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

Carswell also held talks in his Commons office with Lynton Crosby, the Australian strategist who masterminded Boris Johnson’s two London mayoral election victories; but no agreement was reached to work together.

When Cameron conceded a referendum in the Bloomberg speech, Hannan told the group, ‘We’ve got it, now let’s win it.’ He had already begun to prepare. Knowing they would be facing the might of the Downing Street machine, he wanted a nascent ‘Out’ campaign in place in good time. In the summer of 2012 he approached Matthew Elliott and said, ‘You are going to need to be the guy to run this thing.’ The conversation took place in a summerhouse in the Norfolk garden of Rodney Leach, a Eurosceptic businessman who funded Open Europe.

Elliott, then thirty-four, had begun his career a dozen years earlier as a press officer for the European Foundation, a Eurosceptic campaign group, but made his name in Westminster as the co-founder in 2004 of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which hounded successive governments about wasting public money. In 2009 he also set up Big Brother Watch, a libertarian outfit that campaigned against state intrusion into citizens’ lives. Both organisations were run out of 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, home to a network of conservative campaigns which acted as incubators for thrusting young Tories and wannabe spin doctors to learn their craft.

Elliott might have gone to work in Downing Street in 2011, but his appointment was blocked by Nick Clegg. The reason he was persona non grata with the Liberal Democrats – and the reason Hannan wanted to hire him – was that Elliott had run the NOtoAV campaign in May that year which crushed Clegg’s hopes of electoral reform. Elliott’s campaign helped to secure nearly 68 per cent of the vote in the first nationwide referendum for a generation.

Hannan had been impressed by Elliott, even though he thought his campaign – making a case that a ‘Yes’ vote would be costly because new voting machines would have to be bought – was ‘a pile of crap’: ‘I knew it had to be Matt, not just in the obvious sense that he won it resoundingly, but he had shown huge sense of character in withstanding friendly fire. The anti-AV press were blaming him personally for what they thought was going to be a defeat. He had the strength of character to stick with what his polls were telling him, to disregard all of that. I thought this was the stupidest campaign ever, but he knew that it was working. He stuck to his guns.’ Elliott’s composure under fire would be seriously tested in the EU referendum campaign as well.

When Hannan approached him, Elliott already ‘saw the EU as the next big thing’, and had an idea about how he would run a campaign. He was a keen follower of American politics, and during Barack Obama’s two election campaigns he had been impressed by the gaggle of groups backing the Democrat candidate which all had the title ‘… for Obama’. Elliott devised a referendum campaign that would feature different groups branded ‘… for Britain’, and began registering dozens of websites, of which businessforbritain.org would be the centrepiece.

Around Christmas 2012, Elliott found himself on a plane to the US with Chris Bruni-Lowe, then at the People’s Pledge. Bruni-Lowe recalled, ‘He said he was thinking of a business campaign. He said he was fascinated by things like “Hispanics for Obama”, “Latinos for Obama”. He said business will be the big one, but we’ll have “Bikers for Britain”, “Women for Britain” and “Muslims for Britain”.’ Bruni-Lowe believed Elliott saw these campaigns as paper tigers, with only the business group as a serious campaigning organisation: ‘He viewed everything as a front campaign.’

Elliott’s other insight was that the best way to mobilise business voices in favour of leaving was to work initially with the grain of Cameron’s renegotiation, rather than declaring immediately for Brexit. In April 2013, three months after the Bloomberg speech, Elliott set up Business for Britain, with the slogan ‘Change or go’: ‘I realised business was the way into it. We did not do it as a hard Brexit campaign but went along the lines of the renegotiation, albeit pushing further what the PM would be thinking.’

The early backers included Eurosceptic stalwarts like Peter Cruddas, the former Conservative Party treasurer, and Daniel Hodson, founder of the People’s Pledge, but also more moderate sceptics like Stuart Rose, the former boss of Marks & Spencer. Some of those invited were also pro-Europeans, like Iain Anderson, the chairman of Cicero Group and a former spokesman for Ken Clarke. He said, ‘I was invited along to talk to Business for Britain just in advance of it launching. It was put to me in that meeting with the BfB team that this was about strengthening the prime minister’s hand in his renegotiation.’ One businessman invited said the pitch was that BfB would ‘put lead in Cameron’s pencil’.

Having a broad base of support gave Business for Britain credibility with the media, and it quickly eclipsed Open Europe as the primary voice on EU matters in Westminster, in part thanks to its campaign director Rob Oxley, who Elliott had plucked from the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Oxley, the product of a Lincolnshire grammar school and family in Zimbabwe, was young, smart, hard-working, and understood the media. He was the perfect front man for Elliott.

Business for Britain’s non-committal stance on Brexit did alienate some, including Bruni-Lowe, who wanted to see a full-bore campaign to leave the EU. Nigel Farage doubted that Elliott himself was committed to Brexit. ‘When I was there, the majority of people were broadly Eurosceptic but not all Leavers,’ said Bruni-Lowe.

The divisions between the Conservative and Ukip wings of Euroscepticism which blew up so spectacularly in the referendum campaign were sown in that period between 2012 and the general election. On the Tory side they were driven by an insight Douglas Carswell had about the role Nigel Farage should play in a referendum campaign, which emerged from polling data in 2012 and 2013. It was neatly captured by Sunder Katwala in a piece for the New Statesman in April 2014, ‘the Farage Paradox’. Stated simply, the more media exposure Farage had, the higher Ukip’s national vote share went – but at the same time the lower national support for leaving the EU fell. ‘The most fervent advocates for leaving the EU were some of Remain’s best chances for winning the referendum,’ Carswell said. When Brussels was bailing out debt-ridden Greece, disapproval of EU membership rose to around 60 per cent. ‘We thought, “We are going to win this.” Then Ukip started to take off in the polls …’

In 2013 YouGov’s tracking poll on support for Brexit showed a sixteen-point lead for ‘Out’. But by April 2014, with Ukip on the march, the two sides were tied, and YouGov’s first poll after Farage trounced Nick Clegg in televised debates on Europe ahead of the EU elections that spring gave ‘In’ a six-point lead.1 ‘You see Ukip taking off, disapproval of the EU going down,’ said Carswell. ‘It’s a direct correlation. This is what really obsesses us. We start to think we’re going to lose [the referendum].’ Carswell could see that to win, Ukip and its army of ground campaigners would be important, but he was worried that the party’s image with the wider public was hurting the chances of Brexit. He could also see that Downing Street would do all they could to promote Farage and Ukip as the face of the ‘Out’ campaign: ‘We understood that there was going to become a symbiotic alliance between the Remainers in Downing Street, and the purple Faragists.’

In the summer of 2014 he decided to do something about it. In great secrecy, and with Hannan’s knowledge, Carswell began secret talks with Farage about defecting from the Conservative Party to Ukip. What Carswell now admits is that he jumped ship with the express goal of changing the image of Ukip and ensuring that it was an asset rather than a liability in the referendum campaign. A desire to ‘do something about’ the Farage paradox, he said, ‘explains my behaviour subsequently’: ‘We wanted to put men in their trench, and to do that, we had to go over the top. And on 28 August 2014, some of us started going over the top, and we talked about a very different type of Ukip. We tried to decontaminate the brand.’

That was the day Carswell walked into 1 Great George Street, a stone’s throw from the House of Commons, and stunned the waiting media, who had been expecting Ukip to unveil a new celebrity donor, by announcing that he was defecting from the Conservatives and calling an immediate by-election. Chris Bruni-Lowe crossed to Ukip with him, and would help run his campaign. In his defection speech, Carswell immediately struck a different tone from his new leader, hailing Britain as ‘open and tolerant’, praising political correctness as ‘straightforward good manners’ and declaring, ‘I am not against immigration.’ He condemned ‘angry nativism’ and said, ‘We must welcome those who come here to contribute.’ The detox was under way.

In the by-election on 9 October, David Cameron’s forty-eighth birthday, Carswell slightly increased his majority to 12,404, with a 44 per cent swing from the Tories. In his acceptance speech he told Ukip, ‘We must be a party for all Britain and all Britons, first and second generation as much as every other.’

He admits now that this was all part of the secret plan to win the referendum: ‘Nigel did a superb job in making sure we got the referendum. One of the two reasons I joined Ukip was because I thought I could give an additional heave. But the other was all about trying to detoxify this brand that was ruining our chances of winning the referendum. I could see where this was going. If it became a choice between being rude about Romanian immigrants versus the economy, we would lose 60–40.’ In April 2014 Farage had said he would be ‘concerned’ if Romanian men moved in next door.

If David Cameron was bewildered by Carswell’s defection, he was incandescent four weeks later when Mark Reckless overshadowed the start of the Tory conference by jumping ship as well. The prime minister openly denounced Reckless for betraying the Tory activists who had helped ‘get his fat arse’ on the Commons benches. Reckless held his Rochester and Strood seat in the subsequent by-election on 20 November, but was to lose it to the Tories at the general election six months later.

The hunt was on for more defectors. Daniel Hannan had considered changing parties during the Tate Gallery talks, but ruled it out after the Bloomberg speech. Carswell said, ‘Two [other MPs] were prepared to do it, but the circumstances slightly changed.’ Shortly after the Rochester and Strood by-election, with panic rife in Downing Street, Cameron announced that he would legislate to hold a referendum within the first hundred days of a Tory government being elected. ‘That closed off the possibility of anyone else coming over,’ Carswell said.

That winter the Tate conspirators’ plan appeared to be working. The huge excitement of the defections and the two by-election wins appeared to have solved the Farage paradox. Ukip were on just under 20 per cent in the polls, but there was no discernible downward shift in Euroscepticism. ‘We looked like winners,’ said Carswell. ‘We thought at that point the Tate strategy had worked. Given what transpired, the battle had barely begun.’

During the 2015 general election campaign, Nigel Farage reasserted himself in the battle for the soul of Ukip. He sought to maximise the party’s core support with his trademark provocative comments. In a radio interview he said breastfeeding mothers should ‘sit in the corner’. During the main televised leaders’ debate he complained about foreigners with HIV coming to Britain for treatment, at a cost to the NHS of £25,000 per year each. Carswell despaired. Despite predictions that Ukip might win between six and ten seats, only Carswell was successful, holding on to Clacton. Farage himself fell nearly 3,000 votes short in South Thanet, the seventh time he had tried and failed to be elected to Parliament.

Carswell breathed a sigh of relief when Farage stood down as leader after the election, fulfilling a promise he had made during the campaign, and handing the reins to Suzanne Evans, the media-savvy author of the party’s manifesto. But there was despair among Ukippers who wanted a new direction when Farage un-resigned just three days later, sparking a coup to force him out again. Patrick O’Flynn, Ukip’s economic spokesman, broke cover to brand Farage a ‘snarling, thin-skinned, aggressive’ figure who made the party look like a ‘personality cult’. But the attempted putsch failed, and O’Flynn resigned. The result was a simmering civil war which played out for months as Farage loyalists went to war with his internal critics, with Carswell at the top of the list.

Chris Bruni-Lowe, who had switched his allegiance from Carswell to Farage, said it was Carswell’s disdain for the leader that encouraged him to return: ‘Nigel had decided he was going to leave, but Douglas Carswell called him that morning and said to him, “Are you planning on coming back?” Nigel said, “Well, I’ve not really given it much thought, but I probably will now there’s going to be a referendum.” And Carswell says, “You cannot do that, you’re toxic. You’ll damage the cause.” And Nigel thought, “Well, fuck this.”’

But Carswell was adamant that the election campaign had undone the good work of the previous autumn: ‘During the campaign we talked about breastfeeding on LBC, we talked about HIV, we ran a general election designed to appeal to the base rather than attract support from beyond the base. It was a disastrous election strategy. After the general election, I thought to myself, “You can’t detoxify the Ukip brand under the current leadership.”’ He resolved to ‘switch my efforts to detoxify the Leave brand’ instead, aligning with Matthew Elliott’s operation to ensure that it became the official ‘Out’ campaign and to prevent Farage being a prominent part of it.

Carswell’s first move was to write an article for The Times urging Farage to ‘take a break’, and arguing that the referendum campaign ahead should focus on the costs of EU membership ‘instead of feeding the idea that EU membership is synonymous with immigration’.2

Farage was baffled: ‘I read that and thought, “Fucking hell! I’ve spent ten years trying to do that!”’

The degree to which immigration should be front and centre of the referendum was a faultline that was to bitterly divide Ukip from Carswell and the Tory campaigners for the next thirteen months.

With the general election approaching, Matthew Elliott was under pressure to step up his campaigning and make explicit that Business for Britain would lead the ‘No’ or ‘Out’ campaign. In February 2015 he was approached by Richard Tice, a millionaire property financier who was a BfB signatory. ‘He was saying, “Come on, why isn’t BfB for Leave?”’ Elliott recalled. ‘I explained “change or go” had to be our position. It was a way we could keep as many business people engaged as possible. And there was always the possibility the PM would go for a more substantial deal than people thought he would, and we should therefore be urging him to push the boundaries of what renegotiation meant, rather than assuming it was a completely lame exercise.’ Tice went away dissatisfied, but would soon find someone willing to run a more aggressive campaign.

In April, the month before the general election, another important meeting took place at the Caistor Hall Hotel in Norwich. David Campbell Bannerman, a Tory MEP who had previously been the chairman and deputy leader of Ukip, was determined to ensure that different branches of the Eurosceptic family worked together if there was a referendum campaign. ‘I knew it was a bit like herding cats, and the real problem we were going to have was going to be fighting amongst ourselves,’ he said.

Campbell Bannerman set up a ‘Contact Group’, and invited Elliott and other prominent sceptics like the businesswoman Ruth Lea and Rory Broomfield of the Freedom Association. The gathering would later be described by the Electoral Commission as a ‘pivotal moment’, and a key reason why Vote Leave was designated as the official ‘Out’ campaign.

Campbell Bannerman was also involved in another development that spring, the creation of Conservatives for Britain, the parliamentary wing of Elliott’s operation. When Cameron won his majority in May, Elliott was shocked: ‘I realised, “Crikey, I’ve actually got to set up this referendum campaign.”’

At a lunch the following day Elliott met Campbell Bannerman, plus Nick Wood from the Westminster PR firm Media Intelligence Partners, a grizzled, chain-smoking former Times and Express political journalist who became Iain Duncan Smith’s communications director when he was Tory leader. Campbell Bannerman recalled Elliott’s shock: ‘Matthew looked horrified at winning his own election. I don’t think he expected it.’ The discussion quickly turned to how to put pressure on the newly elected government. The strategy agreed was to form a group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, MEPs and peers to turn the screws on Cameron during the negotiations. Campbell Bannerman agreed to become co-chairman and run the operation in Brussels.

For the key post of co-chairman in the Commons, Elliott and Daniel Hannan approached Steve Baker, the MP for Wycombe. At forty-four, Baker had only been an MP since 2010 – but he was liked and trusted by all factions on the Conservative benches. An RAF engineer who retrained as a software engineer, Baker was devoutly religious – he was baptised during a full-body immersion in the sea – and had been gifted with the innocent face of a chorister. Behind the smile, Hannan and Elliott also saw a man prepared to take risks: Baker was a keen skydiver, with more than two hundred jumps to his name.

When Hannan approached him, he had just one pitch: ‘There’s no one else to do it.’ Baker himself joked later that he got the job because he was a ‘cleanskin’, untainted by the battles of the past. Hannan remembered, ‘I thought, everyone likes Steve Baker, everyone trusts him, he’s a born-again Christian, he is just incapable of dishonesty.’

Baker was also a resolute Eurosceptic, who like Hannan had come into politics to get Britain out of the EU. Unlike Hannan, his inspiration was not a Latvian foreign minister, but David Cameron himself. Baker had flirted with the idea of joining Ukip, but decided the Tory Party was the vessel that would bring about Brexit: ‘One of the principal reasons I knew the Conservative Party could be relied upon on the EU is that in 2007 David Cameron went to the Czech Republic and made a speech in which he said the EU was the “last gasp of an outdated ideology, a philosophy which has no place in our new world of freedom”. David Cameron inspired me to join the Conservative Party.’

Cameron soon had cause to regret his own powers of persuasion. Friday, 5 June 2015 was the fortieth anniversary of the 1975 EU referendum, and Baker, Campbell Bannerman, Wood and Walsh decided it would be the perfect moment to launch Conservatives for Britain. Matthew Elliott was out of the country at the time, and was nearly as blindsided as the prime minister when the story announcing the creation of the organisation appeared on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph on 7 June. By that point CfB had been meeting in secret for a month, and had already recruited fifty Tory MPs. Cameron admitted to Baker later that he was ‘spooked’ that no intelligence on the operation had reached him. Campbell Bannerman recalled, ‘It wasn’t expected, and we hit the Remain campaign very early and very hard. Steve did an excellent job of getting people on board.’

A week later, Baker had recruited 110 Tory MPs, thirteen peers and twelve MEPs. Sympathetic cabinet ministers privately signed up to the mailing list. Later that week Labour MPs launched a sister group, Labour for Britain, to escalate hostilities. Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Kelvin Hopkins and Gisela Stuart were all on board, along with the leading Labour donor John Mills, a veteran of the 1975 referendum campaign.

But there was a more seismic announcement to come. Elliott flew home and resolved to exercise greater control over the MPs. He had already secretly recruited just the man to do that. On 14 June the Sunday Times revealed that Dominic Cummings had been charged with setting up the ‘Out’ campaign. For Eurosceptics their hour had come. And so, now, had their man.

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