Читать книгу All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 24

Rob Oxley thought he had done pretty well. He’d been in a television debate with Lucy Thomas, and he knew he’d wiped the floor with her. Oxley had teased Thomas by referring to Stronger In as ‘the BSE campaign’. The two were friends, but the taunt was as effective as it was childish. Normally highly composed, Thomas lost her temper, and a video of their exchange was quickly posted on the Guido Fawkes website. Oxley returned to the Vote Leave office pleased with himself – only to be told off by Dominic Cummings. Oxley thought he had done everything that had been asked of him. He had got across Vote Leave’s favourite message, that EU membership cost taxpayers £350 million a week, he had called Stronger In ‘EU-funded’, and he had hurled the ‘BSE’ jibe.

But Cummings admonished him. When Thomas lost her rag, he told Oxley, ‘What you should have said was, “And as I was saying, the BSE campaign …” Just double down.’ That was Cummings all over. ‘Double down’ became Vote Leave’s internal motto. ‘If we’d started a row, you didn’t withdraw, you doubled down,’ says Oxley.

This uncompromising approach by Cummings was to spark an attempt to oust him which, had it succeeded, could have killed Leave’s chances of victory stone dead.

Cummings’ other instruction to Oxley that day was more obscure, but even more revealing of the kind of campaign he wanted to run. It was not just Steve Baker who had read classics of military theory. When Oxley returned to the office, Cummings told him, ‘You’ve got to get in their OODA loop.’

‘OODA loop’ is a term from American military strategy that stands for ‘observe, orient, decide, and act’. It was the brainchild of US Air Force Colonel John Boyd, a fighter pilot in the Korean War. Boyd believed that everyone makes decisions by following the four stages of OODA. He wrote: ‘In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries – or, better yet, get inside [the] adversary’s Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action loop. Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable) thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries.’ Cummings describes Boyd as ‘a brilliant guy, a modern-day Sun Tzu’.

In Cummings’ view, with Thomas disorientated and on the run, Oxley should have made her more so. Vote Leave’s strategy throughout the campaign was to disrupt and disorientate the enemy. Cummings’ grounding in strategic theory did not stop there: ‘If you’re serious about these things, the classics speak truth,’ he said. ‘Thucydides, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Mao on guerrilla warfare.’ Cummings had studied Otto von Bismarck at university under the historian Norman Stone, and had later read ‘a whole bunch of biographies and original sources’ on the nineteenth-century statesman after he stopped working for Michael Gove. He vowed to run the Leave campaign on the same principles as the man who unified Germany by means of war and exploiting the weakness of his enemies: ‘Of the people we’ve got good sources for, he’s undoubtedly the most extraordinary and most able political operator. He approached things with extreme flexibility. Always avoid being boxed in, always have two irons in the fire, wherever you can. Try to avoid dead ends, because you never know what’s going to come and bite you in the arse.’ Critics of Vote Leave’s campaign messaging might also recall Bismarck’s insight that ‘People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.’

Since Cummings knew many of the Downing Street and Remain chiefs well, he also knew their weak points. ‘Dom knew which lines would annoy the other side,’ a campaign source said. ‘He knew the pressure points of people.’ When Downing Street’s Daniel Korski was accused of bullying businesses, a dossier on Korski’s pro-European background found its way to the media. When Kate Rock, a Tory peer who worked for Cameron, found herself in the news, one paper was encouraged to use an unflattering photograph that she was known to hate – both examples of getting in the enemy’s OODA loop. ‘The Labour press office did not know how to hit the Tories like we did,’ the source said.

The happiest Paul Stephenson ever saw Cummings was on the morning he told the team to put the NHS logo on the side of Vote Leave’s bus: ‘He was literally jumping around saying, “We’re going to use the NHS logo and they’re going to hate it.”’ Health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s team had already sent a legal letter threatening to sue Vote Leave for putting the logo on their leaflets. Stephenson responded that if they wished to impound the bus he would be happy to arrange a media call for Hunt to come down and do it personally.

Cummings’ psychological warfare was good strategy, but it also caused a rift with MPs that was almost his undoing. From the moment he began briefing journalists in May 2015 about his approach to the campaign, he was clear that he wanted to take the Confederation of British Industry off the battlefield. He saw the CBI as irredeemably pro-EU, and as it was one of the most influential business voices in the country, he wanted it neutralised. Protests from Nationalists in the lead-up to the Scottish referendum had meant the CBI was forced to largely sit out that campaign. Cummings decided to stage a protest at the CBI’s annual conference in November. Stephenson suggested they should infiltrate the conference hall and get people to hold up something. Cummings embraced the idea, and told the team, ‘If there are not calls for me to be sacked after the CBI conference, then you haven’t done your job.’

The team found two students – Phil Sheppard and Peter Lyons – from Students for Britain, Vote Leave’s ‘militant wing’. They created a fake company and gained access to the event. When David Cameron got up to speak on 9 November they held up banners reading ‘CBI = Voice of Brussels’. The protest might have been even more dramatic. The usually cautious Matthew Elliott reminded people that Countryside Alliance campaigners had set off rape alarms during a protest at a Labour conference, though he denies suggesting their use at the CBI.

The stunt got huge publicity, but Eurosceptic MPs ‘hated it’ because they had been kept in the dark by Cummings. Steve Baker, by his own account, ‘went bananas’ and the two fell out ‘very badly’. Baker says, ‘I didn’t like that it breached the PM’s security. I didn’t like that it involved lying to the CBI. I didn’t like that it put those two young lads in a position where they’ll always be remembered as the lads who did the CBI stunt.’ Paul Stephenson rejects this argument: ‘They weren’t duped into anything. They were up for it. They knew exactly what they were getting into.’ Both Sheppard and Lyons worked for the campaign until the end.

Baker’s main beef was that the MPs had been frozen out. ‘What I really hated is that my permission was not asked and I was not trusted with that knowledge. It really hurt that my reputation had been played with.’ Peter Bone, the MP for Wellingborough, shared Baker’s concern that the students would ‘have a mark against them’, while Bernard Jenkin was also ‘very annoyed about it’: ‘Dominic became very much the focus of attention because he kept saying or doing very controversial things.’ Jenkin believed the stunt might imperil Vote Leave’s chances of winning designation as the official ‘Out’ campaign and put off voters: ‘The reputation of the Leave campaign would be intrinsic to its effectiveness. Unlike a plain “No” campaign, in this referendum we were the people making the proposition, to leave the EU, and people would need to be able to trust our campaign.’ When Baker refused to join Vote Leave’s board because he did not feel Cummings was prepared to be held accountable, Jenkin, ‘with some foreboding’, agreed to take his place. ‘The first thing I did was to ask the Compliance Committee to investigate the CBI stunt,’ says Jenkin. ‘It turned out there was nothing untoward, but the board needed to know that.’

The CBI protest might have upset the MPs, but it helped internal bonding in the campaign headquarters: ‘It was blooding everyone for the campaign to come,’ says Stephenson. ‘The office got into its warlike mentality that day.’ They would soon need it.

The event that sparked the anti-Cummings insurrection was the decision of Richard Murphy, Vote Leave’s head of field operations, to resign at the end of November. Murphy had been brought in by Matthew Elliott from Conservative campaign headquarters, where he had been director of field operations, but he quickly clashed with Cummings. Murphy objected to the campaign director wanting to focus on digital rather than ‘on the ground’ campaigning in the initial stages. Cummings believed Murphy was too set in his ways. Stephenson describes him as ‘old school’: ‘We created our own software for canvass returns and Murphy wanted to use this thing he’d been using for thirty years. It was a clash of cultures. He kept on threatening to walk out, and in the end he did.’

Cummings saw a man who was experienced but unwilling to adapt, and who ‘hated’ the questioning, data-driven campaign he was creating. At one point he told Murphy, ‘Just saying it’s what you’ve done for thirty years isn’t good enough. Haven’t you learnt that from Obama’s campaign?’ Murphy, he could see, found that ‘insulting’. According to one witness, he replied, ‘Why don’t we use stuff that British people know about rather than Americans?’

Murphy’s departure further unsettled the MPs at a time when they were already concerned about Cummings’ attitude. Their mood darkened further when Murphy was tapped up by Arron Banks two weeks later as director of field campaigning for Leave.EU.

Shortly after Murphy left, MPs began getting calls from people spreading rumours that ‘Cummings is a psychopath who bullies people in the office, threatens to beat people up.’ Cummings was initially dismissive of this smear campaign. He had been the subject of false rumours before, when he was upsetting people in Whitehall, that he was ‘a heroin addict or gay’. He assumed the MPs would not believe that he was actually threatening to kill people. Afterwards he realised this insouciance was ‘an error’. Murphy’s view that Vote Leave had no ground game caught hold with MPs. While Cummings had no background in field campaigning, Nick Varley, who was brought in by Murphy to be head of ground operations, said this was unfair: ‘Dom never ignored the ground campaign, and knew it was vitally important.’

Murphy’s departure enraged Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove, two Brexit-backing Conservative MPs from the Midlands who were experts in running field operations and believed that Cummings was not doing enough to prioritise the ground war. Bone was sixty-three, and a dead ringer for Sven-Göran Eriksson, the former England football manager. He often raised a smile at PMQs by asking Cameron questions from his wife, ‘Mrs Bone’. If he was in the mood, Cameron would reply that he was doing his best to ‘satisfy her’. Pursglove, who had just turned twenty-seven, was known as ‘Mini-Bone’ at Westminster because the two were virtually inseparable. He had begun his political career working on Bone’s election taskforce.

‘The Bones’ believed they had the blueprint for success because they had got Pursglove elected in the marginal seat of Corby, overturning a Labour majority of nearly 8,000. They knocked on every door in the constituency twice and campaigned hard on immigration, encouraging Tory voters tempted by Ukip to back the resolutely sceptic Pursglove while urging tribally Labour voters who would never vote Tory to support Ukip. In this successful endeavour the pair got no help from Tory HQ. ‘They cut us off completely,’ Bone said. ‘We had a huge bloody row with them; they told us banging on about Europe won’t win us the seat.’

Baker asked Bone and Pursglove to go to Vote Leave in October and give advice on the ground war. Bone believed in ‘endless amounts of canvassing’, since he had found knocking on doors was three times as effective in turning out votes as delivering literature. But he did not believe he got a commitment from Vote Leave to a proper get-out-the-vote effort. His mood darkened when Vote Leave sent him 130,000 leaflets suggesting that some of the £350 million-a-week cost of the EU could be spent on the NHS. He refused to deliver them, because he saw them as an attack on the government. Then Richard Murphy resigned.

If the MPs were angry about the CBI stunt and the Murphy defection, they were incandescent when a week later Vote Leave made its first overt attack on David Cameron. On Saturday, 5 December the Daily Telegraph splashed on claims that the prime minister had ‘made clear to his close allies that he will lead the “Out” campaign if he considers the result of his renegotiation with Brussels to be unsuccessful’.

At Vote Leave the story was interpreted as an attempt by Craig Oliver to encourage Eurosceptic MPs who might have backed Leave to remain loyal to the prime minister. He told Cummings, ‘We need to get him off this pedestal. It’s not true. Let’s provoke him.’ Stephenson texted a couple of Sunday newspaper journalists, including Glen Owen of the Mail on Sunday. The following day the paper carried a quote from a senior source at Vote Leave saying, ‘If Cameron thinks we’d want him leading the “Leave” campaign he’s deluded. He’s toxic on this issue. If there was a choice between who to put up in a television debate between Cameron and Boris, you’d want Boris every time.’

The quote caused uproar among Tory MPs, many of whom had pledged to avoid attacking the PM until the renegotiation was concluded. Cummings was blamed for the briefing, but in Westminster Tower it was Stephenson who was nicknamed ‘Toxic’ for the rest of the campaign. Explaining the rationale for the attack later, he said, ‘The PM never again tried to lead the Leave campaign. And it was also a signal that “We’re not scared. We’re in for a fight.”’

But the first people to pick a fight were Vote Leave’s own MPs. Cummings had established a Monday-morning meeting at which they could sound off. That Monday, Bone and Pursglove joined the usual cast of Steve Baker, Bernard Jenkin and co. Baker complained about the Mail on Sunday story: ‘While we’re briefing that Cameron’s toxic, it’s going to be very hard to sign up colleagues.’

Tempers frayed further when Bone got into an argument with Cummings. First, he took issue with the campaign’s messaging, saying, ‘You’re doing all this NHS stuff, £350 million, we don’t think it’s a winner.’ Cummings explained that he had data showing that the messages worked, but that if MPs wanted to use different messages in their patch they were free to do so: ‘With respect, this is an empirical question and I’ve got an empirical answer, and if you say your local area’s different, fine. Do something different.’

Bone then raised Richard Murphy’s complaints about the lack of a ground campaign. Cummings felt Bone had a point about the slow speed of the ground campaign, but blamed Murphy. Then Bone said Vote Leave should be trying to encourage Cameron to lead the campaign rather than alienating him: ‘You can’t say he’s toxic, this is outrageous. The PM could have led the campaign!’ Bone believed that if Cameron supported Leave they would ‘win by a mile’, and did not like the fact that their potential saviour had been ‘insulted’. He saw Cummings and Stephenson’s approach as ‘West Wing behaviour’, after the grandstanding aides in the US television series. He told a friend, ‘They really slagged the PM off, and that was clearly silly.’

Cummings regarded Bone as absurdly naïve about Cameron’s intentions. Biting his tongue, he was relatively gracious at first, but eventually said, ‘We think you’re wrong, and if you don’t like it, you don’t need to be involved in the campaign.’

One observer described the putdown as ‘brutal’. Bone stormed out of the meeting. After it broke up, Pursglove complained that Stephenson’s briefing was ‘very short-sighted’. But even Baker, who was annoyed by the ‘toxic’ quote, sided with Stephenson, saying, ‘Tom, if the PM’s going to lead the Out campaign, he’s not going to decide against it because someone briefed against him.’

The upshot of the Bone–Cummings bust-up was that Bone and Pursglove, with the support of the Labour donor John Mills, set up a new organisation called Grassroots Out to help MPs create a ground game in their constituencies. The group’s name was abbreviated to ‘GO’, and Bone had livid lime-green ties made up sporting the logo. GO quickly became a place where MPs annoyed by Cummings could find a home. Arron Banks targeted Kate Hoey and John Mills, urging them to help bring the two wings of the Eurosceptic movement together. By Christmas, Mills was openly calling for a merger with Banks.

Turning the screw, Banks began writing to Matthew Elliott suggesting a merger. Chris Bruni-Lowe remembers, ‘We said to Banks, “You must write to Elliott as many times as possible because he’s looking for the designation.” So Banks said, “We’re replicating each other on so many things, we’re spending so much money, millions. Why don’t we just spend it all on the same campaign?” Elliott would tell people, “We’re not doing that. We don’t trust this madman Banks.”’

Cummings’ biggest problem, though, was a growing view among Conservative MPs that he was not the right man to run the campaign – they were. ‘People like Bernard [Jenkin] and Bill [Cash], who didn’t like what we were doing, didn’t like the fact they weren’t on the news every day, were causing trouble for us,’ said one Vote Leave official. Jenkin says it is ‘absolute rubbish’ that they wanted more media attention, and that he was ‘very happy to take more of a back seat’.

Cash, the MP for the Staffordshire seat of Stone, was respected as an authority on the minutiae of EU procedure, but was regarded by many colleagues as the last man with whom they would wish to be trapped in a lift. Even his friends admit that he had to be kept away from the public: ‘Although he’s absolutely right, he wasn’t the face of Brexit we wanted to put on TV all the time,’ another Eurosceptic MP said. ‘Bill took it a bit hard. You can’t put Bill out to sell Brexit to the people.’

Cash also clashed with Cummings over his contract and his pay. He had been fed rumours that Cummings was on a huge salary. In fact Cummings, Elliott, Stephenson and Victoria Woodcock, the most senior figures in the campaign, were all paid £96,000 per year. The standoff resembled a spat between two sets of groupies for a band called Euroscepticism. The Palaeosceptics had identified the act when it was just playing gigs in local pubs, always preferred their early stuff and resented the producer who had turned their minority pursuit into a stadium act even if that meant playing some different tunes.

Cummings’ main beef, according to one of his closest collaborators, was that ‘Conservative MPs have been in charge of Euroscepticism for the last twenty years, and it’s been defeat after defeat for the period. I turn up and the group of MPs who are responsible for all those defeats tell me that they know how to win. I know if I let them run this campaign we’ll lose. I don’t have time to be diplomatic to them, I just have to get on with it and run it.’

That was certainly how Bernard Jenkin felt: ‘Dominic was very down on anyone who’d been a Maastricht rebel. His narrative was that the Eurosceptics were completely incompetent and their image was hopeless. John Redwood, Peter Lilley, Bernard Jenkin, Iain Duncan Smith, Owen Paterson, all these people were toxic and therefore not the face of the campaign.’ But Jenkin added, ‘Sometimes, I did feel that people rather green on the subject weren’t answering the questions as capably as some of us who’d been doing it for thirty years.’

Daniel Hannan could see faults on both sides: ‘Although Dom was very brilliant, did the job for which he was contracted and carried it out superbly, he doesn’t see the point of MPs. He’s not a patient man if he thinks people are being foolish. A lot of MPs have big egos. They think they are terribly important, expect deference, and get huffy when they don’t get it. A lot of MPs are thin-skinned creatures, and felt that they should have been in control, and I think they took it badly that the campaign was being run by someone who didn’t pretend to defer to them. Leave.EU scented the opportunity of targeting Dom as the weak point, so they were constantly briefing against him.’

When MPs and donors complained that Arron Banks was bad-mouthing the campaign to other Tories in order to peel them off into GO, Cummings would reply, ‘If you stop having meetings and talking about it, it will stop being a problem.’

But for Bernard Jenkin it was Cummings’ manner, not his arguments, that was at fault: ‘Some people think he made the situation worse, other people think he was a genius, and the fact is it probably was a combination of the two. Dominic was right in principle about not merging, it was just the tone with which it was being done which was so destructive.’

The MPs were right to think they had no power. Paul Stephenson said, ‘Where did power sit in the campaign? Not really anywhere other than wandering in to have a chat with Dom.’

Everything acquired greater urgency in December, when it became clear that Cameron intended to do his deal in February. The day the Referendum Bill got royal assent, Cummings’ favourite researcher, ‘Ricardo’ Howell, correctly predicted that the referendum would be held on 23 June. A countdown clock was put up on Vote Leave’s wall. At the board meeting before Christmas Cummings said, ‘I think these guys are going to go early. We have to start spending money and planning on this basis.’

Eurosceptic donors were also on the warpath. David Wall, the influential secretary of the Midlands Industrial Council, was concerned by Richard Murphy’s departure. The two had worked together during the general election, when Murphy was responsible for checking that MIC money donated to Tory marginal seats was well spent. Chris Bruni-Lowe said, ‘David Wall and lots of other donors who’d given a lot of money were just really unhappy – Patrick Barbour, Richard Smith, who owned Tufton Street.’ The declared donors were unimpressed that Vote Leave was struggling to land new big-name backers and their cash. Conservative donors were under huge pressure from Downing Street to keep their wallets zipped. Rodney Leach of Open Europe phoned Tory donors to say, ‘Give the PM a chance, he’ll come back with more than people think, trust me. This will be a deal worth having.’ This charm offensive frustrated Elliott: ‘I had some quite senior Eurosceptic party people and donors who were quite convinced until the PM came back with his deal that it was going to be much more radical than it was. They literally thought the PM would come back with a trade-based relationship, and said we were being much too hasty in coming out for Leave.’

In early January 2016 a group of Leave donors gathered at Stuart Wheeler’s home, Chilham Castle in Kent, to discuss merging Vote Leave and Leave.EU. Patrick Barbour and others were keen on the two groups coming together. Arron Banks was pushing the idea too, though he was not at the meeting. Paul Stephenson believed Banks deliberately ‘started trying to make Dom public enemy number one with donors because Dom was the only thing stopping the merger’. Chris Bruni-Lowe, a Banks ally, said, ‘The donors weren’t giving any money because of Cummings. He is portrayed as some sort of genius, but most people saw him as completely mad.’ During the meeting, which he attended, Cummings emailed Stephenson to tell him that some of the donors were discussing getting rid of him. ‘It’s a bit touch and go,’ he said. Stephenson replied that if it would help he could tell people there, ‘If you’re off, I’m off,’ and sent him a resignation statement that he could show them if necessary: ‘If you need this, have it in your locker.’ Cummings did not need the pledge on that occasion, but it was to come in useful soon.

Cummings also had his ear bent at the retreat by Daniel Hannan about who would represent the Out camp in the television debates. According to a Vote Leave official Hannan said, ‘We don’t just need the people who are the biggest personalities. We need the best debaters. People have been debating this for twenty years.’ No one was in any doubt that he considered himself the pick of the bunch. In the Vote Leave offices Hannan was quickly dubbed ‘the world’s greatest debater’.

Hannan was in fact a very gifted speaker, and was deployed all around the country during the campaign in local debates. Stronger In officials regarded him as their most formidable foe in these encounters. But Cummings did not want Hannan fronting the campaign on television, and said to him what he had said to Nigel Farage, that he would test all the possible debate spokesmen and put up the one most likely to win over target voters. ‘Dan, who basically helped get the thing off the ground, was then pushed out, because they were waiting for Gove,’ said Bruni-Lowe.

The final straw for Cummings’ critics came on 21 January, when The Economist published a cover interview with him. Bursting with his eclectic knowledge of everything from the EU to Soviet propaganda, it seemed calculated to offend the Palaeosceptics. Cummings argued for a simple campaign message about cost and control that could be digested by ordinary voters, rather than constitutional abstractions: ‘The Eurosceptic world has thousands of books and zillions of pamphlets and has been talking about this for many decades. The challenge is not to say more things. The challenge is to focus, to simplify things.’

It may seem odd that an article in a low-circulation publication aimed at high minds could cause uproar, but it did. Cummings was not just running the campaign: a respectable part of the media had now made him the face of it too – and for many who had been campaigning on the issue for decades that was too much to bear. According to one senior figure at Vote Leave, Bernard Jenkin phoned him and said, ‘We’re going to lose the campaign because of Dom.’ Hannan was also ‘in a tailspin’ about it. Another campaign official is clear that the article directly gave rise to an attempt to remove Cummings: ‘The trigger for the coup was the interview Dom gave with The Economist, which caused various MPs to think, “Why aren’t I on the front cover of The Economist?”’

In this toxic environment, tensions between Cummings and Elliott were amplified. Everyone at Vote Leave praised Elliott for creating the organisation and getting Cummings on board, but they also felt he was status-conscious. Cummings believed Elliott was ‘discombobulated’ by media rumours that Michael Gove would back Brexit, a development that would make him immovable and immeasurably more powerful. Looking back, Cummings said, ‘Everyone’s thinking at this point, “How do I get into controlling position?” And a lot of them, unfortunately for me, are thinking, “The clock’s ticking and if Gove comes in then Cummings is locked in. He’s going to run it for good or evil. So you’ve got to get rid of Cummings before Gove moves.”’ Elliott says his fear was that Gove would not join the campaign, not that he would.

But by the middle of January, Elliott was troubled enough by the deterioration of his relationship with Cummings to invite Daniel Hodson to lunch. Hodson was a former financial services regulator who had been treasurer for the People’s Pledge and then Business for Britain. At Vote Leave he took charge of compliance and governance issues, believing that if the campaign did things ‘by the book’ it was more likely to get the designation than Leave.EU. He had been a friend of Elliott’s for two years, but recognised that when it came to the ‘all out war’ of a campaign, ‘Cummings delivers.’ Over oriental food in the Park Plaza Riverbank hotel, up the Embankment from Westminster Tower, Elliott explained his frustrations: the ‘toxic’ slur against Cameron, the way Cummings had ‘pissed off MPs’, and the pressure they were subsequently putting on him to change the way Cummings was managed. Hodson told him, ‘You really have to get in a room and sit down with Dominic and talk about it. You need to rehash the relationship.’ Hodson then received a series of calls from board members who wanted Cummings restrained or removed.

In the final week of January, things came to a head. Bernard Jenkin, who as chairman of ExCom had borne the brunt of complaints from MPs, said he got a phone call. ‘It was Matthew Elliott who rang me up after some kind of summit which was held in Chilham Castle in January and said to me, “Everybody agrees that Dominic’s got to be moved to an advisory position.” Dominic was never going to be removed totally. We wanted access to his expertise but we didn’t feel he was right to be in a leadership role, running the entire organisation. He had a very autocratic management style. Some people hero-worshipped him, other people were terrified of him. And anyway, he had initially said to ExCom that he only wanted to set up the campaign, and had not wanted to run it.’ Elliot flatly denied that this conversation took place: ‘What Bernard says is complete rubbish, and he’s obviously trying to displace the blame and throw the bloody knives in my direction.’

As chairman of the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, Jenkin had presided over a report into mismanagement at the children’s charity Kids Company, run by the colourful and controversial Camila Batmanghelidjh, which was critical of the trustees. He worried that if the campaign disintegrated there would be similar questions for Vote Leave’s board. ‘My concern, shared with the other directors, was that Dominic represented a considerable risk to designation because you know you have to be a fit and proper person, you have to be pukka to get designation. Some of the things he did and wanted to do were not things that respectable companies did. Business people who were thinking about where to place their money could see that the way Vote Leave carried on was a bit of a risk, so they wanted to hedge their bets.’

The trouble with this approach is that political campaigns are not democracies. Nothing presages defeat like decision-making by committee. Campaigns are best operated as dictatorships.

Matthew Elliott vehemently denies that he orchestrated what became known as the coup. Friends say he recruited Cummings because he thought he was the best man for the job. But they admit that Cummings’ rivalry with Arron Banks drove donors and MPs to approach Elliott to express concern about the way the campaign was being run. ‘Vote Leave’s USP was that they were the nice cross-party campaign, positive, forward-looking, internationalist, more based on the economics than immigration, competent campaigners,’ a source close to Elliott said. ‘Banks was the nasty campaign, Ukip-based and unprofessional. That was the narrative between the two groups. But you got to a situation in January where it was quite difficult to sustain that. People were saying, “Hang on, you’re saying these guys are unprofessional, but they’ve got six-figure numbers on their Facebook likes. You say they play dirty, but what about the CBI stunt?”’

Elliott’s advocates say that MPs like Jenkin and Chris Grayling, newly liberated by David Cameron, began to question how the campaign was being run and why more money had not been raised. ‘Matthew listened to them rather than shouting at them,’ a friend said pointedly. ‘He engaged with them, but he did not want to have anything to do with Ukip or Arron Banks.’ From Hodson’s perspective, the decisive intervention was Grayling’s. A senior figure in the campaign told him, ‘The message has come across: Grayling says Cummings has to go.’ Hodson was concerned by this, as at that moment he was ‘the first great hope’, the most senior cabinet minister expected to commit to Leave at a time when the loyalties of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Theresa May were unknown.

Grayling himself denies knifing Cummings. He said, ‘I met two of the board members, including John Mills the chairman, and I simply expressed a worry that the rift between the different camps was actually putting people off at Westminster. The decision to go after Dominic Cummings and to remove him from his position was one taken by the board, and could only be taken by the board. I don’t think they ever intended to remove Dominic altogether, they just intended to try and take him out of the front line. I think the board were generally worried the whole thing was going to fall apart.’

Banks sought to persuade Mills and other members of the Vote Leave board that the best solution was to sideline Cummings and have Elliott take charge of a merged campaign. ‘The idea was that Elliott would be the chair of the combined organisation with Mills and Banks,’ says Chris Bruni-Lowe. ‘That was the plan, but it never happened.’ Matthew Elliott remembers, ‘I think in around November I was the nasty one, the one that Banks couldn’t have anything to do with. Then it changed to being “They’re both as bad as each other.” Then it became Dom who was the one in his bad books.’

Banks also worked on Kate Hoey and other members of the Labour Leave organisation, who had also tired of Cummings. Banks said, ‘Labour Leave were very discontented with Cummings. There was a Hertford Street lunch I had with Peter Bone, Tom Pursglove, Kate Hoey, John Mills and Matthew Elliott, where Kate Hoey just said to Matthew Elliott’s face, “You’ve got to get rid of Dominic Cummings or we’ll be walking.” The feelings were very high. We tried to merge four times with them. It was always a different thing. First “Our donors won’t allow this.” Then “Our MPs won’t allow it.” Then “The cabinet ministers won’t allow it.” There was always an excuse why it couldn’t be done.’

If the Vote Leave board remained divided about a merger with Banks, they did now agree that they wanted shot of Cummings. Daniel Hodson called a meeting with Cummings at 9 o’clock on the morning of Monday, 25 January to discuss Bill Cash’s concerns about his contract. Cummings duly turned up at Westminster Tower, but there was no sign of Hodson. Then his phone rang and an ‘agitated’ Hodson said, ‘You’re not here for the meeting.’ He was at 55 Tufton Street. Cummings explained that he was at the Vote Leave offices. Minutes later Hodson called back and said the meeting was definitely supposed to be at Tufton Street. Cummings, who was as usual rushed off his feet, said, ‘I’ve got umpteen different problems going on. The meeting was meant to be twenty minutes ago. If you want to have this meeting, it’s a trivial issue, come over here or let’s do it another time.’ Hodson blurted out, ‘No, no, no, Dominic, I’ve sacrificed a lot for this campaign and I want to do this today.’ Cummings thought, ‘Fine, I don’t want another argument, let’s pop on a bike and go over there.’

While he headed off, Paul Stephenson and the other senior staff were waiting for a meeting with the leading Vote Leave politicians. Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan were present, but no one else was. Stephenson thought, ‘That’s weird.’ A short while later, Stephenson took calls from Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC and Chris Hope of the Telegraph, who had fresh intelligence. Kuenssberg told him, ‘I’ve got this from someone who’s never been wrong before – Dom’s going to resign today.’ Stephenson said, ‘I haven’t heard anything of that.’ But he was seriously worried. Both journalists were well connected in the Eurosceptic world. At around the same time, Nigel Farage took a call from ‘someone very senior on the board of Vote Leave’, who told him, ‘Cummings will be gone by half past ten.’

After a cycle ride of five minutes, Cummings sat down with Hodson, described by one Vote Leave source as ‘a very sweet, old guy, an English gentleman eccentric’. Cummings could tell at once that something was wrong. Hodson said, ‘I’m very sorry Dominic, but I’m afraid to tell you this meeting is not exactly what you thought it was.’

Immediately suspicious, Cummings remembered his time in Moscow and thought to himself, ‘Where’s the plastic sheeting?’

Hodson went on, ‘The board’s lost confidence in you, Matthew’s lost confidence in you. You’ve got to go. But we don’t want you to go completely. You’ve got many skills, Dominic. But Matthew’s the manager, and Matthew’s the one who should be running the campaign, and you’ve annoyed too many people.’

Cummings, his mind racing, played for time. ‘OK,’ he replied.

Hodson went on, ‘There’s some other people here who want to talk to you about this. And we have a suggestion of the way forward.’

At that point the key Vote Leave directors filed into the room, including Bernard Jenkin. They repeated Hodson’s message: ‘You can’t manage this, Matthew’s got to manage it, we want you to be an adviser, but you are no longer running anything here.’ They offered Cummings a deal: ‘You can have it the easy way or the hard way. If you do it the easy way, we’ll pay you a bunch of money to be a consultant and you just tell everyone your wife’s pregnant and that’s the reason why you’re heading off.’

Cummings looked around the room, read the faces of his opponents and made a judgement that they could be beaten. He couldn’t help recalling several unpleasant experiences in Moscow: ‘I’ve dealt with a lot, lot worse things than a bunch of clowns in a building in SW1.’ He outlined the reasons why he thought the plotters were wrong, and then played what he hoped was his trump card: ‘Have you thought through about what’s going to happen in the office when you announce this?’

‘What do you mean?’ someone asked.

‘Well, I don’t think the senior people there will accept what’s going on, and if they all walk out, then you haven’t got a campaign organisation.’

This created consternation. ‘Well, what do you suggest we do about that?’ came a voice.

Cummings smiled and said, ‘That just about sums you guys up, that you ask me for advice on how to do your own coup! Typical, especially of you, Bernard.’ He then asked, ‘What does Matthew think about this?’

‘He completely agrees with all this.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Back in the office.’

‘You’re asking what’s going to happen to the staff. Why don’t you get the chief executive here to see what he’s going to say about the staff?’

Someone phoned Elliott, and he arrived a short while later with Dan Hannan. Hannan said Elliott asked him to accompany him to see if they could ‘calm things down’.

What happened next is hotly disputed. A member of the board who was present that day is adamant that when ‘Matthew joined the meeting, he initially supported the board line’. This supports the version of events Cummings recounted to colleagues afterwards. According to Cummings’ account Hannan told him, ‘Dominic, it’s your patriotic duty to step aside for Elliott and tell the other staff it was a good idea.’

‘Dan, I don’t think you understand,’ said Cummings. ‘I don’t think you understand that Paul Stephenson and Victoria Woodcock are much more capable than Matthew. And much more capable than you. And much more capable than the people around this table. I’m not going to go along and tell them what to do and they’re going to do it, because they’re not idiots. They know that you can’t run this and they know that Matthew can’t do this, so that’s not going to work.’

‘Well my God, if that happens and they all walk out, that’s going to be a complete disaster,’ came a voice.

‘You should have thought about that before you started this stupid business,’ said Cummings. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’

Hannan admits that he was aware of the coup plans ‘the night before’, but insists his ‘immediate reaction was we shouldn’t lose Dominic’. He says that his role that day, along with Elliott, was to act as honest brokers between Cummings and the board: ‘The two of us went in together, and suggested a compromise solution, which effectively both sides ended up rejecting at the time but ended up happening. I put on the table what I thought would be a compromise where Dom would focus on being the campaign director, but not do any tweeting and the things that were annoying people, which basically is what happened in the end.’

Hannan claims that Cummings said, ‘No, no, I insist on having no conditions put on me,’ while the hardliners on the board said, ‘No, he’s got to go.’ Hannan explains, ‘I was fairly disappointed to see people on both sides making it personal. It seemed to me that the obvious compromise was that Dom could focus on doing the strategy, and not do any of the MP interactions.’

Either way, there was now concern among the board members that the plans were unravelling. Jenkin says he discussed the implications of moving Cummings with Elliott, who had been of the view that two or three other members of staff might quit in protest, but that there would not be a mass exodus. He now believed that Cummings had got wind of the move against him and lined up support in the office to face it down.

Daniel Hodson was increasingly concerned. He had understood that only Paul Stephenson and Victoria Woodcock would resign if Cummings was defenestrated. He regarded both as replaceable. Now it seemed Elliott’s intelligence was wrong. He then intervened, telling Cummings, ‘We’ve got this contract. I want you to look at this contract.’

Cummings replied, ‘You want me to look at this contract and you want me to talk with the staff. I’ll go away and look at this contract.’

The plotters tried to stop him: ‘You can’t do that. The lawyers are all standing next door, and you can’t leave until you’ve signed this contract.’

Cummings laughed again. ‘I don’t think you guys understand anything. The idea that you could hold me hostage in a room and get me to sign a contract. Who do you think you’re dealing with? I’m going to go to the Pret down the road, I’m going to get myself a coffee and I’m going to read this contract. I’m going to suggest that you go to Vote Leave and talk to the staff there.’

He left the Tufton Street office and immediately called his PA Cleo Watson at Westminster Tower, who doubled as the head of outreach, to explain what was happening. She quickly gathered Paul Stephenson, Victoria Woodcock and Stephen Parkinson in Cummings’ office and told them, ‘A bunch of people are coming here now to tell us Dom is going on paternity leave. What are we going to do about that?’

Stephenson said, ‘This sounds like a coup to me. I’ll leave.’ In what became the Leave campaign’s ‘Spartacus moment’, Woodcock said, ‘I’m off as well,’ and Parkinson agreed, ‘Me too.’

They put Cummings on speakerphone. Agitated but not panicking, he said, ‘There’s a fucking coup going on. It’s fucking Elliott. And all this lot are trying to get rid of me. You lot have said to me, you’ll go. If that’s what you’re saying, excellent. This will kill the thing now.’ At Cummings’ request Watson moved his personal possessions into her desk drawers.

Matthew Elliott, accompanied by board member Alan Halsall, who even Cummings’ supporters still see as ‘a good guy’, walked over Lambeth Bridge to Vote Leave and sat down with the three senior figures. Halsall asked them if they would quit. Stephenson said, ‘We’ll be gone within ten minutes.’

‘So how many of your team would resign?’

‘Most of them.’

‘We’re talking about half, two-thirds of the team going,’ Halsall said reflectively, realising that the board’s intelligence had been bad. In the classic outline of a failed coup, the plotters had sought to oust the president without first securing the support of the military and the civil service, and without seizing the headquarters of the state broadcaster.

Elliott, apparently nervous and seeing the way the wind was blowing, told his colleagues, ‘I didn’t want this to happen. Dom’s very stressed. This is bad for the campaign.’ Cummings even claims Elliott was so thrown by the course of events that he began showing Cummings texts from Grayling urging the plotters to ‘press on’. ‘I was dictating Elliott’s replies to Grayling,’ he said.1

While that was going on there was another crucial encounter. Rob Oxley, the head of media who had worked for Elliott at Business for Britain and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, bumped into Bernard Jenkin in Smith Square. Jenkin told him that Cummings was being moved to an advisory role, and that he needed to help settle down the campaign. Oxley let rip, saying, ‘Dom’s not the problem, it’s Matthew.’

Oxley had twigged that some of the MPs thought he could replace Stephenson. He said to Jenkin, ‘I reckon you guys think I can take Paul’s job.’ But he made it clear that despite his successful career, he did not yet feel capable of doing such a big job, and that he would never betray Stephenson: ‘My loyalty is with Dom and Paul, and if they leave I would go too.’ He predicted, ‘The entire media team and research team would probably walk out at that point.’ Jenkin seemed taken aback. Oxley recognised that without Elliott’s patronage and advice he ‘wouldn’t be much’ at such a young age, but when he had to nail his colours to the mast he chose Cummings. He raced back to the office and said to Stephenson, ‘If I have to go and find a job, I will do.’ It was partly that Cummings and Stephenson had taken him on and trusted him, it was partly that ‘These were the only guys who’d shown me they were willing to win the campaign.’

‘The Ox is a very loyal and great man,’ says Stephenson, ‘and was very important in stopping the whole thing from happening.’

When Cummings returned to Westminster Tower, he rallied his troops. Channelling the spirit of Zulu, he said, ‘Gentlemen, we are surrounded. The good news is that we can shoot in any direction and we’ll have a direct hit.’

Michael Gove first heard about the attempted coup when he received a text from the Daily Mail journalist Andrew Pierce saying Cummings was going to be sacked. He rang Cummings to offer assistance. ‘Dom is rarely agitated, and even though he wasn’t agitated, he was clearly in the middle of a drama,’ Gove recalled. He then made a series of calls, to Peter Cruddas, the Tory treasurer who was funding Vote Leave, to Steve Baker and to Bernard Jenkin. To each of them he delivered the same message: ‘Look, I haven’t declared yet, but you won’t have a chance of winning if you get rid of Dom.’ The subtext, unstated, was that if Cummings was to go they would have little chance of securing Gove’s support.

Jenkin said later that Gove was ‘completely unexplicit’ about joining the campaign, but ‘the implication was, hang in there until cavalry arrive’. During the call he sought to placate Gove, telling him, ‘Michael, if you come over you’ll have a good campaign to join.’

Gove replied, ‘Bernard, it won’t be a good campaign unless Dom Cummings is running it.’ He acknowledged the anger about the CBI stunt and the ‘abrasive and undiplomatic’ nature of Cummings’ interactions with MPs, but backed him up on the central proposition that the campaign could not be won by the Palaeosceptics. To Cummings, he offered a little advice: ‘The brutal candour of your analysis is correct, but you’re leaving other people to sweep up after you. So you should restrain yourself.’

Chris Bruni-Lowe believed Cummings also played the Gove card to save himself: ‘Cummings said, “I can get you Gove.” And then that stopped it.’

Through it all, Cummings had one simple thought: in less than a month David Cameron would go to Brussels and finalise his deal. At that point, he believed, ‘Michael will be on my side and then I’ll be able to wrap all this shit up.’

While Gove was putting in calls, further soundings were taken in the Vote Leave office. ‘Ricardo’ Howell, the whizzkid of the research department, and his boss Oliver Lewis said that they would also walk. It became clear to Halsall and the other board members that Elliott had lost the office. As one Vote Leave staffer explained later, ‘Being generous to him, most people didn’t see what Matthew did, whereas they saw what Dom and Paul did. Being less generous, it was that they thought he wasn’t actually doing anything.’ Elliott was struggling to get donors to hand over money, but he had delegated the task of signing up business supporters to Lewis.

In the end, the key staff sided with Cummings because they thought he was their best hope of a referendum victory, and they believed he was a meritocrat. ‘People wonder why so many staff are loyal to Dom and all the rest of it given his abrasive nature,’ one said. ‘It’s because he doesn’t choose phoneys, he only chooses people who are capable, and he’s incredibly loyal to people who are talented and he goes to bat for them.’ Another staff member, reflecting at the end of the campaign, said, ‘There’s a number of reasons why we won. Cummings was responsible for more than half of why we were good and effective.’

As the situation became clear, Cummings took a call from a member of the board: ‘We’ve reconsidered the situation. The staff won’t agree to your going, therefore we think that maybe you should stay. But if you are going to stay …’ Thus commenced a negotiation about the future governance structure of the campaign that was to last a fortnight.

Vote Leave staff say that by the end of the day Elliott, having gambled and failed, was ‘sucking up’ to Cummings, telling him, ‘Oh, Dom, all your training in Moscow must have really helped you with being able to get off that. Hats off to you.’

Elliott is adamant that he did not conspire against Cummings, that he believed their double act was the way to win the referendum, and that going it alone, or in tandem with Arron Banks, would have condemned Leave to defeat: ‘Lots of donors and MPs came to me. They were trying to tempt me to ditch Dom and do it myself. I knew I’d be forced to join up with the other lot, it would be an embarrassing failure, and we’d lose. Even from a selfish point of view, there was no point in me wielding the dagger. I wanted to win the referendum, and I knew I couldn’t do that without Dom at my side.’

Cummings’ allies believe Elliott saw the opportunity to emerge as top dog and – at the very least – did not talk the board out of it. Gove’s view was more generous than some. A friend said, ‘Michael thought Matthew was not particularly brave on behalf of his comrades, but nor was he plotting against them. He was passive.’

The events of 25 January irreparably harmed some relations in the office. When Elliott found out that Oxley had sided with Cummings they had to have a reconciliation breakfast. Elliott’s relationship with Victoria Woodcock never recovered. With Cummings it was hugely awkward. A Cummings loyalist said, ‘Imagine: you’re sat next to the person who tried to sack you, who’s then said, “Nothing to do with me, it was the MPs.”’

As a result of the peace talks it was agreed that a campaign committee would be established, giving a forum in which MPs could challenge Cummings. The make-up of the board changed, with John Mills stepping down. Jenkin persuaded Nigel Lawson to take over as chairman. Lawson agreed, on the condition that Cummings and Elliott left the board. Jenkin said, ‘It was Dominic’s difficulty in accepting that there had to be proper governance which led to the row. He was determined to be unaccountable, and what occurred is he basically agreed to be accountable.’ In truth, the changes were merely cosmetic. Cummings did agree to moderate his public utterances, but nothing changed the fact that he – with Paul Stephenson and Victoria Woodcock – continued to make every major campaign decision without consulting the MPs. ‘We had to create a string of Potemkin committees for people to attend while the core team actually did the campaign,’ Cummings explained.2

A deal was also agreed to present the attempted coup to the media as having intended to oust both Cummings and Elliott, in order to minimise coverage of the rupture between them. Ten members of staff were summoned to a ‘farcical meeting’ at which they were told that ‘this was a joint attempt to remove Elliott and Cummings together’. ‘It was self-evidently bullshit, and everyone in the room with two brain cells knew it was bullshit,’ said one of those present. ‘The outcome was no quotes would go out in Dom’s name, Dom would remove himself from Twitter and just tweet random things about science. The idea was to have Elliott front and centre of the campaign, which is what he wanted, unsurprisingly. After that, every quote from the campaign was in his name – other than a couple from Rob when they were really, really outrageous.’

The fallout continued for days. Stories were briefed to the papers blaming Jenkin and Grayling for the abortive coup. Jenkin was furious, and Daniel Hannan visited Vote Leave and ‘gave them a proper bollocking’. On the Wednesday evening, with the atmosphere still tense, Oxley took it upon himself to call Steve Baker and say, ‘We have to get this sorted.’ There were rumours that Conservatives for Britain were threatening to withdraw support from Vote Leave. Some of the staff at Westminster Tower were threatening not to work for the MPs. Oxley extended an olive branch to Baker, who was frank in return, admitting that the MPs had had discussions about gutting Vote Leave and bringing ‘our own people’ in to run the campaign. Oxley said, ‘If you do that, you’ll lose the designation process and you’ll lose the race.’ He felt as if he was in ‘nuclear disarmament talks’. When the meeting was over, Oxley called Stephenson and told him to go to see Baker. Stephenson took Stephen Parkinson with him, and they talked for more than an hour, clearing the air about everything since the CBI stunt and coming to ‘a good understanding’. Baker said, ‘I wore the UN blue helmet that week. It’s me who patched it up.’

Jenkin was ‘very scarred’ by the experience: ‘For me, it was one of the most horrid weeks in politics. I agonised about it and I am convinced I had to do what I did, and then I was rather appalled when the rest of the board just backed down.’ He objects to Cummings’ depiction of the events as a coup: ‘“Coup” is the wrong word. The board was completely united that he should be moved but he browbeat the board into submission by threatening to blow up the whole campaign.’

Daniel Hodson uses Cummings’ terminology, but thinks it was essential to give him ‘one hell of a shock’. He said, ‘The force may well have been with us but it was only just with us. If we hadn’t at that point clipped Dominic’s wings we might well not have got the nomination and the campaign would have been lost.’

The battle also hardened the core team at Westminster Tower. Stephenson often thought back to that moment at difficult moments during the campaign: ‘When things were bad, we’d be like, “Hang on a minute, we’ve been within a minute of walking out this office.” When you’re taking a shellacking from your government, at least you’re not taking it from your own side. It helped road-test us.’

What occurred in that last week of January was pivotal to the success of the Leave campaign. Even if you believe that Cummings was out of control, ousting him would have created further chaos and rendered the Leave cause a public laughing stock. It may have deterred some ministers from signing up, or handed control of the campaign to Arron Banks, who most neutral observers believe would have repelled more voters than he attracted.

Steve Baker sums up what happened best: ‘Dominic Cummings is like political special forces. If you don’t care about what collateral damage you sustain, he’s the weapon of choice. He operates with the minimum of civilised restraint. He is a barbarian. Dominic has undoubted mastery of leadership and strategy and political warfare. But he will not let himself be held to account by anybody. And that is basically what that attempt to sack him was about.’

Cummings may not have been the perfect campaign manager, but he was the best available to Vote Leave. The surest proof of this is that when his colleagues were asked to choose between him and the alternatives, every campaign official of note backed him. The failure of the coup meant that when David Cameron finally went to Brussels to sign his deal, Vote Leave were ready to eviscerate the prime minister rather than each other.