Читать книгу All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 22

Steve Baker does not look like a military commander. In a decade as a Royal Air Force aerospace engineer he had never fired a shot in anger. As a devout Christian he hated war, and helped set up an educational charity called the Cobden Centre to ‘promote social progress through honest money, free trade and peace’.

Yet when he was appointed commanding officer of the Conservative Eurosceptics in June 2015, it was as if Baker had been waiting for the opportunity to lead men into battle all his life. Politics is one of those arenas of conflict where armchair generals are just as effective as the physically brave, but no one could doubt Baker’s bravery either. One of the reasons for his success at Conservatives for Britain (CfB) was his willingness, politically, to put himself in harm’s way. Like all the best infantry officers he realised he should never ask anyone to do anything he was not prepared to do himself. Initially at least, it was a lonely business. ‘When I launched myself out early over the top of the parapet, in a government with quite a slim majority, my colleagues were actually quite happy to hold my coat,’ he observed later.

On assuming control of CfB, Baker did what any general worth their salt has done for the last millennium – he read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. He then picked up a book called The Thirty-Three Strategies of War, by Robert Greene, which explains how to adapt the strategies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Carl von Clausewitz, Erwin Rommel and Hannibal to life and politics. From Sun Tzu, Baker digested the insight that all wars are won in the preparation: ‘I basically read the book and applied the book as bloody hard as I could. In particular you need guerrilla strategies. The whole of the launch phase of Conservatives for Britain was a very deliberated guerrilla operation. You have to keep people frightened. That’s the guerrilla strategy: frighten them, use overwhelming force, disguise purpose.’

The launch of Conservatives for Britain was a piece of ambush marketing which left Downing Street and the Tory whips’ office in a spin. Baker gathered support in secret, and on Sunday, 7 June 2015 he announced that Conservatives for Britain was in business and already had fifty MPs backing it. A week later the number had more than doubled. The victims of his ‘frighten them’ strategy were his own party leadership. ‘They had to know they really were going to deliver fundamental change,’ he said.

Like any guerrilla commander, Baker set out to harry the enemy, beginning a daily drip-feed of information to the media as more and more MPs signed up: ‘How many have you got?’ ‘Oh, sixty-five, seventy-five, eighty … I’m not doing any more numbers until I hit a big number … now it’s a hundred!’ Baker was careful never to lie. Only that first weekend did he take a chance, telling journalists, ‘We’ve got fifty and I’m confident that next week it will be one hundred.’ He recalled, ‘It bloody well was as well. I took a gamble that I’d get another fifty, and I did.’

When news of Conservatives for Britain broke, the whips, under their new chief Mark Harper, launched a frantic effort to assess the scale of the problem. ‘To be honest, I think they’re a bit frightened,’ one MP said that weekend.

Baker realised that he could not employ a totally scorched-earth strategy. The referendum was a civil war within the Conservative Party. Baker wanted to win, but he also wanted there to be a Tory Party left standing at the end of the process. He resolved to act with politeness and decency throughout the battles ahead. ‘The central point was to not break the Conservative Party,’ he said. Baker led by example. When he launched Conservatives for Britain he had not told his whip, George Hollingbery, who was away: ‘I bought him a bottle of whisky to say sorry.’ He continued to shower the whips with gifts: ‘I bought them flowers and chocolates, and I’ve tried to be nice to the whips whilst making their lives miserable.’ On 13 June he emailed all members of the CfB mailing list, ‘Above all, please remain respectful to other colleagues, come what may.’

Downing Street initially dismissed the group as a mere talking shop, and pointed out that many of those signing up would probably not back Brexit. Like Business for Britain, Baker’s outfit was ostensibly trying to stiffen Cameron’s spine in the renegotiation rather than oppose him outright. But having built his army, the general intended to use it. He believed time was tight: ‘We kept hearing the government’s intention was to move to a referendum extremely fast, before we had any chance to organise.’

The Referendum Bill had been published in May, and the Eurosceptics were concerned that it stacked the campaign against them. Baker planned his military campaign. ‘There were five early battles we had to win,’ he said. The first battle seemed esoteric at the time, but may have been crucial. Following the Scottish referendum, Cameron’s team believed that the SNP had derived a great deal of benefit from owning the ‘Yes’ side of the question on the ballot paper. Voting positively for independence seemed a more attractive thing to do than voting ‘No’ for the status quo. They resolved not to make the same mistake again. When the Referendum Bill was published at the end of May the EU question read: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?’ David Cameron would own the ‘Yes’ vote this time.

The sceptics protested. It would ultimately be for the Electoral Commission, the watchdog that oversees such issues, to decide the wording. There was precedent for the approach the government had taken. In 1975 the public had been asked, ‘Do you think the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community?’ That had delivered a 67 per cent share of the vote for ‘Yes’.

The importance of the question was highlighted by polling from ICM, published in early June. It found that if voters were asked, ‘Should the UK remain a member of the EU?’ 59 per cent said yes. But if the question was, ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ only 55 per cent opted to remain. The Eurosceptics seized on this evidence. ‘It seemed to reveal there was 4 per cent in what the question was, whether it was a “yes/no” question or a “remain/leave” question,’ said Baker. ‘We put forward a number of colleagues together to write to the Commission saying we strongly believe it should be “remain/leave”, not “yes/no”.’

On 1 September the Electoral Commission announced that it was changing the question to ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’ The watchdog had commissioned its own research, and found that while the original question was ‘not significantly leading’ it was doubly unbalanced, since only the ‘Remain’ option was explained in the question, and the ‘Yes’ response was for the status quo. Baker’s guerrillas had won an important victory, the significance of which was only understood nine months later. ‘Bearing in mind ICM thought there was 4 per cent in that question, that battle alone could have won the campaign,’ Baker said.

The second battle concerned the timing of the referendum. Cameron was expected to call it for spring 2016, and ministers saw the advantages of holding it on the same day as the local elections in England on 5 May. Elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly were also due on the same day. Prior to the publication of the Bill, the Electoral Commission had recommended that the referendum not be held on that date. But the wording of the Bill allowed the government to combine the vote with ‘any election’. In early June Cameron said, ‘I think the British public are quite capable of going to a polling booth and making two important decisions rather than just one.’

The Eurosceptics envisaged Conservative activists being asked to deliver double-sided campaign literature, urging a Tory vote in council elections and a Remain vote in the other. On this, crucially, they had the support of the Labour Party, which feared the referendum would boost turnout in Tory areas and damage their local election effort. In a bid to avoid a rebellion and a Commons defeat, the government performed a U-turn, and ruled out a referendum on 5 May. It was another morale-boosting win for Baker’s team, setting them up nicely for the first real Commons showdown on the second reading of the Bill.

Baker’s third battle, and perhaps the most important, was over the issue of purdah. ‘Purdah’ is the civil service term for the time between the formal start of an election campaign and the announcement of the results. During that period, government officials are forbidden from doing anything that might influence the vote one way or another. In pretty well all British elections there is a purdah period, usually of twenty-eight days. But buried in the small print of the Bill was a plan to scrap purdah altogether. When this was spotted by the Eurosceptics they immediately smelt a rat. They believed there was nothing to stop Cameron enlisting the Whitehall machine to pump out Remain propaganda until polling day. Owen Paterson accused the government of ‘seeking to bend the rules to leave it free to fix the vote in its favour, right up until polling day’.1

Ministers argued that applying strict purdah rules during the EU referendum campaign would make government dealings with Brussels ‘unworkable’, and would open the door to legal action if a minister so much as made a statement on the EU. But the sceptics were unmoved, and when the Bill had its second reading in the Commons on the evening of 16 June they decided the time had come for a show of strength. They met in Baker’s office in Portcullis House and agreed that they would mount the first major rebellion against a majority Tory government in twenty-three years. In an email to his MPs, Baker joked that they ‘will be enjoying the tender pastoral attention of the whips’, but urged them to avoid ‘prevarication’, and to ‘tell them directly that you will be voting for [the] amendment’.

‘I will never forget the night of the first purdah rebellion,’ says Baker. He walked with John Redwood, Owen Paterson, Bernard Jenkin and Bill Cash to the office of David Lidington, a ‘little cell underneath the House of Commons’. It was a big moment for Baker. Lidington had helped get his name onto the Conservative candidates list, and Baker considered him ‘my neighbour and friend’. Now he was there to tell him the Eurosceptics planned to defeat the government. ‘We got into a lift and I thought, “God, what am I doing walking down this corridor with these guys?” We went to see David Lidington. It was a real Reservoir Dogs moment, because there weren’t enough chairs. I can still vividly picture it in my mind. John Redwood got comfortable by crouching, I was leaning against a door sideways, Bernard was leaning against the door frame. And we were just scattered around the room talking about the way it was and the way we wanted it to be, and then telling him we were going to be rebels. It was like a horror film. All our game faces came out, and all of a sudden it was war. It was horrible.’

During the debate in the Commons that followed, Lidington said the government would amend the Bill in the autumn to prevent ministers paying for campaigning activity in the last four weeks before the poll. But the rebels rejected this as inadequate. In the end the government defeated Cash’s amendment by 288 votes to ninety-seven, a majority of nearly two hundred, because Labour abstained, preferring to let the issue run and run. But Baker had shown his strength. In total, twenty-seven Tories defied the whip, including Liam Fox. The former defence secretary voted against his party for the first time in twenty-three years. ‘I had no choice,’ he said. Baker suddenly understood the power he now exerted as the shop steward of the Eurosceptics: ‘We could have won if Labour hadn’t peeled off.’

Baker, who was a teller for the rebels, made sure he was standing nearest the despatch box when the result was announced. Ostentatiously, he reached over and offered his hand to Lidington. Guerrilla war, but not a scorched-earth policy. ‘The reason I did it was to show we weren’t going to make it personal and nasty. Everyone was afraid we’d go back to a caricature of the Maastricht days. The point of these rebellions was always to win the referendum, it wasn’t to be difficult.’

He made this point when he asked to see Cameron in July. They had a cordial meeting, during which Baker explained, ‘I don’t intend to destroy the Conservative Party. I intend to do this in a civilised way.’ He said later, ‘I’m quite sure he thought I was going to be bravely losing, that he was patting me on the head and that I’d be leading twenty-five Conservatives to a brave defeat.’

Bernard Jenkin led the next stage of the battle. Using his position as chairman of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, Jenkin first set up hearings on the purdah issue, summoning the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to explain his position, and then got unanimous backing from the other committee members to write a letter to Lidington at the start of July warning that the change to the rules made it ‘appear that the government is seeking to circumvent proper processes to enable it to use the machinery of government for campaigning activity’.

When the Bill returned to the Commons on 7 September there was a head of steam for action. Vote Leave had spotted another potential minefield. Richard Howell, a cerebral-looking red-headed young man in his early twenties, was known in the office as ‘Ricardo’. A key figure in the research team, Howell was an expert on EU law, and would be called ‘a genius’ by both Cummings and Michael Gove. He spotted that the government were trying to push through plans for a very short campaign. The Bill called for a designation process to choose the official Leave and Remain campaigns. Everyone had assumed that would take place in February, if that was when Cameron got his deal, with a referendum in June or July. But Howell noticed that the government had given themselves wriggle room to delay the designation process until just four weeks before polling day. It was already clear that Vote Leave might face competition for the designation from Arron Banks. The Bill would allow the government to campaign for several months before the official Leave campaign had even been selected, giving Dominic Cummings just four weeks to take the fight to Cameron. Rob Oxley said, ‘We knew purdah would be a fight, but the four-week thing we were significantly worried about. The one member of staff that no one knows about who was most instrumental in us winning was Ricardo. He was the guy who was reading the parliamentary procedure. He understood it even more than Bill Cash.’

Jenkin tabled an amendment that would force the government to set out the rules four months before polling day, to prevent ministers ‘bouncing’ opponents into a quick referendum. This time, Labour lined up with the rebels and the SNP. Jenkin’s amendment was conceded without a vote. Lidington sought to buy off the Tory backbenches by agreeing to amend the Bill, reinstating purdah to ensure a ‘fair fight’, but allowing ministers and officials to talk about the EU as long as it was not directly related to the referendum. But in the main vote the government lost by 312 votes to 285. It was Cameron’s first Commons defeat since the general election. Thirty-seven Tories defied the whip.

Baker was conflicted but euphoric. ‘We won it, because Labour was with us. That was one of the hideous parts of this process, we had to work with Labour and the SNP. But purdah was a big thing. It might have been enough to win the referendum.’

It is tempting to regard the purdah issue as just the kind of obscure constitutional humbug that the Palaeosceptics had specialised in for decades, but it had a material effect on the campaign. The start of purdah on 27 May 2016 coincided almost exactly with the moment the Leave campaign gained the advantage. It prevented Cameron from using the power of government to grab headlines. Paul Stephenson said: ‘If there was no purdah, we’d have been screwed.’

Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, said, ‘There were battles that were fought which ended up immensely important, and the point when the campaign turned was the point when purdah kicked in, and that thing – which seemed like a slightly dry little tussle in the Commons months before – actually might have been the thing that made the difference by ensuring that at least for part of the campaign it was fair.’

Brady himself was a pivotal figure in the fourth battle.

David Campbell Bannerman, the co-chairman of Conservatives for Britain, wrote a strategy paper before the general election, which he showed to Matthew Elliott, laying out some of the lessons of the Scottish referendum: ‘My main concern was always that we weren’t caught with our pants down. The key lesson was, you’ve got to neutralise the party machine. In Aberdeen, where I was, Labour got their vote out from the Better Together office. I thought, “We are in trouble if we are up against these type of machines.” So part of Conservatives for Britain’s role was to neutralise the Conservative Party.’

Steve Baker recruited Steve Bell, the president of the National Convention of the Conservative Party, as a vice-president of Conservatives for Britain, and urged him to use his influence. Brady, as chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, also went to work on Cameron and the party board, making the case that the party would ‘tear itself apart’ if its activists, two-thirds of whom backed Brexit, were told to side with Remain.

On 21 September the Conservative Party board unanimously agreed that the party and its staff would remain neutral. Cameron himself proposed the solution. The decision had two practical consequences. It meant that the Remain campaign had effectively lost £7 million to spend, the amount the Conservative Party would have been permitted by the Electoral Commission. ‘The equivalent of the entire budget of Vote Leave was taken out of the Remain campaign by keeping the Conservative Party neutral,’ says Baker.

The second consequence of the decision was that Tory MPs would be barred from using their own canvassing data to target voters during the referendum: ‘CCHQ will not supply funds or voter information to either campaign,’ the party said. The decision upset pro-Europeans like Alistair Burt: ‘I felt disappointed that the Conservative Party, the great European party over the years, had to fight this with its hands tied behind its back. I felt ashamed that we weren’t able to say, “We are the Conservative Party, in favour of the European Union.” But I’ve no doubt that had we done so there would have been mass resignations. For the long-term interests of the party those voices were right and I was wrong.’

Conservatives for Britain were not the only ones mounting ambushes in the Commons. On 19 November a combination of Labour and the Liberal Democrats passed an amendment to the Bill in the House of Lords to give sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds the vote, as they had had during the Scottish referendum. The government, this time with the backing of Baker and his supporters, killed off the plan, which Cameron saw as a precedent that would only help Labour in general elections. The sceptics saw it as a chance to prevent an influx of young voters likely to back Remain.

Stronger In campaign chiefs believe the decision was one in which the interests of the Conservative Party were put before those of the Remain campaign. ‘The votes-at-sixteen decision in retrospect was a big mistake,’ Will Straw said after the referendum, when Stronger In had lost by 1.2 million votes. Had there been a 75 per cent turnout among sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, which would have been consistent with what happened during the Scottish independence referendum, and had three-quarters of them voted Remain, which would be consistent with what eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds did in the EU referendum, it would have represented a net gain of 650,000 votes for Stronger In. That would not, in itself, have been enough to get them over the finish line, but Straw believed ‘it would have changed the atmospherics of the campaign’. If one in four of those young people had persuaded their parents to vote a different way, Remain would have won.

The fifth and final battle which Baker had mapped out months before came to a head in January 2016. Throughout 2015 David Cameron had insisted that ministers were bound by collective responsibility, and would have to resign if they wanted to campaign against him in the referendum. This position provoked fury among the Eurosceptics, and Graham Brady repeatedly raised the issue. Cameron knew it would be a problem. When he appointed John Whittingdale culture secretary just after the general election, Whittingdale told him, ‘You do know I would probably campaign for Brexit.’ The same message was conveyed by Iain Duncan Smith.

Chris Grayling, the leader of the Commons, and Theresa Villiers, the Northern Ireland secretary, forced a change of heart. Grayling said, ‘I decided a long time ago that once we’d won the election and knew we were going to get the referendum I was never in any doubt I was going to campaign to leave.’ At party conference in October he deliberately ‘sailed close to the wind’ when addressing a Business for Britain and Conservatives for Britain event. In the summer he had sat down with Daniel Hannan at a bar in Brussels to discuss how they were going to get involved in the campaign. ‘I expected to have to resign to do it,’ said Grayling. He also met Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott in November to let them know he would be on board. He had a further discussion with Elliott in December about his intention to tell Cameron after Christmas that he was going to declare for the Leave campaign. Rumours swept the lobby that Grayling was going to quit as leader of the Commons in January, and he discussed the prospect of an exit interview with at least one journalist. Downing Street briefed that he might be fired before he had the chance to jump ship. Paradoxically, that strengthened his position.

Grayling went to see Cameron in early November and said, ‘My worry about where we are is that we are powerless to resist a decision that will cost jobs in the United Kingdom, that we have no ability to set limits on how many people come and work here, and we have little to do with the decisions of the EU.’ Cameron replied that he hoped to keep his ministerial team together, and vowed to ‘do my best’ to get what he wanted. Grayling said he would support him as prime minister even if he failed, and they parted on cordial terms.

When the details of Cameron’s preliminary deal were published Grayling decided the prime minister clearly had no chance of satisfying him, and that it was ‘only a question of when’ he would have to pay Cameron another visit. Grayling had been told by a ministerial colleague that Theresa Villiers was also considering her position. They talked over the Christmas break: ‘I told her what I was going to do, and she agreed that she was going to put in a call to the prime minister on the same day.’

Shortly after the regular 8.30 a.m. planning meeting in Number 10 on Monday, 4 January 2016, Grayling saw Cameron and Ed Llewellyn in the prime minister’s study and told them, ‘I’m going to declare for Leave, and campaign for Leave. If you want me to resign I will.’ He was expecting to have to go: ‘David Cameron had always said up until that point that ministers will be expected to toe the line. So I expected to have to resign to do it.’ But Cameron replied, ‘Please don’t. I’m going to let you campaign anyway, but in a few weeks’ time.’ Grayling pressed him: ‘I’m really keen to get involved now, because I want to add a bit of weight to the campaign, there are things that I want to get going and doing.’

After two meetings they reached an accommodation. Cameron agreed to make a statement the following day that cabinet collective responsibility would be suspended for the duration of the campaign, in exchange for which Grayling agreed that he would not formally declare for Leave until after the Brussels summit more than six weeks later, at which Cameron hoped to finalise his renegotiation. Instead, Grayling would signal his intent by writing a piece for the Telegraph, and would be able to get involved informally in campaign preparations. Later the same day Villiers spoke to the prime minister, who told her she would be free to campaign after the summit. She said she was content to comply as well. Announcing the change to the Commons, Cameron said, ‘There will be a clear government position, but it will be open to individual ministers to take a different personal position while remaining part of the government.’

Steve Baker, who had been a confidant for Grayling through the autumn, saw this commitment as key, because it liberated ministers, particularly those outside the cabinet, to back Brexit. Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Penny Mordaunt and Andrea Leadsom were all relieved when they no longer had to choose between their beliefs and their careers. A Leadsom aide said, ‘Those ministers wouldn’t have been available to the campaign if Chris Grayling hadn’t worked to do it.’

Daniel Hannan sees Villiers as an unsung heroine of Brexit: ‘She doesn’t get a scintilla of the credit she deserves. Her first act as transport secretary was to take down the EU flag from all of the buildings that she was responsible for. I only know this because a civil servant told me. Can you imagine any male politician making that decision then not telling anybody?’

A friend of Grayling believes Cameron should have called his bluff: ‘The PM could have been completely bloody-minded. The gambler in me would have said, “Take a chance, see what happens, sack him, and if in two weeks on from this, if nobody else has gone, you get an even freer run.”’ Cameron at that stage believed that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove would support him, and that the only cabinet ministers who would back Brexit would be easy to dismiss as right-wingers with little public profile. Cameron felt the risks of giving ministers freedom were lower than the cost of enraging the party if he stuck to his guns. Once again the prime minister had done what was best for the Tory Party, rather than for the Remain cause. Ryan Coetzee, the head of strategy for Stronger In, believed Cameron was too ready to give ground to the rebels: ‘If a stray dog comes to your campsite, you don’t make it go away by giving it some food.’

In just six months, Conservatives for Britain had ruthlessly executed Steve Baker’s guerrilla war plan. They had helped change the referendum question, the date and the campaign lead time, saved purdah, and ensured the Conservative Party was neutral and cabinet ministers could take sides. None of those things was sufficient to win the referendum on its own, but each of them was necessary, and together they may have been decisive. ‘The war really was won in many ways in the preparation,’ said Baker. ‘The question might have been worth 4 per cent. The Conservative Party’s neutrality took the entire Leave budget out of the Remain campaign. Neutrality made the superstars available. The principal purpose of CfB was making it possible to win the referendum and marshalling the MPs to do that.’ By remaining polite, Baker also maximised the number of Tory MPs who joined the Leave campaign. As one MP put it, ‘Steve’s an aerospace engineer who doesn’t much like conflict, but he held the government by the bollocks on this journey.’

It was just as well that Baker was blooded. As the New Year dawned his powers of negotiation would be put to the ultimate test as MPs, donors and his colleagues turned on Dominic Cummings, the man who held the entire Leave campaign by the bollocks.