by Owen Bennet
Carswell added:
You cannot allow Downing Street to spend £9.3 million on propaganda, you can’t allow them to use the machinery of the state. You would never tolerate a general election where the incumbent government decided who the spokespeople were for each party and that is precisely what happened and it was an absolutely disgraceful ITV fiasco.
What Vote Leave did not know was that ITV had been in conversation with Farage since the beginning of the year, when the UKIP leader had sat down with ITV’s director of news Mark Jermey in a restaurant at St Pancras station. Farage was on his way to Brussels, but he, his personal press officer Michael Heaver and UKIP’s head of press Gawain Towler found time for a meeting with the TV executive before departing on the Eurostar. The network had asked for a sit-down to get a flavour of what Farage would be up for in terms of debate formats in the run-up to referendum day. The lunch was very much a brainstorming session, as at that point the referendum date was yet to be officially announced.
A few weeks later, Heaver was asked to go into ITV headquarters to see Jermey for a one-on-one meeting. ‘I remember Jermey said, “We think we can do it, we think we can get Cameron v. Nigel,”’ said Heaver, who suddenly realised he was about to broker a huge political event. ‘I’m sitting there thinking, “Fucking hell, I’m twenty-six years old, a working-class boy,” and I knew I was about to help set up the most-watched, biggest part of the whole fucking referendum campaign. It felt quite historic. This is serious shit.’
After a couple more meetings – including one after Vote Leave had been awarded designation – ITV went quiet until Heaver got an email ‘out of nowhere’ to say that Downing Street had agreed to take part in a show. The conditions were that Farage and Cameron would not share the stage at any point, and the UKIP leader would face the audience first. Heaver and Farage agreed. The UKIP leader’s spokesman did not buy the idea that Downing Street chose Farage because they felt the MEP would damage the Brexit cause. ‘If he’s that easy, why didn’t Cameron do him one on one and make him look stupid?’ said Heaver. Reflecting on receiving the email, he added: ‘It was frantic, they confirmed all the details and were going through it with No. 10 and confirmed it with us. And then ITV said to me about two or three o’clock, “We think we’ve got it and at ten o’clock tonight we’re going to announce.”’ The spokesman decided to miss that evening’s Brexit: The Movie premiere so he could be fully prepared for the news breaking.
Heaver, Farage and Towler were the only Brexit campaigners who knew what was coming, meaning that those at the top of Vote Leave found out about the debate at exactly the same time as everyone else. However, the ferocity of the Vote Leave statement was not intended simply as a threat to ITV, but also as a warning to the BBC.
The next morning, executives at the broadcaster were due to meet to finalise the terms of the corporation’s own debates. The BBC had announced in February plans for what would be the largest political campaign event in the UK – a debate at Wembley Arena on 21 June. There had been reports in the press in March that the BBC was hoping for a four-on-four debate, with Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Iain Duncan Smith and George Galloway representing Leave, up against George Osborne, Alan Johnson, Tim Farron and Caroline Lucas for Remain. The story was strongly denied by the BBC, but Vote Leave was becoming increasingly worried that the broadcaster would ignore the designation protocol and request that Farage take part – as ITV had done.
Elliott said:
The reason why we were quite strong that evening against ITV was partly trying to get ITV to change, but also to fire a warning shot across the bows of the BBC for the next morning, so when they were sitting round working out what to do and thinking: ‘Should we go with Nigel, he’s better box office than anyone Vote Leave can put up’, they would be scared off it.
ITV did not change its mind, but the BBC did seem to be edging away from including Farage in its Wembley showpiece. Leave.EU became so irked about the potential exclusion of the UKIP leader it took the bizarre step of publishing the personal telephone numbers of the BBC’s head of Westminster Robbie Gibb, as well as Elliott, Cummings and Robert Oxley from Vote Leave, and UKIP’s Douglas Carswell.
It then emailed supporters asking them to lobby for Farage’s inclusion. The email, signed by Banks, Andy Wigmore and Richard Tice, read:
Nigel Farage, a charismatic campaigner with over twenty years’ experience and leader of the only major, UK-wide party dedicated to Brexit, absolutely needs to be part of the debate.
It will be completely unacceptable if Matthew Elliot [sic] and Dominic Cummings, the backstairs crawlers behind the creaking Vote Leave machine, are allowed to sideline UKIP entirely, as they tried to with the planned ITV debate, in favour of a handful of Tory ministers who have only been part of the Brexit movement for five minutes.
The stunt did not go down well, and Leave.EU sought to wind Carswell up further by publishing a private message he sent them asking for his contact details to be removed from its website. ‘Note from @DouglasCarswell. Only asked public to tell him we want Nigel at BBC debate. So much for Direct Democracy!’ the Leave.EU Twitter account posted, along with a screenshot of Carswell’s message.
Banks, Wigmore and Tice may have been having fun, but the action was certainly not approved by UKIP. ‘I don’t know a single person in our group who hadn’t said, “Don’t do it” when they floated it. Everybody. We thought it was a joke, it was so bloody outrageous,’ Towler remembered.
Speaking afterwards, Banks said:
I thought it was great. Robbie Gibb had 61,000 emails from our supporters saying he should include Nigel in the big debate. Apparently his phone went into meltdown as he had three or four thousand phone calls. Rob Oxley put out a wonderful tweet saying, ‘An angry phone call lasts a few minutes, class lasts forever’. We killed ourselves, I couldn’t stop laughing for about half an hour. Nigel calls Andy and says: ‘What are you going to do next, throw bricks through their window? I quite like Robbie, poor Robbie.’ Andy replied: ‘You are the leading Brexit politician in the country, what right do they have to keep you from the debate?’ Nigel said: ‘What are you going to do next? You’re only one step away from ISIS. Are you going to put bricks through their window?’ Carswell went ballistic. His phone melted down, it was hilarious.
Despite – or maybe because of – Leave.EU’s direct lobbying, Farage was not chosen for the Wembley debate. Yet he would get his moment in the spotlight on 11 June, giving Vote Leave an anxious month ahead.
CHAPTER 26
While those at the top of Vote Leave and Leave.EU were arguing with television executives and sending out aggressive emails, the actual campaign to get the UK out of the EU was still going on.
Wednesday 11 May was not only the day of the Brexit: The Movie premiere and the announcement of the Farage/Cameron ITV show, it was also the first time the Vote Leave battle bus hit the road. Aboard the 36-seat coach were Boris Johnson and Gisela Stuart and, as the bus pulled into Truro, a crowd of people brandishing Vote Leave banners gathered to greet the politicians. Johnson spent the day in full ‘Boris’ mode: he waved a Cornish pasty in the air, clutched a bunch of asparagus and claimed it would be more delicious outside the EU, and even gave an ice cream to an unsuspecting member of the public. But it was not Johnson’s antics when off the bus that provoked a storm: it was what was emblazoned on the side of it: ‘We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead.’ Just the day before the bus was unveiled, the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Andrew Dilnot, had written to Dominic Cummings, effectively asking Vote Leave to stop using the £350 million figure.
He wrote:
I note the use of the £350 million figure, which appears to be a gross figure which does not take into account the rebate, or other flows from the EU to the UK public sector (or flows to non-public sector bodies), alongside the suggestion that this could be spent elsewhere. Without further explanation I consider these statements to be potentially misleading and it
is disappointing that this figure has been used without such explanation. Given the high level of public interest in this debate it is important that official statistics are used accurately, with important limitations or caveats clearly explained.
Dilnot was not the first person to take issue with the number. It had originally been used in the video to mark Vote Leave’s launch back in October, with Bernard Jenkin raising concerns at the time. As the campaign progressed, others felt uncomfortable using a figure which at the very least required clarification. Labour Leave’s Brendan Chilton said the £350 million was raised as a concern during meetings of David Campbell Bannerman’s contact group on numerous occasions. ‘Everybody said, “Use the net figure.” It was ignored,’ said Chilton.
There were lots of debates about it, we weren’t happy about it but they got designation, they could do it, but I have to say we never used that figure, we always used the net as we felt it was more honest. Using that figure, you leave yourself open to criticism – why create an easy target of yourself?
Ruth Lea, the respected economist who had worked as a civil servant for almost sixteen years, ended her official involvement with Vote Leave in February 2016 because of the campaign’s use of the figure. ‘When I was showed the £350 million, I thought, “I’m going to paddle my own canoe,”’ she said. When she saw the figure on the side of a bus three months after quitting Vote Leave, she found herself shaking her head. ‘I can make mistakes, I can get things wrong, but at least then it’s my fault, I answer for it,’ she said.
I wrote a piece at the beginning of the year on the budget contribution. Very rough-and-ready figures: gross contribution £18–20 billion, you get about a quarter of it back with a rebate and you can spend that how you like – it’s in arrears but nevertheless you get that money back and you can spend that exactly how you like. Then of course there’s another quarter back in terms of public sector receipts, whether it’s farming or regional policy.
The use of the figure was also raised by John Mills with the Vote Leave campaign team when he was chairman. As well as a defence of the claim’s validity, he was also offered a more cynical explanation.
‘The argument for the £350 million claim was that it was a very, very big number, and that everyone would dispute it but all this would then draw in everybody’s attention to the fact that it was a very big number,’ said Mills. Even when he pushed for the net figure to be used, he was met with the same argument: ‘Their response was that we’re better off with a big number because even if it’s disputed, just in tactical terms, it keeps the size of the contribution in front of everyone.’
Bernard Jenkin did not know the number was going to be on the side of the bus, and although he was uncomfortable about its use, he saw the benefits of the plan, which had been put in place by Dominic Cummings and the campaign team. Jenkin said:
Vote Leave deliberately used the £350 million figure out of context in order to provoke a row about it and I remember one six o’clock news with one broadcaster saying: ‘But how do you justify that?’ with a picture of the bus with ‘£350 million for the NHS’ on it – you couldn’t pay for that publicity! This was a tension we had to deal with, but I would never use that figure out of context. Nor would people like Andrea Leadsom. Whenever any minister or respectable politician was dealing with this, we would always use the context, but the Vote Leave propaganda was short of that context, therefore made it very controversial and it cut through.
Jenkin also pointed out that, despite the UK Statistics Authority’s concerns about the figure, it had used the number in its own publications. ‘Why do they approve publication of this figure if they do not think it should be used? The UKSA chair Sir Andrew Dilnot told the Select Committee, which I chair: “The £19.1 billion figure is a legitimate figure for gross contributions,”’ said Jenkin.
Iain Duncan Smith also defended the tactic, and said: ‘Let’s be honest, it created a row and it alerted the public to the fact we give money to the European Union.’
He added: ‘The figure £350 million was just a kind of characterised figure in a way and it was a catalyst to create the debate, ironically, about that you give money and that money can be better used here. That was really how it got going.’
While some were opposed to the gross figure entirely or recognised it as a piece of propaganda designed to stoke up a row, others defended its use. Matthew Elliott, who conceded ‘the rows were good’, said: ‘When you tell me your salary, you probably tell me in gross terms what you’re paid.’ Daniel Hannan used similar logic to defend the figure, saying:
If I say to you: ‘What’s basic rate income tax?’, do you say: ‘It’s 20p in the pound’, or do you say: ‘Well, if you think about it it’s actually zero because we get it all back in roads and schools and hospitals!’? It was a perfectly legitimate thing to quote the gross figure. What was extraordinary is that the other side walked into the thing of arguing the toss and made that figure a big part of the campaign and all people heard was: ‘We’re giving a lot of money to the EU. Whether it’s £180 million or £350 million, it’s a hell of a lot of money.’ If they had been clever they’d have said: ‘Yeah, it’s £350 million a week, but here’s what we get…’
It wasn’t just the figure on the side of the bus that provoked a row, but also what it was linked to: funding the NHS. The Leave campaign was calling for the UK to quit the EU; it was not a government-in-waiting. Making specific promises on what the money currently spent on EU membership could be used for was out of its jurisdiction. Leave supporters were quick to point out that the text did not say all the £350 million should be spent on the health service, and it was just one of the many things that could benefit from the funds.
That distinction may have been made clear on 11 May when the bus was unveiled in Truro, but Vote Leave’s very first billboard poster did promise to give the money to the NHS. Reflecting on the bus slogan, John Whittingdale seemed oblivious to the initial claim: ‘I was always happy to defend the £350 million figure. Where it has been wrongly interpreted – I don’t think we ever said this, Farage might have done – we never said we will give £350 million a week to the NHS.’ When it was pointed out that Vote Leave had made that explicit promise almost as soon as it was awarded designation, Whittingdale said: ‘Well, we shouldn’t have done.’
Elliott acknowledged that initial claim of giving all the £350 million to the NHS was an error. ‘I think we were always very careful but one poster did slip through where it made the full link,’ he said.
The row was all too much for Tory MP Dr Sarah Wollaston, who on 8 June announced she was switching from Leave to Remain because of the campaign’s claims over the NHS. She told the BBC: ‘I could not have set foot on a battle bus that has at the heart of its campaign a figure that I know to be untrue. If you’re in a position where you can’t hand out a Vote Leave leaflet, you can’t be campaigning for that organisation.’
Regardless of the merits of its slogan, the bus was performing its job: getting people talking about the money the UK paid to be part of the EU. It also successfully carried out its other requirement: getting Vote Leave politicians around the country. Michael Gove, Priti Patel, Theresa Villiers, Iain Duncan Smith, Douglas Carswell and other campaigners all clambered aboard the red bus as they took their message out to the voters. Most of the photo opportunities involved Boris Johnson, who was snapped playing cricket, pulling pints, speeding round a race track, clutching a lobster, kissing a fish and even auctioning off a cow.
Seeing the fun Vote Leave were having, Nigel Farage decided to get involved with a bus tour of his own. In deliberate contrast to Vote Leave’s executive coach, UKIP hired an old-fashioned double decker, which was then painted purple. It too had a slogan on the side, but instead of focusing on a particular issue, UKIP stuck with a message based on emotion: ‘We want our country back – vote to leave on June 23rd’ (Farage and his advisors could never quite bring themselves to say the phrase ‘vote leave’ – hence the word �
��to’ in the slogan).
By this point, Chris Bruni-Lowe had decided to make UKIP’s campaign ‘all about Nigel’ and wanted the messaging to appeal to people’s guts, not their brains. His inspiration came from an unlikely source – a 1993 film about Jamaica’s Olympic bobsleigh team. ‘It needed to be like Cool Runnings,’ said Bruni-Lowe.
In Cool Runnings, the guy says to whatever the character is: ‘What do you see when you look in the mirror?’ and he says: ‘I see pride, I see passion, I see someone who won’t take no shit from no one and I’m going to stand up for myself.’ I said if we can make the referendum about that, we’ll win.
The UKIP bus rolled into towns and cities across the country right up until referendum day, with the theme from the film The Great Escape blasted out from on-board speakers as a means of firing up patriotic fervour. After its launch in Dagenham, east London on 23 May, Farage travelled to South Yorkshire, Birmingham, Leeds, Essex and many other places, where he would address public meetings and wave his passport in the air, decrying the fact that it had the words ‘European Union’ written on the front cover.
Despite the exposure the UKIP bus tour was giving Farage, the MEP still believed he was being underused in the campaign. On 30 May, he sat down for dinner with Michael Gove at the house of UKIP donor Christopher Mills, who had issued the invitation to the pair. Farage had been in contact with both Gove and Johnson over a number of issues, including the £350 million claim on the bus (‘I begged them to change it. I spoke to Gove. He said: “It’s all a bit late for that,”’ remembered Farage), but at the dinner the UKIP leader had some ideas he wanted to put to the Vote Leave campaign co-convenor.