The Brexit Club

by Owen Bennet

  One of them was for a campaigning rally at the Royal Albert Hall with himself, Boris Johnson and Kate Hoey. The plan had originally been floated at a meeting in the House of Lords with UKIP peer Lord Pearson, Richard Tice, Hoey and Bruni-Lowe. ‘I said, “Why don’t we do the Royal Albert Hall, Nigel and Boris, and why don’t we do five cities in five days, Nigel and Boris touring the country?” We’ll win. We have Hoey, so we’ll have Labour. We’ll win because the public will go, “Fucking hell!”,’ remembered Bruni-Lowe. Farage brought the plan up with Gove, along with some ideas. According to a source close to one of the top Vote Leave figures, Farage also asked to appear on a Vote Leave platform and requested that, for one day leading up the referendum, UKIP be given free rein in the campaign – meaning Vote Leave would cease activity for twenty-four hours. Gove listened politely, but turned down all the requests. ‘We decided to stick to the strategy, which was Farage was not part of the Vote Leave campaign,’ said the source.

  Another rebuffed idea of Farage’s was to bring together the battle buses of Vote Leave, UKIP and Labour Leave for a symbolic convoy. Farage said, ‘It would have been like the Russians and the Americans meeting at the Elbe. It would have been an amazing event.’ The UKIP leader put the idea to Johnson in a phone call, but met with a familiar response. ‘Boris was really taken with it but he had to consult with his people,’ said Farage. ‘I put the phone down and thought, “He could be Prime Minister soon and he’s got to consult his people.”’ Bruni-Lowe added: ‘That’s when Nigel and I realised that Boris would be a shit Prime Minister. He was totally indecisive. He would agree and then say no.’

  Vote Leave may have not wanted to work with Farage, but Grassroots Out were still holding rallies where he was always welcome. GO events took place in Herefordshire, Manchester, Portsmouth, Cornwall, Witney, Weston-super-Mare, Bristol and Monmouth, as well as street stalls and leafleting campaigns. While these rallies saw the familiar faces of Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove, there were also figures from Vote Leave at some of the events – including Defence Minister Penny Mordaunt. However, while a degree of rapprochement seemed to be developing between Vote Leave and Grassroots Out, Leave.EU were not happy with the green-tie-wearing campaigners.

  On 21 April, it emerged that Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove had been paying themselves money from Grassroots Out. Bone’s company PWB received £21,750 in the first four months of 2016 – £20,000 for accountancy services and a £1,750 director’s fee. Pursglove invoiced Grassroots Out £19,250 – £17,500 for 450 hours’ work as chief executive between 16 December and 31 March, and £1,750 in director’s fees.

  Banks was furious. He had piled in £5 million into various Leave campaigns by that point, and to see others appearing to earn money from the groups annoyed him immensely. A statement from Leave.EU said: ‘We are extremely shocked and disappointed to discover that two elected individuals have treated the GO BREXIT campaign as a business not a cause and would urge them to do the honourable thing and donate the sum directly to a smaller BREXIT group.’

  Bone insisted that neither he nor Pursglove benefited financially from the transactions, as they donated the cash back to Grassroots Out. The reason they took the money out of the company in the first place was that they believed if they didn’t, their work would have been treated as a benefit in kind by the Electoral Commission, which the pair would have had to pay tax on. The easiest way was to take the money out, pay the tax on it, and then donate the money back.

  ‘To make it absolutely clear,’ said Bone, ‘we were paid the money, paid the tax and donated the net amount.’ Electoral Commission records show that this was the case for Bone, who donated £13,050 to Grassroots Out – reflecting his status as a 40 per cent rate taxpayer. Pursglove, who would be on the same rate thanks to his MP salary of £74,962, paid back £10,300 – slightly less than the £11,550 which would represent the money he received after tax.

  Banks’s anger about Bone and Pursglove’s tax arrangement strategy came a day after he was subjected to the now traditional Treasury Committee grilling. It had started off quite well for Banks, who was given ample time to elaborate on his previous attacks on Vote Leave.

  Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie offered up a free hit with the following introduction:

  We need a bit of clarification on a number of the allegations that you in particular, Mr Banks, have made about Vote Leave. Perhaps I should read a few of those out and then ask you to comment on them. You said that their submission to the Electoral Commission was, I quote, ‘full of lies and misrepresentations’. You said Vote Leave are lying and misrepresenting the situation; that ‘these people are jokes’; that ‘he’ in particular – that is, Matthew Elliott – ‘wants to be Lord Elliott of Loserville’; and that ‘he’ – Dominic Cummings – ‘has become a liability and a danger to both Leave campaigns’.

  Banks replied: ‘You saw his evidence last week, didn’t you? You do not need to ask that question.’

  The session provided fewer fireworks than Cummings’s appearance, but did turn slightly surreal when Banks tried to answer a question about President Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ threat by talking about his child’s music lessons:

  The only thing I would say on Obama is I took my son to his piano lesson on Monday night and the piano teacher said to me, ‘You are someone to do with Brexit, aren’t you? I do not like that Mr Obama coming over and telling us what to do.’

  Labour MP Helen Goodman replied: ‘Mr Banks, I am not asking you about your child’s piano lessons. I am asking you about your views on foreign direct investment.’

  Banks answered: ‘We are allowed a little bit of levity, surely? It is not do or die, surely?’

  The only serious news line to come from the grilling was Banks insisting that even if George Osborne’s prediction that Brexit would cost UK households £4,300 by 2030 were correct, it was ‘a price worth paying to get back our own democracy’. Stronger In were quick to send out a press release flagging up the admission.

  With the Treasury Committee grilling over, Banks was able to turn his attention to another project that had been occupying his mind, and that of Andy Wigmore, since the UKIP conference in September. It was while having an evening drink on the veranda of the Earl of Doncaster hotel that the pair came up with the idea of holding a huge rally in aid of Brexit. The original plan was to hire out a football stadium in the Midlands and bus in supporters from around the country. However, Wigmore decided what the campaign really needed was a sprinkle of showbiz, and decided to turn it from a rally to a concert. The NEC Arena in Birmingham, which has a capacity of 16,000, was booked for Sunday 8 May, and ‘BPop Live’ was launched.

  However, Wigmore came up against the same problem many others had experienced when it came to celebrity endorsements: the vast majority don’t want to get involved in politics. For every Michael Caine and Ian Botham who was prepared to speak out in favour of Brexit, there were hundreds more who preferred to keep quiet. ‘Someone like Michael Caine, their brand’s impenetrable and he doesn’t give a monkey’s. For someone like Ian Botham, he took a huge risk and in hindsight would he do it again? I question that. There were a number of others who wanted to but couldn’t or wouldn’t,’ said Tice, reflecting on his own experience of trying to secure celebrity endorsements for Leave.EU.

  Even when Wigmore did manage to get artists to agree to appear, they quickly pulled out once they were made aware it was a Brexit-backing concert. Rumours of bands such as the Stereophonics began to circulate and, at the beginning of March, journalists from the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed were even promised a trip to a recording studio to meet some of the artists lined up. Eventually, drum’n’ bass duo Sigma, singer Ella Eyre and six-piece band the Electric Swing Circus were unveiled as headliners. However, after Buzzfeed contacted the groups to ask them why they were supporting an anti-EU rally, they all pulled out.

  Wigmore was not deterred, and rebooked the concert for Sunday 19 June. It may have been a different date, but the problem
s remained the same. Alesha Dixon, East 17 and two-fifths of the group 5ive all pulled out when they learned the political nature of the concert. Leave.EU had a third attempt at reviving the show and, in an email sent out on 2 June, unveiled BPop Live’s new lineup. ‘Journalists wondering how BPop could possibly top East 17 and two-fifths of 5ive need wonder no longer,’ it read, as it proudly revealed that Mike, Cheryl, Jay and Bobby – formerly of Bucks Fizz – and Elvis Presley impersonator Gordon Hendricks would be appearing, alongside Nigel Farage, Kate Hoey and Liam Fox – who one assumed would be speaking, not singing.

  For some reason, ticket sales were slow – even after the price was dropped from £23 to £5. Alas, on 14 June, the whole event was scrapped entirely. Reflecting on BPop Live, Banks said:

  Originally they had Rudimental, who Andy was friends with. But the press killed it. Every time we put forward a series of artists they got shot down. We actually found it quite funny: ‘We’ve got two-fifths of 5ive and they’ve just pulled out. Now we’ve got 3/8ths of Bucks Fizz and one Drifter.

  As the days ticked down to 23 June, Labour Leave also stepped up its activity. On 23 April, having helped Vote Leave secure designation, John Mills finally quit the organisation.

  In a statement, he said: ‘Over the last few weeks within the campaign, I have come to believe that it would be useful and more effective for the Leave campaign if there was a strong and independent Labour voice for the arguments to leave the EU.’

  Mills’s right-hand man Brendan Chilton, who had switched his support to GO, saw his old friend becoming increasingly distressed at the way Vote Leave were running the campaign:

  The Vote Leave board meetings used to take place on a Tuesday morning and they had the Wednesday committee meetings. After every Tuesday morning we’d either meet or I’d go up to his place or we’d speak on the phone and he was utterly depressed because after every meeting he would say: ‘They just don’t get it.’ All these people sitting on this board, well-respected people, but they’re not campaigners, they are turning up lording it at the board meeting but not seeing what’s going on on the ground.

  Farage, who was becoming good friends with Mills, claimed the businessman’s relief was visible when he left Vote Leave. ‘They abused him, they were horrible to him, they abused his money, they were disgusting to him,’ said Farage. ‘I saw John at one point at a lunch and he looked so ill, I thought, “He isn’t going to make this, he’s trying to do the decent thing with these vile people,” and in the end even he cut loose. God, he was so happy that night.’

  With Labour Leave now finally free from Cummings’s group, it was able to focus on getting the left-wing case for quitting the EU out to its voters. Mills said:

  There was an interesting poll that showed, I think a couple of months before the referendum, a very high proportion, about 40 per cent or something, of Labour people didn’t know what the Labour Party’s policy was. And I think this is partly because the Labour In campaign, to be honest, wasn’t terribly effective. I think probably the rather halfhearted performance by Jeremy Corbyn was a factor in that, and I think the fact that Labour Leave gave a sort of home for Labour people on the Leave side may have confused people to some extent.

  It was not just Labour Leave who noticed the apathy from the party leadership bleeding into its supporters’ minds. An internal memo sent from Stronger In to Labour MPs which was leaked to The Guardian on 31 May flagged up serious concerns. The paper reported that:

  Focus groups in London, Brighton and Ipswich over the past few weeks showed voters were ‘uniformly uncertain’ about whether Labour was campaigning to stay in the EU. They did not know what Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn thought or believed he was for remain but ‘his heart isn’t in it’. In a sign that Labour’s arguments are not cutting through to the mainstream, it revealed that a group of undecided working-class women in Liverpool mostly assumed the party was for leaving the EU.

  The fears Labour Leave had had when Corbyn had announced he was turning his back on years of Euroscepticism on becoming leader – namely that he would be an enthusiastic campaigner for Remain – had proved unfounded. He refused to campaign alongside the Prime Minister, and his speeches were limp, unenthusiastic and uninspiring. Chilton was delighted with Corbyn’s behaviour, and noted: ‘Whenever he made an intervention, it was as if he was willing us on from the background.’

  Indeed, during one intervention on 2 June, he spent much of the speech attacking Downing Street’s arguments for staying in the EU, including George Osborne’s claim that the UK would fall into a year-long recession after Brexit.

  ‘I was at home watching that,’ said Chilton. ‘I think it was lunchtime when he made that speech and I always have a glass of wine with my lunch. I raised my glass to the television.’

  As revealed by the Huffington Post after the referendum, the head of Labour’s Remain campaign, Alan Johnson, struggled to secure meetings with Corbyn to discuss strategy; pro-EU lines such as ‘That’s why I am campaigning to remain in the EU’ were deleted from speeches; and the leader even went away on holiday for three nights at the end of May just as the referendum campaign was intensifying.

  This lack of enthusiasm from Corbyn and those around him created a space for Labour Leave, or Labour GO, to push forward with its anti-EU message. Whereas Corbyn appeared reluctant to get out on the road, Labour’s Eurosceptics were relishing campaigning across the country, and were delighted with the reception they received. Chilton said:

  On more than one occasion we had people coming up to us, some were crying, saying: ‘This is what we want Labour to be, we want it to be the party for the working-class people.’ It doesn’t mean marching off to the left and going mad. It means patriotic centre-left.

  While Chilton was delighted to see such support in Labour-voting areas for his Eurosceptic campaign, he knew this could cause problems for the party in the long term. ‘We were warning the party, we sent private emails, private memos to Tom Watson, to Jeremy, to the General Secretary, to Alan Johnson, saying: “We obviously disagree on this but you need to be aware that this is what we’re finding,”’ he said. When asked why he was giving such intelligence to what was at that moment his opposition, Chilton replied defiantly: ‘Because we’re still Labour.’

  Yet, despite all the activity, all the quirky photographs, all the briefings, all the leafleting and all the rallies, the opinion polls were not looking good for the Eurosceptics.

  Of the seven surveys carried out from 11 May – the date of the Vote Leave’s bus launch – to 19 May, Remain was in the lead in six of them. It seemed that Stronger In’s campaign tactic of pointing out the dangers of Brexit, including in Cameron’s speech at the beginning of May questioning whether European peace and security would remain if the UK left the EU, was carrying more weight with the public than Vote Leave’s messaging.

  On Friday 20 May, a frustrated Richard Tice sent an email to a number of Eurosceptic campaigners, including Gisela Stuart, Lord Lawson, Kate Hoey and numerous UKIP and Conservative peers, urging for a change in tactics.

  Dear Gisela, other Vote Leave leaders and key Vote Leave funders,

  Halfway through the official designated period, with less than 5 weeks to go, it is increasingly clear that the Vote Leave campaign of Boris and Gove, masterminded by Elliott and Cummings, is failing.

  I have not heard anyone on our side say, or write, that it is a well run campaign with a clear strategy. It is turning into a depressing blue on blue male ego battle, between Boris and Dave, with a splash of Michael, which is turning off Tory voters and leaving the rest utterly cold. Most of the campaign appears to be based around £350m / week, to spend on the NHS – the wrong number on the wrong thing.

  Tice then set out how he felt the campaign should change:

  1. VL have given Remain a free run on the economics (despite this being the favoured strategic battleground of Elliott / Cummings):

  1) The likes of John Longworth, Digby Jones, other business people toget
her with Ruth Lea, and Roger Bootle need to be promoted to address this

  2) The appalling forecasting track record of the Treasury, IMF, Carney etc needs much greater emphasis

  3) Greater acceptance that short term uncertainty < 2 years is worth the medium / long term benefits

  2. More emphasis on being safer out than in, using our security supporting people like Dearlove

  3. Democracy and immigration

  1) Labour people like Kate Hoey and commentators like Julia Hartley Brewer need bringing to the fore

  2) Working with not against Nigel

  3) Emphasising that it is about so much more than just the economics

  4) More focus that there is no status quo option, Remain means more Brussels, more regs, less democracy.

  He ended with a final dig at Vote Leave:

  An admission needs to be made by the Vote Leave non exec leaders that Boris and Gove need less exposure, whilst Elliott and Cummings need to go. The first two have not performed that well on TV where they should be best, and the latter two’s core strategic plan has proven to be utterly wrong and flawed.

  Such a course of action would actually gain the respect of the press and the people.

  The country’s future is in your hands. There is still time.

  Little did Tice realise that Vote Leave were about to go big on immigration and the idea that ‘there is no status quo’, and were preparing to zone in one issue to highlight both of those concerns: Turkey.

  CHAPTER 27

  ‘I would say very clearly to people: “If your vote in this referendum is being influenced by considerations about Turkish membership of the EU, don’t think about it. It is not remotely on the cards.” It is not an issue in this referendum and it shouldn’t be,’ said David Cameron to Parliament’s Liaison Committee on 4 May 2016. Unfortunately for him, his opponents didn’t quite agree, and they were determined to make sure Turkey was very much an issue in the referendum.