by Owen Bennet
Ahead of the meeting, Owen Paterson told the Telegraph:
The Tusk letter was a once in a generation opportunity to seek fundamental change in Britain’s relationship with the EU. The requests made by the Prime Minister will not secure a deal the British public deserve. The renegotiation process is effectively over and I will be focusing on campaigning for Britain to leave the EU.
It was the moment when Bernard Jenkin also publicly declared for Leave for the first time. ‘My view is that the letter was a turning point. I am now fully signing up to vote “Leave”,’ he told the Telegraph, adding: ‘I think most Conservative MPs will probably vote Leave.’
With Cameron’s negotiation aims falling short of even the relatively low bar he had set himself in May, many Vote Leave supporters were anxious to get on with the job of campaigning. Yet, it soon became clear that those running the show were not prepared to sanction the kind of activity the group’s members felt was needed.
In mid-November, Richard Murphy quit Vote Leave after learning the campaign would initially be focused on digital activity, with the ground game coming into play closer to the date of the referendum – which had still not been revealed. Within a month he was hired by Leave.EU as its director of field campaigning. ‘Leave.EU have already set up over 300 local groups and they are best placed to run an effective ground campaign. The campaign to leave the EU can only be won outside of Westminster, so a vibrant, professional grassroots organisation is critical,’ he said in a statement.
Vote Leave’s digital focus was partly tactical, but also a very real illustration of the lack of money the organisation had to play with.
‘I can understand why Richard Murphy felt those funding constraints in October/November because we couldn’t print a million correx boards and print five million leaflets and have, you know, a thousand street stall packs by tomorrow and ten thousand T-shirts,’ said Elliott.
With no ground war on the horizon, some in Vote Leave tried to seize the initiative and organise grassroots events. However, it was at this level that the lack of cooperation between the two Leave campaigns was starting to make a difference. ‘You were getting activists coming to us and saying, “Who do we support? Whose orders do we follow?”’ said Chilton. The Ashford councillor was so frustrated with the inactivity he wrote to all the political parties in his area to try to coordinate some action. ‘I said, “Any Brexiteers, there’s a meeting tomorrow night in the Queen’s Head pub, turn up.” We got a group but only half the people were there, because Leave.EU were organising a training session on exactly the same night in a pub two miles down the road,’ he remembered. Grievances were raised at the ExCom meetings, which, according to Chilton, ‘did get quite heated on occasions because politicians were frustrated. There were very stern words and often those stern words were met with a “So what?” approach and “We’re not doing it” – more so from Dom.’
As Labour Leave’s General Secretary was worrying about the absence of a ground campaign, John Mills, Vote Leave’s chairman, was questioning why there was such a determination not to work with Leave.EU. He understood that while Farage was not going to appeal to ‘liberal-minded metropolitan people’, the UKIP leader ‘does have a very substantial pull with the sort of people who switch their vote, and he was clearly very good’.
He added:
I certainly shared the view that you need two separate campaigns addressing different constituencies, but that you could have some sort of coordination, some sort of overarching body, that you wanted to avoid loads of resources going into competing designation applications, and that there really was a substantial role for those sort of UKIP-type of people, knocking on doors and acting as a ground war.
Mills tried to persuade the board there should be greater cooperation between the two campaigns, but found himself in a ‘minority of one’. He said: ‘Generally speaking, the rest of the board very much just took the line that was put forward by Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings, that there should be a sharp division.
Mills added: ‘It rumbled on. I remember one particular meeting when I know I did put this quite strongly but obviously it was getting nowhere. You didn’t need a vote from the board [on whether there should be a change in tactics] as it was quite clear that there was no support for it. Not much at all.’
It wasn’t just those from the Labour part of Vote Leave’s tent who were getting frustrated. Even some of the Tories who helped get the campaign off the ground were finding out it was not quite the organisation they had envisaged in the aftermath of the general election. Every Monday morning at 10 a.m., parliamentarians would descend on Vote Leave HQ for a briefing on the campaign’s activities. David Campbell Bannerman remembered one incident in particular which to him summed up the way he and other Tories were viewed.
‘You had a former Secretary of State, Owen Paterson, in this meeting, and Bernard Jenkin was behind me – he was one of the heads of Vote Leave at that point,’ remembered Campbell Bannerman.
The guys that were meant to be briefing us – Dominic Cummings, Matthew Elliott – were in a private meeting, though we could see them – with Dan Hannan and Doug Carswell. The four of them are in that meeting and we’re being briefed by Victoria the campaign lady, and Bernard and Owen were looking, thinking: ‘What the hell are they doing in that room? They’re meant to be briefing us and the parliamentary meeting.’ So it sent messages they weren’t particularly bothered, they had more important things to do.
Paterson agreed: ‘The exploratory committee became more and more just a fringe routine meeting which had to be gone through, and in the end it was dropped.’
There was one word Campbell Bannerman used to sum up the attitude of Vote Leave, and Cummings in particular: contempt. ‘Vote Leave was regarded as having contempt for people. Contempt was a word that kept coming back,’ he said, looking back.
Again, Paterson agreed: ‘There was no arguing: he was right, his ideas were right. He was so driven by his belief in his own ideas he was prepared to upset committed Eurosceptic MPs like Peter Bone and important Labour representatives like Kate Hoey.’
Tensions boiled over on Monday 7 December. It was one of the regular meetings between MPs and Vote Leave staff, this time with Cummings in attendance. Before the briefing began, the atmosphere was frosty. The previous day, the Mail on Sunday had run an article claiming that even if David Cameron was to back quitting the EU, Vote Leave wouldn’t want him to head up its campaign. The article had a quote from a senior source at Vote Leave, complete with a word usually reserved to describe Nigel Farage:
If Cameron thinks we’d want him leading the ‘leave’ campaign he’s deluded. He’s toxic on this issue and he would undermine the campaign. No one believes him on the EU any more. If there was a choice between who to put up in a television debate between Cameron and Boris, you’d want Boris every time.
Many Eurosceptic Tories were furious. Despite their wide and entrenched differences with Cameron over Europe, having their party leader described as ‘toxic’ by a campaign they were backing was a step too far. Just months before, he had won the Tories their first election since 1992, and they did not want to see such language hurled in the direction of the man who had secured such a feat. There was also a practical reason why you would not turn Cameron away from leading Vote Leave, if he so wanted. He was the Prime Minister, and on issues such as this, having the leader of the country as part of the campaign was deemed to be a bonus. ‘Most of us thought, “Who the hell is briefing that we don’t want the Prime Minister?” The Prime Minister is worth 20 per cent of the vote,’ said Campbell Bannerman.
Peter Bone raised the article with Cummings. He had already been feeling deflated before he saw the article, as Vote Leave were putting out leaflets he knew nothing about. ‘We were supposed to be there to do the ground work but then they produced a leaflet without even talking to me,’ he said. Richard Murphy had quit just a few weeks before, and Bone was beginning to realise that the ground campaign he
felt was essential if Vote Leave were going to win the referendum was nowhere near the top of the group’s priorities.
He was also, like many others, struggling to understand why Vote Leave was refusing to work with Leave.EU and UKIP. ‘We didn’t see how we could win without having UKIP,’ he said. For Bone, Vote Leave saying the Prime Minister was ‘deluded’ and ‘toxic’ was the final straw.
He remembered:
The Prime Minister was saying that ‘if I don’t get the right deal, basically I’ll lead the Out campaign’, which I thought was great news, and that was slagged off by Cummings in the press. I didn’t agree with that point of view, I thought that was a huge mistake and that was the thing that pushed me over the top.
Bone raised it in ‘a pretty angry way’, prompting Cummings to respond: ‘I don’t care, I don’t care what you do, we’re just going to go on and you can think what you think, I’m just going to do what the hell I want to do,’ according to Campbell Bannerman,
With parliamentarians watching, Cummings continued to tear a strip off Bone. Paterson, who was in the room, said: ‘He was gratuitously rude to Bone. Bone was a very committed backbencher who has got a group of MPs around him in Northamptonshire who get on with him very well and he was inevitably going to play a big role on the campaign. It was wholly and unnecessarily rude.’
Once Cummings had finished, Bone very quietly picked up his coat and left the room. It was the last time Bone was involved in Vote Leave, but not the last time he would be involved in a Leave campaign.
CHAPTER 19
Peter Bone was down, but he was not out. Vote Leave had never really suited him. He was a campaigner who felt comfortable manning a street stall, not a Westminster insider who could manipulate donors and the press. After walking out of Vote Leave, he could have gone across to Leave.EU, giving them some much-needed Conservative support. But why swap one campaign full of egos obsessing about designation for another? Sitting in his office in Portcullis House, decorated with posters and leaflets from previous victorious election campaigns, Bone and his political apprentice Tom Pursglove decided what was really needed was a new organisation entirely, which would focus purely on the ground campaign – one that would take the referendum out to the rest of the country. Public meetings, street stalls, leafleting, door knocking – all the tactics and techniques Bone was comfortable with. It would be a grassroots campaign, hence the name: Grassroots Out – often shortened to GO.
Bone said:
We decided we would set Grassroots Out up to campaign at a grassroots level on a cross-party issue, because we knew that from our own area there were lots of people who were Labour, UKIP and non-aligned who wanted to do it. I wanted to replicate what we were doing locally, which was having organised canvassing all the time. We thought if we could set up groups all round the country we could get a proper grassroots campaign, so that was the point of it.
Bone and Pursglove knew the failing of Vote Leave and Leave.EU was that they were both too tribal, and if their new project was to work it had to be cross-party from the off. A call went out to Kate Hoey, who Bone knew was getting just as frustrated with Vote Leave’s lack of a ground campaign as he was. The proposition was music to Hoey’s ears, and the three met in her office to iron out the details. It wasn’t just Labour and Tory figures Bone wanted to get signed up to Grassroots Out: it was also Ukippers. Bone and Hoey were both very much in the camp that felt Eurosceptics from across the spectrum should be working together, not at cross-purposes. Bone and Pursglove met with Farage at the Blue Boar Hotel near St James’s Park to discuss their venture, which was met with enthusiastic support from the UKIP leader.
There was one other failing that was also common to both Vote Leave and Leave.EU – they were both obsessed with securing the official designation. According to Bone, when Grassroots Out was formed: ‘There was no intention of going for designation whatsoever. It never crossed our minds.’
On 16 December 2015, Grassroots Out Ltd was registered with Companies House, with Bone and Pursglove listed as directors. It was just nine days since Bone had walked out of Vote Leave.
With Tory, Labour and UKIP Eurosceptics all on board, Bone organised a meeting with representatives from Vote Leave to inform them of their plans, and to ask if anyone would like to be involved in the activities they had planned. Joining Bone in his office were Pursglove, Hoey, Brendan Chilton from Labour Leave, and John Mills and Daniel Hodson from Vote Leave.
‘Everyone was in favour of that in the room, we all thought it was marvellous because it finally meant these two warring tribes would have something to work through,’ said Chilton.
On 4 January, the group was announced to the media, with supportive quotes from Bone, Pursglove, Hoey and Farage. ‘At the moment, every day that passes while we are not organised at the grassroots is a wasted opportunity to spread our message on the ground, gifting the advantage to our referendum opponents. GO will help to redress that imbalance,’ said Bone in an article for MailOnline.
Two days later, Pursglove, Hoey and Farage penned an article for the Telegraph in which they announced that Grassroots Out would hold a public meeting in Kettering, Northamptonshire, on 23 January. ‘For it is only by leaving Westminster and taking the debate across the country that we will win,’ the three wrote. Set to speak were Bone, Pursglove, Hoey, Farage and Tory MP Philip Hollobone, while the event would be chaired by UKIP MEP Margot Parker.
With Farage backing GO, it was no surprise that in its regular mail-out to supporters Leave.EU welcomed the new organisation, describing it as ‘a group we look forward to working closely with in the run-up to the referendum’. The UKIP leader had spotted an opportunity to reboot his attempt at being a key player in the referendum. Instead of creating a group and hoping Tories and Labour MPs would back it – like Leave.EU – he would align himself with one created by representatives of other parties. But what to do about Leave.EU and Banks? He couldn’t just drop them now Grassroots Out was on the scene. He decided to merge the two together, and Banks agreed to pump in some money to get it off the ground.
‘Nigel didn’t think we were going to win the designation without some form of political coverage and of course at Leave.EU we didn’t have any Conservatives,’ said Banks. ‘So they came up with this idea of Grassroots Out as a way of bringing in Conservatives, Labour and UKIP, as that would give Vote Leave a run for its money.’
Leave.EU co-chair Richard Tice was extremely enthusiastic. ‘I thought it was great,’ he said:
It was a logical answer to politicians’ frustrations. It was very easy to say Leave.EU is what it is and where it is in the whole thing and it made sense to say Grassroots Out was a vehicle for politicians who didn’t agree with Vote Leave to come to help.
Keen to get support from his party, Farage invited Bone and Pursglove along to the UKIP MEPs and NEC away days in Bristol on 13–14 January. The Tory duo made a presentation to the UKIP delegation on the morning of the second day, emphasising that this group would not be going for designation and was merely a vehicle to organise ground campaigning and public meetings.
On Saturday 23 January, Grassroots Out hosted its first public rally at the Kettering Conference Centre. Before its 2 p.m. start time, Farage, Bone and Pursglove went for walkabouts in Wellingborough and Kettering to publicise their new group. Activists wore bright grass-green coloured T-shirts and waved balloons as the Brexiteers pounded the streets and posed for photographs. Farage lived up to his reputation and popped into the Little Ale House in Wellingborough for a pre-rally pint.
Also in Kettering was Chilton, who had caught the train up from London. He was supposed to be arriving with a cheque from Vote Leave as part of an agreement Mills had secured with Elliott to help get the group off the ground, but no money was handed over.
Chilton says:
I was instructed to go and meet Matthew Elliott by John to go and collect a cheque for £20,000 and to take it to the first big rally in Kettering. I called Matthew the night be
fore and said: ‘When am I meeting you?’ – in fact I had called him several times and text him but got no reply – and that Saturday morning I came into London, I was at St Pancras station, the train was due to leave in half an hour. I kept texting: ‘Matthew, where’s the cheque? Who’s coming to give it to me?’ and I never got that cheque.
Upon arriving in Kettering, Chilton met up with Hoey and the pair shared a taxi. On hearing that the money from Elliott had not materialised, Hoey was furious, but it also confirmed to her what she had been thinking for a while: she needed to quit Vote Leave. As the cab got closer to the conference centre, Chilton suddenly realised he had no idea what he was about to encounter. He had never met Farage, Banks or Andy Wigmore before, and the only things he had heard about them were negative.
Chilton recalled:
Prior to getting involved with Leave.EU and Grassroots we had been told that Leave.EU and Arron and Nigel were devils with horns and we mustn’t go near them. It was sort of like Plato’s cave – we mustn’t venture out! As we were going across to the rally ground, I said to Kate: ‘What the bloody hell are we going to do now we’re here? We’re in the heart of the empire!’ And she said: ‘I don’t know, we’re just going to have to go with it.’ We got there and they were nice as pie.
By the time the clock struck 2 p.m. and the speakers were ready to take the stage, two and a half thousand people had filled the conference centre. Along with the six names previously announced, DUP MP Sammy Wilson had been added to the line-up, giving the group an excuse to walk on to the stage to the theme tune from The Magnificent Seven.
Margot Parker spoke first, and fluffed her first line when she welcomed everyone to the ‘Cottering Conference Centre’. Up next was Sammy Wilson, followed by Philip Hollobone (in a Union Jack sports jacket), Peter Bone, Tom Pursglove, Kate Hoey and then Nigel Farage – who ended his speech by getting the audience to shout: ‘We want our country back!’ As the standing ovation came to end, Farage indulged his showman side: ‘All the speakers that were advertised have turned up and spoken, but I might just have one more speaker for you. One little surprise up our sleeve. Are you ready to welcome another guest? Well, I’m pleased, because we’ve got a big hitter,’ he said.