The Brexit Club

by Owen Bennet

  The letter precipitated a meeting in early December involving Banks and Tice from Leave.EU and John Mills and Daniel Hodson – a retired British banker who also worked as a trader in the City of London in the 1990s – representing Vote Leave. It may have been different Vote Leave voices, but the words were still the same. No to Farage playing a role, no to focusing on immigration, and no to a merger.

  By the end of December, relations had deteriorated to such a degree that Banks was convinced Vote Leave had hired private detectives to follow him. He decided to ‘turn the tables’ and set his own surveillance company, Precision Risk & Intelligence, loose on Vote Leave.

  Banks said:

  I discovered I’d been trailed by a private investigator so basically someone was obviously trying to collect information or do something. We figured out it was probably Vote Leave or something to do with them, who knows. So we turned the tables and did the same back. What I did was I wrote an email to Elliott.

  The email read: ‘I have a personal investigator on my tail. You might want to watch out – I have a business that specialises in personal security and counter-intelligence … we have ex-MI5 and SAS operatives who specialise in counter-surveillance.’

  Elliott took the email to be a warning that he and others were about to be put under surveillance. The email was leaked to the Mail on Sunday on 23 December, with a Vote Leave source saying: ‘We believe that Arron Banks has been monitoring the Vote Leave office because he has been passing information about staff movements to people, and he has operatives tailing their top people.’

  In the article, Banks denied the claim that he had set spooks loose on the rival Leave campaign, claiming Elliott had misunderstood what was supposed to be a warning that the In camp were using private detectives. His denial was just another piece of the psychological warfare against Elliott he was engaging in.

  ‘For two weeks running they were terrified about it, they were shredding all their documents, they were absolutely terrified,’ said Banks, adding: ‘It was quite amusing because during Christmas, the Vote Leave lot were terrified of our team of former SAS and MI5 agents. Of course, when it appeared it just looked stupid. It looked like Vote Leave had lost the plot.’

  When told Banks had admitted hiring the private detectives, Elliott wasn’t surprised:

  The number of times he knew certain things, it was clear from emails he was sending to John Mills, and things that he ordinarily wouldn’t have known. Having said that, it’s difficult to know how much of that was the ExCom being leaky like a sieve or spooks following us around. I suspect a lot of the time it was the fact that ExCom and people were very liberal in forwarding emails.

  Banks may have been happy playing with the minds of Vote Leave, but he was in full seduction mode when it came to UKIP. While Farage and thousands of councillors were already committed to backing Leave.EU, there were still twenty-one MEPs and the party’s ruling National Executive Committee up for grabs. If these Ukippers split their support between the two Leave campaigns, it could effectively negate the claim that Leave.EU had the backing of the only officially pro-Brexit party in the UK. Farage was having the same concerns, but he knew he could not just instruct the MEPs and NEC to back Leave.EU. They needed to be convinced that Banks’s campaign was not only the most likely to win designation, but the one that would put the UKIP voice front and centre of the referendum debate. ‘We had to let people make their decision independently, but we knew the way they will end up wanting to back Leave.EU is the moment they see Banks’s operation, they will be blown away,’ said Bruni-Lowe.

  It was decided to arrange for the MEPs and NEC to visit both organisations to see for themselves which campaign deserved their support. UKIP chairman Steve Crowther contacted Vote Leave to arrange a time, and it was agreed the party’s MEPs and the NEC would go to Westminster Tower on Friday 22 January 2016. But first, they would go to Leave.EU.

  Banks’s attempts at wooing high-profile Ukippers hadn’t got off to the best of starts. Carswell may not have been the most popular member of the party, but seeing Banks describe him as ‘borderline autistic with mental illness wrapped in’ at the UKIP conference did lead many in the party to question whether this was someone they could do business with. One of the most reticent was Suzanne Evans, who was still deputy chairman of the party when Banks asked to meet her on 2 November. Banks was planning to explain over lunch how Leave.EU would move forward, and also speak to her about a potential role in the organisation. The meeting was arranged for the private members’ club 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair, and at 12.15 p.m., Evans was sitting at a table waiting for Banks. Half an hour later, Banks had still not arrived. Evans called and texted him, but got no response. He had forgotten about the meeting.

  When it came to wooing UKIP’s MEPs and its NEC, Banks made sure nothing would go wrong. On Wednesday 13 January, he ferried the entire group down to his plush manor house on the outskirts of Bristol. Some stayed in his country pad, while others were booked into lavish hotels nearby. Regardless of where they stayed, they all found a bottle of champagne awaiting them in their rooms. ‘It was “Olympic-bidding” type behaviour,’ joked one MEP.

  On the evening of the first day, the group were treated to a sumptuous dinner, and the alcohol flowed freely – more than one of the delegation had a sore head the next morning. On Thursday 14th, the group were shown around Leave.EU’s headquarters and phone banks, and all their questions and concerns were dealt with. ‘It was brilliant,’ one MEP remembered.

  The schmoozing was a tremendous success, and the MEPs and NEC left Bristol happy to throw their support behind Banks and Leave.EU. On Friday 22 January, the delegation descended on Vote Leave’s HQ, knowing that it would take something special from Elliott and Cummings to convince them to endorse a campaign which, up to that point, had seemed disinterested in working with UKIP. The party was split into two groups, with the MEPs scheduled to go in first, followed by the NEC members.

  Four days prior to the Vote Leave meeting, Banks deployed his ‘mess with their heads’ strategy and published a letter he had sent to Elliott accusing him of not really wanting to leave the EU.

  After opening the letter by saying he was ‘dismayed to see members of Vote Leave in the media recently advocating two referendums in order to somehow secure a better deal for the UK with the European Union’, Banks turned the screw:

  The actions of your colleagues and previous historic statements suggest you are committed to staying in a reformed EU rather than campaigning for a Leave vote. It is inconceivable that the Electoral Commission could award Vote Leave the official designation while you remain committed to reform through a second referendum.

  Knowing there were currently tensions within Vote Leave over the way the campaign was being managed, he zoned in on the group’s weak spot:

  As I have said previously, the only person apparently standing in the way of a formal merger is Dominic Cummings. With his latest comments suggesting the Prime Minister use anything other than Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to initiate our withdrawal from the EU, he has become a liability and a danger to both Leave campaigns.

  He ended the letter by offering to ‘extend my hand, again, for us to open up talks about how we can move forward as one unstoppable campaign devoted to securing a Leave vote and only a Leave vote in the one and only referendum we will have’.

  The letter had the desired effect and, as the MEPs and NEC entered Vote Leave HQ, their heads were filled with the notion that they were about to listen to people who didn’t really want to leave the EU.

  As they took their seats in the boardroom, John Mills welcomed them all and thanked them for coming. Elliott then stood up and began by praising UKIP for the work it had done for the Eurosceptic cause, and acknowledging the party’s crucial role in securing the referendum. He then began explaining the various groups Vote Leave had under its umbrella: Conservatives for Britain, Labour Leave, Muslims for Britain etc. Farage arrived about half an hour late – flanke
d by Bruni-Lowe and Michael Heaver – and sat at the back of the room. Some of the MEPs were bemused, wondering why Farage had brought his two advisors along to a meeting that was supposed to be for MEPs only. With the presentation over, the questions began.

  Patrick O’Flynn, the sole UKIP MEP backing Vote Leave for designation, nonetheless gave the campaign’s representatives a rough ride over the notion of a second referendum. Cummings struggled to explain why he favoured the two-referendum approach, but, according to Bruni-Lowe, said, ‘We are advocating a second referendum because the person coming across to us from the Tories wants a second referendum and we have to leave that option open.’ At least two MEPs in the room got the impression that Cummings was talking about Boris Johnson. After O’Flynn had quizzed Vote Leave over the second referendum, Heaver jumped in and accused the organisation of ignoring Farage. ‘Why do you never retweet anything that Nigel posts on social media?’ he asked, followed by Bruni-Lowe reading out statistics of how many times Douglas Carswell had been retweeted compared to Farage. Some MEPs were angry about the intervention. One described the pair as ‘charmless and aggressive’, and added: ‘They weren’t really bothered about UKIP, they were bothered about Nigel. It was very much about Nigel’s ego and Nigel’s pride.’

  Some of the MEPs backed Farage and accused Vote Leave of being little more than a Tory front. Voices began to be raised, and eventually East of England MEP Stuart Agnew cut across Heaver and called for calm. ‘There was some embarrassment at their behaviour,’ said one MEP, a sentiment shared by another colleague:

  There were a lot of MEPs who weren’t happy with the behaviour of Chris Bruni-Lowe and Nigel. A lot of us were embarrassed by what happened. They came in, sat at the back of the room and started shouting and screaming. The points they made were valid but it was Stuart Agnew who had to take control of the meeting in the end because Vote Leave had completely lost control.

  From Farage’s point of view, the meeting had been a total success, and when the MEPs got together in Strasbourg at the beginning of February they all – with the exception of O’Flynn – agreed to support Banks when it came to designation.

  The people at the top of Vote Leave weren’t bothered by the decision of UKIP’s MEPs and NEC. The meeting had been a distraction from a much bigger issue – whether Vote Leave would even still exist by the time the referendum arrived. Little did the MEPs realise it at the time, but Vote Leave was on the verge of completely disintegrating.

  CHAPTER 18

  ‘You think it is nasty? You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ Dominic Cummings told the Telegraph. Like Arron Banks, he too preferred to double down in the face of criticism.

  He went on: ‘These guys have failed the country, they are going to be under the magnifying glass. Tough shit. We are going to be tough about exposing the failure of the establishment – they can bleat that it is nasty because they don’t like scrutiny. It is going to be tough.’

  Vote Leave’s campaign director had no regrets over the CBI stunt – which was what worried Bernard Jenkin the most. The North Essex MP took Steve Baker’s place on the company board and, for his first act, tried to establish just how the organisation he had helped set up had managed to smuggle two students into a conference for high-flying businesspeople. Jenkins asked the Vote Leave compliance committee, chaired by Vote Leave board member Daniel Hodson, to investigate the incident. After being assured that, while it was an act of subterfuge, it would not cause any long-lasting damage to relations with the CBI, Jenkin called for a meeting with Cummings to find out what else was planned. The conversation was ‘robust’, remembered the Tory MP.

  ‘I just thought it important for the board to send a message to the executive that they are accountable, and if things like this happen there are going to have to be explanations and assurances. Dominic was absolutely livid with me,’ he said.

  Cummings felt the organisation needed to be nimble, willing to think outside the box and be unafraid to challenge orthodoxies – mirroring the view he had taken while working in the Department for Education. Jenkin read the situation slightly differently: ‘It basically means he should be able to decide whatever he wants, when he wants, and nobody should interfere with it.’

  He added:

  Dominic was making it quite clear there would be other stuff that would be much more radical. And if we weren’t prepared for it, we had better get prepared for it. At the back of my mind was the whole question of designation. If Vote Leave was not regarded as a fit and proper person in corporate terms, we would not get designation.

  It wasn’t just Jenkin who was questioning the direction Vote Leave was travelling in. Labour for Britain – which had now become Labour Leave – was also getting frustrated. Despite going public at the beginning of October, Vote Leave was still very much a Westminster-based operation. For politicians like Kate Hoey, who were used to being involved in ground campaigns, it was enormously frustrating. One of the early flashpoints came at a meeting of the exploratory committee one afternoon in October.

  ‘There were heavy criticisms,’ remembered Brendan Chilton. ‘It really came to a head when the Leave.EU campaign had done a national leaflet back in October. We turned up at that meeting and it was like, “What the fuck’s going on?”’

  Another person getting increasingly frustrated was Peter Bone. The Tory MP was one of the three – along with Tom Pursglove and Philip Hollobone – who had run their own mini-EU referendum in Northamptonshire in 2014. The Wellingborough MP was first elected to the Commons in 2005 and had spent ten years cultivating an image of a ground campaigner who took the fight to the doorsteps.

  Looking back, he said:

  What was becoming clear was that Vote Leave was very good at the air warfare, and the research and all that, but had very little knowledge or interest in ground warfare. And the people like Steve Baker and Bernard Jenkin never had to fight for marginal seats, they weren’t used to ground campaigns.

  Around the time Vote Leave officially launched, Bone went over to Westminster Tower to meet with Cummings and Elliott to discuss how to get a ground campaign started, and what role he and Pursglove could play. After hearing ‘all the right noises’, Bone left the meeting feeling confident that Vote Leave were committed to the sort of campaigning tactics he was used to.

  Another reason for Bone’s optimism was the recruitment of Richard Murphy, the Conservatives’ former head of field campaigning, who had spent eighteen years as an election strategist for the party. He was appointed Vote Leave’s head of field operations and regional campaigning, and having him on board seemed to signal a commitment to taking the fight to the Remain camp on the doorsteps of Britain.

  * * *

  On 10 November – a day after being heckled at the CBI – the Prime Minister formally set out his demands for EU reform in a speech at Chatham House in London. He confirmed what had been leaked to The Guardian – namely that he would not call for an emergency brake on migration to the UK – and also admitted that there would be wriggle room on restricting benefits to foreign workers. In the Tory manifesto, which was barely six months old, Cameron had vowed to ‘insist that EU migrants who want to claim tax credits and child benefit must live here and contribute to our country for a minimum of four years’.

  In the Chatham House speech, he stepped back from such a hardline position, and gone was the word ‘insist’. ‘I understand how difficult some of these welfare issues are for other member states. And I am open to different ways of dealing with this issue,’ said the Prime Minister. He followed up the speech by sending a letter to European Council President Donald Tusk in which he outlined his four areas of reform: economic governance; competitiveness; sovereignty; and immigration.

  The speech, and the follow-up letter to Tusk, was the tipping point for Iain Duncan Smith. The Work and Pensions Secretary had been given the impression that the so-called emergency brake on migration would be a key part of the address. He was on his way to his colleague Dominic Raab’s constituency
of Esher and Walton in Surrey when he was called by one of Cameron’s top advisors to say the brake had been pulled.

  Duncan Smith remembered:

  I got called by Ed Llewellyn at that stage to say: ‘You know that emergency brake we’ve got in there? We’ve had to remove it from the speech.’ I said: ‘Why’s that?’ He said: ‘Only because there’s some technicalities and issues around it.’

  I just knew why they’d removed it: because Angela Merkel finally read the speech. The staff probably said: ‘It’s OK,’ but then she then read it, I think, and I think she simply said: ‘I can’t back a speech which has this in it because this breaks one of our principles,’ so we’re back to square one again. From that moment on it was pretty much downhill because David Cameron didn’t have a lot of options. I don’t blame him for this. What became apparent to me was the European Union didn’t really take this referendum seriously.

  In the Commons the next day, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg spoke for many Eurosceptics when he took to his feet:

  This is pretty thin gruel – it is much less than people had come to expect from the government. It takes out a few words from the preamble but does nothing about the substance of the treaties; it deals with competition, for which the European Commission itself has a proposal; and it fails to restore control of our borders. It seems to me that its whole aim is to make Harold Wilson’s renegotiation look respectable. It needs to do more; it needs to have a full list of powers that will be restored to the United Kingdom and to this Parliament, not vacuously to Parliaments plural.

  Conservatives for Britain – which had been on a Leave footing since Lord Lawson took over as chairman in October – saw its numbers swell to well over 120 at a meeting on Tuesday 17 November to discuss the package.