The Brexit Club

by Owen Bennet

  With the opening TV skirmishes delivered, all eyes turned to Farage to see if he would sink or swim during his questioning by the studio audience. After arriving at the studio at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, east London on his UKIP battle bus, Farage and Michael Heaver relaxed by having a quick cigarette before going into the building. As the pair were smoking, they saw Cameron and his entourage arrive. Never ones to forgo a spot of mischief, the duo, along with Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore, rushed back inside to make sure the Prime Minister would have to walk past them on his way in. ‘You could see the look of shock on Cameron’s face and his aides looked like, “Oh God, we’re totally losing our job!”,’ remembered Heaver. The Prime Minister said, ‘Hello, Nigel.’ Farage replied, ‘Hello, dear boy. Good luck.’

  With the Vote Leave top brass watching on anxiously, the show kicked off at 9 p.m. It was an anti-climax in every sense. Farage was subjected to a light grilling, but there were no real gaffes or flare-ups – and certainly nothing as controversial as the leaders’ debate in the run-up to the 2015 general election, when he had talked about migrants with HIV using the UK healthcare system and accused an entire audience of being biased against him. The main flash point came when an audience member took Farage to task for comments he had made in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph the previous weekend. The UKIP leader had claimed mass sex attacks which took place in Germany on New Year’s Eve – mainly perpetrated by men of north African descent – could be replicated in the UK if migrants from that part of the world ‘get EU passports’. He described the issue as the ‘nuclear bomb’ in the referendum debate. In the ITV debate, an audience member said: ‘You have basically suggested that a vote to Remain is a vote for British women to be subdued to the same horrific assaults.’

  Farage: ‘Just calm down there a little bit, all right. Sometimes in life what it says at the top of the newspaper page and what you’ve actually said can be slightly different things. I’m used to being demonised because I’ve taken on the establishment.’

  ‘Aren’t you demonising migrants?’ responded the audience member.

  Farage replied:

  What I said about Cologne is it’s a huge issue in Germany, it’s a huge issue in Sweden. I think Angela Merkel has made a big mistake by saying ‘please everyone come’, and what we’ve had is a very large number of young single males have settled in Germany and in Sweden who come from cultures where attitudes towards women are different. I haven’t scaremongered in any way at all.

  It was a tense moment, but as Farage was merely restating views he had expressed a few days before – and which had been widely reported – it was by no means disastrous. The UKIP leader even managed to repeat his campaign trick of brandishing his passport and decrying the presence of the words ‘European Union’ on its cover.

  Cameron’s half-hour slot was mainly focused on migration issues, but he did get in some good digs at the Leave side, including: ‘The British thing is to fight for Great Britain in the EU, not Nigel Farage’s Little England.’

  Although Vote Leave was trying to keep its distance from the debate for fear of being seen to endorse Farage, Gisela Stuart was sent down to the ITV studios to provide commentary after the programme finished. She said later: ‘We didn’t want to have a story where he split the Leave camp, however, I was prepared that if during that debate he said something which we felt was inflammatory and inappropriate, I was on hand to say it. To be fair, he didn’t.’

  Even Douglas Carswell, who was still furious that ITV had selected Farage in the first place, did not think his party leader had made any gaffes. ‘Fortunately it wasn’t too damaging but simply juxtaposing it as a choice between Cameron and Farage was very, very damaging,’ he said.

  A Stronger In source also agreed that Farage had not delivered the gaffes they were hoping for. ‘At the end of the day, Farage is really strong on Europe. Yes, he might turn some people off on immigration, but EU bureaucracy, sovereignty, all that stuff is his strength. It was Cameron who underperformed if anything.’

  With the Farage/Cameron programme out of the way, Vote Leave could turn its full attention to another ITV show scheduled for that week – and this time it would be a proper debate. Boris Johnson, Gisela Stuart and Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom would take on Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon, Labour’s shadow Business Secretary Angela Eagle and Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd.

  To prepare for the clash, Vote Leave hired Brett O’Donnell, the American debating guru who coached George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008 for their presidential TV debates.

  Recognising that the Remain camp would focus their guns on Johnson, O’Donnell spent more than six hours in the weeks running up to the debate, and an additional three hours on the day itself, coaching the trio in how to behave. Vote Leave’s preparation didn’t go entirely smoothly, as a water leak in Westminster Tower meant staff had to decamp to Dominic Cummings’s house on 2 June while the plumbers were called in. Cummings’s wife Mary Wakefield – commissioning editor for The Spectator, who was on maternity leave at the time – revealed the carnage caused when Team Brexit pitched up in her living room in an article for the publication:

  Brexit was younger and cheerier than I had imagined: seven twentysomethings sat around the dining table bent over Macbooks; another five sat on the floor. Four men in their thirties treated the kitchen island as if it were a fashionable standing desk. Their cables trailed through the butter. Two Canadian geeks stood by the midget’s changing mat, laptops propped on the wetwipe box. In the toilet, a brace of physicists discussed Facebook algorithms.

  Around teatime the big beasts appeared: Boris, followed by Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston. They prepped for their TV debate beside a tangle of just-washed sleep suits as the midget and I watched agog. For months now, my life has been dominated almost equally by the baby and the EU referendum. It felt as if fate had fixed it so that reality mirrored my mental state.

  Despite the water-related disruption, the preparation was pitch perfect, as on the night itself the Remain trio did indeed zone in on Johnson. Sturgeon claimed he was ‘only interested in David Cameron’s job’, while Rudd said: ‘Boris, he’s the life and soul of the party, but he’s not the man you want to drive you home at the end of the evening.’ In a row over the £350 million figure, Eagle pointed at Johnson and told him: ‘Get that lie off your bus.’

  Yet while the three Remainers focused their anger and attention on Johnson, Leadsom and Stuart were able to concentrate on their campaign message, repeatedly using the phrase ‘take back control’.

  If anyone was in any doubt that No. 10 had approved the hit on Johnson, Cameron all but confirmed it with a tweet once the show had ended: ‘.@AmberRudd_MP was a star in the #ITVEUREF debate. She was passionate and clear about why we are #StrongerIn the EU, “leading not leaving.”’

  The publication of Vote Leave’s official leaflet, the Farage/Cameron ITV show and the six-way debate had all taken place in the space of four hectic days. It was a crucial period for the Leave campaigners, and the important question was whether public opinion had moved behind Brexit. Of the five opinion polls carried out between 9 and 14 June, Leave was ahead in four of them. On Tuesday 14 June, the Times front page spelt it out: ‘Britain on course for Brexit after poll surge: Seven-point lead in record YouGov survey’.

  With just over a week to go, Leave looked on course for victory.

  CHAPTER 29

  At 10 a.m. on Wednesday 15 June, Gawain Towler sat down outside London’s City Hall on the south bank of the Thames and took a sip of his morning coffee. On the table beside of him was a copy of that day’s Times. The day before, the paper had splashed on Leave being seven points ahead in the latest opinion poll. The front page of the next day’s edition seemed to be the Downing Street reaction to the story: ‘Osborne to raise taxes if voters go for Brexit – Emergency Budget “would put 2p on basic rate”’. It was the latest scare story fr
om the Remain camp – this time that Brexit would lead to a £30 billion black hole in public finances, spelling tax hikes and spending cuts. Towler, like all the Leave side, dismissed the threat. Besides, the UKIP press chief had his mind on something else that day.

  By just before 11 a.m., Towler had walked the short distance from City Hall to Butler’s Wharf, where journalists, film crews and photographers were already starting to gather. Moored next to the jetty was a boat decked out in red, white and blue balloons and Union Jack deckchairs. This was the vessel that Towler, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and a host of media would soon sail up the Thames on. And they wouldn’t be alone. Another thirty fishing boats would be joining Farage’s ship to form a flotilla on the river. They would then sail en masse down to Parliament as a demonstration of how the EU controlled the UK’s fishing waters.

  Although the sky was cloudy and there would be light showers throughout the day, there was no danger of the event being called off, unlike a stunt involving Farage which had been planned for earlier that week. The UKIP leader was offered the chance to take to the sky in a twin-seat Spitfire at Biggin Hill Airport on Monday 13 June. The last time Farage had got in a plane for a political stunt, it had nearly cost him his life. It was on the day of the 2010 general election, and the ‘Vote UKIP’ banner the plane was dragging across the sky got caught up in the tail fin, sending the aircraft crashing to earth. Farage was left with permanent back problems after the incident. Six years on, and he was seriously contemplating whether to take to the air again in the name of political campaigning. He said: ‘I hadn’t finally decided if it was yes or no. I think there’s only one twin-seater in the country. The chance to do it was there and the weather kiboshed it. Would I have done it? Would I have turned up? Of course I would!’

  The Thames adventure would be a much safer way to generate some headlines for the Brexit campaign, and at just after 11.30 a.m. the boat set sail for Parliament. As well as the flotilla on the water, UKIP and Leave activists were also lined up on the bridges that straddle the Thames, all preparing to cheer and applaud the boats as they passed. Douglas Carswell, however, was neither on the water nor on a bridge. ‘I got an email from the UKIP London people saying did I want to meet in Parliament Square for something they were planning on doing,’ he said,

  and I emailed back and I said: ‘Please tell me you don’t have some daft scheme’ and they said: ‘Oh no, no, no, we want to stand on a bridge because a flotilla of boats is going past and we want to make sure other people…’ and I just said hang on – boats, water, bridges, UKIP activists, counterdemonstrators – it didn’t feel right to me.

  Carswell was certainly right to be worried about counterdemonstrators, but not just on dry land. No sooner had Farage’s boat begun making its way up the Thames than a rival ship appeared from the opposite direction, manned by Sir Bob Geldof and a host of activists calling for Remain – including Boris Johnson’s sister, Rachel.

  Using an extremely loud public address system, Geldof’s boat repeatedly blasted out the 1960s soul classic ‘In with the In Crowd’ as it followed Farage’s boat up the river. Geldof even took to a microphone to lambast Farage for only attending one out of forty-two meetings when he was a member of the European Parliament’s Fisheries Committee.

  ‘You are a fraud, Nigel. Go back down the river because you are up one without a canoe or a paddle,’ he said, before adding: ‘You’re no fisherman’s friend.’ Geldof then began sticking two fingers up to Farage and making a wanker gesture at him.

  The UKIP leader tried his best to ignore him, and just muttered, ‘A load of rich kids,’ to himself. Michael Heaver was more forthright in his views: ‘What a bunch of cunts.’ UKIP MEP David Coburn summed up what many Leave campaigners on the boat were thinking when he branded the rival boat ‘millionaires for Remain’.

  He added: ‘The guy has got a big mouth, he was a crap pop star and he’s not even British as far as I understand, he’s from the Irish Republic, he hasn’t got a say in the matter.’

  It wasn’t just Farage who was on the receiving end of Geldof’s insults. Some of the fishermen who had brought along their own boats to be part of the flotilla were also mocked by the singer. The atmosphere became so uncomfortable than one of the activists on Geldof’s boat – Labour supporter Bethany Pickering – actually disembarked from the vessel in protest. She later told LBC Radio: ‘We didn’t expect it would be a billionaire being condescending to fishermen.’

  She added: ‘It was very patronising, very much mocking the issue they had, jeering at them, using his ability and his money to drown out what they had to say.

  ‘He definitely swore at the fishing boats – and made gestures at them as well. It just became very negative.’

  The Stronger In campaign, which did not organise Geldof’s rival boat but were aware of it, initially found the so-called ‘Battle of the Thames’ amusing. ‘Actually, Bob Geldof doesn’t poll as badly as you might think,’ said a source. However, as the day wore on, the mood in Stronger In changed as they realised Osborne’s emergency Budget announcement was losing air time to images of Geldof swearing at Farage and the fishermen.

  Speaking afterwards, Farage said:

  The arresting image of the campaign should have been that unwashed yob. That was an amazing moment. Everything you want to know about this campaign was summed up. All you need to do is write about that flotilla and who was on each side and you know why the referendum went the way that it did.

  Once Farage was back on dry land, he headed up to Peterborough for a public meeting scheduled for that evening. Appearing alongside Labour’s Brendan Chilton, UKIP’s Patrick O’Flynn and Tory MP Stewart Jackson, Farage ended his speech by parading round the stage with a UKIP banner repeatedly shouting: ‘We want our country back!’

  After the meeting, the Brexit campaigners went for a celebratory meal. As far as they were concerned, it had been a fantastic day. But there was another reason the UKIP section of the group were feeling happy. Noticing the smiles on their faces in the restaurant, Chilton asked: ‘What’re you all laughing at?’ A UKIP activist replied: ‘Tomorrow we’re unleashing our first in a series of posters,’ and passed Chilton a phone with a photo of the first image. Chilton took a look at the screen, frowned and handed the phone back.

  CHAPTER 30

  Douglas Carswell left Vote Leave headquarters after his regular morning briefing in a confident mood. It was the day after the flotilla, and what could have been a credibility-damaging PR stunt by Nigel Farage actually worked in Leave’s favour thanks to Sir Bob Geldof’s uncouth intervention. The previous week’s ITV debate featuring Farage had also passed without any major gaffes, and the focus was increasingly shifting to the Vote Leave top team of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Gisela Stuart and Andrea Leadsom. His strategy of keeping Farage away from the Leave campaign was appearing to be broadly successful, and the polls showed Leave were on course for victory – a win that would validate the Tate Plot.

  After crossing Albert Embankment, Carswell started walking across Lambeth Bridge to return to Westminster when three poster vans drove past him – each bearing an identical image. Carswell put his head in his hands and uncharacteristically swore to himself as they went past. Perhaps the detoxification strategy wasn’t such a success after all.

  Minutes after passing Carswell, the three vans pulled up outside Europe House in Smith Square, Westminster. Waiting for them was Nigel Farage and a host of media. The posters were to be the start of a series of images which would be pumped out in the run-up to referendum day a week later. That day’s poster focused on immigration. Underneath the words ‘Breaking point – the EU has failed us all’ was a photograph of a seemingly endless queue of refugees crossing into Slovenia from Croatia in October 2015. At the bottom were the words ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.’

  Introducing the posters, Farage said:

  This is a photograph – an accurate, undoctored photograph – taken on 15 Oct
ober last year following Angela Merkel’s call in the summer and, frankly, if you believe, as I have always believed, that we should open our hearts to genuine refugees, that’s one thing.

  But, frankly, as you can see from this picture, most of the people coming are young males and, yes, they may be coming from countries that are not in a very happy state, they may be coming from places that are poorer than us, but the EU has made a fundamental error that risks the security of everybody.

  Within minutes of its unveiling, the poster was branded ‘disgusting’ by SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, while Labour’s Yvette Cooper said: ‘Just when you thought Leave campaigners couldn’t stoop any lower, they are now exploiting the misery of the Syrian refugee crisis in the most dishonest and immoral way.’ One Twitter user even juxtaposed the poster with Nazi propaganda attacking immigration after the First World War. UKIP’s head of press Gawain Towler said:

  There had been a television documentary which had shown a Nazi propaganda film in which a column of refugees in black and white graininess were there. It will not surprise you to know that we had not been watching it. It’s interesting how lefties watch things about Nazis and we don’t. We had no idea of that, of course we didn’t, as we don’t sit there watching Nazi propaganda films, it’s not what we do.

  Carswell was astonished by Farage’s tactics, and said:

  It’s a few days to go before the referendum, you’re five to seven points ahead in the polls, by what conceivable logic do you publish those Breaking Point refugee posters? Just ask yourself, is there a single person in the country who would respond positively to those posters who hasn’t already made up their mind how they are going to vote? So why use those posters? The only thing those posters are going to do is upset swing voters and make yourself the centre of attention. Perhaps that is the tactical objective. It hindered us from winning and it came ruddy close to costing us the referendum.