The Brexit Club

by Owen Bennet

  On the evening of 8 November, the night before they were to carry out their mission, Sheppard and Lyon were talking through the plan over Facebook’s messenger service. The two students – still teenagers, of course – were nervous, but Sheppard tried to reassure his co-conspirator. ‘We’re going to do this – and remember all these Eurosceptic heroes like Tony Benn and Dan Hannan, they’re going to be behind us,’ he said.

  The next morning the pair made their way to Grosvenor House in London’s Mayfair. Arriving at registration, they gave their names and presented the only form of identification they had on them – their provisional driving licences. Looking round at the other men and women milling around the venue, the pair began to feel very self-conscious. Regardless of the fact that they were in their smartest suits, they were clearly the youngest people at the conference by quite some margin. Surely they would be rumbled before they got anywhere near the Prime Minister.

  The pair made their way into the main conference room and sat about ten rows from the stage. They pulled out the notebooks Vote Leave had issued them with. Tucked inside was the banner they would brandish as the Prime Minister spoke. The original plan was to stand up and begin shouting at 9.50 a.m., about ten minutes into Cameron’s speech. The rolling news channels would be tuned in by then and it would ensure maximum coverage. But, as the clock struck 9.40 a.m., Cameron was not on the stage. He was running ten minutes late, meaning the 9.50 a.m. protest time was now redundant. Sheppard texted Stephenson, and the teenager was told to now go at 10 a.m. At 9.55 a.m., the Prime Minister took to the stage and the BBC’s deputy political editor James Landale, who was reporting on the conference, received a message from Stephenson, telling him to make sure his camera was trained on the two teenagers sitting a few rows behind him.

  At 10 a.m., and with the BBC and Sky News channels providing live coverage of the Prime Minister’s speech, the teenagers knew their moment had arrived. As Cameron was outlining the importance of running a surplus during long periods of economic growth, the pair pulled out the banner from their notebooks and made sure it was the right way round.

  ‘At the time, just before I did it, I was really nervous, to the point where I almost didn’t do it,’ remembered Sheppard. But there was no chance of backing out, as Lyon was already on his feet. A second or two later, Sheppard joined him. ‘I didn’t want him to look like an idiot,’ he said. The pair began chanting in unison ‘CBI: voice of Brussels’. It was hardly a roar, but in the room of businesspeople listening respectfully to the Prime Minister, the sound carried quickly.

  Cameron hesitated for the briefest of moments as he realised he was being heckled, before relaxing and taking control of the situation. ‘We’re going to have a debate in a minute, if you wait for a second you can ask me a question rather than interrupting what’s a very good conference,’ said the Prime Minister.

  The pair continued: ‘CBI: voice of Brussels! CBI: voice of Brussels!’

  ‘Come on, guys,’ said Cameron, clapping his hands together. ‘If you sit down now you can ask me a question rather than making fools of yourself by just standing up and protesting.’

  The audience applauded Cameron’s polite but firm rebuke, and conference security staff made their way to the two protestors. As they were escorted out, Cameron said, ‘Thanks, guys,’ and gave them a wave. The incident lasted thirty-five seconds, but to the two teenagers carrying out the stunt, it seemed a lot longer.

  Lyon said: ‘It felt like it went on for so long before security came over, they seemed to have no idea what to do. It completely took them by surprise, but David Cameron played it off very well – which you’d expect him to.’

  With the point made, the two left the conference centre and began giving interviews to the media outside. On Sky News, Sheppard was open about how he and Lyon had managed to infiltrate the conference. He said: ‘We got in because Vote Leave formed a company for us that was able to get us in.’

  When asked how it felt to interrupt the Prime Minister, Lyon said: ‘It was the most terrifying thing I’ve done in my life.’

  With the protest completed, Lyon returned to university to attend a lecture on crime and punishment, while Sheppard went to an orthodontist appointment. Neither of them realised that their 35-second protest would trigger an internal battle that would almost destroy Vote Leave.

  Later that day, Bernard Jenkin was having lunch with a political journalist who asked for his view on the protest. The Tory MP had had a busy morning and had yet to catch up with the latest news. ‘I was initially rather amused,’ he remembered. The journalist was surprised Jenkin knew nothing about it, especially as it was a Vote Leave operation. ‘No, it can’t be Vote Leave, I don’t know anything about it,’ he told his lunch partner.

  ‘But someone called Robert Oxley has been briefing the lobby about it,’ came her reply. Upon hearing that name, Jenkin realised it was indeed a Vote Leave stunt and hurriedly changed the subject. ‘I thought it was juvenile, and for us it was embarrassing that our leader had been heckled by an organisation we were associated with,’ he said later.

  Elliott, who knew about the stunt, had no regrets – despite acknowledging that it was ‘hugely controversial’. He believed that in order for the Leave side to win the referendum, it needed to be shown that the business community was split on the EU issue. ‘I think the stunt sent an extremely strong signal to the CBI and also to other business groups that when they enter the European debate they should make sure they reflect all sides of their business supporter base, rather than piling in on one side,’ he said.

  A few minutes after changing the subject at his lunch with the journalist, Jenkin felt a buzz in his pocket and discreetly looked down at his phone. Flashing up on the screen was a message from Steve Baker, saying he had informed Dominic Cummings he no longer wished to be a board member of Vote Leave.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘I think it was a bit childish. I think heckling people isn’t the way forward,’ said Arron Banks.

  ‘So your organisation would never do anything like that?’ replied Sky News journalist Kay Burley.

  ‘I wouldn’t say we wouldn’t do anything like that…’ was Banks’s response.

  The CBI stunt put the Leave.EU co-founder in an unusual situation – he was able to take the moral high ground in public over Vote Leave. Just twenty-four hours earlier, it was his campaign group that had been accused of inappropriate behaviour. The Leave.EU social media activity was fast gaining notoriety for its irreverent and provocative style. The campaign’s official Twitter account in particular sometimes danced close to the edge of bad taste and hyperbolic claims. On 8 October 2015, it argued that if Germany continued to register 409,000 refugees every forty days then ‘3.7 million will arrive in a year’. On 16 October, it warned the UK to ‘brace yourself for another influx’ of migrants – this time from Turkey. On 23 October, Leave.EU mocked the acronym ascribed to the official Remain campaign (‘What does BSE mean to you? Britain’s Stronger in Europe or… Mad Cow Disease?’), while on 25 October it used the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt to claim, ‘Britons have always triumphed in the face of adversity. Let’s lead the charge once more and #LeaveEU.’

  These tweets may have been a little odd or far-fetched, but they did not provoke any serious outrage. However, an image posted by Leave.EU on 8 November was deemed to have gone too far. To mark that year’s Remembrance Sunday, the organisation tweeted a photo of a Chelsea Pensioner veteran examining the ceramic poppies in the grounds of the Tower of London. Along with the picture were the words ‘Freedom and democracy. Let’s not give up values for which our ancestors paid the ultimate sacrifice. #LeaveEU’. There was an immediate backlash, and Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said: ‘Using Remembrance Sunday and our veterans to try and make a political point is crass.’ Shadow Culture Secretary Michael Dugher also piled in, saying: ‘Remembrance Sunday is the day when the whole country unites and comes together to honour the service and sacrifice of our veterans and our
armed forces. It’s not an opportunity or a day to advance a political platform.’ Leave.EU realised they had gone too far and, after deleting the tweet, Andy Wigmore told MailOnline:

  Clearly it’s provoked a bit of anti-feeling. The post was there to illustrate the democracy that people fought for and our freedoms. It was probably a little bit clumsy. Of course if it has caused any offence we would apologise. That was not the aim at all so we have taken it down. People’s reaction to it was probably right.

  Speaking after the incident, Banks suggested that the tweet wasn’t as unpopular as it was being reported. ‘My mailbag absolutely filled up with veterans and different people supporting us, so the press perception of it versus the public was very interesting,’ he said. Tice agreed:

  We did make a mistake but we took it down and we said sorry. Interestingly, it wasn’t the veterans who complained. In fact, we had the opposite. The veterans said, ‘You’re quite right.’ It was the liberal luvvies and Vote Leave who complained. Those who had fought and got injured in wars had no problem with it, and that explains the gulf between SW1 and the rest of the country. Arron always said from day one you can’t win this from SW1.

  When it came to producing the graphics, Banks was clear about what the aim should be: cause a fuss, as it gets more followers. He said:

  The team were briefed to sometimes come out and be punchy and not back off. What we found was if you backed off, you got into more trouble. We just didn’t care what the press thought. We realised as well that after the shock horror, the press moves on very rapidly to something else. Actually, it just dies quite quickly, but the publicity just gains you more followers and gains more interest.

  Banks added: ‘Our main approach to PR was to double down. If we got nailed on something our philosophy was to send up a distress flare somewhere else that takes the press attention away. Very Trump-style campaigning.’

  Leave.EU continued in its irreverent manner, with other tweets including a picture of Father Christmas in handcuffs with the line ‘Christmas is incompatible with EU law and shall be renamed the winter festival’. It wasn’t just through its social media outlets that Leave.EU seemed determined to provoke a reaction. As he had shown with his angry statement after Lord Lawson announced he was taking over as Conservatives for Britain chairman, Banks was always happy to make a public dig at his Leave rivals. When the two-referendum idea was floated again in October, Banks released a statement saying: ‘Suggesting two referendums is a cheap political trick and as a non-political campaign we support one referendum: in or out.’ The CBI incident gave him an opportunity to really lay it on thick. ‘If we are to gain the trust of the British people in this campaign then provocative stunts and schoolboy politics [are] not the answer. This is a serious debate about a very serious matter and we now have to conduct ourselves accordingly,’ said Banks.

  The businessman was fast becoming an almost constant presence in the media whenever the EU referendum was discussed. On the day of the CBI stunt, he appeared on both Sky News and the BBC, and on 13 November he appeared as a panellist on Radio 4’s Any Questions? programme when it was broadcast from Basingstoke. His media appearances continued into the new year, with a five-minute profile package of him broadcast on Channel 4 News on 29 January. Two days later, he told the BBC’s Daily Politics he expected there to be a ‘coming together’ of Leave.EU and Vote Leave. It was no accident that Banks was seeing his profile rise, and it was thanks to a tactic put forward by Chris Bruni-Lowe:

  I said to him to sue the BBC and say you’re going to basically sue every media outlet. Issue them with legal notices saying that if you get one side on – Elliott – and don’t get us on, you’re going to prejudice the Electoral Commission. Of course the media haven’t got a clue and started thinking, ‘Oh God, are we?’ and started giving Banks equal coverage despite him having no right to be given equal coverage. You had Banks becoming the most senior Brexit figure because he was just suing everyone.

  Leave.EU weren’t just focusing on the air war. Like Vote Leave, they too were forensically studying the Electoral Commission’s criteria for official designation, and were in dialogue with the organisation to discover just what they needed to produce to demonstrate a breadth of support. Knowing that Elliott would be able to secure the backing of a large number of MPs, Leave.EU began focusing on the thousands of oft-forgotten elected officials in the UK: local councillors. More than 2,000 councillors were signed up to back Banks’s outfit, the majority coming from the Conservative Party.

  While Banks and Leave.EU were having fun generating headlines, Nigel Farage was not holding back on his ‘Say No to the EU’ tour. As the events were filling up across the country, it became clear to Bruni-Lowe and Farage that they no longer needed to be constrained by UKIP and they quietly began to drop the party branding and just focus on the MEP himself.

  ‘The branding means that Nigel’s asked about councillors who say shit. On his own, he can say, “It’s just me, guv,”’ remembered Bruni-Lowe.

  The refugee crisis that was engulfing much of southern Europe had been an underlying theme at many of the events since the tour kicked off in September. Indeed, UKIP MEP Tim Aker used a rally in Essex on 17 September to claim that it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to grant asylum to thousands of refugees that was causing the local roads to look unkempt.

  At the meeting, Aker was asked by an audience member: ‘The state of the grass verges, pavements and roads in Tilbury is disgusting. I pay my council tax so why isn’t the grass being cut and why aren’t the streets being cleaned?’

  He replied:

  I just think the question with that is, why are we sending so much to the European Union that we have to ask these questions? I mean, when you pay your taxes and you work hard and all sorts, do you pay it for Angela Merkel to throw at the European Union? And even today we [UKIP MEPs] voted to stop the fact that the European Union is going to resettle these refugees. Six thousand euros a pop. Where do you think that’s coming from?

  On 16 November, the tour arrived in Basingstoke. It was just three days after a terrorist attack in Paris, in which at least 129 people were killed by a combination of suicide bombs and guns. The terrorist organisation styling themselves as Islamic State – or Daesh – claimed responsibility. All of the attackers were EU citizens, but at least some, including the leader Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had visited Syria before travelling to France to carry out the deadly attacks. For Farage, this was proof of his warning in the run-up to the general election that terrorists would exploit the EU’s border-free Schengen zone to carry out attacks.

  He told the audience in Basingstoke:

  This dream of the free movement of people, this dream for others of the Schengen area – it hasn’t just meant the free movement of people, it has meant the free movement of Kalashnikov rifles. It has meant the free movement of terrorists, and it has meant the free movement of jihadists.

  He went further, arguing that there was ‘a problem with some of the Muslim community in this country’, and claimed research suggested that British Muslims experienced a ‘tremendous conflict and a split of loyalties’.

  ‘We already have a fifth column,’ he said.

  The comments provoked uproar from other politicians, with then Home Secretary Theresa May telling the House of Commons the next day: ‘British Muslims and indeed Muslims worldwide have said very clearly these events are abhorrent.’

  Labour’s former shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper addressed the UKIP leader directly, and said: ‘As Nigel Farage knows, people from Muslim communities across Britain and Europe have condemned the vile attacks in Paris. This is not the time to divide and denigrate our communities – that is what the terrorists want. Nigel Farage should retract these irresponsible and shameful remarks immediately.’ It wasn’t the last time Farage would generate controversy for comments relating to Europe’s migrant crisis.

  A week later, on Monday 23 November, Banks upped the pressure on Elliott by making a
public plea for unity. He leaked an email he had sent to Elliott four days earlier to the Telegraph, in which the businessman tried to brush off past disagreements by claiming that since ‘our respective campaigns have launched, there have been times when our respective competitive spirit has spilled over the top, which was perhaps inevitable, given the potential competition for the designation’.

  He then explicitly set out a merger:

  It is time that we put all these disagreements to one side and remember our ultimate objective – leaving the European Union. As you know, we reached out to you in July and August, but your view then was to proceed on your own course. The two Leave campaigns have focused on very different things. Vote Leave produces great technical analysis such as the 1,000-page document ‘Change or Go’ and developed good links with big businesses.

  We have attracted 300,000 supporters in three months, a huge social media presence and increasing small donations from the general public. We have signed up over 1,300 crossparty local councillors from all political parties and over 3,000 SME businesses in the last three weeks alone. We have some 200 groups up and down the country.

  In terms of uniting Leave.EU and Vote Leave we have no prior conditions and believe that discussions should now take place that reflect the complementary strengths that the two organisations enjoy.

  I have a simple view of life and this is my unequivocal message moving forward – if you want to leave the EU, you are on our side. We should be one winning team. I appeal to everyone to move forward in that spirit and take on our real enemies.

  The tactic was simple: by making the merger proposal public, Banks was hoping those sympathetic to the idea in Vote Leave would place even greater pressure on Elliott and Cummings to facilitate a coming together of the campaigns.