The Brexit Club

by Owen Bennet

  Farage had decided to call Galloway to ask if he wanted to appear at the rally after seeing him proclaiming his Euroscepticism on the Sunday Politics show on 7 February. ‘I organised it a week before but didn’t tell anybody. I spoke to lots of people but George was very much a part of my thinking for doing that,’ said Farage.

  Wearing his trademark fedora, Galloway took to the stage to a mixture of boos and applause. His appearance was too much for some people, and a hundred or so of the 1,500 people in the room walked out. ‘He’s a despicable person,’ one man said, while another added: ‘We need proper people, proper democrats. He won’t do us any good.’ A third man said simply: ‘I can’t stand the man.’ Fearing a mass walk-out, some organisers told security staff to ‘shut the doors’ to keep people in, although this was ignored.

  Standing at the back of hall was Arron Banks, who had a simple reaction to seeing the controversial figure take to the stage: ‘Holy fuck!’

  Those who did stay for Galloway’s speech lapped it up. The former MP told the audience he was on the stage that night ‘in memory of the late great Right Honourable Tony Benn’, that he didn’t want to ‘subcontract out’ the UK’s foreign policy to Romania and that he wanted a return of parliamentary sovereignty.

  Referencing the breadth of political views on the panel, Galloway ended with a line that made Farage visibly chuckle: ‘Left, right, left, right, forward march to victory on the 23rd of June.’

  Farage might have been enjoying it, but Campbell Bannerman was not happy. ‘That was a huge mistake,’ he said.

  Banks had moved on from his initial shock and enjoyed the speech: ‘Nigel is the best speaker I’ve ever come across but Galloway ran him a pretty close second. That was pretty sensational. It looked like a third of the audience were going to rush the stage and rip Galloway to pieces.’

  Farage wasn’t bothered about the people who left when Galloway appeared, and had no regrets about inviting him to speak. ‘Some Jewish people were upset, I know that, I get that,’ he said, before adding:

  What was even more remarkable was the number of sort of UKIP types who gave him a standing ovation … What it showed was there was an audience out there that listened to George. Far bigger than Mr Hannan. He was the only root we had to try and start a conversation in the Muslim community. Muslims for Britain? That was a fucking joke that Elliott set up.

  While Galloway was lapping up the applause in Westminster, David Cameron was finally able to confirm that a deal had indeed been struck in Brussels. Taking to Twitter at 9.44 p.m., the Prime Minister said: ‘I have negotiated a deal to give the UK special status in the EU. I will be recommending it to Cabinet tomorrow. Press conference shortly.’ Standing before the media, Cameron confirmed what he had achieved: no more UK bailouts of Eurozone countries; protection for UK businesses; new powers to stop criminals coming to the UK; a seven-year emergency brake on migrants claiming in-work benefits; and an exemption for the UK from ever-closer union.

  He also said that the planned Cabinet would now be held on Saturday morning – the first Saturday meeting of the Cabinet since the Falklands War. Cameron had his deal; he now had to sell it – and the first customers would be his own ministers.

  At just before 10 a.m. on Saturday 20 February, David Cameron’s Cabinet filed into Downing Street for what would be a historic meeting. Duncan Smith could not keep the smile off his face as he walked up to the door of No. 10. Patel managed to keep her emotions hidden a little better, but a small smile did eventually break out as she made her way up Downing Street. Gove elected not to undertake the walk in front of the waiting media, and instead was dropped off right outside the door by a black Land Rover. Duncan Smith, Whittingdale, Villiers, Grayling and Patel already had their exit plan in mind – as soon as the meeting was over, they would travel to Vote Leave’s HQ and pose for photographs. They knew Cameron would be giving a speech in Downing Street that would dominate the news coverage, and it was important to get across as early as possible in the campaign that not everyone in government backed him. Division was key. One source close to the Cabinet ministers said:

  There was a talk at first of there being a press conference, but we thought they wouldn’t be ready for that, it just had to be a statement of ‘Here’s a picture we give out to the papers that has everybody together showing a united front’ – boom. At first IDS wasn’t that keen to do it because he was doing an interview with [BBC political editor] Laura K and wanted that to be his exclusive. But we said: ‘OK, it won’t be interviews, it will just be a picture,’ so he agreed too.

  One person who wasn’t aware of the plan was Gove, who had missed out on the meetings in Duncan Smith’s office. After Duncan Smith ‘collared’ him on the way into Cabinet, Gove agreed to join the others in their photoshoot.

  With the Cabinet members seated, Cameron kicked off proceedings by setting out the deal. Each member of the Cabinet then took it in turns to announce whether they were for Leave or Remain. Chancellor George Osborne was first, followed by Gove. ‘Prime Minister, I can’t support this,’ said the Justice Secretary. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond was next, and then Duncan Smith. ‘I made the point that it is possible for us to stay together over this,’ he remembered:

  At that stage the Remainers all thought they were going to win quite easily so they were indulgent of us. They all kind of smiled and said, ‘Yes, yes, off you go and you do your usual nonsense over Europe,’ but it was clear and obvious to them they were going to win.

  After all the members of the Cabinet had spoken, Cameron left the room to prepare for his press conference outside 10 Downing Street, where he would confirm that the referendum would be held on 23 June 2016.

  As he was getting his notes together, the Vote Leave Six left No. 10 by a back door that led straight out onto Whitehall. Waiting for them was Steve Baker in his Jaguar, ready to whisk them across to Vote Leave’s HQ just over the Thames. There was a moment of confusion when Energy Secretary Amber Rudd – not realising what was happening – left through the same door and almost found herself smuggled into a car bound for Westminster Tower. Also waiting on Whitehall was Gove’s advisor Henry Cook, who hadn’t been told that his boss would be making the trip to Vote Leave. Not everyone could fit in Baker’s Jag but, as Villiers was Northern Ireland Secretary, meaning she had a designated government driver and car at all times for her own protection, Gove hitched a ride with her.

  Once the short drive to Westminster Tower had been completed, the six split themselves across the three small elevators in the building and went up to Vote Leave’s floor in the office block. ‘There was a feeling [that] this was an extraordinary moment,’ remembered Whittingdale. The group walked into Vote Leave’s HQ to applause from activists. Grayling gave a brief speech, saying that that morning’s Cabinet had been ‘deeply civilised’ and both sides had agreed to have ‘a mature, sensible, grown-up, friendly debate about these matters over the next few months’.

  The group then signed a giant campaign board and posed for a photograph. The plan worked perfectly, and the front pages of the next day’s Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph ran the picture of the Vote Leave Six brandishing their banner, as opposed to a photo of David Cameron outside Downing Street.

  With the deal signed off, the referendum date confirmed and the Cabinet divided, there was just one outstanding question left to be resolved: what would Boris Johnson do? Duncan Smith sent messages to Johnson after the Vote Leave Six had gone public, asking him when he would also be declaring, and for which side. ‘I do remember that I got the impression he was going to join us,’ said Duncan Smith. Johnson spent Saturday in his Oxfordshire home working on his column for the Telegraph, in which he would announce with ‘deafening éclat’ his decision. He was actually writing two columns – one backing Remain, and one rooting for Leave. He was unsure which one to send over to the Telegraph for publication, but after re-reading the Remain article he realised the only argument he had put forward was that of showing loyalty to Ca
meron. For Johnson, that was not a good enough reason.

  On Sunday 21 February, Cameron appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show to talk up his deal. It wasn’t long before Marr pressed him on Johnson’s position, and asked the Prime Minister if he had a message for the London Mayor. Cameron replied:

  I would say to Boris what I say to everybody else, which is that we will be safer, we’ll be stronger, we’ll be better off inside the EU. I think the prospect of, you know, linking arms with Nigel Farage and George Galloway and taking a leap into the dark is the wrong step for our country, and if Boris and if others really care about being able to get things done in our world then the EU is one of the ways in which we get them done.

  By the time Johnson had returned to his London home on Sunday afternoon, he knew what he had to do. Word began to leak out that he had decided to back Brexit, and the media descended on his Islington home. At just before 5 p.m., Johnson walked out of his front door to face the cameras. Nine minutes earlier, he had texted Cameron to tell him of the decision.

  In his faux-stuttering manner, while running his hands through his neater-than-usual shock of blond hair, Johnson said:

  I will be advocating Vote Leave – or whatever the team is called, I understand there are many of them – because I want a better deal for the people of this country, to save them money, and to take back control. That’s really I think what this is all about. What I won’t do, I’ll just stress, what I won’t do, is take part in loads of blooming TV debates against people from my party.

  Johnson was for Leave, but, crucially for Elliott and Cummings, he was also for Vote Leave. Just a month earlier, Cummings had been fighting to keep control of the organisation he had helped create. Now he had the most popular politician in the country in his ranks, as well as a bevy of Cabinet ministers: the Vote Leave Six was now the Vote Leave Seven. Whereas Farage’s surprise that week had been producing George Galloway, Cummings had managed to land the biggest political fish of them all in the shape of Boris Johnson. But there was still one more person Cummings wanted to complete his Vote Leave operation.

  CHAPTER 22

  On 28 January 2016, Baroness Shirley Williams gave her final speech in Parliament. At the age of eighty-five, the former Labour Education Secretary, co-founder of the Social Democratic Party, and Liberal Democrat peer had certainly lived a colourful political life. In her last address in the House of Lords, Williams called for ‘greater public sector imagination’, praised the introduction of the Open University by the Labour government in which she served in the 1960s and talked up the ‘great public institutions’ of the BBC and the NHS. She also spoke of one of her other great passions – Europe:

  There is one great issue left – it is the reason I am retiring – and it is the most central political question that this country has to answer. It will arise later this year in the shape of the referendum on our relationship with the European Union. Regardless of your own views, Members of this House will know that all my life long I have been passionately committed to the idea that the United Kingdom should be not only a part but a leading part of the European Union. The future demands that of us. We have to contribute to the huge issues that confront us – from climate change through to whether we are able to deal with multinational companies which wish to take advantage of us – and we can do that only on the basis of a much larger body than our own Parliament, important and significant though that is.

  The issue of the UK’s role in Europe had been one of the catalysts for her and three Labour colleagues – Bill Rodgers, Roy Jenkins and David Owen – splitting from the party in 1981 and forming the Social Democratic Party. Despite the 1975 referendum producing an overwhelming vote for staying in the then Economic Community, the Labour leadership of the early 1980s was arguing for a withdrawal. Speaking to the Huffington Post UK in 2015, Williams said: ‘We had a genuine sense of being betrayed, really betrayed, and that was what was for us almost certainly the single most decisive factor … It was nothing to do with equality and all the rest of it, all that we accepted, but on Europe we were outraged.’

  In 2016, Williams was as passionate about staying in Europe as she had been in 1981, but another member of the ‘Gang of Four’ most certainly was not.

  David – now Lord – Owen had been ploughing his own political furrow since 1988, when he refused to endorse the SDP’s merger with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats. After being made a peer in 1992, he sat as a crossbencher until donating more than £7,500 to Labour in 2011, after which he switched to being an ‘independent social democrat’. Unlike Williams, his view on the European project had drastically changed in the forty years since the last referendum.

  He set out his initial concerns over the EU in a 2012 book titled Europe Restructured? The Eurozone Crisis and Its Aftermath. By the time David Cameron was carrying out his renegotiation at the beginning of 2016, Owen was a confirmed Outer. He announced his decision to vote to leave in an article in The Sun on 24 February: ‘To remain in the EU is in my judgement a more dangerous option for British security in its deepest sense – economic, political, military and social – than remaining in a dysfunctional EU dragged down by a failing Eurozone. Remaining in the EU is risking more than leaving,’ he said.

  Vote Leave were delighted to have Labour’s former Foreign Secretary on board, but it wasn’t Lord Owen that Dominic Cummings was so keen on securing: it was the peer’s close friend, Gisela Stuart.

  The German-born Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston had decided not to play a prominent role in the EU referendum campaign, despite her deep-seated Euroscepticism. Unlike many on her side of the argument, Stuart was genuinely waiting to see what deal Cameron could return with from Brussels. She was hoping in particular for a recognition that there should be a two-speed EU – with some countries choosing to be part of the Eurozone, and others, like the UK, having a looser arrangement. ‘It is not “British exceptionalism”, she said,

  it is a recognition [that] this is a legitimate choice that a number of states in the European continent will take. Up to that point I would have said: ‘You know what, you can probably work on that’, so my involvement with all of this did not happen until after he came back with the deal.

  Stuart might have been waiting for Cameron’s return, but Cummings was keen to get her involved in Vote Leave much earlier. The Labour voices in the campaign were making no secret of the fact they were not happy with the way the organisation was being run, but Cummings needed them to prove Vote Leave was truly cross-party. Cummings had come across Stuart during the No to AV campaign, and had earmarked her as someone he would like involved in Vote Leave.

  Just before Christmas 2015, Cummings and Stuart met in one of Parliament’s tea rooms, and the Vote Leave campaign director asked her to come over and join his team. Stuart declined. But the pressure kept on coming. Paul Goodman, the former Tory MP who had worked with Stuart on Parliament’s The House magazine, also urged her to get involved in the campaign. On 17 January, Goodman published an article on the ConservativeHome website asking ‘Where are Labour’s Eurosceptics?’ – illustrated with a picture of Stuart. ‘Where is Gisela Stuart, a convinced Eurosceptic with real knowledge of the issue, as a former UK Parliamentary Representative to the European Convention that produced the European Constitution?’ he wrote. Over a lunch shortly afterwards, Goodman could still not persuade Stuart. ‘I just kept saying: “No, no, I’m not doing this,”’ she remembered.

  With Cameron’s deal nearing completion, one more person sat down with Stuart to try to convince her to play a role in the campaign: Lord Owen. ‘He is the one person which I genuinely could not say no to,’ she said. Lord Owen was not just a political friend, but a personal one. Owen had been close to Stuart’s late husband Derek Scott, who had died of stomach cancer in 2012. Scott had worked for Labour Chancellor Denis Healey in the late 1970s, before joining Owen on his SDP journey in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Scott re-joined the Labour Party, and served as an economic advisor to Ton
y Blair when he was in Downing Street. He was one of the fiercest opponents of the UK joining the euro, and predicted the political and economic instability the single currency would cause on the Continent. As Scott’s cancer became terminal, Owen was one of the ‘two key people’ who helped notify friends and associates of his impending death. ‘He was an absolute stalwart,’ Stuart said.

  With such a strong bond, it was no surprise that Owen should carry the greatest influence over Stuart’s thinking. In the middle of February, while Eurosceptic Tory Cabinet ministers were planning their escape from collective responsibility and Labour Leave were plotting theirs from the grip of Cummings’s campaign, Owen sat down with Stuart in a Lords tea room.

  Stuart recalled:

  David took me to a dark corner and said two things that were very important: one was that he was going to come out for Brexit. Now, to me, this is a very significant step for someone like him. He also pointed out to me that as my day job was to be a politician, and this is about the most significant decision this country is going to take for decades to come, sitting on my hands really wasn’t something I could do.

  It was a forceful argument, and ‘it also happened to be very true’, she said.

  Realising she had no choice but to get involved, Stuart initially planned on forming ‘a small group’ focused on defence and security issues. Yet after looking into the shenanigans at Vote Leave, and speaking to the current chairman Lord Lawson, she became acutely aware of the need for a Labour MP at the top of the campaign group. She said: ‘It was at that stage chaired by Nigel Lawson, which was just, you know, the wrong signal if you were to prove to the Electoral Commission that this was cross-party and inclusive.’