by Owen Bennet
With the amendments to the Referendum Bill secured, Cf B had carried out its main parliamentary function and could drop the pretence that it was backing Cameron’s renegotiation.
It wasn’t just Cf B that was changing its position. Over the summer, while Farage had been planning his tour and Tice had been mulling over mergers, Matthew Elliott had been sounding out the Business for Britain signatories to get a sense of who would be backing a Leave vote. Not only was he trying to get the political weight of senior business figures backing Brexit, he was also hoping to get something more concrete: donations. This was proving tricky, and one man was to blame.
‘The biggest damage that Arron Banks did was preventing donors from stepping forward until the designation issue was settled,’ said Daniel Hannan. ‘To them it didn’t look like a series of one-way howitzer blasts, it looked like a scrap. That’s how it always looked to someone who isn’t really paying attention: “Why can’t you all get together?”’
Bernard Jenkin was encountering similar difficulties.
It was very difficult because a lot of MPs, a lot of donors, kept saying, ‘But why are there two campaigns? Why can’t you work together?’ They weren’t really interested in the detail, they just thought, ‘Surely there should be one campaign?’, which was perfectly understandable. We had to keep explaining to people there was a very fundamental difference not of personality but of tactics, of strategy, that we needed a campaign that was going to be broadly based and appeal to the wavering middle-of-the-ground voters, not just motivate the core vote – which is what UKIP tend to do.
According to Farage’s advisor Chris Bruni-Lowe, the difficulties their Leave campaigning rivals were encountering were no accident. ‘We said, “All you’ve got to do is muddy the waters so donors don’t know who to fund. In the end they’ll fund no one, but Arron’s got the money so they’ll blow Elliott out of the water and we can run a much more aggressive campaign,”’ he said.
Jenkin raised the first cheque, totalling £50,000, from a business contact, and Elliott began putting the structure in place. Like his campaigning rivals, he was working on the premise that the referendum question would present yes/no options, and decided to rehash the logo used for the campaign against the euro – a lowercase ‘no’ in white font inside a red circle. He was even able to utilise a company he had registered in 2010 – ‘No Campaign’ – as the vehicle for the organisation.
All that changed when, on 1 September 2015, Cameron accepted the Electoral Commission recommendation that the referendum question should provide the choice of remain or leave, not yes or no. It was hugely disruptive.
Elliott said:
Websites had been designed and all this sort of stuff and of course we had a perfect suite of having nocampaign.com, for arguments sake, and @nocampaign on Twitter, and the Instagram name, the right Facebook name. So it was all perfectly aligned. Then they changed the bloody question, and then we all scrambled round. Of course, voteleave.com was very quickly taken by somebody and they put one of these music videos on.
Indeed, anyone who logged on to voteleave.com found themselves redirected to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ – a long-running internet joke known as ‘Rickrolling’.
After a brainstorming session, Elliott and Cummings decided to go with ‘Vote Leave, Get Change’ as their new company’s full name, and registered the business on 18 September. Elliott had now moved out of his Tufton Street base, and was able to rent two floors in the Westminster Tower building on Albert Embankment. Located at the end of Lambeth Bridge on the south side of the Thames, the building provides a perfect view of the Houses of Parliament, situated just across the river. The second floor of the office block was used by Vote Leave for phone canvassing and hosting media events. The seventh floor was home to Elliott, Cummings, Vote Leave researchers and other staff. The space had previously been used by TV news station Al-Jazeera, and had been completely stripped out when the company had left. The first few months of Vote Leave’s time in their new offices was characterised by builders making the space suitable for the company – including constructing a boardroom and separate rooms for Elliott and Cummings.
‘It seemed like an age,’ remembered Elliott. ‘We were working out of one half while the other was boarded up and bang bang bang, and all that sort of stuff, while they worked in the other half.’
It was while sitting among dust and building materials in late September that Cummings came up with the slogan that would come to define the campaign. ‘Dom’s initial hunch was to go for “Vote Leave, Get Change”, and that was the initial sort of concept,’ said Elliott, ‘but then he had that sort of spark of inspiration: “Vote Leave, Take Control”. It slightly evolved into “Take Back Control”, which was the catchphrase for debates and what have you.’
The campaign was ready to go, but Elliott wanted to hold off launching until after the Conservative Party conference, taking place in Manchester from Sunday 4 October to Wednesday 7 October. ‘We wanted to allow people to fly the flag and appear on Cf B platforms at party conference,’ he claimed – somewhat strangely given that Lord Lawson had already moved Cf B to a ‘Go’ position three days before the conference kicked off.
On Friday 9 October, the worst-kept secret in British politics was revealed and Vote Leave was launched. Ex-Tory treasurer Peter Cruddas, former UKIP donor Stuart Wheeler and Labour backer John Mills were all put forward as the big financial hitters. Owen Paterson, Steve Baker and Kate Hoey also delivered supporting statements, and Carswell went the extra mile of writing a comment piece for the Telegraph about why he was backing Vote Leave over Leave.EU: ‘Having fought and won two parliamentary elections over the past year, I know the importance of appealing to undecided voters. Everything I have learnt from my experience of fighting and winning for UKIP in Clacton convinces me that the Vote Leave campaign has what it takes to win.’ He didn’t quite write the words ‘unlike Nigel Farage’, but the sentiment was clear.
Along with the platitudes and rallying cries from supporters, Vote Leave also released a campaign video focusing on what it believed would be the strongest argument to persuade undecided voters: the cost of being in the EU.
After an opening shot of the River Thames, the camera focused on the outside of St Thomas’ Hospital. Within a few seconds, what appeared to be bank notes started detaching themselves from the building and flew up into the clear blue sky. As a map of Europe appeared, a voice said: ‘Every week, the United Kingdom sends £350 million of taxpayers’ money to the EU – that’s the cost of a fully staffed, brand new hospital.’ The video then continued setting out what else that £350 million could be spent on: schools, roads, railways, regional airports and even tax cuts. It ended with a series of slogans flashing up over urgent, intense music, complete with pounding percussion: Vote Leave; let’s take control; let’s save money; invest in the NHS; invest in science; get change; the safer choice.
After being shown the video ahead of its release, Jenkin immediately picked up on what would be one of the most hotly contested claims of the whole campaign: that the UK sent £350 million to Brussels every week. Vote Leave were using the gross figure; after a rebate – which was applied before the money ever left the UK – the actual figure was just under £250 million a week. That, however, did not take into account that certain UK industries, institutions and areas received subsidies from the EU – amounting to £4.5 billion in 2015 – or £85 million a week.
‘You’ve got the wrong number here, we are going to be in trouble,’ Jenkin told the Vote Leave team once he had seen the video. ‘It will be a rod for our own back,’ he added. The Tory MP was told the matter had already been decided, and the £350 million figure was used by Carswell in his Telegraph op-ed and Hoey in her supporting statement released to the media.
In a press release sent out by Robert Oxley, Vote Leave’s ‘core message’ was revealed:
Technological and economic forces are changing the world fast. EU
institutions cannot cope. We have lost control of vital policies. This is damaging. We need a new relationship with the European Union. What happens if we vote ‘leave’?
We will negotiate a new UK–EU deal based on free trade and friendly cooperation. We end the supremacy of EU law. We regain control. We stop sending £350 million every week to Brussels and instead spend it on our priorities, like the NHS and science research.
We regain our seats on international institutions like the World Trade Organization so we are a more influential force for free trade and international cooperation.
A vote to ‘leave’ and a new friendly relationship is much safer than giving Brussels more power and money every year.
At the bottom of the press release was a list of ‘key staff’, including ‘Dominic Cummings – campaign director’. It had been just two months since Cummings had publicly and explicitly stated that he was ‘NOT “running the NO campaign”’ and would be helping ‘in minor ways only’ once the organisation had been created. Yet here he was – one of the ‘key staff’.
Elliott was never in any doubt that Cummings would be staying on until the bitter end:
Dom was always very clear, you know, if Karl Rove or David Axelrod or Lynton Crosby had volunteered their services to the campaign and the board felt that was appropriate, he would always be happy to move over to allow those big shots to take the hot seat, but none of them were going to do it.
Saving money. Science. The NHS. These were the areas that Vote Leave felt would win over the undecideds. Immigration and border control were not mentioned once in the video, or in Carswell’s Telegraph piece.
Farage was utterly bemused by Vote Leave’s campaigning focus, but was pleased they had now joined the fray – a move he felt he was responsible for thanks to his endorsement of Leave.EU at the UKIP conference two weeks earlier. ‘Blow me down, within a fortnight, what happens? Vote Leave launches. Would it have launched if we hadn’t launched in Doncaster? No,’ said Farage.
In fact, they probably would have been taken by surprise the following March. Why? Because Elliott’s fear was that a lot of his long-term donors would not support a Leave campaign. Business for Britain was set up to keep us out of the euro, to campaign against excessive EU regulation, but not the radical step, as it was seen, of leaving the EU. They would have left it, and left it, and left it, and left it. Victory number one for us was that we smoked out Business for Britain and not only had we got them to declare for out but they’re immediately pushed on the Cameron renegotiation and find themselves with nowhere to go but to start criticising him, so we were really pleased with that.
Banks too believes his actions had forced the hand of Elliott and Cummings:
Taking away all of the heat and all of the passion, one thing we did do was force Vote Leave to start their campaign sooner than they wanted to start. They definitely wanted to wait until Dave got back and get started afterwards. They were very respectful of the Prime Minister.
Elliott, however, insists Vote Leave emerged at the moment he had always planned, and that he had always been very clear about his plans with Banks, Farage and others involved in Leave.EU. ‘We were always open with people about our timings for things, I just think that people saw us as being sort of quisling Tories who were more concerned about keeping on the right side of David Cameron than getting Britain out of the EU,’ he said.
Campaign launches seemed to be infectious: three days after Vote Leave went public, so too did Britain Stronger In Europe – the Remain organisation. At a brewery in east London, business-people, MPs and celebrities got together to unveil the organisation tasked with maintaining the status quo. Will Straw, son of former Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, was Elliott’s equivalent in the organisation, while hosting the launch was TV presenter June Sarpong.
One of the main backers of Stronger In was former Marks & Spencer boss Lord Rose, a one-time signatory of Business for Britain. Ahead of the launch, journalists were sent extracts of his speech for publication that morning. The line of attack was clear – according to Rose, those advocating Leave were ‘quitters’. He was due to say:
The quitters have no idea whether we would be able to access Europe’s free trade area, or what the price of admission would be. The quitters have no idea how long it would take to renegotiate existing trade deals or how difficult it would be to negotiate new ones outside the EU, let alone how inferior the terms would be. The quitters cannot guarantee that jobs would be safe and prices wouldn’t rise. The quitters cannot explain how we could stop free movement and simultaneously keep our access to the world’s largest duty-free market.
Yet when it came to his speech, Rose dropped the entire section, preferring instead to say that Eurosceptics would be ‘taking a risk with Britain’s prosperity’.
The most startling warning came from former police chief Sir Hugh Orde, who claimed that pulling out of the European Arrest Warrant would have dire consequences for the UK. While he was president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Orde said, the Metropolitan Police was asked to find and arrest fifty murderers, twenty rapists and ninety robbers.
Orde continued:
My experience tells me if you are a robber in another country, you are a robber in this country. If you are a rapist, you are a rapist, and if you are a murderer, you are by definition extremely dangerous … If I was a villain somewhere else in Europe and I was escaping justice, I would be coming here because it’s going to take a lot longer to get you back.
It seemed Stronger In were not going to duck the fight over controversial issues.
With Leave.EU and Vote Leave now announced, Farage again tried to facilitate a merger of the groups. After the conference season had finished in early October, the UKIP leader sat down with Banks and David Wall, the secretary of the Midlands Industrial Council, to try to find some areas of compromise. Farage and Wall then had a meeting with Elliott, who repeatedly blocked any union.
‘Elliott said, “I’m sorry but my board don’t find Mr Banks’s language and behaviour acceptable.” And that was the first in an endless series of attempts to form big umbrellas, all sorts of things, none of which ever came to anything,’ recalled Farage.
Bruni-Lowe, who was also in the meeting, remembered Elliott ‘sat there literally in silence in the most weird way’. After hearing Farage’s plan to focus the campaign on immigration and Turkey, Bruni-Lowe claimed Elliott said, ‘I’m sorry, Dominic says we can’t merge.’
Those at the top of Vote Leave clearly felt Banks and Farage needed to be kept at a distance because of their unpredictability and desire to run a campaign using tactics of which they did not approve. Little did they realise that those concerns should have been focused a little closer to home.
CHAPTER 16
All Phil Sheppard knew was that it was a ‘secret mission’ that had come from the top – the very top – and he had been asked to see if any of his undergraduate friends at the London School of Economics would be interested. Michael Dowsett, director of Conservatives for Britain, was the man doing the asking. He had been tasked with finding young, enthusiastic Eurosceptics, and Sheppard, president of Students for Britain, fitted the bill perfectly.
When Dowsett asked Sheppard if he could recommend anyone who would also like to take part, Peter Lyon was also recruited. Like Sheppard, he was a nineteen-year-old LSE student, and just as willing to do what he could to help the campaign to get out of the EU. With the two operatives selected, they were told to report to Vote Leave’s HQ on the banks of the River Thames for further orders.
Waiting to greet them was Paul Stephenson, the campaign’s communications director. Stephenson was a former Conservative press officer who went on to work in the Departments of Transport and Health. After leaving government, he joined the British Bankers’ Association, before being poached by Matthew Elliott in July 2015 to join what would become Vote Leave.
The two students sat across from Stephenson and received their mission: Vote Leave
were going to create a company and install Sheppard and Lyon as directors. Using the company to secure passes, the pair would then be sent undercover to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference on 9 November, when David Cameron was due to give the keynote address. The two would then disrupt the speech, highlighting how the pro-EU CBI was misrepresenting the views of UK businesses when it came to the referendum.
This was their mission, should they choose to accept it. The students both agreed, and on 26 October – two weeks before the CBI conference – the pair signed some paperwork making them directors of Lyon Sheppard Web Solutions Ltd. A website was even created, complete with a quotation from Steve Jobs on the home page: ‘Here’s to the rebels. Here’s to those who will speak truth to power, who embrace change.’
The following Monday, the pair visited Vote Leave HQ for a final run-through. They were to take their seats among some of the most powerful CEOs in the country, and at 9.50 a.m. would stand up and chant ‘CBI – voice of Brussels’ while holding up a banner with the same words.
Vote Leave’s frustration with the CBI had gone up a notch that very day, with Dominic Cummings claiming an oft-quoted 2013 survey that showed eight out of ten UK businesses backed remaining in the EU was unreliable. Cummings emailed a complaint to the head of the British Polling Council, John Curtice, and copied in YouGov boss Peter Kellner, Simon Atkinson of Ipsos MORI and Nick Moon, secretary of the British Polling Council. ‘Bugger – at first glance the odious Cummings might be onto something. Survey looks pretty dodgy but luckily we don’t need to rule on that. But my initial thought is that YouGov did not give as much info as they should have,’ Moon responded, not realising he had hit ‘reply all’ – meaning that ‘the odious Cummings’ saw the message.