The Brexit Club
Page 17
Campbell Bannerman, who wasn’t on the board, was trying his best to find out what was happening, as all he and others were hearing was that Cummings had been sacked. He said:
I was getting these phone calls from Steve [Baker] and others while all this was going on and it was slightly comic: ‘Has he been fired or not fired?’ or ‘Where are we?’ It just kept going on and on. It was like a Houdini act and he managed to get out.
It fell to Jenkin to lay it out in plain language to Cummings. The Tory MP happened to be in Baker’s office when Elliott rang to discuss how to move forward, and Jenkin took his opportunity to speak to the Vote Leave pair:
I had a very difficult conversation with Matthew and Dominic to persuade them that they just had to bite the bullet and do this. I don’t think Dominic really ever forgave me for it. I said, ‘Look, if you don’t agree to do this I think this whole campaign is going to collapse and it will be over, there is no option.’ Dominic, very gamely, finally submitted and it saved the campaign.
A compromise was reached. Cummings and Elliott would stay on in their respective roles as campaign director and chief executive but stand down from the board. Elliott later downplayed the reshuffle, and said:
That was basically part of a broad restructure. If you notice Dom and I set it up as the first two directors, then the idea was that we would always have a board, where the executives sit in attendance but don’t actually sit on the board as leading directors. If you look at any charity, that’s how it’s set up – trustees are sort of non-executive and not paid to do what they do.
While the Tory members of Vote Leave were happy with the way the matter had been resolved, the Labour representatives were not. Tensions had already been exacerbated by Labour Leave holding its own campaign launch on Wednesday 20 January.
As Brendan Chilton put it:
We had our little mini-launch in January, which some people in Vote Leave objected to because we were part of their campaign – ‘We’ve already launched, why are you launching again?’ they said. We knew we need our own identity in all this if we’re to win Labour voters. Unfortunately, relations broke down because we were very ambitious, we wanted huge leafleting agendas, ground wars going on, and the strategy of Vote Leave, while commendable in some respects, didn’t have the focus on the ground war which we felt was important. There was also then clashes of personality, there were growing concerns that the two main Leave campaigns weren’t working together.
The introduction of Lawson as the new chairman did little to quell fears that Vote Leave was essentially a Tory campaign with a few Labour people tacked on simply to appear cross-party for the purposes of designation.
On Tuesday 2 February, Mills, Chilton, Hoey, former Labour minister Nigel Griffiths and trade unionist John Sweeney met to air their frustrations. The meeting was a blood-letting. Hoey was furious with Vote Leave’s constant refusal to work with any of the other campaigns or UKIP, and announced she was quitting Labour Leave. Mills managed to persuade her not to make the decision public, something she reluctantly agreed to. Chilton, Griffiths and Sweeney told Mills they would work for Vote Leave for another three weeks – to just after the conclusion of David Cameron’s renegotiation with Brussels – then think again. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have another offer – Banks had promised Labour Leave £30,000 a month plus an office across the River Thames in Millbank Tower at no charge – on the condition that the organisation switched its support from Vote Leave to Leave.EU. Such a move would ruin Vote Leave’s claim to be a cross-party campaign group, and strengthen the hand of Leave.EU when it came to applying for official designation.
After the meeting, Mills fired off a furious email to Elliott and Cummings, beginning by rebuking Vote Leave’s campaign director for a text message about Griffiths.
[The meeting was] not helped by a text sent by Dominic I think yesterday with another disparaging comment about Nigel. Dominic – What on earth are you doing, generating more and more ill feeling like this entirely unnecessarily? I thought you had promised to stop doing this sort of thing. Don’t you realise that this kind of behaviour puts more and more damaging and unnecessary strain on everyone? It certainly makes my life more difficult, entails me spending more and more inordinate amounts of time pacifying people and defending policies in some of which I don’t really believe, and wearing down such credibility as I still have, because of the need to undo the damage to relationships which your insensitivity causes.
The bottom line is that Labour Leave are fed up with the way they have been treated by VL [Vote Leave] and the intransigent and insensitive – from their perspective – policies it pursues – unfortunately typified by the remark referred to above.
The email went on to list the flare-ups from the meeting, and ended with a clear warning:
LL [Labour Leave] is as sick of all the divisions there are in the Leave camp as many other people, and if nothing is done between now and the end of February to improve relations with Leave.EU – which incidentally now has wider and wider trade union support, which is a big pull for LL staff – there will be another crunch point.
The warnings went unheeded, and on Wednesday 4 February, Hoey told The Spectator she had quit the campaign group. ‘I have made it clear I was not prepared to work with Vote Leave,’ she said. In an interview published in the Telegraph the next day, she went even further in her criticism.
Citing Elliott and Cummings as the reasons for her departure, Hoey said:
It’s about style of campaigning and it’s about the lies some of them have been saying. They are always trying to do down Leave.EU by saying it’s a UKIP front. We have been working now for a while with all these people and it’s not true. This week, there have been a few emails exchanged, just showing Dominic particularly at his most strange. We have been pushing to get back some kind of unity. But every time there have been discussions going on and things have been doing quite well, there is some vitriol and it all stops again.
With Hoey gone, Labour Leave’s position within Vote Leave was hanging by a thread – and, with it, the chance of the campaign securing designation as the official Leave campaign. The pressure to make amends was on, especially as, finally, the Cabinet cavalry were coming.
CHAPTER 21
It had been almost two months since David Cameron had set out his negotiation goals at Chatham House, and Eurosceptic members of his Cabinet were getting restless. On 18 December 2015, just over a month after the speech, the Prime Minister travelled to Brussels for more face-to-face talks with EU leaders. In a statement after the summit, the Prime Minister effectively announced the referendum vote would be in 2016 – with some time in June the most likely date.
While the negotiation aims and date of the referendum were starting to become clearer, the issue of whether Cabinet ministers would be able to campaign with their consciences instead of toeing the government line was still a matter of debate. Before the Commons broke up for Christmas, Iain Duncan Smith told Cameron he needed to be decisive about the issue:
I said to him, ‘You need to make a feature out of this because you’re going to have to do it, so why don’t you do it as a positive rather than a negative? Just say you’re going to do it and not have it dragged out of you.’ He kept saying, ‘I’ll think about it.’
It wasn’t just those inside Cabinet telling Cameron to suspend collective responsibility. Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, penned an article for the Telegraph on 19 December in which he said: ‘It has made sense for collective responsibility to apply during the renegotiation but as the negotiations draw to a close, the Cabinet and other ministers should be given the freedom to express their views. As in the 1975 referendum, the Cabinet must be given the “freedom to differ”.’
On 27 December, former party leader Michael Howard added his voice to the growing clamour, telling the BBC: ‘When it comes to the campaign, if there are Cabinet ministers who feel strongly that we should vote to leave the EU, they should certa
inly be allowed to do so without losing their seat in the Cabinet.’
Yet Downing Street were only offering vague assurances over the matter, and there were fears that even if Cameron did lift collective responsibility, it would only be in the short campaign ahead of the vote – meaning ministers would be tied in to supporting a deal they didn’t agree with until virtually the eleventh hour.
By the first week of January 2016, Leader of the Commons Chris Grayling and Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers had had enough. The pair may not have been the highest-profile members of Cameron’s top team, but their Euroscepticism was well-known around Westminster – and the Cabinet table. Daniel Hannan was a particular fan of Villiers, who had joined the government as a Transport minister in 2010: ‘The first thing she did was to take the EU flags off all the buildings under her ministry’s control. Now can you imagine any male politician doing that and then not telling anyone? I only know about that because a civil servant told me,’ he said.
On Sunday 3 January, Grayling called Cameron’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and demanded a meeting with the Prime Minister for the following day. He was going to give him an ultimatum: publicly commit to lifting collective responsibility as soon as the deal is done, or accept his resignation.
On the morning of Monday 4th, Grayling met with Cameron in Downing Street and set out his position. The PM was not entirely surprised by Grayling’s ultimatum, but did not give any ground initially. He asked Grayling to come and see him again that afternoon. In the meantime, Villiers called Cameron and issued a similar demand. Cameron was boxed in. To lose one Cabinet minister would be embarrassing; to lose two would be damaging.
Cameron, fearing a mass walk-out of Eurosceptic Cabinet ministers, agreed to the demands, and in the Commons the next day gave the assurance many had been waiting for. Speaking from the Despatch Box, he said:
My intention is that at the conclusion of the renegotiation, the government should reach a clear recommendation and then the referendum will be held. But it is in the nature of a referendum that it is the people, not the politicians, who decide.
As I indicated before Christmas, there will be a clear government position, but it will be open to individual ministers to take a different personal position while remaining part of the government.
The relief among Cabinet ministers on the Leave side of the argument was palpable. Since his appointment after the general election, Culture Secretary John Whittingdale had been mulling over whether he would sacrifice a job he loved for a cause he believed in. As well as being a Maastricht rebel in the 1990s, Whittingdale had served as political secretary to Margaret Thatcher from 1988 to 1992 – meaning he was by her side as she drew up the infamous Bruges speech in which she set her face against further European integration.
He said:
Would I have resigned from Cabinet if I had been told that I had to support the renegotiated package if I remained in the Cabinet? I would have found that incredibly hard. I wouldn’t want to give up this job but on the other hand, I was told I was throwing my career away in 1992 because of my views on Europe and I’ve always been consistent and I can’t see how I could change that now.
Grayling was the first out of the blocks to hint he was preparing to vote to leave. In an article for the Telegraph on 13 January, he claimed: ‘Simply staying in the EU with our current terms of membership unchanged would be disastrous for Britain.’ It was the first time a Cabinet member had spoken so openly about wanting the UK to quit the EU. On 4 February, Whittingdale followed suit, telling The House magazine:
I have a track record where I’ve been highly critical of the way the EU works and I have opposed measures for closer integration and it certainly needs reform. I hope the Prime Minister will get that agreement and then I’ll look at it when he comes back with it.
When asked whether he would rule out breaking ranks with the Prime Minister on the issue, he said: ‘I wouldn’t.’
The next EU summit was pencilled in for 18 February and, leading up to the Brussels meeting, Cameron embarked on a frenzy of activity as he tried to shore up his renegotiation. On Friday 29 January, he held talks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker over whether the UK could hold back in-work benefits from EU migrants. This ‘emergency brake’ – which would only affect access to welfare – would allow the UK to stop paying benefits to new migrants if public services were under excessive strain.
As well as needing permission from other member states before the brake could be activated, the proposal was potentially open to a legal challenge, as it discriminated against foreign workers. Iain Duncan Smith, who was involved in the Downing Street discussions over this measure, repeatedly warned that Brits could be affected by this change.
He said:
I was sat quite deeply in those benefit negotiations throughout, and they kept trying every permutation of ‘Could we introduce this stuff but not introduce it also for British citizens?’ and everything else, and I said: ‘Well, you’re going to have tens of thousands to a hundred thousand British citizens adversely affected by this, and I don’t think that’s a very good message for us to say that we’ve gone for reform of the European Union but, by the way, we are going to give a bunch of British citizens a good long kick while we’re at it’ – it’s not really saleable. You’ll be astonished how Downing Street turned itself into knots over this and I kept looking at them all and my team kept coming back saying: ‘This doesn’t work, lots of British affected’ until my team put forward a proposal. I said at the end of the day the best thing you can do is treaty change.
On Sunday 31 January – after failing to reach an agreement with Juncker over the deal in Brussels – Cameron invited European Council President Donald Tusk for dinner in Downing Street. Over a meal of smoked salmon, beef with vegetables, and pear and apple crumble, the two tried to iron out their differences, with the emergency brake the main area of disagreement. It was a relatively quick discussion, with Tusk only staying in Downing Street for an hour and forty-five minutes, but it was enough time for the Prime Minister to get agreement that the current levels of immigration from the EU – 265,000 a year according to the most recent figures – would be sufficient to trigger the brake. ‘This is a significant breakthrough, meaning the Prime Minister can deliver on his commitment to restrict in-work benefits to EU migrants for four years,’ said a Downing Street spokesperson.
Cameron may have been feeling optimistic, but Tusk was clearly enjoying the drama: ‘No deal yet. Intensive work in next 24 crucial. #UKinEU,’ he tweeted upon leaving No. 10. Throughout the next day, UK officials worked with EU counterparts to try to nail down exactly what would be part of the final negotiation. At 5.44 p.m. on Monday 1 February, Tusk teased those waiting to see what was in the deal: ‘Tomorrow around noon I will table proposal for a new settlement for #UKinEU. Good progress last 24 hours but still outstanding issues,’ he tweeted.
2 February was a crucial day for Cameron’s negotiation, and the morning papers were not kind. ‘Is that it then, Mr Cameron?’ was the Daily Mail’s headline, while The Times ran with: ‘Cabinet rift as Cameron softens deal on migrants’. At 9 a.m., Boris Johnson appeared on radio station LBC for a phone-in show. For Johnson, one of the key changes he had been hoping to see was the reassertion of the sovereignty of the UK Parliament over the EU. Cameron’s negotiations seemed to be offering only a pooled veto: the UK would be able to block proposed EU laws, but only if it could persuade 55 per cent of the other members to sign up in agreement.
‘A red card that needs thirteen other countries waving it too is not a win. A democracy would have an outright veto,’ said UKIP’s Gawain Towler. On LBC, Johnson revealed his own scepticism about the deal – after engaging in some typical sarcasm: ‘I am, unfortunately, not able to give you a full read-out because I haven’t yet been able to absorb the full, quivering magnitude,’ he said about the draft package on offer.
When asked about the red card system, Johnson replied:
While Johnson was on the air, the Cabinet gathered in Downing Street for its weekly meeting. With the draft deal all but signed off, Grayling felt that collective ministerial responsibility should be lifted immediately. He repeatedly tried to catch Cameron’s eye as the meeting progressed, until eventually the Prime Minister relented and allowed him to speak. After Grayling asked whether now was the time to allow ministers to speak out, Cameron shut him down, telling him there were still details to be sorted out and ‘we don’t want you tying yourself up in knots’.
Duncan Smith shared Grayling’s frustrations and, away from the Cabinet table, spoke to the Prime Minister.
I said: ‘This is wholly wrong,’ and we had a slight falling out over it at the time. It was very much my view that it was just not good, it was bad faith from the government to still keep us trapped in the Cabinet while you were busy selling something about the referendum which we couldn’t comment on. That was it really, and at that point I felt a bit upset by their behaviour.
With Cabinet over, Cameron left Downing Street and travelled not to Parliament to give a formal statement on the deal, but to Chippenham in Wiltshire, where he would make a speech on the renegotiation. As he left No. 10, lobby journalists entered to get an advanced look at what was being proposed, which would be revealed by Tusk later that morning.