Читать книгу All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 26

David Cameron was twenty-seven hours into negotiating a new deal for Britain within the European Union when he snapped. It was late afternoon on Friday, 19 February, and Andrew Cooper, back in Britain, was surprised to receive an email from the PM in Brussels asking for some information. Cooper replied, not expecting to get a response, as he knew Cameron was up to his neck in a diplomatic negotiation that would define his premiership. What came back was a cri de coeur: ‘Frankly, after a day and a half of talks with these people, even I want to leave the EU. I’m getting nowhere, I might have to walk away.’

Cameron had arrived in Brussels at lunchtime the previous day hopeful of securing agreement on the deal he had spent nine months negotiating with the other twenty-seven member states. Ever since early November, he and his officials had spent weeks discussing the small print with their partners and Commission officials. The summit was supposed to set a final seal on everything Cameron had set in motion with the Bloomberg speech three years earlier. But, after more than a day of negotiating, things had not turned out that way. The French, of course, had found fault with proposals that they believed would unfairly advantage the City of London. Britain’s Eastern European allies were fighting a fearsome rearguard action against benefit cuts which would affect their citizens.

Cameron sat disconsolately in the Justus Lipsius Building where the European Council meets. At the best of times it was an unlovely pile of pink granite and glass, where politicians and journalists felt whole days of their lives slip away. On that damp and chill Friday the drab British delegation room was brightened only by the piles of Haribo sweets Cameron’s team were chain-chewing. This raised their blood-sugar levels, but nothing seemed to raise their spirits. It was time to call on the big guns to sort out the mess. He said, ‘I’d better make one last suggestion to Juncker and Tusk, but if that doesn’t work the Poles won’t accept this, then I’m going home and we’ll come back to this in November.’ After three years of building up to this moment, Cameron’s gamble was close to failure.

The two EU officials charged with solving the British problem were Jean-Claude Juncker, the arch-federalist former prime minister of Luxembourg who had become Commission president in June 2014 despite Cameron’s outspoken opposition, and Donald Tusk, the former prime minister of Poland who became president of the European Council – the shop steward for the twenty-eight heads of government – in December 2014, with Britain’s backing. A senior figure at the summit concluded that Cameron had made a ‘strategic error’ with both appointments which made his renegotiation all the harder.

When he had decided to block Juncker’s appointment Cameron had sought Angela Merkel’s backing, thought he had it, only to see her bow to domestic political pressure to back down. Juncker was in pole position because he had been chosen by the EPP, the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, from which Cameron had withdrawn the Tories. Downing Street had failed to understand the attraction in Germany of the new spitzenkandidaten system, whereby the main blocs in the Parliament nominated their preferred candidates on the understanding that whichever grouping got most votes in the European elections that year would get the presidency. The senior mandarins Ivan Rogers and Tom Scholar, who thought the idea as stupid as Cameron, nevertheless both warned him that Merkel might betray him again. ‘This may become unstoppable,’ said Rogers. ‘Even though you think Juncker is a clown, it could end up being him.’ He was right. While Downing Street spin doctors briefed stories about Juncker drinking whisky for breakfast, Peter Altmaier, Merkel’s chief of staff at the German Chancellery, was doing a deal with Martin Selmayr, the German Commission insider who would become Juncker’s all-powerful chief of staff, to ensure that Juncker got the job. When Cameron demanded a show of hands at the summit, just one rose alongside his own: that of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban.

One of Cameron’s aides thinks it would have been better for his referendum prospects if he had accepted Juncker, rather than drawn attention to Britain’s isolation: ‘We introduced Juncker to the nation in a way that people saw the EU as a place which would go against British wishes. I don’t think we suffered because he was in that role. I think we suffered because we were seen to fail to prevent him from taking that role.’

The same aide believes Cameron should not have backed Tusk, who was given Downing Street’s support in an attempt to woo the Poles, who were crucial to any deal on migrant benefits. The alternative front-runner was Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Danish prime minister and model for the main character in Borgen, the Scandi political drama series which was popular on British television, and who is married to Labour MP Stephen Kinnock. ‘We vastly overestimated Tusk’s capabilities,’ the aide said. ‘Helle Thorning-Schmidt has lots of flaws but she is very telegenic and articulate. She’d have been a persuasive, congenial, attractive spokesperson for a proposition that Brits generally tend not to like. Instead, we got a stuttering Polish prime minister whose command of the English language was not great and who struggled with the job.’ The final problem was that Tusk’s appointment led to a general election in Poland, which his Civic Platform party lost. ‘That meant that we had a Pole in the job, but he had less traction in Poland than we did.’

The story of Cameron’s renegotiation is one of piecemeal manoeuvres rather than a long-planned strategy. As one civil servant who watched it up close observed, ‘My big criticism is they only ever worked from point to point to point. They never started with winning a referendum and working back from that. It was always tactical. It became driven by, “We’ve got to give a speech on this day.”’ The polls showed that voters were equally divided between Leave and Remain, but when they were asked ‘Do you want to be in a reformed Europe’ there was a large majority in favour. Cameron’s mistake was believing the public would be happy to accept his definition of ‘reformed’.

The one big strategic decision, made by Cameron and Osborne immediately after the general election, may have been the root of their defeat. They decided to ask only for what they thought the European Commission and the other member states would give them, rather than press them into uncomfortable demands to rewrite the fundamentals of EU law. One of Cameron’s team said, ‘We decided to go for what we can get and get it. That was George and Dave’s decision. That was our first big error.’ Osborne, the ultimate pragmatist, thought there was ‘a gulf’ between what was realistically achievable whilst retaining EU membership and what others thought could be achieved. The chancellor’s position, communicated to his team, was, ‘Britain holds very few of the cards.’ He said privately, ‘We wanted to be in a position where we recommended that we remained in. So you couldn’t set out a list of demands which we had no prospect of achieving.’

Cameron was certainly not short of advice on what to ask for. In September 2011 a group of more than a hundred MPs led by George Eustice, Chris Heaton-Harris and Andrea Leadsom set up the Fresh Start project to draw up proposals for a new relationship with the EU. In July 2012 they released a paper called ‘Options for Change’ which called for a reduction in the EU budget, an overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy and repatriation of European structural funds. In April 2013, after the Bloomberg speech had fired the starting shot, Fresh Start published a ‘Manifesto for Change’ calling for five changes to EU treaties, including powers to halt new legislation affecting financial services, the repatriation of all social and employment legislation, and the abolition of the Strasbourg seat of the European Parliament. William Hague, who wrote the foreword to both documents, privately told Leadsom, ‘If I wasn’t foreign secretary, I could sign up to virtually all of it. As foreign secretary I could probably sign up to 85 per cent of it.’ Cameron had told Leadsom she was doing ‘good work’. Yet by the time he started drawing up his own wish list it fell well short of Fresh Start’s.

In 2015 Cameron did not seem inclined to ask even for what he had already publicly suggested he would demand. In the Bloomberg speech he had promised ‘fundamental’ reform. In March 2014 he wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph in which he said that the police should be free of ‘unnecessary interference from the European institutions’, including the European Court of Human Rights, and made two additional demands relating to immigration: new countries joining the EU should face initial controls ‘to prevent vast migrations across the Continent’, and the EU’s principle of free movement should only apply ‘to take up work, not free benefits’. Once again, Cameron had raised rather than moderated Eurosceptic expectations of what was possible.

Daniel Hannan went to see the prime minister before the general election to make an offer. He told Cameron, ‘We should try and behave patriotically, and get the best deal possible. I don’t want you to come back with a crap deal just because it makes it easier for us to win the referendum.’ Hannan outlined a Eurosceptic wish list for the renegotiation, including repatriation of powers in non-economic areas and more defence of parliamentary supremacy. In short, what he wanted was a trading relationship and little else. By Hannan’s account, Cameron said, ‘Well that is doable, but that’s not the direction I want to go in. I think we get a greatly amplified voice through having a common foreign policy. I think we get more security through common criminal justice policies. I don’t want to do what you are suggesting, which is to opt out.’ The prime minister had a deal of his own to offer: ‘Help me get a Conservative majority, then get a referendum, and then you and I will go on opposite sides.’ Hannan now says, ‘In terms of understanding what is feasible today, the myth shouldn’t be allowed to take root that these things were not on offer; it’s that we didn’t want to ask for them.’

After the general election, Cameron began a diplomatic offensive to secure support from the rest of the EU to include the migration proposals from the JCB speech in the renegotiation package. Cameron, Osborne, David Lidington and the new foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, went on a whistlestop tour of Europe. Craig Oliver recalls, ‘The prime minister visited countries that no British prime minister has visited in a century.’1 The challenge on immigration was that it was Britain’s natural allies in Eastern Europe who were most antagonistic to reform of benefits and migration rules, since it was their citizens living in Britain who would be affected.

Part of the problem was that there was now no prospect of a new treaty which would have given Britain the leverage to demand sweeping change. When Ivan Rogers took over as Britain’s permanent representative in Brussels in 2013, he advised Cameron that any demands for institutional change should be dressed up as ‘some for the eurozone, some for us’, but by the end of 2014 he was warning the prime minister that he was ‘pushing your luck’ to achieve that by 2017. Before the general election he said, ‘They’re all shit scared of their own publics. If you go into a manifesto commitment to get permanent treaty change as a precursor to staying in the EU you’re fucked, mate.’

Lidington met his EU counterparts after the general election, ‘The others were not buying into the idea that this was some opportunity for major European reform,’ he said. ‘When the decision to go ahead with Bloomberg was taken, that had just followed a state of the union speech by [then Commission president José Manuel] Barroso, in which he called for a new treaty. It looked as though eurozone dynamics were going to push France and Germany to some sort of deal straight away. The bandwagon was moving, and if we didn’t latch our ideas for reform onto it, we were in danger of this other negotiation gathering speed without us. During 2013 and 2014, the impetus dropped away. All of a sudden, not because of anything we’d done or not done, this was just a British problem.’ In his discussions with the other twenty-seven countries, Rogers found resentment that proposals for reform of the whole union had narrowed to ‘a load of special pleading’ and demands for ‘British exceptionalism’.

Meanwhile the EU published its so-called ‘Five Presidents Report’, signed in June by Juncker, Tusk, European Parliament president Martin Schulz, Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank, and Jeroen Dijsselbloem of the Eurogroup, which mapped out a blueprint for the future of the EU. Envisaging deeper economic, financial, fiscal and political union in the euro area by 2017, and full union by 2025, it was hardly helpful to Cameron. At the exact moment he wanted a hearing for a less centralised EU, the institutions were mapping out what Eurosceptics saw as a United States of the Eurozone.

Cameron and Osborne’s cautious approach was endorsed by senior figures like chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and the senior diplomats Rogers and Tom Scholar, who were conscious they had to deliver the prime minister’s wish list in a legally binding way. ‘Ivan saw his job as warning of the chasm between perceptions, stressing the legalism of the opposite side.’ That put the civil servants on a collision course with Daniel Korksi and Mats Persson, the leads on EU affairs, Ameet Gill, the director of strategy, and Max Chambers, a special adviser and speechwriter, who all wanted Cameron to ‘go big and not get all of it – get eight out of ten’. Mats Persson says: ‘The biggest mistake we made was that we treated it as an exercise in political management, and a communication exercise, rather than going for proper and fundamental change.’

Korski was bright but passionate; in centuries past he would have been an imperial governor or a great duellist. He had arrived in Number 10 the previous April after an unhappy period working for Cathy Ashton, Britain’s Commissioner in Brussels. His swashbuckling style was honed alongside Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia and in Kabul at the height of the war in Afghanistan, where he was private secretary to a minister in Hamid Karzai’s government. He had also had a spell on secondment to the US State Department, helped set up the Spectator’s Coffee House website, and found himself, Zelig-like, in Tahrir Square during Egypt’s version of the Arab Spring. Convinced Britain should be helping the Libyans to liberate themselves from Colonel Gaddafi, he took a car across the desert and smuggled himself into Benghazi to talk to the rebels. His time in Downing Street featured similar outbursts of impulsive activity.

Ivan Rogers and Tom Scholar clashed repeatedly with Korski and Mats Persson. A Swede by birth, at six feet seven inches Persson towered over everyone else in Downing Street – height he had put to good use as a member of the 2004 Liberty Flames basketball team at Liberty University in Virginia, where he studied on an athletics scholarship: the team won the Big South Conference that year. Persson was temperamentally ice to Korski’s fire, but he believed from his time at Open Europe that Britain should push the limits of EU law to get change. ‘Mats felt we could go a lot further,’ a minister said.

‘We were too beholden to Tom Scholar and Ivan Rogers,’ one Cameron adviser said. ‘They were status quo. They were happy to take “No” for an answer, happy to believe things weren’t possible when they could be possible. I’ve lost count of the number of times Ivan threatened to resign.’ The politicos say Rogers was aggressive in dismissing their arguments, and went over their heads to Cameron: ‘He would send emails that were the stuff of legend, saying why didn’t we know anything? We were just politicos, we didn’t understand.’ Another aide said Rogers’ emails were ‘notorious’.

Rogers also clashed with the special advisers over their desire to include reforms of the European Court of Justice in the renegotiation. ‘Korski had a long-running battle with officials saying that we needed to do something, and he kept getting told that it was impossible to do something,’ a Number 10 source said. A range of proposals were put forward, ranging from new rules on the selection of judges to proposals for the ECJ to get out of lower-level decisions. Their advocates believe the plan would have allowed Britain to get a serious review of the court on the agenda. It was rejected by officials over the summer.

For his part, Rogers felt his ability to negotiate with Brussels was ‘holed below the waterline’ by Cameron and Osborne’s determination to go for a referendum in June 2016 come what may – diluting the threat that they might walk away – and the belief, widespread among the politicos, that victory was certain. Rogers told them, ‘I’ve got nothing to work with. You guys are swanning around in No. 10 saying it’s going to be 60–40 or 65–35. One, I don’t think that’s true, but two, can you shut the fuck up, because I need to go around Brussels saying it’s on an absolute knife edge and unless you deliver an absolute corking deal then it may well go pear-shaped.’ Rogers had some sympathy for Korski when proposals for business reform, which would have demanded exemptions from EU regulation for small businesses which did not sell into the single market, were also abandoned. ‘We had lots of other stuff on competitiveness, but we got browbeaten by officials into not doing anything on it,’ an aide said. ‘Mats and Dan would talk to their contacts across Europe and come back and say we have got political counterparts who are saying “There might be something here.” And then they’d be met with officials going round their backs, persuading the PM they were being naïve.’ The blame must rest, ultimately, with Cameron. ‘Ivan and Tom got their direction from the top,’ said one aide. ‘They needed to be told to operate outside the tramlines of existing EU rules. But the PM never did that.’

Despite Korski’s rage, Rogers was not actually a typical Europhile Foreign Office lifer. His civil service career began at the old Department of Health and Social Services. He had done time at the Treasury during the passage of the Maastricht Treaty, in Downing Street as Tony Blair’s principal private secretary, and in the City, where he had a spell with Barclays Capital and Citibank before Jeremy Heywood asked him to return as Cameron’s man in Brussels. ‘Ivan is not a paid-up starry-eyed enthusiast who imagines the eurozone is wonderful,’ a source close to Rogers said. ‘Within the system, he was notorious for thinking the referendum would quite probably be won by Leave, not a view shared by any of the political appointees. I don’t think the narrative of radical, ambitious reformist spads versus stick-in-the-mud, unambiguous pro-status-quo mandarins really bears examination.’

Cameron also clashed with Rogers, mocking him for adopting the pessimistic mindset of the EU ‘Ayatollahs and theologians who read the treaties every night before they go to bed’, insisting he was getting a warmer response to the proposals from his political counterparts. Rogers would hit back, pointing out that fellow leaders would never give Cameron ‘both barrels’ to his face, but would instead go behind his back to Juncker or Tusk and say, ‘We’re not having that.’ Rogers told friends that Cameron’s style, ‘allergic to any planning or strategy’, drove him ‘completely mad’. He regarded the four baskets as a ‘weird package’ lacking ‘crunch’, and regretted that much of the ‘good stuff’ in the Bloomberg speech had ‘bitten the dust’.

None of these ideas in and of themselves would have salvaged the renegotiation, but they would have helped to make it more substantial. Collectively they ensured that George Osborne’s battle to safeguard the rights of non-eurozone nations became the only significant element left on the economy, and magnified migration as the issue on which the deal would stand or fall. By the autumn one aide had concluded, ‘If the referendum campaign is fought around what is actually renegotiated, we are fucked.’

Given how limited Cameron’s demands were, some of his team believed he would have been better striking a quick and dirty deal and holding a referendum in the autumn of 2015, before Cummings had Vote Leave properly organised. ‘The assumption was always that you want people to watch you sweat and fail and get up again and fight,’ says a senior Downing Street source. ‘The irony of the whole situation was it was really, really hard, and still people said it was worthless and a stitch-up. What David saw as a great diplomatic overture came to be seen as a diplomatic begging tour around Europe, unbecoming of a great nation. We should have accepted no one was going to believe it anyway, and do it sharp and short.’

Korski also tried and failed to get Cameron to talk more positively about Europe in the eighteen months before the deal. All Conservatives were familiar with Lynton Crosby’s first rule for election success: ‘You can’t fatten a pig on market day.’ Successful politicians lay the groundwork for the arguments they will make in a campaign long before polling day. Korski argued, ‘We’ve got to speak differently about Europe if we’re ever going to speak positively about Europe.’ He devised initiatives to show that Cameron was getting his way in Brussels, taking business leaders there to cut red tape and putting the UK at the heart of plans for a ‘digital single market’. But invariably Cameron would emerge at the end of EU summits to stress his frustrations rather than his achievements to the waiting media. A Downing Street official who sympathised with Korski said, ‘We never pitch-rolled our proposition. I don’t think it was in David’s nature. He was temperamentally Eurosceptic.’

The business end of the deal-making came in four stages. On 10 November Cameron wrote a public letter to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, spelling out the broad thrust of his demands. He fleshed it out in a speech at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank, on the same day. On 17 December he talked his fellow leaders through his proposals at an EU summit in Brussels. After six further weeks of negotiations, Tusk published a full draft deal on 2 February, laying out the precise details for the first time. The final showdown came two weeks after that.

After nine months of seeing Britain’s wish list whittled down, Craig Oliver briefed the Sunday papers the weekend before the letter to Tusk that Cameron would be prepared to campaign to leave the EU if his demands were met with a ‘deaf ear’: ‘If we can’t reach such an agreement … we will have to think again about whether this European Union is right for us.’2 The rhetoric was hardened to disguise the fact that Cameron’s demands had softened. The ‘Dear Donald’ letter that followed outlined ‘four baskets’ of demands familiar to those who had followed the negotiation since June.

On ‘economic governance’, Cameron said changes in the eurozone must ‘respect the legitimate interests of non-euro members’. He asked for a recognition that ‘the EU has more than one currency’, and that ‘taxpayers in non-Euro countries should never be financially liable for operations to support the eurozone as a currency’. On ‘competitiveness’ he said ‘the United Kingdom would like to see a target to cut the total burden on business’. He told Tusk that ‘questions of sovereignty’ were ‘central’ to the British debate, and demanded to ‘end Britain’s obligation to work towards an “ever closer union”’ and a ‘new arrangement where groups of national Parliaments, acting together, can stop unwanted legislative proposals’.

He argued that net migration to Britain of over 300,000 a year ‘is not sustainable’, and demanded assurances that ‘free movement will not apply to new members until their economies have converged much more closely with existing Member States’. In a section inserted at the instigation of Theresa May, the home secretary, he called for a ‘crackdown on the abuse of free movement’, with ‘longer re-entry bans for fraudsters and people who collude in sham marriages’. He went on, ‘It means addressing the fact that it is easier for an EU citizen to bring a non-EU spouse to Britain than it is for a British citizen to do the same.’

Finally, arriving at the most controversial part of the letter, Cameron turned to the ‘pull factors’: ‘We have proposed that people coming to Britain from the EU must live here and contribute for four years before they qualify for in-work benefits or social housing. And that we should end the practice of sending child benefit overseas.’

The only real surprise came not in the letter to Tusk, but in Cameron’s Chatham House speech. There he proposed new arrangements to emulate Germany’s constitutional court, which can ‘review legal acts by European institutions and courts to check that they remain within the scope of the EU’s powers. We will consider how this could be done in the UK.’ In this obscure paragraph Cameron had planted a colourful lure to land the biggest fish in the Tory Party. The week before, he had discussed the need to devise a means of asserting British sovereignty with none other than Boris Johnson, the mayor of London.

Cameron knew he needed reinforcements. When MPs debated the Tusk letter in the Commons later that day, Bernard Jenkin got to his feet and asked, ‘Is that it?’ The following morning the Sun’s splash headline was ‘ARE EU KIDDING?’ The Mail went with ‘IS THAT IT, MR CAMERON?’, describing the prime minister as ‘in retreat over plans to strip benefits from EU migrant workers’.3

In Brussels, Nigel Farage met officials who were perplexed that Cameron’s demands were so modest: ‘There was general surprise, laughter in the Hack, which is the boozer I go to. A lot of very senior Commission figures drink there after work, and really they thought it was laughable he’d asked for so little.’

The demand to axe ‘ever closer union’ was symbolic of the problem Cameron faced – a red rag to Europhiles but all too easily dismissed by Eurosceptics. Guy Verhofstadt, the federalist Belgian MEP, told Ivan Rogers, ‘This is completely poisonous, you’re trying to destroy the European Union.’ Yet Rogers himself told colleagues there ‘wasn’t much in it’, and that he had ‘wasted months of my life’ trying to explain Britain’s position.

Cameron had ditched many of the ideas he himself had floated in the preceding three years. Conspicuous by their absence were any attempt to repatriate social and employment legislation – ditched at the behest of Labour and the unions – or to demand smaller EU budgets or assert UK judicial control over justice and home-affairs laws. Korski’s efforts to put reform of the European Court of Justice on the table had been rejected, along with proposals to demand a ‘one in, three out’ rule for EU regulations, advanced by Sajid Javid, the business secretary.

During this period there had been no effort to talk to the Eurosceptics to get their ideas. Daniel Hannan says, ‘When Philip Hammond was in Brussels, I went to speak to the guys who were with him and said, “Just out of interest, why have you not come to us, and found out what our bottom line is? It might have helped you get something that will be more sellable.” The answer was, “Nothing would be good enough for you guys.”’ For Hannan that was certainly true, but his ideas would have improved the deal, and that could have helped Cameron to win over wavering MPs. One of his proposals was to ditch EU passports and return to the iconic navy-blue documents of the past. Hannan said, ‘It would have been a visible symbol that we were outside the political union. I’m not saying that would have swung the issue, but I’m giving that as an example of the easiest imaginable thing that wasn’t asked for.’

When the European Council opened on 17 December, Tusk declared it a ‘make-or-break summit’. Cameron laid out his plans in a passionate forty-minute address to his fellow leaders over dinner. The benefits plans were the most controversial. Beata Szydło, the new Polish prime minister, said that stripping migrants of welfare would not be ‘acceptable’ because her citizens were ‘building the GDP of Great Britain’. It was clear that the flat four-year ban on in-work benefits was a non-starter. Juncker proposed a compromise, combining the old idea of an ‘emergency brake’ with the benefits ban so payments could be temporarily halted. After the meeting concluded Cameron said ‘We are well on our way to a deal,’ and confirmed for the first time that the referendum would take place in 2016. But having not ‘gone big’ with his renegotiation, the measures to tackle immigration were growing both thinner and more difficult to explain to voters.

On 2 February Donald Tusk published the detailed draft plans for the renegotiation, and tweeted a little Shakespeare: ‘To be, or not to be together, that is the question.’

Then all hell broke loose.

The publication of the Tusk draft was seen in Downing Street as simply a step on the path to the February European Council, at which the final deal would be done. In fact it was the first major media showdown between Number 10 and the Leave campaign. This confrontation shaped public views of the deal for good, and it was one that Cummings, Baker, Stephenson and Banks won hands down.

Tusk’s sixteen-page paper confirmed that in the six weeks since the December council, Cameron’s benefits plans had been watered down in two ways. Gone was the standing four-year ban for new arrivals, replaced with a proposal for a temporary restriction activated by an emergency brake. Instead of a total ban on welfare handouts for the four years, benefits would be slowly ‘tapered’ in. For a month media coverage had focused on what rabbit Cameron might pull from his hat to boost the deal. In the event, it emerged sick with myxomatosis.

Downing Street could not have stopped Tusk from writing the document, since it was usual practice for the Council president to circulate papers for discussion ahead of a summit, but they could have tried to prevent it being formally published. Tusk assumed the draft would leak, and decided it was better to put it in the public domain himself. Yet that gave it an official status that left Cameron less room for manoeuvre. As a minister said, ‘When Tusk took the decision to formally publish we couldn’t say, “We don’t comment on leaked drafts, it’s an ongoing negotiation.”’ Number 10 could also have pointed out where the document was lacking, if nothing else to show that they were fighting for more. ‘We didn’t give it such a warm reception,’ one Downing Street official said.

The reception in the House of Commons was far from warm. Steve Baker, the head of Conservatives for Britain, saw an opportunity for another act of guerrilla warfare, even if it involved putting his reputation as one of Parliament’s gentlemen at risk: ‘The deal came out and we immediately rubbished it successfully. That was a purposeful strategy.’ That morning Baker sat down with Paul Stephenson and said, ‘I’ve got this idea, and it’s a bit coarse, but what if I was to say, “It’s like the prime minister’s polishing poo”?’ Stephenson, less delicate by nature, suggested a refinement: ‘It’s not good enough – you need to say something like “It’s shiny on the outside and soft in the middle.”’ Baker recalled, ‘It was breathtakingly crude, but also not out of order. I sat there in the chamber of the Commons that day, thinking, “Do I want to win this referendum or not?” I realised that if I stood up and made yet another tedious point of EU law it would be completely forgotten.’

Around 1 p.m. Baker got to his feet in the Commons and said to David Lidington, ‘This in-at-all-costs deal looks and smells funny. It might be superficially shiny on the outside, but poke it and it is soft in the middle. Will my right hon. friend admit to the House that he has been reduced to polishing poo?’ To his credit Lidington came back, quick as a flash, to say, ‘I rather suspect … my hon. friend was polishing that particular question many days ago.’ But Baker’s gambit worked: ‘It got me coverage everywhere. It was coarse, it was crude, my members didn’t like me doing it, I’ll probably never do anything like it again. But we had to make sure people knew it was poo. I had to swallow my pride and be a bit crude in order to be effective.’ First blood to the Leavers.

Cameron’s team knew the deal would be a big media moment. Craig Oliver asked the Stronger In digital team of Tom Edmonds and Craig Elder to map out a plan for a ‘Twitter war room’ to leap into action when it was signed, with MPs, business leaders and other influential supporters declaring that Cameron had got a good deal. ‘Craig was very focused on how social media played out in the Westminster bubble,’ said David Chaplin. ‘This was about creating a tidal wave of sentiment on social media, from people that politicians and journalists would recognise.’

The paper prepared by Oliver goes into meticulous detail: ‘Twitter Warroom to be set up in Nick Herbert’s Conservatives for Reform in Europe Office … Many supportive MPs are out of the country, so we will give those a set time to tweet remotely.’ It detailed how Edmonds was ‘working on paid push’ for Cameron’s Facebook page and an email to supporters on the day of the deal. Oliver himself planned to lead the tweeting from the prime minister’s @David_Cameron account. In the Cabinet Office, a new unit was set up under Matthew Gould, returning to London after a spell as ambassador to Israel. Gould would run the civil service team who would prepare official government documents on the referendum. They would also have responsibility for rapid rebuttal to the media.

The only problem with all this planning was that it was built around the weekend of 20–21 February. On 2 February Gould’s unit had not got off the ground, and Oliver’s Twitter war room was no more than an idea on a piece of paper. Ivan Rogers had tried to warn the political team: ‘The key moment is not February 18th or 19th, it’s when Tusk produces the text. That’s where the shit hits the fan.’ But Stronger In’s David Chaplin says, ‘In all the conversations that we’d had with [Number 10] I don’t remember that Tusk paper or that moment ever really being signposted. Everything’s easier in hindsight, but that was the moment the world reacted to the deal, because that was when they saw the parameters of what the EU was willing to offer us. We had not been asked to prepare any kind of reaction to that.’ Will Straw is blunter still: ‘We’d been told by Number 10 it wasn’t going to be a big deal. The leave side just piled in at that point.’

By the time Cameron got to Brussels and Oliver’s media plan cranked into action, the deal he had spent nine months negotiating was already a dead duck. A member of his team admitted later that the lack of preparedness was one of the signal strategic mistakes of the entire referendum campaign: ‘The opportunity was lost in those two weeks, between the publication of the draft and the council meetings. And by then, the public’s mind had been set.’

The following day’s newspapers were merciless, with even sympathetic publications focusing on what had been traded away. The most damaging attack was the splash in the Sun, whose graphics department had done up Cameron and his team as the hapless platoon from Dad’s Army with the headline ‘Who do EU think you are kidding Mr Cameron?’ The paper branded the deal a ‘steaming pile of manure’. Cameron and the Sun’s editor, Tony Gallagher, had a ‘face-to-face row’ in Downing Street. A poll by ComRes shortly afterwards found that only 21 per cent of voters thought the deal was a good one; 58 per cent thought it was bad. One minister said, ‘What genuinely surprised Number 10 was not that the Mail, the Sun, the Express were supporting Leave, but that the tone of the criticism was so venomous.’

A jubilant Steve Baker texted his Conservatives for Britain supporters, ‘spectacular omnishambles renegotiation; PM should campaign to leave.’ In a follow-up email he added, ‘The EU referendum battle has now been joined in earnest. We are getting the best of it.’ It concluded by predicting, ‘The cavalry are coming.’

The media response to the Tusk document revealed one of the greatest strategic problems for the Remain campaign. The Tories at the top of Stronger In were about to run a referendum campaign based on a playbook devised by Lynton Crosby for winning general elections in an environment where the print media was sympathetic. But this time their natural allies were hostile. The Sun and the Daily Mail campaigned aggressively for Brexit from the off. Rupert Murdoch, the Sun’s proprietor, was a Brexit sympathiser, and pushing 70 per cent of the paper’s readers agreed. Sources at the Mail say the editor, Paul Dacre, believed passionately in leaving the EU, and felt that Cameron had never acknowledged the assistance the paper had given in propelling him to his majority the year before. The Daily Telegraph gave Cameron a fair hearing, but its proprietors, the Barclay brothers, had links to Ukip, and it too backed Brexit. The Times and the Sunday Times took a neutral approach and eventually split, The Times for Remain, while the Sunday Times called for a Leave vote as a way of getting a better deal from Brussels. Oliver could expect good shows in the Guardian and the Independent, but both were papers with dwindling circulation which did not speak to the kind of voters the ‘In’ campaign would need to convert. Only the Mirror papers and the Mail on Sunday went into what Oliver called ‘campaign mode’ on behalf of Remain. ‘It pains me to say it,’ a member of Cameron’s team said, ‘but if the Mail, Sun and the Telegraph had been for “In” we would have romped home.’

For Oliver a hostile press was unfamiliar terrain, both because he was used to supportive newspapers and because his core skillset since he moved to Downing Street from the BBC in 2011 was shaping broadcast coverage. Oliver, forty-seven at the time of the campaign, had been a reporter with a small Scottish TV station before rising through the ranks to become a senior executive at ITV News, from which he was poached by the BBC in 2006. There he boosted the ratings of The Ten O’Clock News and met his (now ex-) wife, the news presenter Joanna Gosling, with whom he had three daughters. John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, judged him ‘undoubtedly the best editor I ever worked for’.4 It is little wonder that Oliver’s view during the campaign was that what mattered was what led ‘the six and the ten’, the two main evening BBC television bulletins at 6 and 10 p.m. In this he was hugely successful. No one in government knew the BBC better, and a well-timed call to the right editor or correspondent could alter the tone of the coverage or the running order, winning him plaudits in Number 10.

Relations with the print press did not begin well, when Oliver initially refused to hand out his mobile phone number. The papers retaliated by ridiculing him for wearing a pair of Beats headphones by the American rapper Dr. Dre as he made his way up Downing Street for the first time – Dominic Cummings, for years an antagonist, referred to Oliver dismissively as ‘Dre’ ever after. In time Oliver came to understand the value of the papers in shaping the broadcast coverage, and he developed strong relationships with several newspaper political editors, his reputation growing in tandem with his influence in Downing Street. But he remained suspicious of print journalists, who he saw as a different species. They, in turn, swapped stories about his regular texts of complaint when their tweets did not meet with his approval. ‘Craig was obsessed with what’s happening now on social media, what’s happening on the six and ten and who is going on the Today programme,’ says a campaign source. ‘Those are the four parts of Craig’s brain.’ By the time of the referendum Oliver’s teething troubles with the newspapers were long in the past, but for the first time he was confronted with a campaign that was an away fixture. As a non-Tory working for Stronger In said, ‘It turned out the emperor has no clothes. When the press are not supporting Cameron, the Tories didn’t quite know what to do.’

Oliver did not believe there was anything he could have done to make the coverage of the Tusk draft more congenial. A Downing Street source familiar with his thinking says, ‘You have to ask yourself about the fairness of the coverage of what Tusk was doing. It was part of a Brexit campaign – and very noisy. Would anything have been good enough?’ Oliver would have plenty of good moments during the campaign, when his broadcasting expertise was invaluable to Stronger In. But the weekend of Donald Tusk’s draft was not one of them – and it was to cost Cameron.

The one bit of good news for the prime minister that week was the emergence of Theresa May as a supporter of the Remain campaign. The home secretary had helped shape Cameron’s letter to Tusk in November, but Downing Street’s worst fear was that she would announce that she had concluded, as the minister in charge of immigration, that it could not be controlled within the EU – a move that could have swung public opinion decisively against them. But May had also made a series of interventions making clear that she believed national security was bolstered when countries teamed up to combat cross-border terrorism and organised crime. In that vein, she had been willing to frustrate Eurosceptics by pushing through moves to opt back in to the European Arrest Warrant and thirty-four other EU-wide justice measures in 2014. Coupled with her innate caution and concerns about the economy, her security instincts were enough to keep May in Cameron’s camp. ‘She weighed the decision quite broadly,’ a close aide said. ‘For economic reasons she thought the risk was too great.’

May did not sell herself cheap. She insisted to Cameron that any deal included measures cracking down on ‘sham marriages’ which enabled non-EU nationals to stay in member states. She also demanded that residency restrictions imposed on the non-EU spouses and other family members of Britons should also apply to European citizens seeking to settle their families in the UK. May’s importance was clear to Donald Tusk. As those elements made their way from proposals into the Council president’s draft document, he repeatedly asked Cameron’s aides, ‘Will this be enough for Theresa May?’ When the draft was published, Cameron, frustrated by weeks of evasions from May about her intentions, called to pin her down and she announced, ‘This is a basis for a deal.’ In Number 10, where May was seen as an at times truculent enigma, there was relief. One Downing Street official said, ‘She said what she wanted, she helped us get it, and then she stuck to her side of the bargain.’ Another Number 10 aide said, ‘I think we overdelivered on what she wanted. Although I don’t know how she could have ever credibly gone “Out”, having read everything she’d said on Europe and security. She’d basically said, “If we leave the EU, paedophiles roam free.”’

May’s decision did disappoint some of her closest associates, who did not know which way she would go until the last minute, and would have preferred her to campaign to leave. Stephen Parkinson was already working for Vote Leave, and Nick Timothy was also a Brexiteer. ‘Nick and Parky hoped she’d be for Out,’ a senior Vote Leave source said. It is possible that if May had been inclined to back Vote Leave, she would have been put off by the chaos of the coup against Dominic Cummings just a week earlier. As it unfolded, Parkinson remarked to a colleague, ‘She’s not going to join this kind of organisation.’

Timothy was ‘depressed’ about May’s decision when he saw Paul Stephenson later that day, believing she could have been the key to victory for Vote Leave. Stephenson said, ‘Don’t worry, the cavalry’s on its way.’ Vote Leave were growing in confidence that Michael Gove, and possibly even Boris Johnson, would be joining them.

With May on board, Cameron turned his attention to the preparations for the final summit and a last-minute burst of diplomacy. Of his four baskets, two were straightforward. British demands for the EU to become more ‘competitive’ were largely agreed. Belgium’s objections to the rejection of ‘ever closer union’ were also easily resolved – the UK would get an opt-out while others continued down the path of centralisation. That left just two baskets in play. The first was the need to secure protections for non-euro countries, which George Osborne had made his responsibility.

Osborne told aides that sorting out rules that would allow the single-currency bloc to integrate further without letting them run roughshod over the nine countries outside the eurozone was ‘the most important part of the deal in terms of Britain’s actual position in the EU’, even if the immigration measures were the ‘most politically important’. Without action, every other country was expected to eventually adopt the euro, leaving Britain in ever less splendid isolation. The chancellor made a series of trips to European capitals – Berlin, Paris, Rome – and gave a speech to the German equivalent of the CBI, the BDI, calling for a set of principles which would be written into the European treaty ensuring that Britain would not be liable for future eurozone bailouts.

Two relationships were key to Osborne securing support for his proposals. He became close to the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, and also wooed Emmanuel Macron, the young French minister of the economy, like Osborne a reformer and a risk-taker. When the summit began, just one sentence in the draft remained in dispute. It would prove to be quite a sticking point.

Cameron prepared for the summit in the usual way, by lobbying Angela Merkel. On 12 February the two leaders talked tactics over dinner in Hamburg at the city’s annual St Matthew’s Feast. Merkel publicly declared Cameron’s reforms ‘justified and necessary’, and said it was in Germany’s ‘national interest’ for the UK to remain in the EU. His next stop, on the Monday of summit week, was in Paris, where he lobbied François Hollande. Their relationship, initially frosty, had improved after Cameron was quick to offer support when France was subjected to a series of terrorist attacks, first on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then at the Bataclan theatre in Paris that November. Nonetheless, the French continued to point out that free movement was one of the founding principles of the single market, and criticised anything that smacked of an ‘à la carte’ EU.

Cameron also tried to curry favour with the Belgian prime minister Charles Michel, the leader most implacably opposed to greater powers for national parliaments, by sending him a collection of Beatrix Potter books for his newborn daughter, and with the Poles by backing an increase in NATO forces in Poland.

On Tuesday, Cameron met Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, an institution for which the prime minister had made little effort to hide his contempt over the years. The previous June, Cameron had put aside his distaste for Schulz’s federalist views and invited him to Downing Street, taking him to the service at St Paul’s Cathedral commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Unfortunately, this meeting did not go as well as hoped. Cameron arrived half an hour late. ‘Hi Martin,’ he beamed. ‘Good morning. All well?’ With acid irritation Schulz replied, ‘Technical problems?’ The substance of the meeting with senior MEPs was not much better, as Schulz said there was ‘no guarantee’ they would not seek to amend any deal agreed by the Council after the fact – a gift to Eurosceptics, who did not believe the renegotiation would be legally binding.

Cameron was not the only one comparing notes. The so-called ‘Visegrad Four’ – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – met together to discuss how they would thwart his benefits reforms. In one-on-ones, British officials were confident that the four countries were prepared to do business. But collectively the ‘V4’ gave each other the confidence to take a tougher line.

Shortly before the summit Cameron and Osborne had a sobering conversation with Lynton Crosby. The strategist had been using the back door of 10 Downing Street for several weeks to slip in for weekly meetings with the prime minister and chancellor. The three had been close since the 2005 general election, when Crosby had run Michael Howard’s campaign and identified Cameron and Osborne as the party’s stars of the future. Having overseen that gruelling campaign, Crosby had no interest in running Cameron’s referendum war room, but ‘he was providing weekly advice and his own polling’, said a senior Tory. ‘He was actually contracted to the Conservative Party, so he couldn’t take sides.’

Crosby was attributed with near-mythical status after the general election, which makes it stranger that Cameron and Osborne chose, in February 2016, to ignore his very firm view that they should not rush into a deal or a referendum until the end of 2017. ‘Don’t go so soon,’ he told them, and repeated that view to cabinet ministers. One of those who discussed the referendum with Crosby said, ‘His argument was to play the referendum late, to run it into 2017, on the grounds that the more people were exposed to the argument, the more they’d likely want to remain in.’ Another source said Crosby envisaged an even more dramatic gesture: ‘One thing he did advise was to rip up the deal live on the steps of Downing Street. I’m not convinced that would have worked. It would have bought ourselves another year. We’d have got a bit more on immigration. But not enough.’

Crosby did not tell Cameron he would lose if his advice was not heeded. ‘His judgement right up to – and including – the week of the referendum was that we were going to win,’ says a Cameron confidant. Crosby’s position was complicated by his close friendship with Johnson. ‘We all knew he was talking to Boris too,’ a Downing Street aide says. ‘He treated us both with respect and equal distance. He must have been in a difficult position, actually.’

Cameron and Osborne decided to ignore Crosby’s advice. Osborne strongly believed they would not get a better deal by waiting, telling Cameron, ‘The EU is never – in my view – going to give Britain the benefits of membership without the costs.’ He regarded the idea of ‘banging the desk’ and a staging a walkout as ‘huff and fury without any substance to it’. For his part, Cameron wanted to get the referendum out of the way, fearing his chances a year later would be impaired by mid-term unpopularity, protest votes and a fresh wave of migrants. Andrew Cooper remembers, ‘The big fear was another summer of migration issues dominating the news. The polls said that the previous summer had brought a 5 per cent swing from Remain to Leave, and we couldn’t afford another 5 per cent swing.’ He adds, ‘The problem was, they had exhaustively established that this was as good as they were going to get.’

David Cameron began the final battle for his deal at 2.20 p.m. on Thursday, 18 February when he arrived on the red carpet outside the Justus Lipsius Building, telling reporters he was there to ‘battle for Britain’. At 5.10 p.m., armed only with a red ring-binder of notes, he strode into the summit room on the eighth floor and faced his fellow leaders. After half an hour of small talk they posed for the traditional group photograph, and then had two hours of ‘tense’ talks. It was immediately obvious that it was going to be harder going than Cameron had hoped. He stressed that what he was after were just ‘modest’ requests which had already ‘been badly received’ at home and could not be ‘watered down any further’. ‘This is already a compromise on a compromise,’ he said. ‘I am not asking for anything impossible.’5

François Hollande was having none of it. With a vehemence that shocked Downing Street, the French premier went to war over the protections for non-eurozone countries, saying there could be no ‘British veto’ on eurozone policies. French officials had given no indication of the scale of their objections in preliminary talks. In the privacy of their delegation room, Cameron’s aides made pointed remarks about the ‘French resistance’. ‘With Hollande it has been a debate about three words, for four days,’ one official complained later.6

Cameron was soon fighting on two fronts. The Visegrad Four attacked en masse against the benefit cuts, particularly those to child benefit being sent back home. Cameron’s opening demand on benefits was for a ‘temporary’ emergency brake that would let him slash in-work benefits for up to thirteen years – an initial period of seven years which could twice be extended by three years at a time. The Czech Europe minister Tomáš Prouza declared, ‘It’s about as temporary as the stationing of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia.’7 Cameron’s bottom line was a brake lasting seven years.8 The Poles were insisting that there was no way any emergency brake could last for more than five years. To cap it all, Charles Michel of Belgium demanded an extra clause making it clear that any deal would be a final offer that could not be improved if Britain voted to leave. ‘There’s no second chances,’ he said.9 Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, was a rare voice in support. He urged the other leaders to give Cameron a break: ‘His party is divided, his cabinet as well. He faces a hostile media. Let’s give him the tools for this fight.’ Then, quoting from Macbeth, Kenny concluded, ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’10 Angela Merkel also made warm noises, but others present felt she was ‘detached’ and preoccupied with the migrant crisis.

At 7 p.m. the meeting broke up with no agreement. Cameron, growing increasingly anxious, warned that he could not go home with a dodgy deal: ‘It would be suicide. I would not have the support of my cabinet. And I would not be able to win the referendum.’ He had expected pushback, perhaps even a few confected rows, but this was much worse than that. As one aide put it, ‘Everyone was playing bad cop.’11

No army can fight on an empty stomach, and no EU leader should be expected to negotiate in the same condition. Over a dinner of avocado and shrimp ‘imparfait’, cod loin with wheat-beer emulsion and duo of potato, light mango mousse with caramelised pineapple and coffee, the leaders discussed the migrant crisis. After dinner, Tusk emerged at 1.20 a.m. and said, ‘A lot remains to be done.’ An hour later Cameron held an emergency meeting with Tusk and Juncker, the two presidents sitting across a table from him in a fifth-floor room resembling a police interrogation cell. The Council president agreed to press on with face-to-face talks with the three biggest troublemakers: the French, Czechs and Belgians. Cameron returned to the British delegation room, as soulless as it was airless, tired and depressed. There he wolfed Haribo sweets – one of twenty-three bags consumed by the delegation in the thirty-three hours of negotiations – and drank coffee while his aides swigged Diet Coke.12 Then he tried to sleep. At 4 a.m. he was summoned to see Tusk. They were still nowhere near a deal. Tusk sent the leaders to bed and asked them to return for a discussion over an ‘English breakfast’. Cameron left, pale and drawn, at 5.40 a.m., for the British ambassador’s residence. Dispirited but determined, he told his team, ‘I’m ready to stay here and work, but I am not going to take a deal that’s not right.’13

After just three hours’ sleep, and fortified by a breakast of scrambled eggs, Cameron was back at the Justus Lipsius Building at 10 a.m. on Friday for another meeting with Tusk, who was sustaining himself with croissants. Announcing this controversial Continental breakfast news, an aide addressed British reporters: ‘I hope that doesn’t offend you.’ Cameron told Tusk, ‘I’m happy to stay until Sunday. I’ve told the wife and children.’14 They agreed that there was no point summoning the national leaders to their ‘English breakfast’ – even the prospect of a fry-up had not been enough to satisfy the French or the Visegrad Four.

As the day went on Tusk held a series of one-on-one encounters with the holdouts, and the failure to convene for a meal became the subject of a running joke on the flatscreen televisions in the vast atrium of the Justus Lipsius Building which becomes the press room during summit weeks. ‘Breakfast’ became an ‘English brunch’ at 11 a.m., which was then delayed until ‘lunch’, then a ‘late lunch’, then ‘high tea’ at 4 p.m. Even the apparent prospect of scones and cucumber sandwiches did not do the trick. At 5.30 p.m. the screens in the press room announced that there would be an ‘English dinner’ at 8 p.m. Tired of waiting for the authorities to feed him, the PM and his team ordered pepperoni pizzas from a nearby takeaway. In the meantime he had held bilateral meetings with Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, Hollande and Merkel. Also peckish, the German leader popped out for a bag of Belgian frîtes drenched in andalouse sauce, mayonnaise spiced with pepper and tomato at a nearby fast-food joint.15 Those not involved in the crisis talks watched with wry amusement. Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė commented, ‘The timing all depends on the deepness of the drama some countries would like to perform.’

For Cameron’s staff the summit dissolved into long periods of boredom punctuated by panic. ‘It’s a very odd environment up there on that floor,’ one said. ‘The leaders withdraw to their national offices while envoys shuffle between them trying to gain agreement about a text. Suddenly you have these moments of great rush, and “Oh my god, there’s a text,” then, “The text’s not the right language,” and “Who do we need to manoeuvre around?” Then suddenly you’ve got two hours when fuck-all happens because everyone’s negotiating without you.’ Richard Holbrooke, the legendary American diplomat, once remarked that ‘Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.’ A Downing Street source said, ‘I think EU negotiations are a bit like that. You’re constantly open to how you’re going to play it.’

Cameron’s meeting with Hollande eventually resolved the eurozone issue, with the PM reassuring the French premier that Britain was not trying to opt out of all EU financial-services legislation. ‘There were some tweaks of wording,’ a delegation member said. Cameron’s crucial encounters were with Beata Szydło. It was the Polish premier’s first European Council after winning a general election for the conservative Law and Justice Party, led by Jarosław ‘Jerry’ Kaczyński. Szydło refused to give any ground at all on the length of the emergency brake or the level of child benefit paid to children living overseas.

For years the Palaeosceptics had fought for a referendum so they could reclaim sovereignty and battle over whether the UK could avoid the jurisdiction of the European Court or repatriate entire areas of competence from Brussels. Now, as one report later put it, ‘Britain’s place in Europe was resting on whether or not 34,000 children of East European migrants could carry on receiving full child benefit, at a cost of £25 million a year to the taxpayer – about 0.2 per cent of Britain’s £11 billion annual payment to the EU.’16 David Lidington said, ‘It really boiled down to stuff which cost nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.’ But Downing Street knew Szydło ‘could not be seen to cave’, and ‘probably had quite restrictive riding instructions from Kaczyński back in Warsaw’.

While Tom Scholar and Ivan Rogers worked on the Polish officials in Brussels, Daniel Korski, whose parents were both refugees from Poland, began talking to contacts in Warsaw around Kaczyński, urging them to remind Szydło that ‘Cameron is our friend and we need to help him.’

By 5 p.m. there was still no agreement, and Cameron lost heart, sending his text to Andrew Cooper about wanting to leave the EU and announcing that he would give Juncker and Tusk one last chance to sort out the benefits issue: ‘The Council now needs to act this out, I’m not doing any more.’ A source in the room said, ‘We were very close to saying, “There’s no deal now, we’ll come back to it in November and see what happens then.” It wasn’t done in any sort of grandstanding fashion.’ Would Cameron ever have walked away? Another delegation source said, ‘It’s hard to tell with David. It was quite fluid at times. I think in the wrong circumstances he would have walked away from it.’ Another official who was present disagrees: ‘I think the PM said it knowing enough that it would drive them to sort it out.’

Rogers and Scholar sent Martin Selmayr, Juncker’s right-hand man, a message: ‘We’re pretty much at our limit now, we need you to help if there’s going to be a deal.’ Selmayr was regarded as a slippery customer about whom the best that could be said was that he hated the French as much as the English. He was also the most formidable official in the Commission, a man who loved making deals. The big guns wanted the issue resolved – a Number 10 source said, ‘Tusk and Juncker were being helpful, saying, “For God’s sake, we don’t want this hanging over us for the next six months.” Merkel wasn’t fired up, but she said, “Let’s do this.”’

Suddenly word came via the Czechs that the V4 were shifting. The threat of Cameron walking away was sobering for those in Eastern Europe. ‘They were thinking about Putin the whole time,’ one of Cameron’s team said. ‘The Law and Justice government knew we had supported a very tough line on sanctions on Ukraine, that we’d been supporting NATO’s persistent presence in the Baltic region. They were also pretty scared about the interests of the remaining non-euro countries in the EU in the absence of the UK.’

But they still needed a ladder to climb down on benefits. Around 6 p.m. Tusk proposed a compromise. There would be one seven-year-long emergency brake, two years longer than the Poles wanted. Britain wanted the payments cut to the same level at which they were paid in the immigrants’ home country. To the V4 this was unacceptable. The Poles then agreed to the principle of indexing child benefit based on each country’s living standards. The situation was complicated by the fact that the Polish government had won the election on a pledge to raise rates of child benefit at home. Which rate would apply, and how would it be indexed? Ivan Rogers saw that the negotiations were descending into the weeds, and advised Cameron not to engage on the micro detail. The Poles’ final issue was that they were not prepared to allow a cut for anyone already getting the payment. Cameron said ‘No.’ That would mean full child benefit still being sent abroad in 2031. Tusk suggested another compromise: a ‘transitional period’ during which migrant workers could carry on claiming child benefit until 2020. Cameron agreed. In the end, there was a fudge that allowed both sides to claim victory. A Number 10 source said, ‘It allowed them to show you’d have some kind of rate that was proportionate to income without us committing to the rate of actual benefit.’

Around 8.30 p.m. the leaders finally sat down to an ‘English dinner’ of artichoke with goat’s cheese and rocket, fillet of veal with tarragon jus and passionfruit bavarois for pudding. The V4 finally agreed terms. But there was a final crisis. As the dessert was served, the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras spoke up. His country was still suffering from the debt crisis; now it was on the front line of the migration crisis, its islands overwhelmed in places with refugees, he said, and here was the British prime minister having his concerns dealt with by Brussels with more urgency than Greece’s. Cameron thought Tsipras was about to veto the whole deal. Emboldened by this intervention, the Portuguese prime minister António Costa also spoke up. He demanded to see the full text of the agreement before even considering giving his approval. Then Stefan Löfven, the Swedish premier, announced that he would have to consult with his coalition partners at home. The deal required the unanimous support of all twenty-eight member states. One of Cameron’s aides described it as a ‘cliffhanger moment’.

In the event, the darkest hour was just before the dawn. After another half an hour of horse-trading the deal was done. The doughty Dalia Grybauskaitė of Lithuania was the first to announce, ‘Drama over.’ Tusk then tweeted, ‘Deal. Unanimous support for new settlement for #UKinEU.’ Jonathan Faull, the British director general of the European Commission – Jean-Claude Juncker’s chief negotiator – and other EU officials met in the press bar and clinked glasses. ‘It shows Europe listened and responded,’ he said. ‘I hope people in Britain understand that.’17

At 11.10 p.m. in Brussels, just into the evening news at home as Craig Oliver had wanted, a tired but triumphant Cameron emerged to announce that he had his deal: ‘I believe we are stronger, safer and better off inside a reformed EU, and that is why I will be campaigning with all my heart and soul to persuade the British people to remain.’ For Labour’s David Chaplin, watching the 10 o’clock news in London, it was ‘the most surreal moment’ to see a Conservative leader taking this step. Chaplin had worked with Coetzee, Straw and Cooper on the ‘Stronger, Safer, Better Off’ slogan. ‘Suddenly the prime minister stood up and read out our script almost word for word. My jaw dropped. It was like watching the prime minister read out your homework on national television.’

But did Cameron’s own homework deserve a good grade? To this day, Cameron’s closest aides say he and Ed Llewellyn believed he had got substantive reforms that would have made a material difference to Britain’s EU membership. ‘They put everything into it,’ Andrew Cooper said. ‘Endless sleepless nights and difficult conversations. David and Ed genuinely feel that if one is dealing with the realities of the European Union, they got something quite significant – and many other EU countries would agree. But to any observer with a little more distance from the process, it looks much less substantive. And from the considerable distance of a voter, even if you had the chance to explain it to them, it was totally inadequate, given what we knew they hoped for.’

The problem, as Cooper’s polling showed, was that ‘What most voters clearly wanted was a big reduction in the numbers of people coming here – rather than a time-limit on benefit entitlement.’

Cameron deserves credit for getting his fellow leaders to accept reforms they initially opposed. ‘That’s the thing that frustrates me in all of this: even to get what the PM got was really hard work,’ one official said. ‘They salami-sliced us the whole way.’ A senior civil servant said the negotiators delivered what Cameron asked of them: ‘Ivan and Tom did a bloody good job of getting the text. The problem was the manifesto and the selection of the four baskets.’ Ultimately it was Cameron’s own public pronouncements that had helped create expectations he could not meet. As Cooper puts it, ‘The problem was not that David Cameron wasn’t tough enough or shrewd enough in his negotiating stance, but that it was a mistake to suggest in the first place that very significant control over free movement was achievable. It created a massive expectation problem, which turned out to be a hole below the waterline of the campaign to stay in the EU.’ Cameron’s most reckless pledge was the one he made at the 2014 party conference, when he said he would ‘get what you need’ on immigration. One close friend said, ‘I was astonished during the campaign that Leave didn’t play that over and over again, because basically he did take no for an answer. We could not credibly present this as a reformed EU.’

The Eurosceptics certainly agreed, and had done their best to set benchmarks Cameron could not reach. The Fresh Start Group issued an analysis of the deal which concluded, ‘The changes on offer fall far short of the opportunities that we identified, with the vast majority of key underperforming EU policy areas unaddressed.’ The prime minister had ‘partially achieved’ ten of their objectives, but had ‘not attempted’ another eleven. Business for Britain, before it morphed into Vote Leave, had also fenced Cameron in. Matthew Elliott said, ‘We were very confident by the time he came back with his deal that we could win that expectations game.’ The Eurosceptics unleashed an effective media barrage.’ On the day, Richard Tice, the co-chairman of Leave.EU, said, ‘The prime minister promised half a loaf, begged for a crust and came home with crumbs.’ Daniel Hannan tweeted, ‘Britain banged the table and aggressively demanded the status quo. The EU, after some mandatory faux-agonising, agreed.’

Hannan believes the limited nature of the deal dramatically increased the number of Tory MPs and MEPs prepared to defy Cameron and back Leave. In the end more than 140 MPs did so – three times the number of hardcore sceptics. ‘I cannot overestimate the impact of the deal,’ says Hannan. ‘The view was: if this is how they treat us now, when we are about to vote on leaving, imagine how they will treat us the day after we vote to remain. That pushed so many people.’ Nigel Farage agreed the deal was a crucial moment: ‘If it had been something real on migration, I think it would have been much harder for us to win. Much harder.’

Given the deal’s reception, could Cameron ever have grasped the nettle and – as he had obliquely threatened – lead the Out campaign? No one close to him thinks so. ‘There were little moments where his heart said, “You know what, fuck it, it would be great to do this,”’ one confidant explained. ‘But he saw how much Britain’s influence was magnified by “being in the room”. He’s an innate conservative in the small “c”, not wanting to change stuff sense.’

The poor media and public reception for the deal persuaded Britain Stronger In Europe to ditch their plans to promote it, and to focus instead on their core messages. In Downing Street Craig Oliver and Ameet Gill were both keen to move on. ‘Maybe if in the first week we’d absolutely sold the welfare brake we wouldn’t have got into such a mess over immigration later, but I don’t think that would have happened really,’ a campaign source said. ‘Number 10 shat themselves when the right-wing press turned against it, and they decided, “Right, we’ll never mention this ever again.”’ Ryan Coetzee, Stronger In’s head of strategy, agreed that there was no point in lingering on the outcome of the renegotiation: ‘The deal that was done on benefits didn’t address the fundamental concern which people had. Therefore the decision was “Let’s move the hell out of this negotiation as soon as possible and let’s make the core case.” Despite not having something to offer on immigration, we did have a lead on the economy. We did have a lead on risk.’

The problem with the core case was that its lead advocate was Cameron, who until that very day had been claiming he could back Leave if the deal was sub-par. This troubled Coetzee: ‘I think the most legitimately potent argument of the leave campaign, was “If it’s such a catastrophe to leave, why were you prepared to do it in February?”’ David Chaplin regarded the renegotiation as one of Remain’s ‘biggest strategic weaknesses’ for this reason: ‘You have this landmark policy, Euroscepticism, for decades, then you do a massive U-turn and say, “Actually, we have to stay.” You lose people’s trust. Cameron did a handbrake turn on Europe.’

The deal was banished from Stronger In’s script. Two months later, when Joe Carberry suggested in a planning meeting that they refer to the renegotiation, one of those present says, ‘Craig Oliver laughed out loud and said, “No, no, no, we never mention that.”’

Even if they had wanted to talk about the deal that weekend, it’s doubtful the campaign would have been successful, because at 5 p.m. on Sunday, 21 February Boris Johnson followed Michael Gove and declared that he would back Brexit. David Cameron had been to Brussels and – within the narrow parameters he had set himself – got largely what he wanted. Yet in the moment of this qualified success he had also suffered his most grievous blow as prime minister, the one that would ultimately bring him down.