Читать книгу All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 16

Few people would have given the scruffily-dressed man on the bicycle a second glance as he pedalled between offices and coffee shops in Westminster during May 2015. Dominic Cummings never wore a tie, preferred Converse trainers to work shoes, and with his high forehead and wire-rimmed spectacles had the air of a middle-ranking civil servant on an awayday – if your idea of a civil servant is of a hedge dragged through a man backwards. The impression of dishevelled provincial mediocrity was hardly dispelled by the flat vowels of his native Durham or his preference for conducting business meetings in Pret a Manger. Only his penetrating eyes hinted that this was one of Britain’s most shrewd – and feared – political operators.

A former special adviser to Michael Gove, Cummings left the government in early 2014 after waging war on the educational establishment, the Liberal Democrats and the Downing Street machine in equal measure. He sat out the general election, not even bothering to watch the leaders’ debates on television. But as Parliament reconvened ten days after the election, his phone began to ring. He received a series of calls from Matthew Elliott, Bernard Jenkin and Stuart Wheeler, the former Tory donor who had defected to Ukip, asking him to set up the ‘Out’ campaign.

Cummings had form where Europe and referendums were concerned. He was campaign director at Business for Sterling, which helped to keep Britain out of the euro. In November 2004 he led the ‘No’ campaign in a referendum on whether to set up a north-east regional assembly, winning a crushing 78 per cent of the vote, a result so emphatic it persuaded John Prescott to abandon the idea altogether.

With Elliott’s success running the NOtoAV campaign, he and Cummings could muster three major campaign victories between them, but Elliott’s experience during the 2011 referendum had convinced him that he was not the right man to take day-to-day charge of the campaign: ‘I know my skillset is raising funds, organisation-building, gladhanding – which are very useful; it’s part of the campaign. But one of the things I learnt during NOtoAV is I didn’t really like and I’m not very good at running a war room. We needed somebody in there who was fearless, who was a warrior, who had a great strategic mind, who frankly had the appetite to take something on at a time when no one else thought it could be done. And Dom was the man to do that.’

Cummings is a Marmite figure, viewed by his allies as one of the most talented public policy professionals of his generation, a thinker with a Stakhanovite work ethic and a ruthless desire to promote his ideas, someone equipped with a rare ability to see around corners. For his enemies – who are legion – he is a raging menace, a Tory bastard love-child of Damian McBride and Alastair Campbell, a practitioner of the dark arts. Like all caricatures, there is some truth in both these portraits.

Those Cummings had angered in the past included David Cameron, most of his aides and Iain Duncan Smith, to whom he was briefly director of strategy before quitting and labelling IDS ‘incompetent’ as the Tory leader. When the coalition government was formed in 2010 Andy Coulson, Cameron’s director of communications, barred Cummings from any job in Whitehall. He continued to advise Michael Gove, for whom he had worked since 2007, from afar, but only became his special adviser once Coulson had fallen from grace as a result of the phone-hacking scandal. Craig Oliver, Coulson’s successor, was frequently infuriated to learn of Gove’s planned education reforms from the media, and developed a heartfelt detestation of Cummings which dulled his judgement. When it emerged that Cummings would run the ‘Out’ campaign, Oliver texted a journalist, ‘Quaking in our boots about Dominic Cummings. Not.’ That hubris would lead to nemesis a year later. When he left the government, Cameron himself labelled Cummings ‘a career psychopath’.1 Nick Clegg called him ‘a loopy individual’.

But no other special adviser in the coalition years bent a department to their will like Cummings did; no other worked out their goals and drove through reforms as effectively in the face of widespread civil service opposition. No other special adviser wrote a 240-page thesis on their particular area of expertise (‘some thoughts on education and political priorities’) which offered learned observations about Thucydides and statistical modelling via The Brothers Karamazov. Cummings was a true Renaissance man, combining highbrow humanity with a taste for medieval Whitehall warfare. If no other special adviser sparked such loathing, none generated the same levels of loyalty either.

Cummings’ fearlessness in the face of authority had been forged in dark corners of the world. How many others, after graduating from Oxford with a First in Ancient and Modern History in 1994, would move to Russia for three years to help set up a new airline flying from Samara, on the Volga, to Vienna? KGB threats were issued, the airline only got one passenger, and the pilot took off without him. How many others after winning the north-east referendum would have retreated for two years to a bunker he and his father had built under their farm in Durham to read science and history in an attempt to understand the world?2

One of Cummings’ heroes was James Carville, Bill Clinton’s legendary message man, who revelled in the sobriquet ‘the Ragin’ Cajun’ on account of his fiery temper and Louisiana roots, a man immortalised on film in The War Room, a documentary on Clinton’s come-from-behind win in 1992. ‘Dom watched The War Room, I would guess, forty to fifty times,’ a friend said. ‘He would sing the theme music. The missing Dom years were basically spent in a bunker under the Pennines watching The War Room on repeat.’

There is much of Carville in Cummings’ approach. When his involvement in the campaign was revealed under the headline ‘Tory bovver boy leads “No” fight’, a Conservative aide remarked admiringly, ‘Dom knows how to win, and he doesn’t care who he pisses off in the process.’3 The man himself put it this way: ‘I am not motivated by people in SW1 liking me. This is often confused with having a personality that likes fighting with people.’4

Cummings had never stopped being Eurosceptic, but his three years in government had radicalised him. The EU was, he believed, like much of Whitehall ‘programmed to fail’: ‘It’s a crap 1950s idea, it cannot work.’ It was also stifling his efforts to reform education. In a blog written in 2014, Cummings’ rage at the impotence of British ministers was vividly demonstrated: ‘In order to continue the pretence that cabinet government exists, all these EU papers are circulated in the red boxes. Nominally, these are “for approval”. They have a little form attached for the secretary of state to tick. However, because they are EU papers, this “approval” process is pure Potemkin village. If a cabinet minister replies saying – “I do not approve, this EU rule is stupid and will cost a fortune” – then someone from the Cabinet Office calls their private office and says, “Did your minister get pissed last night, he appears to have withheld approval on this EU regulation.” If the private office replies saying “No, the minister actually thinks this is barmy and he is withholding consent,” then [Ed] Llewellyn calls them to say “Ahem, old boy, the PM would prefer it if you lie doggo on this one.” In the very rare cases where a minister is so infuriated that he ignores Llewellyn, then [cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy] Heywood calls to explain to them that they have no choice but to approve, so please tick your box and send in your form, pronto. Game over.’5

With Cummings’ appointment, Elliott had picked someone with an almost unique combination of Euroscepticism, organisational nous and the rage to fight a winning campaign. Douglas Carswell believed the nascent ‘Out’ operation had now found the third of its ‘three indispensables’: ‘There were three people who if they hadn’t been born or didn’t exist, or weren’t central in the referendum campaign, it means we would have lost. Number one is Dominic Cummings, number two is Matthew Elliott, and number three is Daniel Hannan. Every single other person played an important role, but those three were vital.’

When he arrived, Cummings knew exactly what he wanted to do with the campaign. In May and June 2014 he had been hired by Elliott to do polling and focus groups on how an ‘Out’ campaign might position itself. The paper he wrote one friend called ‘the ur document of the campaign’. Cummings realised that the people and the views that would hold the key to a referendum victory were very far removed from the sensibilities of the London elite. He himself went to a fee-paying school, and in December 2011 had married Mary Wakefield, the deputy editor of the Spectator and daughter of Sir Humphry Wakefield, of Chillingham Castle in Northumberland. They lived in some comfort in Islington, the north London borough synonymous with the metropolitan moneyed classes. But Cummings remembered his upbringing in the provinces, rooted in the Durham yeoman class, and constructed his campaign plan accordingly.

A close ally said, ‘He found that people in market towns in the Midlands hate London, hate the elites, think more money should go to the NHS, hate bankers and are not very keen on foreigners. He found that Europe was deeply unpopular, but that if you wanted to reach people you had to talk about immigration and the NHS. This was a campaign that would be ruthlessly focused on people as they actually are. There are two sorts of political communications operators in this business. There are people who see the population as they would like them to be, and there are people who see the population, ruthlessly, as they actually are. There is the wishful-thinking element, and there is the winning element.’

When Cummings met Elliott in May 2015, ‘There was a road map already done.’ His campaign blueprint, chillingly prescient of what would come to pass two years later, was outlined in an article for The Times on 26 June 2014. He wrote: ‘The combination of immigration, benefits, and human rights dominates all discussion of politics and Europe. People think that immigration is “out of control” [and] puts public services under intolerable strain.’ Crucially, the ‘biggest change’ Cummings noticed from when he was fighting to keep Britain out of the euro was that ‘people now spontaneously connect the issue of immigration and the EU. The policy that they raise and discuss most is “the Australian points system for immigration” and many realise that membership of the EU makes this impossible … The second strongest argument for leaving is that “we can save a fortune and spend that money on the NHS or whatever we want” … On issue after issue they side with “let’s take back control” over “we gain more by sharing power”.’ Cummings concluded that the referendum choice would come down to ‘Do you fear economic disaster?’ against ‘the prize of controlling immigration and saving all the cash’.6 He saw the linkage between immigration and control as the key to a referendum victory.

And yet there are hints that he did not want to focus on migration to the detriment of other arguments. Four days later his blog appeared, in which the very first point he made was: ‘The official OUT campaign does not need to focus on immigration. The main thing it needs to say on immigration is “if you are happy with the status quo on immigration, then vote to stay IN”.’ Instead, he said, ‘The OUT campaign has one essential task – to neutralise the fear that leaving may be bad for jobs and living standards. This requires a grassroots movement based on small businesses.’

Cummings and Elliott were to work hard to enlist business support, but ultimately they failed to get the backing they hoped for. But Cummings did understand, even in 2014, that Cameron would struggle to neutralise immigration as an issue, and that outsiders like Nigel Farage might have a role to play alongside the formal campaign: ‘Immigration is now such a powerful dynamic in public opinion that a) no existing political force can stop people being so worried about it and … b) it is therefore not necessary for the main campaign to focus on it in a referendum (others will anyway) and focusing on it would alienate other crucial parts of the electorate.’7

Throughout 2015 Farage and Ukip complained that Cummings did not understand that immigration was the key to victory, and would not make it the centrepiece of his campaign. These writings show that he did understand the issue, particularly its linkage with strain on the NHS. But in 2015 his priority was to get a fair hearing from the media, and that involved downplaying immigration.

As Cummings moved to build a campaign team, he was quickly reminded of why he had stepped away from Planet Eurosceptic. He told Elliott that Business for Britain would have to become a full Brexit outfit, or he would leave. A source close to Cummings said he despaired at ‘dealing with a whole bunch of Tory MPs who were totally and utterly clueless about organisation, strategy, management and a whole lot of donors who were very reluctant to do anything’. Others told him, ‘There’s no way we can win.’

However, Cummings did develop a good relationship with Steve Baker – whom he judged ‘one of the very few honest MPs’ – which would prove useful in the months ahead. Though the two had a series of run-ins, Cummings never resorted to his most objectionable behaviour with Baker. Early in their relationship he said his approach would follow Bismarck’s ‘With a gentleman, a gentleman and a half; with a pirate, a pirate and a half.’

While Baker was a gentleman, Cummings was very soon butting heads with a fellow pirate.

On first inspection, Arron Banks does not have much in common with the man who would become his mortal foe. Short where Cummings is tall, brash where Cummings is cerebral, a fervent critic of ‘failed special advisers’ where Cummings was a serial creature of Westminster, a devotee of Mammon where Cummings is driven by the values of an Odyssean education. But look closer and the two might be cousins. Both share a fervent Euroscepticism, a loathing of most MPs, an ability to put other people’s backs up, an absolute conviction that they are right, and an utter refusal to back down.

Banks, who spent his early childhood in South Africa – where he owns part of a diamond mine – was a successful businessman who had made around £100 million from insurance firms like GoSkippy.com and Southern Rock, but was largely unknown outside politics until October 2014, when he abandoned the Tory Party and offered £100,000 to Ukip instead. When William Hague declared that he was ‘someone we have never heard of’, Banks promptly raised the donation to £1 million. To complete the portrait of an eccentric political berserker, he boasted about his stash of assault weapons in South Africa and about being expelled from school for what he called an ‘accumulation of offences’, including selling stolen communion wine to other boys.8 He married a Russian model, had five children and bought a mansion north of Bristol previously occupied by musician Mike Oldfield, of Tubular Bells fame.

After the general election, Banks went to Farage and Chris Bruni-Lowe and offered to make another major donation to turn Ukip into a more professional outfit. In the midst of the leadership coup, and convinced the party was unreformable, they sought to divert his enthusiasm and cash towards Europe instead. They were driven by a growing belief that Elliott and Business for Britain would not commit to campaign for Brexit. Bruni-Lowe said to Banks, ‘Why don’t you think about setting up a referendum campaign?’

Banks did not need much persuading. His views had been shaped by Maastricht – ‘I couldn’t believe John Major sold out the country in the way he did.’ Now he came to regard the Elliott operation as a similar establishment stitch-up. ‘We got started because Nigel asked us to,’ Banks said. ‘His opinion was that if the organisation didn’t get started quickly, we wouldn’t have the time to match what the Remain camp was going to do. It was apparent that Business for Britain had no intention of getting the campaign started until Cameron came back with his deal, and they had a lot of people who didn’t even want to leave Europe. Didn’t take us too long to work out!’

Divisions with Elliott hardened when Farage and Bruni-Lowe were invited on a cruise in June 2015 organised by the Midlands Industrial Council, a group of influential donors of whom the businessman David Wall was the prime mover. ‘Matthew was there to talk about his strategy,’ said Bruni-Lowe. He said, “I’m planning to do this big campaign, we don’t know what we’re going to name it yet, we don’t know when we’re going launch it yet.”’ Elliott’s hands were tied because some of the businessmen on the cruise were Business for Britain signatories, so he had to be careful not to exceed the terms of the campaign they had signed up to.

Bruni-Lowe said to Elliott, ‘If you’re going to do this campaign, why don’t you get Nigel and every other person in a room and divvy up what they can and can’t do? If you don’t do that and you let Nigel out into the wild, then you lose control.’

When the ship docked at Jersey Farage asked to see Elliott, and they went to a pub with Bruni-Lowe. Elliott talked about the people he was trying to hire, but the Ukip pair regarded his answers as ‘ill-defined’, and shared a concern that ‘there was no strategy’. They disagreed with him about the role of immigration and Farage in the campaign. Afterwards Farage turned to Bruni-Lowe and said, ‘Shit, we’ve got a problem. We need to get Banks going as quickly as possible.’

On 21 June Banks briefed a story to the Sunday Telegraph announcing that he was going to raise £20 million to fund a campaign to leave, provisionally called ‘No thanks, we’re going global’, the first of several incarnations of his ‘Out’ campaign. ‘He went before Elliott,’ said Bruni-Lowe. ‘Banks basically gatecrashed it.’

From the beginning Banks had a brash role model in mind for winning votes and antagonising his opponents. He told Bruni-Lowe: ‘The only way I’m going to do this is by being slightly Trump-esque, which is attack everyone to the point where I can get parity with them – and then try and compete with them on quality. I’ve got call centres, I’m ten times better than them.’

The second ‘No’ campaign was up and running even before the first had got properly organised. Its goal was not, initially at least, to usurp the Elliott–Cummings effort, but to chivvy them along and give a platform for Farage. ‘Nigel and I effectively got Banks to set this up in order to give Nigel a voice,’ Bruni-Lowe remembered, ‘because it became clear when we sat down with Elliott that he didn’t want to touch Nigel with a barge pole.’

Once unleashed, however, Banks was not the sort of man to play second violin to anyone else. He quickly showed he was not messing about by offering Lynton Crosby £2 million to run the campaign. Banks had stood for election as a Conservative council candidate back in the early 1990s, and his first campaign had been run by Mark Fullbrook, now the ‘F’ in Crosby’s CTF Partners. Now he called Fullbrook to dangle the cash. ‘They thought about it for a week but then declined it,’ Banks recalled. ‘Said they couldn’t do that to Dave.’ Banks shopped around and hired Gerry Gunster, a US political consultant who had won more than thirty referendums across the pond.

In July the rival campaign chiefs held peace talks in Elliott’s office at 55 Tufton Street. Banks brought along Richard Tice, the property investor who had tried to get Elliott to declare for ‘Out’ in February. It was not a meeting of minds. As Cummings remembers the discussion, Banks announced, ‘Me and Richard have been thinking about this for a few months and we are going to set up the campaign for the Leave side. The MPs don’t know what they’re doing.’

With this, at least, Cummings could agree. But then Banks also attacked the men sitting on the other side of the table, who he saw as products of the SW1 establishment: ‘You guys don’t know what you’re doing, all these Westminster institutions are crap.’ This was particularly cutting for Elliott, since he ran several of the groups from the office in which they were sitting.

Elliott says, ‘Banks’s approach to that meeting was very much “I’m going to be doing this, I know what I’m doing, you guys are Tories in the pocket of Number 10 who have no intention of setting up a campaign, I’m going to get on and do this. Either come with me or you’ll be blown away.”’

Cummings recalls Banks saying, ‘I’ve got more money than any of you and I’m much more clued-up than any of you, so it’s really a question for you guys of, do you want to be part of what we’re doing or not?’

Banks looked at Cummings and Elliott, but all he could were the faces of two Westminster lifers. ‘They just looked at us across the table and said “You don’t understand politics,”’ Banks recalled, ‘We just said, “All right, let’s get going then. We’ll show you what we can do.” That kicked off the whole thing. I think both sides thought the other were idiots. I’ve made hundreds of millions of pounds in commerce, and from what I can see they’ve done absolutely nothing with their lives. In life, you get people who are so clever they’re stupid. Dominic Cummings certainly falls into that category.’

Cummings did not know Banks, but he knew the type – cleverer than a lot of MPs but out of his depth in terms of politics, a man who ‘didn’t understand what he didn’t understand’. He had dealt with self-made men before. They believed in ‘my way or the highway’. Banks was the kind of bullish character who would create division rather than bring people together. He also made it clear at the meeting that he was a great admirer of Nigel Farage, and believed he should be the front man for the campaign. Cummings concluded that judgement was a ‘massive strategic error’. Thanks to the work he had done in 2014, he believed that no campaign run and fronted by Farage could win. Banks could be useful, but Cummings had no intention of working closely with him.

Following the meeting, Banks ‘blew hot and cold’. First, he tried to peel Cummings away from Elliott to work for him instead: ‘You should come with me, I’ll pay you loads of money.’ Over the summer Banks texted Cummings and offered him a salary of £200,000 and a win bonus of the same amount. He claimed later that this was ‘psychological warfare’: ‘It was definitely intended to destabilise them and also to show power, to show we could buy whoever we wanted.’

Banks also looked at Business for Britain’s ‘reform or leave’ stance, and tried to convince Cummings that Elliott was ‘not really committed to Out’. His mistake, though, was to assume that Cummings and Elliott were two peas in a pod. On one occasion he said to Elliott, ‘All you guys are doing is trying to stay close with Cameron and get a job at Number 10.’ No one with any knowledge of Cummings’ contemptuous view of Cameron could have made such a comment.

Initially, Cummings found Banks’s activities helpful because he could use him as leverage to ‘bounce’ other people into helping For Britain. He would tell them, ‘If you don’t set something up, Ukip will do it and we’ll lose the referendum 65–35.’ Cummings said, ‘The fact that Farage was trying to get control of it was definitely useful to me in the early stage up until the end of July.’ Quite soon, though, Banks became a nuisance.

A second effort was made to patch up relations a month later when Banks hosted Elliott at his club, 5 Hertford Street. ‘Nigel and I were plotting the revolution from Mayfair,’ Banks laughed. The meeting was called to discuss funding for the campaign. Banks says Elliott had questioned where he was going to raise the £20 million he had promised. ‘If I have to write the cheque myself, I’ll do it,’ he replied. The distrust remained.

Daniel Hannan kept hearing from senior Tories and donors who could not understand why Elliott was refusing to cooperate with the energetic Banks: ‘I spent most of that summer explaining to people why it would end badly. Every single one of them came back soon afterwards, saying, “God this man is impossible.”’

What Banks and Farage ignored about Business for Britain and Conservatives for Britain was that by initially backing the renegotiation, the campaign was able to help define what it ought to look like. Throughout the post-election period, BfB briefed stories to the newspapers setting the bar higher and higher, culminating in a colossal thousand-page report called ‘Change or Go: How Britain would gain influence and prosper outside an unreformed EU’, which was serialised by the Telegraph from 21 June, ahead of the key European summit at which Cameron was due to offer a broad outline of his demands. It called for the return of the British veto and the right of national parliaments to overturn EU laws, as well as the repatriation of all social and employment laws.9

Rob Oxley, Elliott’s spin doctor, said, ‘The government were desperately trying to bring down the bar; we were trying to put it up there. There were loads of people who were saying, “You’re traitors, you’re just going to back Cameron.” But I have no doubt that the work we did there was hugely instrumental in how the negotiations were perceived in February.’

The ‘Out’ campaign got fresh impetus when Cameron gave an overview of his demands at the European Council in Brussels in June. Much of the content of the Bloomberg speech and some of Cameron’s other public pledges was missing. Cummings saw it as an ‘important’ moment. He called donors to say, ‘Even if he comes back with what he’s asking for, it is less than what you guys wanted, so you have an excuse to jump ship before the process has finished.’

A story which the Guardian published just before Cameron’s summit press conference helped to turn the tide. It revealed that Cameron’s plan was to run a referendum campaign based on the risks of Brexit. The paper reported a leaked account of a private meeting between the prime minister and a fellow EU leader which stated, ‘He believes that people will ultimately vote for the status quo if the alternatives can be made to appear risky.’10 The Italian embassy was suspected of the leak. It was the first proof that Cameron would re-enact the ‘Project Fear’ approach he had deployed in the Scottish referendum.

Rob Oxley made sure the story was distributed to key MPs: ‘All the Eurosceptics read it. After that point we were able to start moving the Tory backbenchers.’

The summit also persuaded Elliott to act: ‘That’s when we started the process of moving BfB from “change or go” to being Leave.’ By the end of July the board of Business for Britain had agreed that they should switch their allegiance fully to the ‘Out’ camp. A friend of Cummings said, ‘Although Elliott was nervy about going out so fast, he essentially realised that if he didn’t, then Dom would go home and Arron would take over the thing.’

There were already tensions between the two campaign leaders. MPs warned Elliott, ‘You’re going to be airbrushed out. Cummings is going to get the credit.’ The seeds were sown of divisions not just between For Britain and Ukip, but within the campaign itself, which would explode a few months later. The issue grew more pronounced as Cummings hired the two members of staff he most needed to win the referendum.

Cummings’ top priority was finding a director of communications. Initially he had only one person in mind – his old colleague from the Department for Education, Henry de Zoete. ‘Zoot’, as he was known, had been Gove’s media spad throughout the battles with the educational establishment of the coalition years, but had left government to start his own company. Tall with a wispy ginger beard, de Zoete was the yang to Cummings’ yin – calm when he was aggressive, softly-spoken when he was raising his voice, polite when Cummings was blunt to the point of rudeness. But the gentlemanly manner concealed the same steel will as Cummings. De Zoete wanted to make a go of his company and declined the offer, but he provided the perfect alternative solution: ‘I think Stephenson will be interested.’

Paul Stephenson was the communications director for the British Bankers Association, where he was highly thought of, highly effective and highly remunerated. He was also highly bored. He had previously been a special adviser to Philip Hammond at the Department of Transport and to Andrew Lansley at the Department of Health, where he was drafted in to sort out the communications mess of Lansley’s reforms. A fast-talking lover of good stories and a good lunch, he was one of the most effective Conservative media operators, respected and liked by journalists, who delighted in the staccato burst of his machine-gun laugh. Stephenson had been a diehard Eurosceptic for years, having worked on numerous anti-Brussels campaigns.

As significant meetings in the history of Leave’s referendum win go, few can top that when Dominic Cummings sat in Paul Stephenson’s garden in north London in July 2015 and, over bottles of beer, offered him the job. In truth, Cummings had not found a new yang to replace de Zoete. Stephenson was another yin. Like Cummings, he was a brilliant strategist, and inclined to choose the more aggressive of any two options. They hit it off straight away.

Stephenson had recently married, but he signed up at once, starting work in early September. His new wife said, ‘Let me get this straight: you’ve just got married, you’re taking a huge pay cut and you’re about to annoy the prime minister and every other senior Conservative.’

A somewhat bashful Stephenson replied, ‘That’s about the size of it.’

Together, Cummings and Stephenson would form the engine room of the Leave campaign. With guile and cunning they were to take on the might of the Tory establishment and the government machine, and win. Most people who were there say their double act was just as important as that of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Without all four of them it is likely that Remain would have won.

Cummings also approached Victoria Woodcock, a former private secretary to Michael Gove, and persuaded her to quit her job. Described as a ‘secret weapon’ in implementing school reform, she had most recently been working in the Cabinet Office, where she had overseen the government’s planning of the VE-Day seventieth-anniversary commemorations in May, a three-day jamboree involving politicians, the royal family and thousands of veterans. On 23 August the Sunday Times revealed that she would become the ‘No’ campaign’s director of operations. Georgiana Bristol, a fundraiser for Boris Johnson’s 2008 London mayoral campaign, was also on board as development director. Even at this stage, Cummings was consciously creating an organisation in which both Gove and Johnson would feel comfortable. He regarded Stephenson and Woodcock as ‘by far the most important people in the whole campaign in terms of the permanent staff’.

It would have been understandable if Matthew Elliott felt a bit surrounded. The two key posts were now filled by Cummings’ hires, and the media was more interested in him than in Elliott. The only person Elliott had hired who Cummings rated was Rob Oxley, who was installed as head of media and quickly grew close to Stephenson.

In the late summer Stephenson had lunch with Nick Timothy, and sought to get him on board as research director. As the right-hand man to Theresa May, the home secretary, Timothy had been one of the best special advisers in the government – fiercely intelligent, with a subtle political brain and (like Cummings) the backbone to stand up to Downing Street and drive through his minister’s policies. Along with Fiona Hill, May’s right-hand woman, he had kept the flame of her leadership ambitions alive throughout the coalition years without ever doing anything overt that would have attracted the ire of his low-key boss. He was also a committed Eurosceptic who wanted to leave the EU. In early July he had left government to become the director of the New Schools Network, a charity that helped establish free schools, and for months he had been cultivating a vast, lustrous beard that made him resemble Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Timothy was a perfect fit for the team of Tory bad boys. He had been kicked off the list of Conservative parliamentary candidates in December 2014 after he and Stephen Parkinson, another of May’s special advisers, refused to campaign in the Rochester by-election, believing they were being asked to break the civil service code of conduct. Coming five months after Fiona Hill had been forced to resign by Downing Street, this had had the air of a vendetta by the Cameroons against May’s team. Nonetheless, Timothy had led the crack team in South Thanet at the general election who prevented Nigel Farage winning a seat in Parliament.

Timothy was interested in a role, but he had just taken his new job. Over lunch he also expressed reservations about becoming too closely associated with some of the hardline Eurosceptics. For Britain assumed that May herself was ‘nervous about it being a totally Eurosceptic clusterfuck’. Team May did seem to want a foothold in the campaign, though, and it quickly became apparent that Stephen Parkinson was willing to join as head of the ground campaign. He was a natural fit. ‘Parky’ had worked for years alongside Stephen Gilbert, the Conservative Party’s ground-game expert on by-elections, and knew the ropes. ‘They pushed Parky quite hard,’ a campaign source said. Fate had another big job in line for Nick Timothy.

When Cummings met Paul Stephenson in his garden he had outlined a stealth plan for the campaign – to downplay issues like immigration until the ‘Out’ gang had won the right to be heard by polite society, and then get more aggressive in the run-up to polling day: ‘Until February, we will only be talking to the bubble.’ With that in mind, he wrote lengthy blog posts on reasons why Europe was bad for democracy, scientific endeavour and the way the civil service operated. For Banks and Farage this was proof that Cummings was a dilettante. But there was method in his intellectual verbosity: ‘That was deliberately done; we were fighting for the right to be heard at the BBC,’ Stephenson remembered. ‘We went into the BBC and Dom went and did exactly that pitch to a load of execs, and I know from the feedback that people thought, “If that’s what he’s about, we quite like that.” They’d have probably voted Remain, but they recognised we were not Nigel Farage or a bunch of racists. That was quite important to us.’

Cummings also wrote a blog suggesting that there could be a second referendum after an ‘Out’ vote, in which the public could give their views on any subsequent deal with Brussels: ‘If you want to say “stop”, vote no and you will get another chance to vote on the new deal.’ The suggestion that Britain might vote ‘No’ to Brussels and then get a better deal and stay was catnip to the Westminster commentariat. To Cummings it was just another way of drumming up support from those who disliked Brussels but were not hardline Brexiteers. Once again, this reinforced the belief of Banks and Farage that Cummings and Elliott were not real outers, and that they would not set up a proper Brexit campaign until Cameron had his deal.

Steve Baker, the head of Conservatives for Britain, said, ‘It was very clear that the government strategy was to create the tallest, steepest cliff-edge possible around the referendum. What Cummings was doing was reducing the height of the cliff. He’s saying, “You can vote to leave now, and then they’ll have to come back and check if you really meant it.” That’s why the PM hated it so much.’ Baker added, ‘Because Ukip didn’t get the political sophistication, we had to drop it. That lack of trust and failure to understand that not everything’s a conspiracy against them meant we couldn’t use that strategy.’

Cummings was shrewd enough to talk about the idea to Boris Johnson, and the London mayor publicly endorsed the plan at the end of June. Johnson believed Cameron was not playing ‘hardball’ with the Europeans, and that floating the double-referendum idea would show them Britain was ‘serious’.11

Cummings was delighted when Craig Oliver’s first major intervention in the Europe debate, at the end of October, was to brief a speech by David Cameron declaring, ‘Leave means leave … That option of “Let’s have another go” is not on the ballot paper.’ Cummings told friends, ‘You could tell from Number 10’s reaction they hated it.’

But by then relations with Banks and Farage had completely ruptured over four issues: the double referendum, who would run the main campaign, who would represent ‘Out’ in the television debates, and immigration.

In July Farage met Cummings and Elliott in the latter’s office in Tufton Street. The Ukip leader called for healthy competition: ‘Look, Arron says you want a go at this, I want a go at this, I believe in competition, we guys have got to have a clean fight.’

Following this olive branch, Cummings was amused and a little horrified as the meeting went on and it became clear that Farage was ‘obsessed’ with being the face of the ‘No’ campaign in the debates. Cummings said, ‘I don’t know who is going to represent the official Leave campaign yet, but what I’m going to do is go through a rigorous process of testing everyone in a scientific way, and I will figure out who the people are who are the most persuasive to the people we need to vote for.

Farage queried this: ‘Does that mean you’re against me?’

‘No. It just means I’m not against you or for you. This is an empirical business, Nigel, and I care about winning. You’re a hero and you’ll play a big part, but can we agree now to have you as our spokesman? No.’

After the meeting, Bruni-Lowe said, ‘We went away realising we had to push Banks even more.’

Cummings’ impression was that Farage and Banks did not believe they could win the referendum, but were already looking ahead to the world beyond, where they hoped to capitalise politically on the number of people voting ‘Out’, just as the SNP had done in Scotland after the independence referendum, where 45 per cent of the vote in 2014 translated into a near clean sweep for the Nationalists at the 2015 election. ‘You run a campaign, raise a lot of money, get of lot of data, you then lose and then do an SNP,’ was how he saw the Ukip strategy.

Another meeting followed in August with Banks, who got Cummings in to meet some advertising people. Cummings regarded their proposals, which were not based on market research, as ‘garbage’, and said so. His view of advertising agencies was simple: ‘They all think they’re geniuses and they all think the clients are morons.’ His view of Banks now was that he did not understand public communication. In this campaign, Cummings would be driven by the data.

Towards the end of August, relations with Banks broke down again. On the 23rd the Sunday Times reported that Elliott would be chief executive of a new ‘No’ campaign and would re-use the striking logo that had been employed in the battle against the single currency, a white ‘No’ on a circular red background. The story also revealed that he had acquired office space in Westminster for fifty staff. Banks ‘went mental’ at the news that Elliott and Cummings had begun without consulting him. He protested to Cummings, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this,’ and complained about the ‘air of entitlement’ of the men from Westminster. Cummings replied, ‘Arron, you’ve spent the last three months saying we’re not committed to being outers and you’re going to do this, and I kept telling you I was going to do it, and now we’ve done it, so why are you surprised?’

In early September, as a means of corralling more MPs from across the political spectrum, Bernard Jenkin set up ‘ExCom’, an exploratory committee that would form the parliamentary wing of the nascent Leave campaign. Dreamt up over dinner at the Jenkin family home in Kennington, south London, it subsequently met once a week on Wednesday after PMQs at 12.45 p.m., often in Owen Paterson’s room. Regular attendees included Jenkin, Steve Baker and Paterson for the Tories, Kelvin Hopkins, Graham Stringer and Kate Hoey from Labour, Nigel Dodds from the DUP, and Ukip’s sole MP Douglas Carswell. Hoey remembered ‘a useful meeting with very, very nice coffee’.

Yet it remained a struggle to get those beyond the hardcore Eurosceptics to join up. Jenkin said, ‘It was quite difficult to get people to engage with us at that stage because most people not unreasonably insisted, “I want to wait and see until the prime minister comes back from his renegotiation.”’ He told them, ‘If we wait until he’s done the renegotiation, and then try and set up a Leave campaign, there won’t be much of a campaign.’

Elliott and Cummings had no more success when they asked Kate Hoey to join the board: ‘They were very keen for me to go on that, mainly because “We must have a woman.” I don’t really go along with that kind of crap.’ Graham Stringer represented Labour instead. Hoey also pushed for Daniel Hannan to join the board: ‘I felt Dan was our most credible Tory. He was just so brilliant at speaking, but for some reason they didn’t want him on the board.’ These tensions would resurface with a bang in the New Year.

Farage and Bruni-Lowe waited in vain for Elliott to formally launch his campaign. Throughout August and into September nothing happened. Part of the delay was because on 1 September the Electoral Commission announced that the wording of the referendum question would be changed, so that instead of a ‘Yes/No’ answer people would vote ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’ instead. The change necessitated costly and time-consuming rebranding. Banks, who had launched his campaign in July as ‘the KNOW’, renamed it ‘Leave.EU’.

Elliott also needed to rethink: ‘We were going to be called the “No” campaign. Then we had to rapidly book new websites and get a new logo, so that was a practical reason for delaying.’ He also wanted to hold off because Steve Baker was drumming up support in the House of Commons for amendments to the Referendum Bill: ‘They were doing very good work to make sure it was a more level referendum. Had CfB been a Leave organisation at that point, they wouldn’t have got so many supporters as they did.’

None of these reasons washed with Farage, Bruni-Lowe and Banks, who saw only Conservative foot-dragging. They resolved to act as the provisional wing of Euroscepticism and force Elliott’s hand. Chris Bruni-Lowe said: ‘Our view was that Business for Britain would still be going about a week before the referendum if it hadn’t been for Banks. We needed to smoke them out. Our view was that Banks wasn’t going to get designation [as the official Leave campaign], but we wanted to get them off the fence. Banks liked the idea of making Elliott competitive. We decided to fully endorse Banks, as a party, knowing that it would piss off Carswell. And then force Carswell to go back to Elliott and say, “Look, you’re leaving me in an impossible position.”’

On 25 September Farage took to the stage at Ukip’s annual conference in Doncaster and said the party would back Banks and Leave.EU. ‘I basically held his hand up on the platform and said, “This is the team I’m backing,”’ Farage said. When journalists asked why he was not supporting Elliott, who most of the media expected to run the official campaign, Farage said, ‘Well, they haven’t declared. This is the only game in town.’ In his speech, Farage condemned Elliott and Cummings as ‘soft Eurosceptics’, and dismissed the ‘For Britain’ campaign as a ‘talking shop in Tufton Street’.

The desired row with Carswell was immediate and explosive. Banks briefed the media that Ukip’s only MP would also have to back Leave.EU or face deselection; when Carswell confronted him in a corridor, Banks dismissed him as ‘borderline autistic with mental illness wrapped in’.

The comments were to damage Banks’s chances of running the lead ‘Out’ campaign, but Farage’s coup de théâtre had put Elliott and Cummings on the back foot. If they had assumed they were on course to win designation as the main Leave campaign, they had a fight on their hands. Fortunately, they did now have a name.

The first suggestion was not a success. Cummings and Stephenson went drinking and came up with the idea of ‘Democrats’. They liked its American political overtones. But what had looked clever late at night did not look so smart the next morning. Stephenson recalled, ‘We both went back to our wives that night and told them and they said, “We don’t understand it.” We came back the next morning and realised we agreed with them.’

In mid-September Cummings held a team meeting in what would become their office in the Westminster Tower by Lambeth Bridge, across the river from the House of Commons. ‘It was still a building site,’ Stephenson said. Cummings invited everyone to put possible campaign names into the middle of the table. Flicking through them later he suddenly said, ‘“Vote Leave”, because it’s an action.’

The pair then worked on a slogan, and came up with ‘Get change’. They called in Elliott, who said, ‘That’s genius!’ Cummings took a picture of the three of them to mark the historic moment that ‘Vote Leave. Get Change’ was established.

The following morning Cummings came into work and announced it was actually going to be ‘Vote Leave. Take Control’ instead. He said, ‘I thought about it last night. I’ve done focus groups on this for years. I know this works.’ Indeed, his Times article from June 2014 had identified ‘Let’s take back control’ as a killer argument. The phrase had also been used on Ukip adverts.

‘It goes back to the euro campaign,’ he explained later, ‘because we focus-grouped all sorts of different things for the euro and we never came up with something which beat “keep control”. So I thought, let’s play with that idea.’ Stephenson led a rebellion in the office for an hour in favour of ‘Get change’, but Cummings was insistent: ‘No, this is right.’

Vote Leave finally launched a couple of days after the Conservative Party conference. Both Stephenson and Rob Oxley wanted to make the announcement in a Sunday paper on the day David Cameron was due to do his conference interview with Andrew Marr, but it was decided that disrupting the prime minister’s big moment would be seen by MPs and potential donors as ‘too aggressive’. ‘That was an underlying tension throughout the campaign: how aggressive can we be to Cameron without everything kicking off?’ Stephenson said. It would not be long before Vote Leave was kicking very hard at the prime minister.

The launch was a low-key moment. Cummings had decreed that there would be no event or press conference. He knew Vote Leave could not compete with the ‘In’ campaign for major political and business endorsements. Many donors and MPs were not yet ready to commit, and a room full of Palaeosceptics was not the image he wanted to convey.

Instead of an event, an online video was posted which told viewers, ‘Every week, the United Kingdom sends £350 million of taxpayers’ money to the EU. That’s the cost of a fully staffed, brand-new hospital, or looked at another way, that’s £20 billion per year.’ It concluded with the slogan, ‘Vote Leave, let’s take control.’ The tone of the campaign was set.

The launch made Vote Leave resemble a tech startup, which in a sense they were. Their offices still had ‘temporary carpet, with wires hanging out’, Oxley remembered. One day Steve Baker walked in and wrote on a bare wall, ‘You’re all heroes.’ There never was a big event. Banks thought the video was terrible. In an email to Elliott two days later he wrote: ‘The website is awful, the Facebook page worse … You may know politics but have ABSOLUTELY no clue how to reach out to a wider audience … If this is your best shot you should be shot.’12 Cummings’ vindication came a week later when the In campaign launched. Their live event was derailed by gaffes, and slammed by the media as a shambles.

At Ukip headquarters, Farage and Bruni-Lowe were delighted their endorsement of Banks had borne fruit so quickly. ‘Within a fortnight, Vote Leave was launched,’ Farage said. ‘So we were forcing the agenda. We were actually quite proud of ourselves, to be honest with you.’ Rob Oxley admitted that there was something in this: ‘One thing which they did was they effectively forced our hand.’

Having given Elliott and Cummings a shove, Farage and co. now decided they would pressure them to run the kind of campaign they believed would win. They had three demands: that Farage be prominent in the campaign, that immigration be its key message, and that Vote Leave set up a proper ground campaign to harness the Ukip people’s army.

Bruni-Lowe was sceptical about Elliott’s campaign model. The Taxpayers’ Alliance and Big Brother Watch were media-driven organisations: ‘They say to donors, “Look, we’ve got five hundred quotes in the media this week, give us money.” It’s not a real grassroots campaign. Our view was, if we can create competition, it will basically make Elliott do what he’s never done before, which is set up a ground campaign.’

In October, Elliott and Cummings said they would engage with Ukip and Farage. Bruni-Lowe claims this led to an agreement that Ukip would be less aggressive. ‘We said, “OK, we’ll back off. And we’ll let you do it.”’

But the prospect of cooperation was soon dashed, when a damaging rift opened up over immigration. At the start of December Bruni-Lowe commissioned a poll of 10,000 people who were undecided how they would vote. It found that controlling the UK’s border and setting ‘our own immigration policy’ was the number-one reason people gave that might persuade them to back Leave. Just under 38 per cent put it top, more than twenty points clear of saving money, which was second. By a margin of 59 per cent to 18 per cent these swing voters said Cameron and other leaders were wrong to sign an agreement allowing Turkish citizens visa-free travel in Europe.

Bruni-Lowe and Farage went to see Cummings to show him the polling. ‘Immigration is the number-one issue for undecideds, even for the people who want to vote Remain,’ Bruni-Lowe explained. ‘Controlling the borders is the one issue that would make them vote Leave. We can produce literature in January on Turkey and immigration.’

Cummings declined the advice, saying that a focus on immigration would turn off undecided voters. He and others insist he always intended to use the issue nearer polling day. But he did not confide in the Kippers that day. They left in despair. ‘Our view was that most undecided voters don’t vote, and what we were going to need to do was motivate our base in the northern heartlands in order to get the turnout much higher,’ said Bruni-Lowe. ‘It was the number-one issue, and they just wouldn’t acknowledge it. It was a class-based thing. They thought it was unpalatable at dinner parties. They wouldn’t touch it. That was always the problem with Vote Leave.’ Farage vowed to go it alone again. As they left, he said, ‘Fuck that, we’ve got to just go for it.’

Vote Leave and Leave.EU were now effectively at war. It meant Cummings and Elliott were fighting on two fronts, because while the Eurosceptics were battling among themselves, their real enemy – the Remain campaign – had launched with a loud fanfare.