by Owen Bennet
By the time Obama appeared alongside the Prime Minister in Downing Street at just after 5 p.m., it seemed the US President had done his job. The two most prominent Leave figures were questioning the motives of the country’s closest ally based on his father’s nationality – not a good position for a campaign which insisted that reengaging with the world was one of the key reasons for leaving the EU.
At the press conference, Obama decided to dole out what he believed to be some home truths to Leave campaigners who claimed the UK would be able to secure a trade deal with the US soon after Brexit.
‘They are voicing an opinion about what the United States is going to do; I figured you might want to hear from the President of the United States what I think the United States is going to do,’ he said,
and on that matter, for example, I think it’s fair to say that maybe some point down the line there might be a UK–US trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done.
Obama added: ‘The UK is going to be in the back of the queue.’
The line had been delivered, and it was as unambiguous as Downing Street had hoped it would be. ‘Obama has detonated. That sound you hear is panicking Brexiteers running for shelter and returning fire with pea shooters,’ was the verdict of the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire. ‘We expected a hand grenade or two from Obama. He has instead detonated a battlefield nuclear device,’ tweeted the Sunday Times’s Tim Shipman.
What was riling many Leave campaigners, besides the intervention itself, was Obama’s choice of language. Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? that evening, Nigel Farage said: ‘No American would say “back of the queue”. Americans don’t use the word “queue”, Americans use the word “line”.’ The UKIP leader took that as proof that the line had been drafted by Downing Street, and earned a round of applause as he said it was ‘shameful’ that Obama was ‘talking down Britain’.
Despite the row over the language used, the Remain camp were confident Obama’s intervention would provide them with a boost in the polls. Stronger In’s Head of Comms James McGrory could not hide his delight, and tweeted: ‘I’m going to say it. The Obama presser couldn’t have gone better. It has made my day to see how angry it has got the Leave campaigners.’
However, a survey by YouGov carried out on the day of his visit seemed to show the opposite effect. While his net approval rating in the UK was 56 per cent, almost the same number – 53 per cent – thought it was ‘inappropriate’ for Obama to express a preference on how the UK should vote in the referendum. This seemed to be carried through to voting intentions, as of the eight opinion polls carried out from the day of his visit to the following Friday, Leave was ahead in five of them.
Obama may have detonated, but at that moment it appeared to be a suicide bombing.
CHAPTER 25
The queue stretched from the cinema’s entrance deep into Leicester Square. It was made up of gentlemen in tuxedos and smart suits, while the women were wearing posh frocks and elegant dresses. In a cordoned-off area just outside the cinema, photographers took snaps of the VIPs arriving on the red carpet.
‘Is it for The Jungle Book?’ one tourist asked. It wasn’t a bad guess. After all, the Odeon in Leicester Square was the home of film premieres, and the live-action remake of the Disney classic was about to be released in cinemas. However, it wasn’t Sir Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray or Scarlett Johansson walking the red carpet on the night of 11 May 2016, but Nigel Farage, Kate Hoey and Lord Lawson. They had turned out for the premiere of Brexit: The Movie, a documentary directed by free-market advocate Martin Durkin.
Watching from a balcony above the cinema’s entrance were the film’s producers, David Shipley and Hunter DuBose – two corporate finance advisors who had spent almost a year bringing the project to the silver screen. It had not been an easy process, and the story of Brexit: The Movie is a perfect demonstration of the difficulties many faced when dealing with Vote Leave.
One evening in June 2015, Shipley and DuBose were enjoying a steak and a bottle of red wine at the Guinea steakhouse in London’s Mayfair. The pair were avowed free-market libertarians, and as such were opposed to the regulation-heavy European Union. Over the meal, they discussed what they could do to help the Out campaign in the promised referendum. The duo were interested in policy and think tanks, not campaigning, but realised they had to take a more active approach to their politics in order to help achieve the outcome they desired. ‘We knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime, constitutionally significant question that will never happen again,’ said DuBose. They had already met with Matthew Elliott, whom they knew through Business for Britain, and offered to help in any way they could.
Over the steak and wine, the pair talked through a variety of ways of getting involved, before DuBose remembered someone he had first met a few years ago – Martin Durkin. The filmmaker was famous for producing programmes that attacked the consensus on global warming, and also for the sympathetic Thatcher documentary Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary, in which he theorised that the Tory Prime Minister had actually been a working-class hero. DuBose and Shipley agreed that a film about the benefits of Brexit might arm Eurosceptics with the facts needed to help them win the referendum.
At an Institute of Economic Affairs event later that summer, the pair approached Durkin with their idea. ‘We gave him a pitch and before we’d even finished he said, “There should be a movie,”’ remembered DuBose.
After holding meetings with Durkin and members of his production company, Wag TV, the two were confident the project could be a success. All they needed now was funding and help with refining the message. They got in contact with Elliott again. ‘He was at that point the only person we knew involved in the Leave campaigns. We said: “We’re making this film, we’d really like it if this film was informed by what you think [are] the most persuasive messages that [are] going to make it as effective as possible,”’ said Shipley.
Elliott was initially happy to help and Dominic Cummings was despatched to attend planning meetings. After two such meetings, each lasting between two and three hours, the pair were even more excited about the project.
‘Dominic was very engaged, he was forthcoming, contributing a lot, contributing ideas,’ said DuBose.
Shipley agreed, and added: ‘I remember after those two meetings turning to Hunter and saying: “It’s funny, I don’t understand why people say such nasty things about him. He seems like a really smart guy and [is] being really helpful.”’
By the beginning of January 2016, the project had a production cost attached to it: £300,000. The pair had already tapped up all of their Eurosceptic contacts asking for donations, and decided to ask Elliott and Cummings if they could point them in the direction of any rich Brexit supporters who might be willing to contribute. The four were having a conference call to discuss the progress of the film when DuBose said the two words Cummings and Elliott did not want to hear: Arron Banks.
DuBose said:
During the phone call I said, ‘Just so you know we’re having a conversation with Arron Banks tomorrow, do you have any insights you can give us about what his trigger points will be to make him want to help us?’ There was just stone-cold silence at the end of the phone. Matthew said, ‘You can’t speak to Arron,’ and out came this vitriolic rhetoric. The key message was ‘Farage is toxic, Arron Banks is toxic, they will destroy this campaign. They will turn voters away from Leave and make them vote Remain.’
Shipley added: ‘The other key message was “If you let them near this film they will make it their film and they will claim publicly it’s theirs.”’
The pair were shocked. They had been so focused on getting the project off the ground, they had not been paying attention to the various scraps between the groups.
DuBose said:
At that point we didn’t really understand how venomous the politics were between Leave.EU and Vot
e Leave … Naively, we thought we’re all working towards the same goal here, we’re all trying to achieve the same outcome; we took a businessman’s perspective. Our thought was, ‘Surely if we all want the same objective, let’s collaborate and make all this happen.’
Despite being taken aback by the strength of feeling coming from Vote Leave, the pair decided to stick with them. They had no reason to disbelieve the claims about Farage and Banks made by Elliott and Cummings. However, something strange then happened. ‘They just disappeared,’ said DuBose. ‘Over the course of four or five months, from the day of that phone call until about a week before the premiere, we sent email after email, phone call after phone call to Matthew, but got nowhere.’
Shipley and DuBose decided to launch a public Kickstarter for the film, and hoped to crowdsource £100,000 from small donations. But as the clock ticked on, it looked like the project was going to miss its funding target. With Vote Leave seemingly no longer interested, the pair decided to go against Elliott’s advice and contact Leave.EU. Andy Wigmore came to a meeting in the pair’s Berkeley Square office, and they were astonished by his attitude.
DuBose said:
They were incredibly supportive, they couldn’t have been more different. They made a really meaningful donation to the budget of the film: they donated £50,000, which I’m pretty sure came straight from Arron’s pocket. They put a huge amount of effort behind their social media support. At every point, they emphasised we were an independent project. They never once suggested or even hinted at trying to influence or interfere with the creative or editorial process.
With Banks on board and the finances sorted out, production on the film began. Running up to the film’s premiere on 11 May, the pair repeatedly tried to contact Vote Leave to ask for help in promoting the documentary. DuBose and Shipley even went to Vote Leave HQ for a meeting with Robert Oxley and the campaign’s national organiser, Stephen Parkinson. One source recalled the meeting being particularly tense, with Elliott unhappy that the two producers were in the office. ‘I’ve seen emails on those lines,’ said Elliott later:
I must have been particularly stressed that day. I certainly didn’t mean to be rude and wasn’t aware that I was being rude. When I joined the meeting, it was to encourage them and be in the meeting, it wasn’t to control what was going on or anything like that. I think it was close to when we were handing in designation and if you remember the final days ticking up to both sides handing in their designation forms, there’s huge competition in the sense of ‘Which side does Kelvin Hopkins support’ etc.
Indeed, that meeting was mentioned in Vote Leave’s designation document to back up the claim it was working with Brexit: The Movie. ‘Our contact with Wag TV has been productive and cordial,’ the document said, ‘and would continue if we were designated as the lead campaign.’
It was not a description Shipley and DuBose recognised based on their dealings with Vote Leave since January.
Elliott later admitted to keeping the project at arm’s length, and said:
We were very fearful that if we worked with them too hand-in-glove, their spending might be considered against our £7 million. The second point was that we, quite understandably in a sense, weren’t in control of the editorial side of it, and what was in there and the research and the facts and figures and what have you. We were always afraid that things which we hadn’t 100 per cent verified or checked or felt able to defend would all of a sudden be ascribed to us as a campaign.
While all of these production and marketing battles were going on, Durkin had his head down and was frantically making the film. The seventy-minute documentary featured prominent Eurosceptic campaigners such as Daniel Hannan, Steve Baker and Douglas Carswell giving their takes on why the UK should back Brexit. The film contrasted previous periods of low regulation in British history, such as the Industrial Revolution, with today, and surmised that the UK economy was being strangled by the laws coming out of Brussels. Through the use of stereotypes, it also contrasted the workers of Europe with the tiger economies of Asia.
A review of the film on the Huffington Post said:
The film itself focused on regulations, trade and EU waste – and stereotypes. An Italian umbrella factory was portrayed as shoddy with workers more concerned with snogging a curvaceous woman than making quality brollies. A Frenchman was, yep you guessed it, wearing a beret, a striped top and had a string of onions round his neck. The growing economic powerhouse of Asia was portrayed by two men being good at maths.
While the film talked a lot about regulation, there was one topic that was not mentioned at all: immigration.
The night before the premiere, Wigmore was shown the film for the first time. He was not happy. Banks said:
Andy saw the film and said, ‘I can’t believe what I’ve just seen, there’s no mention of immigration in it at all and there’s only one short clip of Nigel in it. It’s basically Vote Leave propaganda.’ Andy was apoplectic, given that we’d just funded the bloody thing and we were trying to get the message out about control immigration and the Australian-style points system.
Farage’s aide Chris Bruni-Lowe had a more succinct take on the film. ‘The Brexit movie was shit, it was all libertarian rubbish, it was the worst thing I’d ever seen made,’ he said.
With Farage getting just a few minutes of screen time, a row broke out over whether he should introduce the film at the premiere as planned. According to one source, Durkin was angry that Farage’s aides had been so dismissive of the film, and didn’t want him to introduce a piece of work he didn’t believe in. Banks and Wigmore decided not to attend the premiere at all, despite Banks having invested a great deal of money in the project.
Those who did attend – including Farage – thoroughly enjoyed pretending to be part of the movie industry for the evening. Champagne was served before the 1,700 guests took to their seats, and the audience played their part in proceedings by booing every time Ted Heath’s name was mentioned and cheering when Farage and Hannan appeared on the screen.
Shortly after the premiere, the film was put up online so people could view it for free, and it secured well over 2 million views on YouTube alone by the time of the referendum on 23 June.
Yet, for all the glitz and glamour of the premiere in Leicester Square, it wasn’t Brexit: The Movie that made the headlines that evening. Nigel Farage, who had spent a year being slammed as toxic by the Eurosceptic ‘posh boys’, had seen the campaign he supported fail to get designation, had been ignored, overlooked and undermined by opponents supposedly on his side of the argument, was about to send Vote Leave into near meltdown. It would put another nail in the coffin of the Tate Plot, and prove that, like Carswell, Farage could play the long game too.
At 10 p.m., as the VIPs from the Brexit: The Movie premiere were drinking champagne at an after-party, ITV announced it would be hosting a prime-time referendum debate show featuring David Cameron and Nigel Farage. It would be broadcast at 9 p.m. on Tuesday 7 June, and would see the UKIP leader facing questions from a studio audience for half an hour, followed by the Prime Minister undergoing a similar interrogation.
Vote Leave was furious and, an hour and fifteen minutes after the announcement, an email was fired out with the kind of language and sentiment normally associated with Arron Banks.
It read:
The establishment has tried everything from spending taxpayers’ money on pro-EU propaganda to funding the IN campaign via Goldman Sachs. The polls have stayed fifty fifty. They’re now fixing the debates to shut out the official campaign. ITV is led by people like Robert Peston who campaigned for Britain to join the euro. ITV has lied to us in private while secretly stitching up a deal with Cameron to stop Boris Johnson or Michael Gove debating the issues properly. ITV has effectively joined the official IN campaign and there will be consequences for its future – the people in No. 10 won’t be there for long.
The Vote Leave response provoked some mocking (after all, they were supposed to be the
sensible campaign) and even forced ITV’s political editor to defend himself against claims of bias: ‘So, & I can hardly believe I need to say this, I never campaigned for the euro & ITV is wholly impartial in EU referendum debate,’ tweeted Robert Peston.
‘The whole point of us getting designation was basically to make sure it wasn’t Nigel Farage in the debates,’ said Elliott. Although he had had no idea that ITV were in negotiations with Farage, he was aware that Downing Street had been on manoeuvres in the few days leading up to the announcement. After a period of seeming non-engagement from Cameron’s team with broadcasters over the format of the debates, or even whether the Prime Minister should be involved at all, suddenly ‘there was a flurry of activity’, said Elliott:
Craig Oliver [Downing Street’s director of communications] all of a sudden started hitting all the broadcasters to talk terms of the debates, essentially trying to bamboozle the process and present a fait accompli – they must be done in this way, David Cameron will not be debating anybody else – all these different sorts of rules and regulations.
It seemed to Elliott that Downing Street had specifically requested to take on Farage, a view shared by UKIP’s Douglas Carswell. Having helped Vote Leave secure the designation, the Clacton MP was furious that ITV had selected the UKIP leader for the show:
What is the point in having a designation process if one side and the broadcasters then choose who’s going to be the spokesman on both sides? Imagine if you had a general election and ITV got to decide who should speak for each party? Imagine if you had a football match and the manager of one team got to pick the players of the other? It’s absolutely insane.