom – again – describing a roomful of women as ‘sluts’ at a conference fringe meeting and then hitting a journalist on the head with an agenda. Yet, while none of these gaffes seemed to be damaging UKIP’s poll ratings, support for leaving the EU was still in the minority.
Panic among the plotters increased when UKIP swept to victory in the European elections, a victory which meant even more airtime for Farage, and a danger that Euroscepticism would forever be associated in the public’s mind with the UKIP leader.
Farage was not going away. UKIP was not going away. Neither could be subdued. They had to be detoxified – from the inside. Which meant someone would have to infiltrate UKIP and neutralise both the party and its leader.
‘Douglas and I had discussed various options about this and we were both focused on winning the referendum, that’s all we were thinking about,’ said Hannan. ‘And he took the view that he could hold his seat under pretty much any colours and that the thing he could do was prevent UKIP losing us the referendum.’
He added:
He took the view that the contribution he could make to our national life was to win us the referendum by getting in and neutralising what was already becoming a visibly negative UKIP campaign.
We needed to have that kind of relationship where we were working in collaboration with each other but working in different parties to keep the thing together. We could see the poll coming. There was this assumption that, well, the referendum will never happen. Well, I never believed that and neither did he. He played an absolutely pivotal role.
It wasn’t just Carswell who was prepared to make the leap. Hannan’s old friend from university, the man who had created the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain in a café twenty-four years earlier, Mark Reckless, decided he too would risk his political career by joining UKIP.
Carswell had already made contact with Farage the previous summer, planting the seeds of a possible defection in his mind. In his book The Purple Revolution, Farage talks of how he put the Tory MP in contact with UKIP peer Lord Pearson and party treasurer Stuart Wheeler ‘to try to woo Douglas’. Little did Farage know that Carswell was actually wooing him.
One thing Farage did get right in his book was the catalyst for Carswell making the jump across to UKIP in the summer of 2014. The Clacton MP, who had been so delighted with Cameron’s Bloomberg speech, began to suspect the Prime Minister was ‘backsliding’ on serious reform. Instead, Carswell feared, he would try to get some minor changes and then use the referendum to put the issue to bed for a generation.
Carswell said: ‘Cameron wasn’t thinking about changing the relationship with the EU, this was about stuffing the Eurosceptics on the back benches and he was going to use the hardcore UKIP strident advocates of leaving the EU to help him do it.’
After a meeting of the Conservatives’ backbench 1922 Committee on 11 June, in which Cameron had failed to reassure Carswell that he was serious about reform, the soon-to-be Ukipper pressed the button on defecting. A by-election would increase the pressure on Cameron to hold to his Bloomberg speech and deliver a fair referendum; joining UKIP would enable the process of detoxifying Farage to begin.
After seeking assurances from the UKIP leader that the party had the money to fight a by-election campaign, Carswell agreed to switch. In The Purple Revolution, Farage describes himself as being ‘on cloud nine’ after a midday meeting with Carswell on 24 July, when the final decision was made. Contemplating the win, Farage said: ‘We would be able to draw blood off that lot, the Camerons, the Cleggs, the Milibands – the fools who know nothing of real life.’
On 28 August – without a word being leaked and with hardly anyone in UKIP being told what was coming – Carswell walked into a press conference in Whitehall and announced to the gathered media: ‘I am today leaving the Conservative Party and joining UKIP.’ Members of the party in the room – including deputy leader Paul Nuttall – erupted into cheers. The press were stunned. They had been promised a major anno
uncement, but no one suspected it would be of this magnitude.
The by-election was set for 9 October, and Carswell won it with ease – banking 21,113 votes to the Tories’ 8,709. The easy bit – defecting to a new party, winning a by-election – was done. Now Carswell had to complete part two of his plan: detoxifying UKIP. He used his very first act as a UKIP MP – his victory speech – to begin the process. ‘I thought, “Everyone’s going to be listening, I’ve got about thirty seconds,”’ he remembers.
‘To my new party, I offer these thoughts,’ Carswell said.
Humility when we win, modesty when we are proved right. If we speak with passion let it always be tempered by compassion.
We must be a party for all Britain, and all Britons, first and second generation as much as every other. Our strength must lie in our breadth. If we stay true to that, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
Journalists watching on immediately picked up on the change in tone, but did not accord it any wider significance.
Carswell’s mission to detoxify UKIP continued the very next day, when he was confronted with comments Farage had given in an interview with Newsweek Europe, released to the press overnight. When asked what sort of people should be allowed to migrate to the UK, Farage had responded: ‘People who do not have HIV, to be frank. That’s a good start. And people with a skill.’
It was particularly ironic that the first controversy Carswell was confronted with as a UKIP MP was on the issue of HIV, as his father had actually pioneered diagnosing HIV/Aids while working as a doctor in Uganda in the 1980s.
Carswell’s response to the row was just to smile and repeatedly call for an Australian-style points-based system when it came to immigration controls.
It was not just Carswell who had made the jump. Reckless too defected – making his announcement to great cheers at UKIP’s party conference on Saturday 27 September. He won his by-election in Rochester and Strood by a much narrower margin, finishing just 2,920 votes ahead of Conservative candidate Kelly Tolhurst.
Both men had now infiltrated UKIP – they were behind enemy lines. Was their plan working? Carswell looked at the polls. Of the fifteen opinion polls carried out before his by-election win, ten had Remain in the lead, four had Leave, and there was one tie. Of the fifteen after his victory, five had Remain in front, nine had Leave winning and, again, one tie. It was working. ‘We think we’ve answered the Farage Paradox. The Tate strategy has won. Little do we know that over the following six months that’s not entirely the case because there’s a small problem of shock-and-awful tactics,’ remembered Carswell.
‘Shock and awful’ was the name given to the increasingly blunt style Farage had adopted when talking about immigration in the 2015 general election campaign. The high point – or low point, depending on which side of the argument you are on – came in the seven-way leaders’ debate five weeks before the election. The second question of the night was: ‘How will your party ensure long-term funding of the NHS, while keeping it as a public service accessible to all?’
Farage decided to focus his answer on health tourism, and said:
OK, here’s a fact, and I’m sure you will be mortified that I dare to talk about it. There are 7,000 diagnoses in this country every year for people who are HIV-positive, which is not a good place for any of them to be, I know. But 60 per cent of them are not British nationals.
You can come to Britain from anywhere in the world and get diagnosed with HIV and get the retroviral drugs that cost up to £25,000 per year per patient.
Carswell later described the comments as ‘awful’, and said they proved to him that UKIP’s toxicity had been taken to a ‘whole new level’ in the general election campaign. When they were later compounded by the damage caused by Farage’s ‘unresignation’ and the Short money row, the Clacton MP realised his detoxification strategy was a failure.
‘Angry, nativist UKIP risked being so toxic that if it ran the referendum it would do to the Eurosceptic cause what kryptonite did to Superman. That could not be allowed to happen,’ he said. The Tate Plot had failed in its crucial second goal. But there was one small change to the plan that Carswell would make which could still blunt the impact of Farage on the election.
‘I thought, “This is it, UKIP shouldn’t be a strand in the Vote Leave brand. So it’s about not trying to detoxify UKIP, but trying to make sure that Vote Leave is not toxified by UKIP.” And that is where we got somewhere,’ he said. As UKIP’s sole MP, Carswell was able to claim that the parliamentary branch of the party was 100 per cent behind Vote Leave. When it came to applying for designation, he would be the proof of cross-party working.
Farage would not be part of Vote Leave. That was decided even before Vote Leave properly existed. There was no chance whatsoever of a merger between Carswell, Elliott and Hannan’s group and any campaign involving Farage. All the talks were for nothing – from day one.
‘There were never any merger talks,’ said Elliott.
On our side there was never any inkling that we wanted to merge with The Know, or Leave.EU, or what have you. In order for us to win over the swing voters, we believed that basically a UKIP-based campaign would be able to get up to 35 per cent, perhaps even 40 per cent on a good day in a referendum, but it wouldn’t be able to get beyond that, wouldn’t be able to, you know, appeal to those swing voters who frankly didn’t find Nigel Farage appealing, or didn’t want to feel they were voting UKIP by voting Leave.
He added: ‘We were always adamant it had to be non-UKIP-based in order to appeal to those swing voters.’
Without knowing it, Farage had held open the door for a man whose main objective was to systematically change the way UKIP operated, and undermine its leader in the process. He was there to ‘neutralise’, as Hannan put it. When that goal was thwarted, Carswell instead focused his efforts on making sure Farage did not play a role in the referendum campaign. Farage was right. The EU referendum campaign was being hijacked by the ‘posh boys’. They were indeed out to get him.
The Tate Plot will go down as one of the most ruthless examples of political infiltration in UK history. But it did not succeed in silencing Farage.
CHAPTER 15
‘For fuck’s sake, who’s the enemy here?’ thought Gawain Towler. The UKIP press chief had been reading his copy of that morning’s Times newspaper, and was now in a bad mood. It was 1 October 2015, and former Tory Chancellor Lord Lawson had been announced as the new chairman of Conservatives for Britain. But that wasn’t what had annoyed Towler; it was the op-ed Lawson had written to go alongside the announcement that had provoked his anger:
A number of my colleagues in the Conservative Party are waiting to see what the Prime Minister negotiates before deciding which way they will vote or whether they will campaign for ‘in’ or ‘out’. We cannot afford to wait that long. If we leave the playing field vacant, less moderate, xenophobic voices will dominate the debate and we will fail as soon as the government, the major political parties, the CBI and trade unions declare that they are backing the ‘in’ campaign.
Lawson hadn’t mentioned Nigel Farage, but it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to realise who he was referring to. Lawson doubled down on the claim on Radio 4 that morning and, when asked who were the ‘xenophobic voices’ he was referring to, he replied: ‘There’ll be plenty, you know as well as I do.’
Lawson went on to deny that he or any other of the members of Cf B were xenophobic, and said: ‘None of us are anti-European. Indeed, I am speaking to you from my home in France.’ The revelation that Lawson would be leading the Conservative attempt to regain the UK’s independence from Europe from a house in France provoked some mild amusement on Twitter. ‘Thatcherite dinosaur to lead UK EU exit group from home in France. Says everything!’ tweeted Labour MP Paul Blomfield.
Lawson’s comments infuriated Leave.EU and, at 1.30 p.m., a statement was put out by Arron Banks, Richard Tice and multi-millionaire Jim Mellon, who was helping to bankroll the group:
The announcement that Lord Lawson is ‘leading’ the campaign to leave the EU is wrong. He’s leading ‘a’ campaign that is run by the ‘Westminster bubble’ from SW1. When are these politicians going to learn that this campaign cannot we [sic] won from SW1. It has to appeal to the people, not the small clique of Eurosceptic Tories. It would be better if the Eurosceptic Tories just ‘shut up’ as they are going to alienate the vast majority of people who will look at this campaign as a Tory stich-up [sic].
The Leave.EU campaign is about the people of Great Britain, which includes Labour, Lib Dem, UKIP, Tories and anyone else who believes we should vote to leave the EU at the next referendum. If the Tories keep using hasbeens like Lord Lawson and the other Eurosceptic rabble then that will turn off supporters. So get back in your box, Nigel, and let the people support a people’s campaign not an SW1 bubble brigade.
The email was angry enough, but seemed to miss the key point: Conservatives for Britain had just publicly altered its position from ‘Change or Go’ to simple ‘Go’. The Tory Eurosceptics, who had been decried by Nigel Farage less than a week earlier for not joining the fight, had now issued a call to arms.