by Owen Bennet
With what was becoming his usual Twitter flourish, Tusk published the draft deal at 11.35 a.m. with the words: ‘To be, or not to be together, that is the question… My proposal for a new settlement for #UKinEU’. The main pillars of the deal were: an emergency brake on in-work benefits, with ‘gradually increasing access’ for up to four years if migration was placing pressure on member states; child benefit would now be paid at the equivalent rate of the country where the youngster lived, rather than the UK level; no more UK bailouts of the Eurozone; a red card system which would allow national parliaments making up more than 55 per cent of votes on the council to be able to veto EU legislation; and an end to ‘ever-closer union’ for the UK.
At 1 p.m., as Cameron began delivering his speech on the deal in Chippenham, his long-suffering Europe Minister David Lidington was fielding angry questions on the draft agreement in the Commons. Steve Baker decided to forgo any forensic analysis of the package and went straight for a headline-grabbing intervention: ‘This in-at-all-costs deal looks funny, it smells funny, it might be superficially shiny on the outside but poke it and it’s soft in the middle. Will my Right Honourable Friend admit to the House that he has been reduced to polishing poo?’
Lidington responded: ‘No, I don’t, and I rather suspect that whatever kind of statement or response to a question had been delivered by me or any of my colleagues from the Despatch Box my Honourable Friend would have been polishing that particular question many days ago.’
At that same moment, Cameron was trying the polish the deal in Chippenham: ‘I can say, hand on heart, I have delivered the commitments that I made in my manifesto.’
The Prime Minister then gave it the most full-throated endorsement he could think of: ‘If I could get these terms for British membership I would opt in to the European Union,’ he said.
The next day, the Prime Minister was at the Despatch Box in the Commons preparing to outline the deal to MPs – many of whom were angry that he had waited a day to face their scrutiny. It had not been a good morning for the Prime Minister, who had endured another terrible set of front pages. While the Express headline, ‘Cameron’s EU deal is a joke’, was to be expected – the paper had long called for the UK to quit the EU – even outlets that didn’t usually splash on politics gave him a kicking. ‘EU are joking’ said the Metro, while The Sun mocked up Cameron as Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring along with the headline: ‘Who do EU think you are kidding, Mr Cameron?’ The only piece of solace was on the front of The Guardian, which led on Home Secretary Theresa May backing the deal.
In the Commons, all eyes were on Boris Johnson. It was clear that his calls for parliamentary sovereignty to be restored had not been met, but it was still not known whether he would go the extra inch and actually campaign for a leave vote. An appeal for him to commit to remain came not from the Tory benches, but from the opposition, when Labour’s Alan Johnson, who was leading his party’s campaign for a Remain vote, got to his feet. After pointing out that Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley, and his brother, Tory MP Jo, had both committed to Remain, he asked Cameron to ‘have a word with his Honourable Friend to tell him about the importance of family solidarity and of joining the swelling ranks of Johnsons for Europe’.
A few moments later, the former London Mayor stood up to ask Cameron a question:
Since you have been so kind as to call me, Mr Speaker, perhaps I may ask the Prime Minister how the changes resulting from the negotiation will restrict the volume of legislation coming from Brussels and change the treaties so as to assert the sovereignty of this House of Commons and these Houses of Parliament?
Cameron responded:
Asserting the sovereignty of this House is something that we did by introducing the European Union Act 2011. I am keen to do even more to put it beyond doubt that this House of Commons is sovereign. We will look to do that at the same time as concluding the negotiations.
The Prime Minister ended his answer with a passionate flourish: ‘I am not saying that this deal is perfect. I am not saying that the European Union will be perfect after this deal – it certainly won’t be – but will the British position be better and stronger? Yes, it will.’
Boris Johnson, who was sitting next to arch-Eurosceptic Bernard Jenkin, leaned back in his seat at the back of the Commons with a slight frown on his face.
With the draft deal in place, Cameron embarked on a mission to try to convince as many of his Cabinet as possible – and Johnson – not to campaign for Leave after the negotiation was signed off at the European summit in Brussels scheduled for 18–19 February. One of the key people he wanted on board was Justice Secretary Michael Gove. As rumours started to appear in the press that Gove was leaning towards Leave, Downing Street began applying pressure on him to declare for Remain. In the run-up to a speech the Prime Minister was due to give on prison reform on Monday 8 February, Cameron’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn called Gove to discuss the topic – it was, after all, in his remit as Justice Secretary. As the conversation came to an end, Llewellyn asked Gove if he could clear up the rumours that he was planning to vote Leave. According to a source, Gove replied: ‘Sorry, I can’t do that, I’m genuinely torn.’ The Justice Secretary then explained that if it wasn’t for the fact that it was his old friend David Cameron putting the deal forward, he would definitely be campaigning for Leave. ‘Llewellyn was quite shocked’, said the source, ‘and told Michael he better come in and see the boss.’
Gove went in to see Cameron after the prison reform speech had been delivered, and the pair were joined by Chancellor George Osborne for the crunch meeting. According to a source, Cameron appealed to Gove’s sense of loyalty, reminding him that he had helped build the modernising Conservative agenda and that a split over Europe would undermine the whole project. The Justice Secretary left the meeting still undecided about what to do, but favouring a Leave vote.
Boris Johnson was also afforded a Downing Street meeting that week, but instead of the No. 10 treatment he was granted an audience with Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Letwin in No. 9. On Thursday 11 February, Johnson and Letwin discussed the plan to return sovereignty to the UK Parliament, but, like Gove after his meeting with Cameron, the London Mayor left unsure of which way to vote, but also leaning towards Leave.
Those at the top of Vote Leave were watching the activity taking place across the River Thames with a keen interest. Dominic Cummings had been in contact with the Justice Secretary about coming out for Leave for ‘several weeks’, according to Matthew Elliott, but Gove had offered no guarantee that he would be joining the campaign.
There were, however, four of Cameron’s team who were definitely going to campaign for Out – Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Theresa Villiers and John Whittingdale. The four began meeting in Duncan Smith’s spacious office to discuss tactics for announcing their decision. Whereas the ExCom committee would meet under a painting of King Charles I in Owen Paterson’s office, the Cabinet ministers conducted their plotting in view of a stuffed toy cockerel – the mascot for Duncan Smith’s beloved Tottenham Hotspur. ‘I convened it as the senior Cabinet minister, as I thought collectively we should be talking, because we were isolated at that moment and it’s important to know if we do something we should do it together. That was the plan,’ said Duncan Smith.
One of the key discussions was when exactly the four would be able to break from collective responsibility and start campaigning. If Cameron finalised the deal on Friday 19 February, it could be another three days until the next Cabinet meeting – giving the Prime Minister even more time to talk up his deal while they were gagged. After pressure from Duncan Smith and Graham Brady, Cameron agreed to hold a Cabinet meeting on Friday evening upon his return from Brussels.
As the week leading up the Brussels summit began, it was still no clearer as to whether Johnson and Gove would be joining Duncan Smith, Whittingdale, Grayling and Villiers in campaigning for Leave. On Tuesday 16th, Gove and his wife Sarah Vine went for dinner at Johnson’
s Islington home. As Vine revealed in her Mail on Sunday column, the two MPs spent much of the night talking about the deal, and whether the ‘red card’ achieved by Cameron really did signify a return of sovereignty to the UK. According to Vine, Johnson was ‘very agitated, genuinely tortured as to which way to go’.
During the dinner, Johnson received a phone call from Letwin to further explain the sovereignty deal. Referring to Gove, Johnson said: ‘I’ve got the Lord Chancellor here,’ before putting Letwin on speakerphone so he could set out the reasons for backing the negotiation to both of them simultaneously. The phone call made little difference to Gove, who was past the point where he could be convinced of the virtue of the deal. For him, it was just a matter of whether he was willing to sacrifice his friendship with Cameron.
The time for making a decision was fast approaching and on Wednesday 18th, the day after the dinner with Gove, Johnson visited Cameron in Downing Street. Wearing a Transport for London woolly hat, Johnson was kept waiting outside the famous black door for a good thirty seconds before being let in at just before 10 a.m. After an hour of talks with Cameron, in which he again pushed him over sovereignty issues, Johnson left, telling journalists: ‘I’ll be back – no deal as far as I know.’
At 1.20 p.m. on Thursday 19th, Cameron stepped out of a car in Brussels to begin the final steps in getting the deal rubber-stamped by the twenty-seven other EU leaders. The Prime Minister knew securing a robust agreement – and being seen to have fought the good fight in doing so – was essential to give the Remain side a boost in the polls. Public opinion at that moment seemed to be evenly split, and of the six opinion polls conducted since the draft deal had been announced, Remain was ahead in three, while Leave was in the lead in the other three.
Any hope Cameron had of a quick agreement evaporated quickly, and at 9 p.m. he was still locked in talks with his foreign counterparts, discussing the mechanics, morality and legality of the ‘emergency brake’. Unfortunately for Cameron, there was the small matter of the migration crisis continuing to affect countries in eastern, southern and central Europe, meaning discussion of the UK’s renegotiation was suspended for five and half hours. At 4.30 a.m., Cameron left the venue to get some sleep, before returning at 9 the next morning.
While Cameron was battling against a lack of sleep, Gove and Johnson were fighting with their consciences. Both were coming under equal pressure from Downing Street, who knew that should one fall in line, it might stop the other from breaking rank as well. On the Thursday evening, when Cameron was settling down to a marathon dinner with other EU leaders, Osborne was speaking to Gove, again trying to convince him to back the deal. The Justice Secretary told the Chancellor he was ‘99 per cent’ certain he would vote Leave. Osborne asked if there was anything he could do to encourage the 1 per cent that would campaign for Remain, to which Gove replied, ‘No,’ adding that this was something he needed to work through himself.
By Friday morning, Gove had made up his mind. As close a friend as he was with Cameron, and as much as he did not want to undermine him, he simply could not advocate a Remain vote in the EU referendum. He would be campaigning for Leave. Gove planned to tell Cameron of his decision face to face as soon as the Prime Minister returned from Brussels, and he set about drafting a lengthy statement explaining his decision.
As Cameron was working on his EU deal and Gove was preparing his statement explaining his decision, the other Cabinet ministers planning to campaign for Leave were putting together their own plan of action. At 11 a.m., Duncan Smith was joined in his office by Grayling, Whittingdale and another high-profile Conservative prepared to call for Leave: Priti Patel, the Employment Minister, who attended Cabinet. Although a Conservative Party member in her teens, Patel’s first job in politics had been with the Referendum Party – the single-issue vehicle set up by Sir James Goldsmith in the mid-1990s. As the name suggested, its sole policy was to secure a referendum on the UK’s EU membership. Patel acted as the party’s head of press, but after the election – in which the Referendum Party failed to win any seats – she moved back to the Conservatives as a press officer for new leader William Hague. Elected to the Commons in 2010, she quickly established a reputation as a no-nonsense Thatcherite, with strong right-wing views on law and order. Given her Eurosceptic past, it was no surprise she was prepared to vote Leave.
Duncan Smith, Whittingdale, Villiers, Grayling and Patel: they were the five preparing to call for Leave as soon as Cameron returned. But at that moment, no one was sure about Gove and Johnson. Duncan Smith had been to see Gove just days before the meeting in his office: ‘He told me he was torn, genuinely torn. I thought he would probably stay,’ he said, before adding: ‘I didn’t know what Boris was doing. I spoke to Boris on a couple of occasions and he said he was seriously thinking about it, so that was all still in the air at the time.’
As the day wore on, the rumours and speculation that had been the currency in Westminster for much of that week intensified. It was not just a matter of who would declare for Leave, but how they would do it. Grassroots Out had organised a rally in the Queen Elizabeth II Centre for that evening, and promised a special guest. With the venue just a minute’s walk from where the final Cabinet meeting was due to be held, hacks were speculating that a Cabinet minister would address the expected thousands of Eurosceptics. If true, it would be hugely symbolic, and put the Farage-backed campaign in pole position to get the official designation.
Over in Brussels, talks were taking so long that a planned English breakfast to finalise the deal turned into an English lunch, and then an English dinner. At 4.23 p.m., Cameron announced that as ‘negotiations are continuing into this evening … a Cabinet meeting won’t be possible tonight’. German leader Angel Merkel was clearly fed up with waiting for an English meal of any description, and at 5.45 p.m. popped out of the talks to get some chips from a nearby café. As the German leader was filling up on fries, the Queen Elizabeth II Centre was filling up with people. While 1,500 Eurosceptics made their way through the glass doors at the front of the building, word leaked out of a potentially game-changing moment in the EU referendum campaign: Gove was going to campaign for Leave. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg and the Huffington Post’s Paul Waugh both received tip-offs about the Justice Secretary’s plan.
Gove was baffled as to how the news got out. A source close to the new Leave advocate said the leak had not come from his team, and they believed that Downing Street had leaked the story to try to bounce Gove one way or the other. No. 10 denied this. Either way, one of the two big cats was out the bag – and all eyes now turned to Johnson.
At 7 p.m., the Grassroots Out rally kicked off with documentary maker Martin Durkin appealing for money to help fund his latest project, Brexit: The Movie. He was followed by the usual Eurosceptic suspects: David Campbell Bannerman, Peter Bone, Tom Pursglove, Kate Hoey and others. The venue was so rammed that Tory MP David Davis struggled to get past security, as did ITV’s political editor Robert Peston.
In Brussels, EU leaders finally sat down for their English dinner at just after 8.30 p.m., with a deal seemingly agreed. By the time Nigel Farage took to the stage in London, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė tweeted: ‘Agreement #UKinEU done. Drama over.’
The drama was not over in London, though. Throughout the evening, journalists at the Grassroots Out rally had been speculating about who the special guest might be. It was clearly not going to be a Cabinet minister, seeing as collective responsibility was still in place. It was not only hacks who had been intrigued. Earlier that day, Whittingdale had asked his Eurosceptic Cabinet colleagues if they had secretly signed up to appear. ‘We were all sat there saying: “It’s not me, it’s not me” – it turned out it was none of us. The rumour was it was Chris Grayling but it was never Chris. It was bollocks actually.’
At just after 9.30 p.m., Farage ended his speech by highlighting the cross-party focus of Grassroots Out. ‘Our last speaker tonight very much proves that point. Our last speaker to
night is without doubt one of the greatest orators in this country.’ At the back of the room, a cry of ‘He’s an anti-Semite’ went up from a member of the audience. Some turned round to see who the shout was aimed at, and their eyes fell upon George Galloway.
The left-wing firebrand was an even more controversial and divisive figure than Farage. After sixteen years as a Labour MP, Galloway was kicked out of the party in 2003 for suggesting UK troops should ‘refuse to obey illegal orders’ in Iraq. He then joined Respect, winning the seat of Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005 general election. His notoriety in the eyes of the public grew with an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, in which he performed a dance routine while wearing a skin-tight red leotard, and asked a fellow contestant, ‘Would you like me to be the cat?’ before miming licking a saucer of milk in a role-playing game. He lost his seat in Parliament in 2010, but returned after winning the Bradford West by-election in 2012. He had long criticised the foreign policy of Israel and its behaviour towards Palestine, and in 2014 he ‘declared Bradford an Israel-free zone’ in a speech in Leeds. ‘We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel. And you have to do the same,’ he said.
Despite deep and significant political differences with Nigel Farage, the pair had always got on well at a personal level. Farage first met Galloway after they appeared on the BBC’s Question Time show together in Edinburgh in 2013. The UKIP leader said:
I sat and had a long talk with him after Question Time. It was very interesting. I thought: ‘I disagree with this guy fundamentally but he’s the only person in this room I want to talk to.’ He’s self-made in many ways of what he does. Interesting, bright, fantastic orator, some of his views I find really difficult but some of mine he probably finds really difficult, that’s the way human beings are.