All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

In Brussels, Rogers told senior Commission officials Martin Selmayr and Jonathan Faull, ‘Guys, if we’re going to solve this, we might have to do something that is risky and cavalier.’ But he was met with firm resistance, and bluntly told the politicos back home that an emergency brake was impossible. As a senior civil servant put it, ‘Ivan was the main bonfire pisser.’

Another political aide said, ‘The PM always wanted an emergency brake, he wanted to announce that in his immigration speech, but he couldn’t because EU law wouldn’t allow it. We’d go round endlessly in circles and come back to emergency brake. He’d go, “We must be able to do something about it!” We’d always come back to “It’s not possible, free movement is a fundamental part of the EU.” It was frustrating for the PM. He knew what he wanted to do, he knew what the British people wanted.’ For their part the officials felt they were being asked to approve ideas with little or no chance of success, and that their job was to advise caution.

Ed Llewellyn had kept lines of communication open with the Germans, who wanted to be helpful but consistently made clear that freedom of movement reform – and treaty change – were not doable. But Cameron believed that he might be successful if he said a brake on numbers was the price of Britain staying in the EU. One of those involved in the deliberations said, ‘A number of people in Number 10 – including the PM – suspected deep down that, when it came to it, in the early hours of a European Council meeting, the EU wouldn’t let the UK leave on the basis of a temporary emergency brake. It would be high-risk, so the trick would be to keep any announced plan high-level – one of the reasons why the Gove leak, with all its detail, was so damaging.’

Two days before the speech, the emergency brake was still in the text and the civil servants mutinied. ‘We asked them how it worked, because you can’t just stop people coming into the country. How do you enforce it?’ an official said. ‘It’s not something we can negotiate, and it doesn’t work in practice. Why the hell are we about to put this in the speech?’

At the last moment, Cameron decided to switch to a proposal that had been drawn up by the Eurosceptic think tank Open Europe to ban EU migrants from claiming in-work benefits such as tax credits and social housing until they had been working in Britain and paying into the system for several years. Ivan Rogers’ team in Brussels and Tom Scholar in London said that would not be tolerated by other EU nations either. Believing the Open Europe proposal would need treaty change, Rogers got his legal adviser, Ivan Smith, to examine the plan. He concluded it was illegal. Rogers told Cameron and his political advisers, ‘Clearly this does require treaty change because this will be deliberate discrimination on the grounds of nationality. I don’t think the other countries can go there. Even if they privately think you’ve got a point, I don’t think they can go there with their publics.’ But Cameron had to offer something on migration. A ban on migrants claiming child benefit for dependants living outside the UK and a pledge to remove those who had not found work after six months were also added. The changes happened so fast that Iain Duncan Smith, who had been sent drafts of the speech for his comments, had no idea the emergency brake had been removed until he turned on the television to watch Cameron speak. As man-management of one of the most influential Eurosceptics went, it left much to be desired. ‘Up until two days before the speech, the emergency brake was there in the speech,’ an aide involved in the deliberations said. ‘The removal was so last-minute that the argument for the brake was still essentially running through the speech he delivered.’

Afterwards, rumours abounded that Merkel and her staff had read the speech and excised the migration cap. But a Downing Street source said, ‘It wasn’t blocked by Merkel, it was blocked by us, because we knew we would never get it. She had not seen the speech.’ The Germans did have some input, however. ‘Ed [Llewellyn] got the message from Merkel’s chief of staff that she couldn’t support it,’ a Number 10 source said.

In fact the decisive intervention that killed off an emergency brake on migrant numbers, a policy which many Cameroons later believed might have been enough for them to win the referendum, was made by Theresa May, the home secretary, and Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary. Both were invited to see Cameron after the regular 8.30 a.m. meeting in Downing Street the day before the speech, along with a small number of officials. A week earlier, May had written Cameron a letter urging him to back an emergency brake. Cameron had made it clear that, despite Merkel’s opposition, he was considering demanding the emergency brake on numbers anyway. ‘The PM told them what the Germans had said, and asked for their view on whether we should go ahead and announce in any case,’ a Downing Street source said. ‘Hammond spoke first, and argued that we just couldn’t announce something that would receive an immediate raspberry in Europe. It wouldn’t be seen as credible domestically, and it would set us on the path towards Brexit. Theresa said very, very little, and simply said that we just couldn’t go against Merkel.’

An eyewitness said, ‘The PM was visibly deflated as they left.’ Cameron turned to one of his officials and said, ‘Look, we tried, but I can’t do it without their support. We’ll just have to go with the benefits plan. If it wasn’t for my lily-livered cabinet colleagues …’

This position might seem reasonable, but given that May and Hammond would later be responsible for negotiating Brexit, it was also instructive of their approach. May was to write a second letter to Cameron on 21 May 2015 urging him to adopt tough immigration measures, but the Cameron aide said, ‘It’s true she obviously wanted as good an immigration deal as she could get. It’s true that she wrote a letter. But when the crunch moment came – do we take a risk, do we go for something that is going to be tougher and that Merkel is not going to back, and that will be tougher to negotiate post the election? – her instinct was that if the Germans don’t support it, we can’t do it.’

A senior Downing Street source says, ‘David Cameron was going for the welfare brake, and he said, “I need an emergency brake. I need to sort this out, because I think that’s what will help.” Who were the two people who told him not to do that because it’s undeliverable? Your new prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer: Theresa May and Philip Hammond. So when Theresa talks about “I will not take no for an answer,” she was the one who folded then. Theresa May and Philip Hammond were the ones to say “You won’t get the emergency brake.”’

The benefits plan was toughened from a two-year ban on claims to three years, and then again to four years in the final draft. When Cameron finally gave the speech on 28 November, he said, ‘Immigration benefits Britain, but it needs to be controlled. It needs to be fair.’ He then used language that was to be adopted wholesale by the Leave campaign: ‘People want government to have control over the numbers of people coming here … they want control over who has the right to receive benefits.’

From that point onwards, David Cameron’s renegotiation hung primarily on the success of a deal on migrant benefits, which was a pale imitation of the one he really wanted. But without the support of Merkel, May or Hammond he did not feel able to proceed. One close aide thinks this was a ‘fundamental misjudgement’: ‘We genuinely thought at the time of that immigration speech we could get some significant movement on immigration. It evolved into controls on benefits because those are more achievable.’ One of the civil servants saw the episode as all too typical of Team Cameron’s general approach to Europe: ‘That was the moment he gave up on controlling numbers, and it was almost by accident.’

Others think he should have been prepared to ignore the officials, and was too quickly frightened off by Merkel. She had rejected quotas, but she was never put on the spot in the small hours of a summit about an emergency brake on numbers. Ultimately the renegotiation was a political, not a legal, enterprise, and Cameron could have challenged Merkel to help find a solution. ‘What I genuinely don’t know is whether Merkel in her comments about emergency brakes had really given it any thought as a separate issue,’ a senior minister said, ‘or whether she treated it as the same issue: “quotas and emergency brakes together”. The whole focus of the JCB speech was to shift the debate to benefits. I wonder up to this day whether, if we’d pushed the emergency brake – in terms of numbers, not on benefits – we could have got that. My gut instinct was that the emergency brake was the outer reaches of negotiability.’

After the general election, the Syrian civil war created a fresh migration crisis which put the issue back at the top of the political agenda. In September 2015 Merkel made the rashest decision of her time in power, announcing that refugees were welcome in Germany. The British reaction to Merkel’s extraordinary offer was ‘astonishment’, according to a source who was in touch with the Germans: ‘She would defend it by saying, “What do you expect us to do? We’re not going to shoot people.”’ The result was a vast human tide that prompted several EU countries to reinstate border controls, including Germany. The International Organisation of Migration estimated that one million migrants arrived in Europe in 2015, three to four times as many as the year before, while approaching 4,000 lost their lives while attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Throughout the summer there were almost daily reports from across the Channel in Calais, where migrants gathered seeking passage to Britain. Gradually, but detectably, support for Brexit rose. Andrew Cooper told Cameron the migrant crisis had cost Remain five percentage points.

Merkel was not the only strong woman giving Cameron grief that summer. On 30 August, a week after immigration figures were released showing net migration had hit 330,000, Theresa May wrote a newspaper article announcing that migrants should be banned from entering Britain unless they had a job to go to. She called for EU leaders to tear up the rules on freedom of movement, and even questioned the existence of the Schengen Agreement, saying it had led to the deaths of migrants and placed people at the mercy of people-traffickers. Going much further than Cameron’s renegotiation, she said, ‘When it was first enshrined, free movement meant the freedom to move to a job, not the freedom to cross borders to look for work or claim benefits.’ Five weeks later May put down another marker with an uncompromising speech at the Conservative Party conference which left parts of Downing Street aghast. The speech, written by Nick Timothy, said asylum seekers who entered Britain illegally would be barred from settling permanently in the UK. It led one MP to describe May as ‘Enoch Powell in a dress’.18

May’s intervention was unwelcome, because it was becoming clear that the four-year benefits ban was not going to fly with Britain’s allies (who wanted benefits phasing in much quicker). Europe minister David Lidington approached Llewellyn at the Conservative conference and said, ‘We’re not going to get four years.’ But he added, ‘I am starting to pick up that people are talking about emergency brakes again.’ The negotiators put out feelers. ‘The problem was, at that stage, because we’d spoken so much about migrant benefits, the emergency brake proposal we’d heard from the others and the European Commission was of an emergency brake on welfare, rather than on numbers,’ said Lidington. This new idea sounded good, but it meant watering down the plans outlined in the JCB speech, which were already a poor substitute for a proper limit on the number of new arrivals.

Just before party conference Sajid Javid, the business secretary, also floated an idea in conversation with George Osborne. He suggested free movement should be linked to a country’s GDP, so migrants from richer countries in the EU could travel freely, but those from poorer nations could not. Javid believed something more on immigration was needed, but he was told the idea was ‘not a flier’, and not to put anything in writing to Downing Street in case it leaked. Number 10 banned him from addressing a Eurosceptic fringe meeting at the conference.

The realisation that the offering at the referendum would do nothing meaningful to limit immigrant numbers led to another bout of infighting over the scale of Cameron’s demands. His younger aides – Mats Persson, Ameet Gill, Daniel Korski and Max Chambers – all wanted a bolder gesture than Ivan Rogers and Tom Scholar were prepared to endorse. ‘I can promise you the PM kept coming back to the idea of an emergency brake. That’s what he wanted all the way through,’ one aide said.

Another member of the inner circle said Cameron and Llewellyn later regretted their caution: ‘I know certainly Ed and indeed the PM do look back and think, “We should have probably gone hard and more publicly on the migration.”’ Cameron’s opponents agreed. Daniel Hannan said, ‘I think the huge mistake that he made, tactically and strategically, was to put all his eggs in the baskets of migration and benefits.’

Andrew Cooper, who was constantly polling and focus-grouping each iteration of the migrant plan, warned Cameron, as he was drawing up his formal proposals at the start of November 2015, that the benefits brake would not be enough to neutralise immigration as a referendum issue: ‘It became clear very early on that it was obviously going to be a massive problem. We tested multiple different versions. The conclusion was: all the things that look achievable don’t remotely pass the credibility test with the electorate.’

As Cameron began to finalise his renegotiation demands towards the end of 2015, he was preparing for a referendum that his closest ally George Osborne did not want, by working on a plan to reduce migrant benefits that his chief pollster thought was inadequate because a tougher plan had been rejected as unworkable by Angela Merkel and consequently by Theresa May. And all the while the migration crisis filled television screens, demonstrating the impact of Macmillan’s ‘events’ on politics.

A member of Cameron’s team said, ‘Perhaps the biggest regret of David’s premiership will be not going for the brake back in that speech. In the end, we actually got far-reaching changes to benefits to the surprise of many, even though it contravened every facet of EU law on non-discrimination. The Commission just found a way to bend the rules. But Tom [Scholar] had advised us that any substantial reform on free movement was simply not achievable and that free movement was a holy, inviolable principle. I regret that we trusted Tom too much. Who knows – if we’d gone with our gut, the boss could still be in Number 10 today.’

David Cameron had not yet lost the referendum, but his failure to demand a cap or an emergency brake on migrant numbers left him with a mountain to climb before he had even started. It was a situation the Eurosceptics were straining at the leash to exploit.

2

For Britain

Bellamy’s restaurant in Westminster is a pretty unglamorous place for a revolution to start. Located in 1 Parliament Street, at the slightly decaying end of the parliamentary estate, it is primarily a haunt for MPs’ researchers flirting with their colleagues rather than an arena for discussing the great issues of the time. Yet it was in Bellamy’s that a meeting occurred in 1993 which would help propel Britain from the European Union twenty-three years later.

Douglas Carswell was twenty-two, and had just finished a history degree at the University of East Anglia before taking a job ‘stuffing envelopes in an MP’s office’. If Carswell was typical of other young men educated at Charterhouse in taking the first steps up the political ladder at a tender age, it is tempting to think that he attracted the attention of Daniel Hannan because there was also something exotic about him. Beyond the intensity of his gaze and the lopsided jawline, so sharp it could slice ham, Carswell spent most of his formative years in Uganda, where his father – a Scottish doctor called Wilson Carswell – had diagnosed some of the first cases of HIV. Wilson’s experiences under the dictatorship of Idi Amin were the inspiration for the character Dr Nicholas Garrigan in Giles Foden’s 1998 novel The Last King of Scotland. Carswell later admitted that his libertarianism owed much to his experiences under Amin’s ‘arbitrary rule’. It also made him susceptible to Daniel Hannan’s views about the European Union.

Born in the Peruvian capital Lima, Hannan also spent part of his childhood abroad and escaped to a top public school, in his case Marlborough, before he arrived at Oxford, where he beat Nicky Morgan, the future education secretary and Remain campaigner, to the presidency of the Oxford Union debating society. Hannan was in his first term at university when the Maastricht Treaty ‘radicalised’ him about leaving the EU: ‘I can date exactly the moment of my activism on this issue which has consumed the last twenty-six years of my life. It was during a very short window between the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher and John Major putting his initials to the first draft of the Maastricht Treaty.’ In that three-week period Hannan and the future Tory MP Mark Reckless founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain. ‘Maastricht was the moment that the EU extended its jurisdiction into foreign affairs, criminal justice, citizenship, the environment, and also the moment where it adopted all the trappings and symbols of nationhood: the flag, the national anthem,’ Hannan said. ‘You couldn’t con yourself any longer that this was a voluntary association of independent states, or a free-trade area.’

Hannan was also inspired by an interview he had seen with the Latvian foreign minister Ģirts Valdis Kristovskis, whose country was newly free from the Soviet yoke. Asked, on a trip to Britain, if Latvia was a properly sovereign country, he said, ‘Yes, Latvia is now more independent than the United Kingdom.’ ‘That really hit home, that remark,’ Hannan recalled. ‘I suddenly thought, “My God, he’s right.” That was when I swore – the old storybooks would call it a terrible oath – that we were going to get out of the European Union, at whatever cost.’

Hannan was one of the most eloquent products of a Eurosceptic movement in the Conservative Party which grew slowly after the 1975 referendum on membership of the Common Market, and found full voice when Margaret Thatcher slammed her handbag on the table and demanded her money back when securing the British rebate in 1984. She would later become the first of three Conservative prime ministers in succession to lose the highest office as a result of the European issue.

The party was bitterly divided by the time John Major took over from Thatcher in November 1990. By the 1997 general election, when Sir James Goldsmith’s single-issue Referendum Party grabbed more than 800,000 votes, the Conservative Party was verging on civil war. If Thatcher’s fall, after the incision of the knife by her former chancellor and foreign secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, was the last gasp of the Conservative Europhiles, so John Major’s six and a half years in Downing Street were disfigured by the emergence of a group of committed and uncompromising Eurosceptics whom he dismissed as ‘bastards’ – a term that implies fringe relevance as well as unpalatable behaviour – but whose views (and briefly under Iain Duncan Smith, the sceptics themselves) came to dominate the party.

These Palaeosceptics earned their spurs during the battles over the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and fought on, limpet-like but in vain, against the subsequent Treaties of Amsterdam (1997) and Lisbon (2007). It is interesting to speculate now about what might have happened if they had been more successful then. Bernard Jenkin said, ‘If John Major had not forced through the Maastricht Treaty, and had not opposed a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, the Maastricht Treaty would never have become ratified. There would have been no euro, no eurozone, no eurozone crisis, no bailout, no European citizenship, no migration crisis, and we would probably still be happily a member of the European Communities.’

When he bumped into Douglas Carswell in Bellamy’s in 1993, Daniel Hannan was director of the European Research Group, a support service for Eurosceptic MPs who had agreed to pay him a salary. ERG held regular breakfast meetings in the Attlee Room in the House of Lords under the chairmanship of Malcolm Pearson, a Tory peer who would later defect to Ukip. Regular attendees included the Palaeosceptics, members of the Bruges Group, the Freedom Association and a certain Times writer called Michael Gove. At this stage most wanted to return to the pre-Maastricht deal, rather than questioning the result of the 1975 referendum. But when Hannan sat down to lunch with Carswell he immediately told him, ‘We need to leave the European Union, and we need a referendum in order to do so.’

Carswell remembered, ‘I said, “No, we need to reform the EU from within, we’ve got to use our influence, we’ve got to make it come our way.” I said absolutely everything that the Cameroonians were saying later. Literally by the time we’re having coffee, I think: “Yeah, we need to leave the EU, and this is the way to do it, this guy is talking sense.” After forty-five minutes, I’m convinced. Dan spends the next twenty-five years trying to persuade the rest of the party. I wish everyone else in the Tory Party had been around that table. It would have meant a lot less grief.’

While the Palaeosceptics waged constitutional war in the Commons, for two decades Hannan became an intellectual driver of the push for a referendum, with Carswell at his side. When Cameron reneged on his ‘cast-iron’ pledge of a referendum over the Lisbon Treaty, Hannan resigned his ‘admittedly very paltry’ frontbench post in the European Parliament. When he called Tory high command in November 2009 to tell them of his decision, Hannan spoke to ‘a very senior aide’ to Cameron, who bears all the characteristics of Ed Llewellyn, and said, ‘Just so you know, this was your last chance to have a referendum on something other than leaving. I’m now devoting myself, full-time, to getting a referendum on “In” or “Out”.’ The response was laughter and a jaunty ‘Good luck with that.’

Just over four years later it was party policy.

In 2011 Hannan wrote a blog suggesting the prime minister hold a renegotiation with Brussels and then a referendum afterwards. Now he was only two years ahead of his time. By then he had helped set up ‘the People’s Pledge’. In 2012 the organisation got the Electoral Reform Society to conduct a complete ballot of every registered voter in the marginal constituencies of Thurrock in Essex, and Cheadle and Hazel Grove in south Manchester, asking whether voters wanted a referendum. On turnouts higher than those seen in local elections, all three voted overwhelmingly in favour. ‘It started becoming obvious to people that a referendum was coming,’ Hannan said. Another of those involved was a young Eurosceptic called Chris Bruni-Lowe, who was to play a pivotal role in future events.

‘Dan put in place many of the key ingredients that would go on to create the Vote Leave team,’ Carswell said. ‘He was one of the guys who put the machine together, and realised what the machine had to look like. He played an absolutely key role.’

Throughout 2011 and 2012 Hannan, Carswell, Reckless and other Eurosceptics met secretly to plot a guerrilla campaign to secure a referendum. They had gone up in the world from Bellamy’s. The clandestine meetings, which included members of the government, met at Tate Britain, half a mile upriver from the Commons. ‘Dan suggested it on the grounds that no MP or journalist would have the aesthetic inclination to ever pop into an art gallery in the afternoon,’ Carswell said. ‘Not once were we ever disturbed.’

The campaign began to bear fruit with the rebellion of the eighty-one. ‘That’s when actually we won the argument within the party,’ Carswell said. ‘From then on they stopped arguing against it from first principles, and it became about practicalities.’