The Brexit Club

by Owen Bennet

  At 7 p.m., just five hours after asking people to bombard the Commission with support for GO, Banks sent out another email.

  The enormous strength of the mass movement we have built was clearly demonstrated today, when 7,500 of our supporters wrote to the Electoral Commission endorsing our bid for designation in the space of just two and a half hours, a level of support so high that their servers couldn’t cope!

  Instead of embracing this incredible demonstration of people power, however, the Commission has declared that it will disregard any direct representations it receives from ordinary members of the public.

  The Commission had reminded Banks that it was down to the applicants to demonstrate their breadth of support within the formal application, not through direct lobbying. It would not be the last time Banks unleashed his Leave.EU followers on unsuspecting players in the referendum campaign.

  On Thursday 31 March, Nigel Farage, Tom Pursglove and Peter Bone donned their lime-green and black Grassroots Out ties and led a group of around fifty activists and supporters to the Electoral Commission’s headquarters near the Barbican in central London. They were there to deliver the group’s designation application; instead of just submitting it by email, the group had brought along a paper version. More than ten boxes, filled with messages of support, were handed over to the Commission, while a Labour GO-branded bus was parked up on the street outside. GO-branded T-shirts, hoodies and flags were on display and, as usual, Farage revelled in the limelight. ‘The designation document was a bloody masterpiece. Eighteen separate properly identifiable political organisations including the New Communist Party of Great Britain,’ he said. The GO gang were in high spirits. They were convinced they had submitted an excellent application.

  The 222-page document focused on two main areas: the sheer number of supporters GO had, and the fact it was not an ‘establishment’ campaign. It proudly listed the political parties it had the support of: Liberal, New Communist Party of Britain (which Andy Wigmore had had to join in order to persuade them to sign up), Respect, Traditional Unionist Voice and UKIP. Yet those five political parties had just one MP between them: Douglas Carswell, who was backing a different organisation. The document listed forty MPs who had ‘attended Grassroots Out events, participated at Grassroots Out Task Forces or are receiving our regular campaigning bulletins or direct mailings’, including John Redwood, David Davis, Liam Fox and Chris Grayling as evidence of its reach and support. However, these MPs were not necessarily endorsing the application. Davis got a mention again in the document when GO suggested its three-pronged team for any planned TV debates. ‘Our potential line-up of Kate Hoey, Nigel Farage and David Davis is one that would leave our rivals quaking in their boots. No other campaign can put forward such an experienced, well-regarded, cross-party team,’ said the document.

  Differences with Vote Leave were repeatedly flagged up, with ‘the factional infighting between groups’ referred to as one of the ‘weaknesses’ GO wanted to address: ‘Approaches have been made to all “Leave” campaigns, and the offer stands – particularly in relation to the “establishment” Vote Leave organisation. Clearly, not being part of the establishment will be perceived as a weakness to some. However, the nature of the “Leave” family is diverse and complex.’

  GO promised that ‘by taking the campaign out of SW1, we will win the referendum door by door, vote by vote’, before issuing a warning about what would happen if its rivals were awarded designation.

  There is a genuine threat that we would not be welcomed into the Vote Leave structure in the event of them being awarded the lead status, despite GML [Go Movement Ltd] offering to merge with them to form a unified entity on numerous occasions, unfortunately to no avail. We have, however, put in place the framework and processes that would allow, and indeed enable us, to easily incorporate Vote Leave into our movement and utilise their expertise. As one of the pillar groups, Vote Leave would be able to operate independently within the umbrella, using its £700,000 on their specific ‘air war’ activities – a realistic sum of money to achieve this.

  The document was full of photographs, graphics, biographies of key players and examples of plans carried out and what was yet to come.

  Vote Leave’s designation application was a lot more sombre. Running to just seventy-seven pages, it shunned graphics and photographs and contained only text and tables. It clearly set out its regional director structure and talked up its local coordinators – 30.9 per cent of whom were UKIP supporters. Although not mentioning them by name, Vote Leave dismissed its rival’s claim that high volumes of social media engagement indicated genuine support:

  Social media is a relatively weak indicator of an organisation’s active supporter base. By contrast our 43,544 registered supporters are each individuals who have pledged their willingness and availability to support actively our campaign, and provided us with their contact details. We believe that these supporters represent a meaningful resource for our campaign, which we are well prepared to build upon. We do not regard any number of fleeting endorsements generated on social media (for example, Facebook ‘likes’ or Twitter retweets) as comparable to this resource.

  Alongside the 121 MPs backing Vote Leave (108 Conservative, eight DUP, four Labour and one UKIP), the campaign also claimed the support of 1,594 councillors ‘either verbally, in writing or online’.

  Also revealed in the document was one of the few examples of actual collaboration that had been taking place between the various groups involved on the Leave side of the argument. It had gone almost unnoticed, but every Monday morning David Campbell Bannerman would chair a contact group which brought together a range of representatives from groups such as Better Off Out and the Freedom Association. Another regular attendee was Brian Monteith, the head of press for Leave.EU. After Grassroots Out was formed, they too sent along representatives. The idea for the group came from Campbell Bannerman, who proposed it even before the 2015 general election as a way of getting all the Eurosceptic groups talking to each other. As the campaign went on, it became a vital forum for exchanging plans and strategy. ‘What the contact group did was try and avoid conflict i.e. Nigel and Boris in the same town at the same time,’ said Campbell Bannerman. ‘It was very much like “What are you doing?” “Well, Better Off Out is running this campaign on fish for this month for these places.” “Oh, that’s interesting, oh, hang on, we’re doing something similar there at the same place maybe we better pull that” or whatever.’ Despite the fact that Campbell Bannerman had actually endorsed GO for designation, this contact group had taken off when he was part of Vote Leave, so it was included in its application.

  After months of battling, splitting and arguing, the designation documents were in, and both campaigns faced a two-week wait before discovering which organisation had won the fight.

  Of course, neither campaign downed tools during this period. GO continued with its public meetings, holding rallies in Glasgow on Thursday 7 April and Bournemouth on Saturday 9th and visiting Gibraltar on Monday 11th. As well as the Bournemouth meeting, that Saturday was also designated another action day for GO campaigners, with two million leaflets produced for distribution.

  Vote Leave was also producing leaflets, and found itself in hot water over one in particular. A double-sided flyer sent out to millions of voters was headed up ‘The UK and the European Union: THE FACTS’ and contained eight claims about the UK’s relationship with Brussels – including that the EU has control over Britain’s borders and the UK has no trade deals with countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

  However, the only place on the leaflet where it was made clear that the document was a piece of campaigning literature produced by Vote Leave was in small font on the back.

  On Tuesday 5 April, Labour MP Chris Bryant wrote to the Electoral Commission asking them to investigate whether the leaflet broke campaigning rules. He said: ‘Vote Leave are actively seeking to deceive people by presenting campaign material as being independent when i
t is in fact campaign propaganda.’

  It was not the first time Vote Leave had stoked controversy that week with its campaigning behaviour. On Tuesday 29 March, the campaign published an ‘EU Most Wanted’ dossier, listing fifty criminals who had committed offences in Europe but were able to come and settle in the UK before reoffending. Top of the list was Arnis Zalkalns, the Latvian who had served a seven-year prison sentence in his own country for murdering his wife in 1998. He was believed to be the killer of fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Alice Gross in west London in 2014, but hung himself before he could be arrested. Of the fifty criminals in the dossier, forty-five had committed serious offences, including nine murders and seven rapes. Vote Leave, which had repeatedly branded the Stronger In campaign ‘Project Fear’ for its economic warnings, was accused of ‘scaremongering of the worst kind’ by its Leave.EU opponents. Vote Leave’s Robert Oxley hit back by saying: ‘It is a bit rich from campaigners who constantly do Britain down to throw around words like “scaremongering”.’ Vote Leave was happy to have the row – if Stronger In was trying to argue the toss about murderers and rapists from the EU coming to the UK, it would only further cement the point in the public’s mind that murderers and rapists from the EU had come to the UK. All publicity was good publicity. It was a tactic they would deploy again and again throughout the campaign.

  What hadn’t generated such good publicity for Vote Leave was Boris Johnson’s appearance in front of Parliament’s Treasury Committee on Wednesday 23 March. The Mayor of London was in particularly loquacious form as he sat down to be grilled by the committee’s chairman, Andrew Tyrie. But, after holding forth in his usual entertaining manner, Johnson found himself quietly but firmly brought back down to earth by Tyrie. The committee chairman pointed out that, despite Johnson’s previous claims, there were no EU laws banning children under eight years old from blowing up balloons – there was instead a requirement to put a safety warning on the product’s packaging – and there was no ruling saying that teabags could not be recycled; that was instead a rather draconian interpretation of EU law by Cardiff Council. Tyrie also told Johnson that his claim about rules regulating the size of ‘euro-coffins’ was ‘a figment of your imagination’.

  Johnson ended the two-and-a-half-hour session by claiming: ‘I’ve demolished the questions I’ve been asked,’ but there was a sense that the London Mayor had not lived up to his billing as the Brexit frontman. His appearance on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday 6 March had generated a similar reaction, with an exasperated host telling him, ‘It’s not the Boris Johnson Show, it’s the Andrew Marr Show,’ after the Brexit campaigner tried to ask and answer his own questions. Commentators were damning in their criticism, with The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh – who was extremely sympathetic to Brexit – claiming the Mayor’s performance ‘may have damaged both Brexit and his dream of becoming our next Prime Minister’. He added: ‘This was the moment for a forensic response from the leader of the Out campaign. Instead Boris disappeared in a cloud of waffle.’

  The Scottish Conservatives’ leader Ruth Davidson was also distinctly unimpressed: ‘Is it just me or is Boris floundering here? Not sure the bumble-bluster, kitten smirk, tangent-bombast routine is cutting through,’ she tweeted.

  With Vote Leave seemingly struggling to find its groove, and GO’s rallies repeatedly drawing the crowd, Banks and Farage were confident heading into the week of the designation announcement that the campaign they were backing would be victorious.

  However, the pair’s fear that they were going to be denied official status because of an establishment-led conspiracy received an unfortunate boost just days before the announcement.

  On the afternoon of Tuesday 12 April, two days before the Electoral Commission was due to reveal its decision, Vote Leave’s press office was having a practise run. A press release was drafted responding to a victory announcement, and sent out to members of the communication team for proofreading. Unfortunately, it was sent to the ‘all team’ email address, instead of the ‘all press team’ account. More than 120 members of Vote Leave staff had an email drop into their inboxes telling them Vote Leave had been awarded official designation. Some of those staff were at that moment sitting in a meeting of the parliamentary council in Westminster – a forum for MPs and peers to ask questions about how the campaign was going and raise any issues they had. One of those at the meeting was Matthew Elliott, who remembers the confusion the press office mistake caused. He said:

  One of the members of staff was sitting in the parliamentary council, saw this come through, thought it was a real press release rather than a draft because it didn’t say test or draft or anything like that, and I think he was sitting next to the guy who is the chairman of the National Convention for the Tories [Steve Bell]. ‘We got the designation! It’s such good news!’ they said.

  Before Elliott could tell his staff that the email had been sent in error, Bell had taken to Twitter to share the happy news. ‘Great news @vote_leave has official designation for Leave in the EU referendum roll on #independence’, he wrote.

  ‘Politics is down to cock-up rather than conspiracy usually,’ Elliott reflected. ‘It was a cock up.’ The Electoral Commission moved quickly to confirm that no decision had been taken, but Arron Banks was far from happy. Within hours he sent out a press release arguing that ‘I know the Conservative Party is one of entitlement but celebrating two days early takes the biscuit’.

  He also said: ‘That such a senior figure in the Conservative Party would issue a self-congratulatory tweet about the formal referendum campaign designation process ahead of any announcement is deeply worrying and gives me cause for concern about the credibility of the whole procedure.’

  Banks’s anger on Tuesday 12th was nothing compared to his mood on Wednesday 13th.

  At just before 3 p.m., Banks was having tea at Claridge’s in Mayfair with Andy Wigmore. Across St James’s Park, Peter Bone was getting his hair cut in Parliament’s hair salon, located just next to one of the restaurants in the historic building. Also getting a quick chop at the same time were Tom Pursglove and David Davis, while Nigel Farage was driving on the A26 just outside the French town of Arras as he journeyed back from Strasbourg to London. All believed the Electoral Commission would be announcing its decision the next day, but that afternoon it took everyone by surprise and revealed its verdict early.

  After being marked out of a possible 52 points, Vote Leave’s application scored 49, whereas GO tallied 45. Vote Leave would be the official Leave campaign for the referendum.

  The scores were tight, and Vote Leave’s victory seemed to come in two key areas. First, they ‘better demonstrated the depth of representation in their support from those campaigning, including at a regional and local level’. Secondly, and perhaps most crucial of all, Vote Leave would support other campaigning organisations without requiring them to ‘deliver messages or activity on their behalf’.

  In its announcement, the Electoral Commission highlighted David Campbell Bannerman’s contact group, which had ‘the specific intended purpose of allowing an exchange of views between campaigners’.

  It added: ‘By contrast, the approach from “Go Movement Ltd” is based on other campaigners signing formalised agreements as “affiliates” but there is no established mechanism for supporting campaigners who do not wish to sign these.’

  Commenting on the decision, Claire Bassett, chief executive of the Electoral Commission said:

  After careful consideration, the Commission decided that ‘Vote Leave Ltd’ better demonstrated that it has the structures in place to ensure the views of other campaigners are represented in the delivery of its campaign. It therefore represents, to a greater extent than ‘Go Movement Ltd’, those campaigning for the ‘Leave’ outcome, which is the test we must apply.

  There was an irony that the organisation which had so strongly resisted any kind of merger should be the one praised for having structures in place to make sure other campaigns’ voices were hear
d.

  The decision prompted mixed reactions from those on the losing side. Farage, dishing out orders from his car in France, instructed that a conciliatory message be tweeted out. ‘I congratulate @vote_leave on getting designation,’ it read. Matthew Elliott responded within minutes: ‘Thank you @Nigel_Farage. We are all focused on winning together on June 23 #TakeControl.’ Bone and Pursglove heard they had lost thanks to a television in the hair salon being tuned into Sky News, which flashed up the decision. Bone was disappointed, but not surprised. ‘Did I think we should have won designation? Yes. Did I think that was a foregone conclusion? No,’ he said. In an interview with the BBC less than an hour after the announcement, Bone also struck a non-aggressive tone, insisting that GO would continue despite not winning designation, and that there wasn’t really a lot of difference between his organisation and Vote Leave anyway.

  One person who was not looking to build bridges was Arron Banks. He was furious with the ruling, and within half an hour Andy Wigmore was telling journalists the decision would be challenged in the courts. In an email to Leave.EU members, Banks said: ‘The tweeting by Steve Bell, the chairman of the Conservative Party Convention, that Vote Leave had been given the designation the night before of [sic] the official announcement smells of political corruption from our high-minded establishment and cannot be allowed to pass without challenge.’

  There was even a suggestion that applying for a judicial review of the decision could set the referendum date back until October, ‘but if we are to avoid the most important vote of our lives being rigged then I feel duty bound to take this course of action’, said Banks. After consulting with legal experts, Banks announced he would reveal his decision on whether to proceed with the legal challenge at noon the next day.

  With the email sent out, Banks and Wigmore decided there was only one more thing they could do that evening: get as drunk as possible. ‘We went out on a monumental bender of monumental proportions,’ said Banks. Richard Tice joined the pair for the early part of it but called time very early. Banks and Wigmore did not call time until 7 the next morning, having hit posh wine bars in Mayfair before ending up ‘in a gay club somewhere as it was the last bar left. We went everywhere, it was a lot of fun, but boy, I was absolutely totalled when I came back,’ recalled the businessman, adding: ‘We were drunk as skunks.’