The Brexit Club

by Owen Bennet

  After having a shower and catching up on sleep, Banks met with Farage at 3 p.m. – he had slept through his self-imposed twelve o’clock deadline – to discuss whether to proceed with the legal challenge. Farage remembered that Banks was ‘absolutely devastated. He was very upset. He cares about things, not like these cold, calculated, lifeless types.’ The UKIP leader tried to calm him down, telling him that being the designated campaign was not the be-all and end-all in any case, and as the GO group was so well established it could carry on campaigning regardless. Also, as a political party officially campaigning for Leave, UKIP were able to spend £4 million during the campaign, alongside the £700,000 GO could invest.

  As Banks put it:

  The thing that swung it for us was the fact that in a lot of ways being the designated campaign wasn’t a happy place to be. We had the money, we were already going, we had the call centre, a huge supporter base. If we’re the designated campaign, we’re probably be highly restricted in what we can say or do.

  After spending another day mulling it over, Banks sent an email at just after 5 p.m. on Friday 15 April informing Leave.EU supporters that he would not be pursuing legal action.

  Bone – who had been against any kind of legal action from the very start – was relieved, especially as Banks’s actions had made it look like he was in charge of GO. ‘For whatever reason, there was a huge view that Arron Banks was running GO, and it was not true,’ said Bone. ‘Basically, whilst he funded some of the events, he never put money into our bank account, for instance. So he just funded events, which was great. He was Leave.EU, which was part of the GO Movement umbrella; he was never ever part of Grassroots Out.’

  Observing from afar, Douglas Carswell believed GO’s association with Eurosceptics keen on getting designation distracted it from the group’s main focus of ground campaigning:

  They launched Grassroots Out and I thought, ‘OK, great, good, if they do what they say on the tin – fantastic.’ Where I think they made a serious error of judgement was when they allowed their organisation to become a vehicle to allow other people to apply for designation. I think that was a serious error of judgement.

  Allowing George Galloway to appear on a GO platform was, for Carswell, ‘exhibit A’ of the organisation being tarnished by those appearing under its banner. ‘I’ve dined with many people but I always use a very long spoon and I don’t think they used a long enough spoon,’ he said.

  Chris Bruni-Lowe, who did not agree with Carswell on many points, echoed his analysis regarding the Respect leader. According to Bruni-Lowe, the reason GO failed to get the designation was ‘basically because we went with Galloway’.

  Those at the top of Vote Leave were not just delighted with the victory, but also relieved that the whole tortuous process of battling for designation was finally over. ‘Getting the designation was probably more difficult and more stressful than actually the post-designation period,’ said Elliott. However, if those at the top of Vote Leave believed their rival campaign would now be starved of the oxygen of publicity because of the Electoral Commission’s decision, they were very wrong. After all, there had to be a good reason why Nigel Farage was suddenly not all that bothered about his group not getting designation…

  CHAPTER 24

  ‘Let’s give the NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week.’

  It was Vote Leave’s first billboard of the campaign, and it was clear. All the money the UK currently handed over to Brussels would be given to the NHS if the country voted for Brexit. Never mind the fact that the £350 million was a disputed figure, or that Vote Leave were a campaigning group, not a government-in-waiting; the pledge was made and sent out on Friday 15 April – two days after Cummings’s outfit had been awarded designation. The message was unequivocal and not open to interpretation, yet over the coming weeks and months Vote Leave and its supporters would repeatedly try to water down and clarify that claim. While the billboard may have raised a few eyebrows in Westminster and among Stronger In, it failed to capture the public’s imagination – at least at first.

  Besides, on that Friday, there were higher-profile events taking place, such as Boris Johnson’s speech kicking off the referendum campaign at a rally in Manchester. To applause and laughter, he told activists gathered in the Old Granada Studios: ‘We are passengers locked in the back of a mini-cab with a wonky sat nav driven by a driver who doesn’t have perfect command of English and going in a direction, frankly, we don’t want to go.’ Indeed, such was his confidence, he even instructed supporters to sabotage Channel 4 News’s Michael Crick’s live analysis of the event. ‘Some chap from the media is trying to do his piece to camera … shut up … can someone go and interrupt Crick at the back there?’ said Johnson. One activist obeyed Johnson’s instruction, and tried to stand in front of Crick’s camera while the bemused journalist tried to address the nation.

  Nigel Farage was also generating some headlines that Friday thanks to a trip to Downing Street. The UKIP leader was personally returning one of the government’s information leaflets, which had been sent to all 27 million homes in the country. The document, entitled ‘Why the Government Believes That Voting to Remain in the EU is the Best Decision for the UK’ had cost £9.3 million to produce and distribute – completely smashing the £7 million spending limit the Electoral Commission was enforcing for both sides in the campaign. However, the leaflet was being sent out before designation had been awarded, meaning the money spent did not count towards the official total. Leave campaigners were outraged. Boris Johnson said the leaflets were a ‘complete waste of money’ and ‘crazy’, while Graham Stringer suggested they had only been produced to distract attention from embarrassing questions about the Prime Minister’s late father’s tax arrangements, which had been raised in the Panama Papers leak.

  Tory MP James Wharton summed it up best when he told the BBC that a colleague had been unhappy that the leaflet was not ‘sufficiently absorbent for the use to which they wanted to put it’.

  Even Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – who was supposed to be on the same side as the government – was not happy, with his spokesman calling on the same money to be given to the Leave side so it could set out its case in a similar fashion. ‘Jeremy is of the view that there should have been an even approach to the information so people can make an informed decision,’ his spokesman said.

  Farage sensed he could turn the leaflet into an opportunity to generate some headlines for himself, and so arranged to personally deliver his copy of document to 10 Downing Street with the words ‘Return to Sender’ scrawled on the front.

  Grassroots Out also kept doing what it did best – rallies outside the Westminster bubble. On Monday 18 April, and arranged at just four days’ notice, an event was held in Stoke. Alongside the usual suspects of Farage, Peter Bone, Tom Pursglove and Kate Hoey was another speaker – Chris Grayling. The Cabinet minister, who had taken over running Vote Leave’s contact group from David Campbell Bannerman, decided now was the time to bury the hatchet with the rival campaign.

  Grayling was the first Cabinet minister to share a stage with Farage, and at the rally he said:

  This is, after all, a campaign that is about people and not about party. That’s why I am standing tonight as a Conservative Cabinet minister alongside two people who would normally be firm adversaries politically.

  I have campaigned vigorously against Nigel Farage and UKIP at elections – but in our desire to leave the European Union, we are united. He has as long a track record in fighting to leave the EU as anyone in this country, and tonight we stand side by side and for the next few weeks we have common purpose for our country.

  ‘Applause for him, that was good skills,’ said UKIP’s head of press Gawain Towler. Farage was also delighted, and the pair even shared a car ride back to London from Stoke.

  After spending almost a year trying to avoid any association with Farage, those at the top of Vote Leave were not happy that within days of getting the designation one of their
Cabinet ministers was sharing a stage with the UKIP leader. However, as the event had taken place on a Monday night in Stoke, Vote Leave ‘didn’t think it was worth a big row over, so we let him do it’, said one campaign source close to the Cabinet minister.

  Indeed, Grayling’s appearance with Farage was largely overshadowed by a speech from Chancellor George Osborne earlier that day in which he attempted to put a personal cost on Brexit for UK households. According to Treasury analysis, if the UK adopted a Canada-style trade agreement with the EU after Brexit, it would cost each household an average of £4,300 per year by 2030. This figure was reached by using a number of wild assumptions. First, that the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) value would only grow by 29 per cent because of Brexit, rather than the 37 per cent the Treasury currently predicted. Secondly, GDP was then equated to household income – a move out of keeping with traditional economic analysis. Finally, Osborne based his assumption on the number of UK households in 2016 – meaning he was assuming there would be no change in the number by 2030. If this was Project Fear, it simply did not make sense. The Brexit-backing former Chancellor Lord Lamont said:

  They say economists put a decimal point in their forecasts to show that they have a sense of humour. The Chancellor has endorsed a forecast which looks fourteen years ahead and predicts a fall in GDP of less than 0.5 per cent a year – well within the margin of error. Few forecasts are right for fourteen months, let alone fourteen years. Such precision is spurious, and entirely unbelievable.

  It would not be the first government stunt to backfire in the campaign, or even in that week, but before any more hyperbole could be unleashed from Downing Street, it was time for Dominic Cummings’s moment in the sun.

  The Vote Leave campaign manager had been summoned to appear before the Treasury Select Committee, which had fast become a one-stop shop for holding the referendum campaigners to account. It had already given Boris Johnson a rough ride, and on 3 March it managed to get Stronger In’s Lord Rose to admit that workers’ wages would rise if the UK left the EU (‘I am deeply grateful to Stuart Rose for all the help he gave us,’ Gisela Stuart later joked). On the afternoon of Wednesday 20 April, Cummings sat down in front of the Treasury Select Committee and set about bamboozling, challenging and quibbling with his interrogators for more than two hours.

  The session kicked off with a discussion about the cost of regulation to the UK economy, but it wasn’t long before committee chairman Andrew Tyrie zoned in on Vote Leave’s headline claim: that the UK sends £350 million to Brussels each week.

  After Cummings asserted that, according to the Office for National Statistics, the UK sends £19.1 billion to the EU every year, Tyrie reminded him that that wasn’t strictly true, as there is a rebate of £6 billion.

  ‘The money stays in the UK for the whole of this period. It never leaves the UK or crosses the exchanges,’ said Tyrie.

  Cummings was having none of it:

  When you are sitting in your slippers talking to Mrs Tyrie, looking at your bank statements, and it says X amount of money is debited from your account, that means that it has gone from your account, does it not? It is pretty clear what that means. The debiting is exactly what the ONS says here. It is debited from the UK. In table 9.9 of the ONS, that is what it says.

  Tyre responded: ‘£19 billion is not the figure that we pay across the exchanges; we pay £13 billion across the exchanges.’

  Cummings hit back: ‘We are debited £19.1 billion according to the Office for National Statistics.’

  An increasingly exasperated Tyrie tried again: ‘That is an accounting procedure, but the money never leaves the UK, Mr Cummings.’

  The Vote Leave campaign chief volleyed back: ‘What happens on your bank statement when you are debited £19? That means that you are debited £19. That is what the ONS says we are debited – £19.1 billion.’

  The rows continued:

  TYRIE: You are saying in your literature, in hospitals, that we can give a lot more money to hospitals, are you not? You are distributing literature to that effect. You are doing that, are you not?

  CUMMINGS: No, we are not. We have not distributed any literature whatsoever to hospitals.

  TYRIE: I have a piece of literature here with your logo. Is this a pirated piece of literature? It says, ‘Vote Leave. Take control.’ It is badged as your literature. It says, ‘Help protect your local hospital.’ It has here at the bottom, ‘Vote Leave. Take control.org.’ Is that not your organisation?

  CUMMINGS: It looks like it is one of our leaflets, yes.

  TYRIE: So you are distributing these things to hospitals. This was picked up from Guy’s Hospital.

  CUMMINGS: I saw that story, I think, on a website.

  TYRIE: I have one of the leaflets here, yes.

  CUMMINGS: Yes. I saw that story on the website last week. We do not have a clue where that has come from. It certainly was not done by us.

  TYRIE: So is this pirated?

  CUMMINGS: No. Well, I have no idea. I very much doubt it.

  TYRIE: I just want clarity.

  CUMMINGS: I am giving you clarity.

  TYRIE: You have not yet on many of the points that I have been asking. Let me go through some very simple questions. Did your organisation print this leaflet?

  CUMMINGS: It looks likely that we did, but I cannot tell about any individual leaflet.

  TYRIE: You do not know which leaflets might be printed by your organisation. You are running a campaign and do not know—

  CUMMINGS: You are misunderstanding what I am saying.

  TYRIE: I do not think you are understanding the question. I am asking a straightforward and simple question. We are getting down to very simple questions. Is this a leaflet of your organisation?

  CUMMINGS: Do you mean that design of leaflet, or that individual leaflet?

  TYRIE: I am asking you if this leaflet is one of your organisation’s leaflets.

  CUMMINGS: Yes, it is.

  It wasn’t just campaigning literature that Cummings was determined to argue over. When asked about whether the UK should retain access to the single market after Brexit, Cummings challenged the premise of the question.

  CHRIS PHILP: Does that mean – and this is really a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question – you think we should not be a member of the single market, whether in or out of Europe?

  CUMMINGS: What do you mean by the single market?

  PHILP: I mean the single market that we currently trade in and that Norway trade in. It is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question: should we be part of the single market or not?

  CUMMINGS: The single market is defined by the European Union as including membership of the euro and Schengen.

  PHILP: That is not true, as we are currently members of it and are neither euro nor Schengen members, so that is clearly untrue.

  CUMMINGS: Exactly; that is the point. However, that is how the European Commission and European Court of Justice define the single market.

  PHILP: We are currently members of it and that is not how it is operating. It is a very simple question that you are persistently refusing to answer.

  CUMMINGS: You are confused about what the single market is.

  PHILP: We are currently a member of it. Norway is currently a member of it. Other EU members are members of it, whether or not they use the euro. It is a very simple question. Should we be a member of the single market or not: yes or no?

  CUMMINGS: The single market is a political project from Jacques Delors and it encompasses…

  It was a window into the world of Dominic Cummings, and evidence that, while he was blessed with an extraordinary analytical brain, he seemed to relish picking fights with as many people as possible.

  Daniel Hannan, who was a fan of Cummings, later admitted that ‘in retrospect Dom might have been a little bit less combative. Your goal in that situation should be to get through it without generating any headlines. However, that’s the package you get with Dom. You won’t find me criticising him at all.’ />
  With Cummings’s aggressive performance doing little to round the edges of a Vote Leave campaign that was already proving spiky – contested figures, the dossier of criminals, Johnson instructing supporters to silence TV reporter Michael Crick as he tried to file a piece to camera – Remain were feeling positive. Of the five opinion polls conducted between the date of the campaign officially kicking off on 15 April and 19 April, Remain were ahead in four of them.

  On Friday 22 April, Downing Street deployed someone it believed would push Remain even further ahead in the polls: Barack Obama. The US President was on his valedictory tour of Europe and, having already expressed support for the UK staying in the EU, he was set to make another intervention in the debate. The visit was well-trailed in advance, and Boris Johnson decided to hit Obama with a pre-emptive strike in order to undermine the President’s credibility. Writing in The Sun, the Mayor claimed a bust of Winston Churchill – Johnson’s political hero – had been removed from the Oval Office on ‘day one of the Obama administration’.

  ‘No one was sure whether the President had himself been involved in the decision,’ Johnson wrote. ‘Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.’

  The article provoked outrage in the media, with the reference to Obama’s ‘part-Kenyan’ heritage drawing most of the fire. Labour MP Chuka Umunna called the comment ‘beyond the pale’, while shadow Chancellor John McDonnell accused Johnson of ‘dog-whistle racism’. Farage decided to come to Johnson’s aid and, appearing on BBC Radio 4’s World at One that afternoon, claimed that Obama ‘bears a bit of a grudge against this country’ because of his ‘grandfather and Kenya and colonialisation’.