by Owen Bennet
Her timing was fortuitous. While the Cabinet ministers and Boris Johnson had just joined the fray, there were serious concerns over the future of Labour’s representation in Vote Leave. Brendan Chilton and his comrades were in the process of taking up Arron Banks’s offer to come and work in his offices in Millbank Tower, just across the River Thames from Vote Leave. The arrival of the Vote Leave Seven, who were all Conservatives, further convinced Chilton that Labour voices would not play a significant role in Cummings’s plans. That contrasted with Banks and Farage, who recognised that millions of Labour voters, particularly in Labour heartlands, could not be reached by Conservative voices. Chilton said:
From the very start, one of the first conversations I had with Arron was the vital nature of the Labour vote in this. In some ways you can discard the Tory and UKIP vote because we’ve got them. He understood the need for the Labour vote and the need for Labour people delivering Labour messages and so we hit it off.
With Vote Leave’s campaign team having changed dramatically in the space of a few weeks, the board was restructured. Having delivered the stability he was tasked with providing, Lawson stood down as chairman and left the board – although he remained on the campaign team. Stuart was asked to take over and on 13 March it was announced that she would become chairman of Vote Leave. John Mills would stay on as deputy chairman, meaning the organisation had Labour figures in two of the highest roles. As well as acting as chairman, Stuart was also made co-convener of the campaign committee – sharing the role with Michael Gove. Other members of the committee included all the other Cabinet members: Boris Johnson, David Owen, Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan. Yet the real power lay in the ‘core group’ which would meet on an almost daily basis to discuss the campaign. This was composed of Gove, Stuart, Elliott, Cummings, Johnson and former Labour MP Ian Davidson.
The reorganisation signalled an end to the so-called coup against Cummings that had been launched earlier in the year, and those at the top of Vote Leave were undoubtedly much happier with the new arrangement. Bernard Jenkin, who had led the efforts to try to solve some of the problems in the organisation, said:
The whole dispute was hugely draining of energy and momentum, which was painful and frustrating for everyone, but the outcome was positive. The result was that we established proper governance and the authority of the board over the campaign. This was hugely important for Vote Leave’s reputation with donors and with the Electoral Commission. The board was still too big to function effectively as a whole, so it relied very heavily on the chairman – Nigel Lawson and then Gisela Stuart; the compliance committee chairman Daniel Hodson, the chairman of the finance committee, Jon Moynihan, and the designated ‘Responsible Person’, Alan Halsall. They really put in the hours and they all did a fantastic job, so we were able to optimise the very considerable abilities of Matthew, Dominic and the team.
In the days leading up to the announcement of the new board, Vote Leave embarked on a flurry of media and campaigning activity. It kicked off on Friday 11 March with Johnson giving a speech at a logistics company’s warehouse in Kent. He even hopped into the cab of a specially branded Vote Leave heavy goods vehicle, taking it for a short drive down the forecourt while journalists looked on in amusement. The same day, Priti Patel addressed a reception of business leaders in the east of England, while Iain Duncan Smith also met entrepreneurs in the West Midlands.
On Saturday 12 March, Vote Leave organised ‘Take Control Day’, which involved more than 400 street stalls, canvassing sessions and leafleting drops. The organisation also projected the words ‘Vote Leave, Take Control’ on the Angel of the North, and ‘Let’s take back control – Vote Leave’ onto Edinburgh Castle, Cardiff Castle, the Gateshead Baltic Flower Mill and the White Cliffs of Dover. Even Matthew Elliott donned a Vote Leave baseball cap and helped stuff flyers through front doors.
In the three weeks since Cameron’s deal and the arrival of the Cabinet ministers, Vote Leave had evolved from an essentially passive Westminster-based operation – mainly focused on courting the media and MPs – to a proper campaign organisation. Elliott and Cummings had kicked into top gear just as the decision on which campaign would win the official designation was due to be made.
CHAPTER 23
‘Slap her!’
On hearing the name Suzanne Evans, the UKIP activist delivered a rather blunt verdict on how to handle the increasingly problematic party member.
The comment was out of keeping with what up to that point had been a good-natured UKIP spring conference in Llandudno, north Wales. Party activists and officials descended on the picturesque town with its sweeping bay for their seasonal get-together on Saturday 27 February. Coming just a week after Boris Johnson, Michael Gove et al. had broken cover and declared for Leave, there was a sense that now the referendum campaign was really under way.
The conference was taking place in the Venue Cymru, with the keynote speech from Nigel Farage set for midday. As with all political conferences, there were a number of fringe events scheduled alongside the main events, and those entering the venue that morning were handed numerous flyers outlining what was on offer. One was for a Vote Leave event with Suzanne Evans, Douglas Carswell and Tory MP David Jones – who was also a former Welsh Secretary. It was set for 11 a.m., and would take place at a hotel along the seafront.
Also planned for 11 a.m. was a Grassroots Out fringe event, which would be hosted by Farage inside the conference centre. UKIP’s head of press Gawain Towler claimed the clash were purely coincidental – ‘We were always going to have one, but it was a happy timing,’ he said – but rumours persisted that the event had been called just to scupper the Vote Leave meeting.
At just after 11 a.m., Evans delivered her speech to a room of journalists and the braver party activists who had decided to shun the Farage fringe. Any notion that this Vote Leave event would be about building bridges with UKIP quickly disintegrated when Evans began referencing a report called How (Not) to Talk about Europe, produced by think tank British Future.
Sitting alongside Carswell, she said: ‘[The book’s] poll found that the two least trusted voices on Europe are Tony Blair, which isn’t surprising, and also Nigel Farage. You might not like it, and I don’t like it either, but that is what the book says.’
Discussing how best to convince undecided voters to back leaving the EU, Evans added: ‘They say really, even if you love Nigel Farage and you love UKIP, it’s best not to mention it unless somebody else mentions it instead.’
Turning to UKIP’s main campaigning issue – immigration – Evans added: ‘This book suggests that those people who are concerned about immigration have already made their mind up, they are going to vote to leave.’
She also cited claims that the presence of the UKIP logo on campaign tools could turn people off from the Eurosceptic cause:
UKIP campaigners were handing out these bags thinking it was a great idea, but even people that wanted to leave the EU wouldn’t take the bags as they had UKIP on it. Now, you might think that’s daft, but would you take a bag that had a Tory logo on it?
It was an astonishing attack on UKIP’s leader and its campaign strategy, delivered on a day when the party was getting together to refine its message ahead of the referendum.
Evans’s comments were published on the internet within the hour, prompting the activist to proclaim ‘slap her’ when her name was mentioned within earshot later that day.
By the time Farage sat down with journalists outside a pub in the town at 3 p.m., he was exasperated. Referring to the fact that the survey Evans had mentioned was produced in 2015, Farage said:
The facts are all desperately wrong and cooked up and there is a very significant wall of data which shows that actually the immigration issue and security issue is by far – by about three to one – the issue upon which undecided voters will make their minds up. So to quote something that was done during a general election when people were thinking about different issues is just wrong. As
far as her saying that, well, she’s an ordinary member of UKIP, she can say what she likes. I couldn’t care less.
Farage’s views were drawn not just from his experiences of campaigning across the country, but also from the results of the huge opinion poll Chris Bruni-Lowe had been carrying out. Three months earlier, Bruni-Lowe had commissioned another 10,000-strong poll to make sure Farage was hitting the right spots when it came to campaigning. Of those undecided or considering switching their vote, regaining control of the UK borders was the top issue, with 37.9 per cent ranking it as the argument which would most likely influence their decision. The second highest ranked was the fact that leaving the EU would ‘save the UK money which could be spent at home’ – which was chosen as the main reason by only 17.7 per cent. When respondents were asked to pick their top three issues, immigration and border control was selected by 61.9 per cent.
Sensing Farage was in a punchy mood, the journalists asked if he would support Vote Leave if it got the designation. He began his reply sarcastically: ‘Yeah, I think a double referendum is a super idea! And let’s not discuss immigration and we don’t really want to leave at all! It’d be great! I’d love it!’ he said, before continuing:
We are committed to a genuine cross-party campaign, the most cross-party campaign that has ever been put together in British politics – and by the way an alliance that hasn’t finished building either – that is pulling the left and right together, and this idea that you can win the referendum by being middle-class Conservatives is just b—
Farage stopped himself from saying ‘bollocks’, and ended the sentence with the words ‘not right’.
As for Carswell, Farage pretended not to know who he was. ‘Who? … Oh, I remember, I met him once.’ After being reminded of the identity of UKIP’s only MP, Farage added: ‘He can do what he likes, I don’t care. I’ve not got time, I’m not interested.’
Peace was certainly not breaking out between the rival groups, and designation day was fast approaching. With Cameron’s EU deal now in place, Grassroots Out stepped up its campaigning activity. An ‘Action Day’ was pencilled in for Saturday 5 March, with more than 500 street stalls planned in villages, towns and cities across the UK. Farage may have been convinced that Evans was ‘desperately wrong’ to claim UKIP branding would turn people off, but others in the party seemed to agree with her. An email sent out to activists ahead of the Action Day by UKIP’s West Midlands regional organiser, Andrew Illsley, contained advice remarkably similar to Evans’s warnings. ‘No UKIP logo’s [sic], literature, rossettes [sic] must be visible on the day,’ he wrote, in bold type.
Grassroots Out continued its group campaigning the following weekend, running its own Super Saturday alongside Vote Leave’s Take Control Day. After months of criticism that there was no ground campaign, both organisations were now out on the ground with branded flyers, T-shirts, pens, hoodies and even condoms (‘The safer choice’ and ‘It’s riskier to stay in’ were the slogans printed on the Vote Leave-produced contraceptive packets).
In market towns and metropolitan cities, activists were focusing their energies on attacking the real enemy: Stronger In. But at the top of the campaigns, the old tensions still remained. On Monday 14 March, UKIP peer Lord Pearson emailed both Vote Leave and Leave.EU asking for a truce. ‘We are not even collaborating about our core messages, whereas the Remain people are sleek, ruthless and on message,’ he said in the email, according to the Financial Times.
Pearson received no response, as both groups were at that moment frantically putting together their respective bids to be chosen by the Electoral Commission as the official Leave campaign. Each group had to demonstrate a range of abilities, including: breadth of support among campaigners; how they planned to represent other campaigners; how they would use the benefits of being appointed the designated campaign; how they would fund their campaign.
As the designation documents were being put together, it became even clearer how vital the appointment of Gisela Stuart was to the Vote Leave board. A series of emails between Labour Leave members showed just how far relations between the two organisations had deteriorated. On Wednesday 16 March, Elliott was forced to explain to John Mills why a letter that had gone out to supporters asking for funds implied that Labour Leave was still backing Vote Leave, when it had decided to be neutral. ‘This letter was drafted and signed off weeks ago,’ said Elliott.
It takes mail houses a long time to print, collate and post big mailings, so this is essentially several weeks old, even though it has only just landed in the past few days. You can tell that it was written a few weeks ago because it doesn’t mention Gisela being chairman of VL or Frank [Field] being on the campaign committee. These appointments happened after the letter was written.
The Vote Leave chief also pointed out in his email that while Labour Leave was officially claiming neutrality in the designation battle, Nigel Griffiths, Kate Hoey and Brendan Chilton had publicly promised to back GO.
Mills forwarded the email on to Hoey – copying in a number of people, including Griffiths – and added his own thoughts about how members of Labour Leave should be behaving. He wrote:
Another difficult issue, in terms of keeping everyone together, is what we should do about paid staff siding one way or the other on the bodies seeking designation and here we have a particular difficulty round Nigel and his position in GO. I am not at all suggesting that Nigel should not stay with Labour Leave as he has been a longstanding and valuable member of our group but there clearly is a problem with paid staff having formal positions in the competing organisations and being paid by funds coming at least in part from the other camp. Can I therefore propose, if Nigel wants to retain his present position in GO which I very much expect he will, that as from the beginning of April 2016 he should be paid by GO and not by Labour Leave? Can you please confirm that this would be acceptable?
The email prompted a furious response from Griffith. After rebuking Mills for only copying him into the email and not contacting him directly (‘You discuss my future and my intentions with others, without ever contacting me about it – most dishonourable,’ he wrote), Griffiths tore into Vote Leave:
Your Vote Leave mailing was a disgrace and I am sad that you have become an apologist for Elliott and Cummings, who even used the Vote Leave target mailing to puff themselves up and tell the world what wonderful organisers they are – they just can’t help themselves.
My statement which you refer to was on behalf of Labour Leave after Kate and Brendan contacted me on 4 February and informed me that they were both leaving Vote Leave because they had [had] enough of the lies and bullying, and both had been in discussion with Arron Banks to set up Labour GO.
And the failure of Vote Leave managers to act against the Vote Leave member of staff who threatened people who crossed him, saying, ‘I’ll put your name on the sex offenders register’ tells us all what sort of people they are.
Hoey did not hold back in her views either, telling Mills:
You have personally allowed the Labour Leave operations to be deliberately sabotaged by VL staff. Taking away the Twitter access, Facebook and now even Brendan’s email. Words fail me but I so agree with Nigel about the utter nastiness of VL staff. I too am sorry that you seem to be in the pocket of Elliott and Cummings and that none of the Lab members of the VL board are prepared to stand up to them.
VL may win designation but you have long lost the moral case to win it and I have grave doubts about your two henchmen being able to work with anyone other than their chosen little elitist lot during the referendum period.
I see absolutely no point in meeting as you nave [sic] wasted so much time of Brendan and the others in ‘promises’ that you have never fulfilled.
Hoey, Chilton, Griffiths and other Labour Leave members were now more than happy to add their names to Grassroots Out’s designation application. Yet despite the support of many Labour Eurosceptics, Grassroots Out, which was applying for designation under the name the
GO Movement, knew they were at a disadvantage by not having the support of any of the Cabinet ministers who had come out for Leave.
Richard Tice, who had been appointed chairman of GO Movement, was realistic about the group’s chances of securing designation. He said: ‘We win on breadth and depth, but we lose on the establishment. If they vote for the establishment, we lose.’
Indeed, such was Tice’s fear of the establishment that he and other members of GO began to suspect their phones were being hacked. ‘We had a Grassroots Out board meeting where phones were left outside,’ he recalls. ‘You might say that was total paranoia, but there’s some bad stuff out there.’
At just before 2 p.m. on Monday 21 March, ten days before the designation applications had to be submitted to the Commission, Arron Banks sent a message out through Leave.EU’s mailing list, appealing for support for GO:
We transcend the British political spectrum at all levels from members and group leaders, to councillors, MPs and MEPs. With prominent figures in the Conservative Party, Labour, UKIP, DUP, TUV, the Liberal Democrats and the Respect Party all on board, the GO Movement is in pole position to win designation, however… We need your help to get us over the line. One of the criteria the Electoral Commission will look for when assessing our application is the ‘breadth of support’ we can show for our campaign among activists. At this crucial point in the referendum campaign ask you to do two things [sic].
Readers were then invited to sign a pledge supporting GO, and also email the Electoral Commission directly, calling on them to award designation to the campaign.
The tactic was simple: the more people who emailed in, the greater the ‘breadth of support’ it demonstrated. It didn’t quite go to plan.