Project Fear henchman cynically cashing in
AS IT sank in that the EU referendum was lost, Craig Oliver, one of the architects of Downing Street’s reckless Project Fear, walked out of the front door of No 10. Dawn had broken and, while the final votes were still being counted, Oliver, who was David Cameron’s communications chief, stumbled into Whitehall.
The description of this moment in his memoir is melodramatic to say the least.
‘The street is deserted. My mind feels calm but as I approach the memorial opposite the entrance to the Ministry of Defence my body seems to go into spasm,’ he writes.
‘I suddenly retch harder than I have done in my life. Nothing comes up. I retch again – so hard it feels as I’ll turn inside out.’
It’s rather more information, perhaps, than readers might want – and leaves us in no doubt that the Brexit result hit him hard.
However, unlike the rest of Cameron’s kitchen cabinet of Remainers, Oliver had organised himself a lucrative insurance policy if things went wrong.
To the irritation of many ministers and civil servants, he made little secret of the fact that he had been keeping detailed notes about the daily dramas of his time in Downing Street.
One minister told me: ‘When Oliver arrived he took the deeply cynical view that he would exploit his privileged access not for the benefit of contemporary political history but to line his pocket and help him bag a big corporate job.
‘The fact his memoir is out already shows you how advanced it was even before he left. If he had spent more time honing the government message, rather than his own, Cameron might still be PM.’
Brought in from the BBC to replace No 10 spin doctor Andy Coulson, Oliver rapidly discovered that his predecessor was a hard act to follow. Coulson is of course the disgraced former editor of the News of the World who was jettisoned by Downing Street in 2011 because of the hacking scandal and jailed for his part in it in 2014.
Yet, despite his unacceptable behaviour at the newspaper, Coulson’s red-blooded tabloid instincts had been highly successful in getting the Tory message across. His spin operation was well regarded by politicians and aides. Coulson was also a rare beast in Cameron’s privileged inner circle in that he was a working-class Tory who went to an Essex comprehensive school and he never hesitated to tell Cameron when he thought he was wrong.
Many Tory MPs and government aides feared Oliver wouldn’t have the same sharp skills and was far too ‘metropolitan’ for the job.
When he arrived for his first day in Downing Street in February 2011, Oliver was mocked for sporting huge, but ultratrendy, white ‘Beats’ headphones, earning him the nickname of Dr Dre, after the rap artist who makes them. It was not long before the MPs and advisers were proved correct in their misgivings. Oliver was no Andy Coulson – he wasn’t as clever or as cunning.
Yet Cameron – who ironically had opted for Oliver precisely because he was a scandal-free BBC pen-pusher – came to rely on him more and more heavily.
But where Coulson had led with his heart, say insiders, Oliver led with a clipboard. Coulson got things done, whereas Oliver talked a good game but achieved little – in true BBC style. Oliver, 47, grew up in Scotland and went to state school followed by St Andrews University after which he joined a small Scottish TV station. He was married to BBC News presenter Joanna Gosling and they have three daughters but the couple split up after he entered Downing Street.
By his early 30s, he was a senior executive at ITV News and in 2006, the BBC poached him to edit the News at Ten. Then came the jump to Downing Street. One of the people who recommended him for the job was Nick Robinson, then political editor of the BBC, who is a friend.
Nevertheless it was a surprise appointment. Robert Peston, who was the BBC’s business editor at the time, said: ‘Despite working closely with Craig Oliver for three years I had no clue about his politics or that he was interested in politics.’
Five years later, his political beliefs are still a mystery. One minister said last night: ‘There is no evidence that Oliver is a Conservative. I never heard him come up with a genuinely Conservative idea. I do recall him being dismissive of our attempts to reform welfare. He’s not a Tory – he’s just made a career out of being loyal to David Cameron.’
THERE’S no doubt that in his time at Downing Street he became one of the most trusted members of the inner circle. Oliver also jealously guarded his territory, shutting out some ministers from seeing Cameron if they weren’t on message.
‘When things were going wrong Oliver shielded Cameron from it. So the PM had no idea about the scale of the revolt on things like gay marriage,’ said the minister. ‘Oliver was part of that snooty metropolitan elite who bought into all that rubbish about gay marriage detoxifying the Tory brand.’
For the most part, Oliver ran a disciplined but unimaginative media operation but he saw his main job as ensuring Cameron looked and sounded good on TV. In the last parliament, with the polls suggesting Labour’s Ed Miliband couldc become Prime Minister, a number of senior Tory peers went to see Cameron to protest about Oliver, who they regarded as too lightweight.
Cameron would not listen. ‘ ‘He was badly burned by losi ing Coulson and was unwilling to lose another communications chief so he closed his ears to the fact Oliver wasn’t very good,’ said one peer.
Fiercely loyal to Cameron, Oliver never hesitated to use the black arts to undermine politicians he decided had not been sufficiently supportive. Theresa May, then Home Secretary, was high on his hit list. In the spring of 2013, Nick RobinsonR revealed that Mrs May was regarded in Downing Street as being ‘ grotesquely naive’ for allowing her name to b be touted as a successor to Cameron. Where did Robinson get that idea? Oliver was spotted having coffee with him in Westminster’s Portcullis House barely an hour before the hostile report appeared.
Oliver is a committed Europhile, so it was natural that Cameron turned to him when he needed a trusted ally to oversee the campaign to keep Britain in the EU.
He worked with Britain Stronger In Europe, the official Remain campaign, helping to create Project Fear which was designed to scare people into voting to stay in the EU. He was responsible for generating many of the ludicrously over-the-top economic warnings which were dismissed at the time as a scaremongering.
As we now know, the campaign was considered too overblown and too negative by voters and it showed that Oliver had woefully underestimated the depths of public concern about immigration.
‘He sneered at people who went on about immigration,’ said a senior Brexiteer.
It was a mistake that cost Oliver his job. But that’s something you won’t find written in the vengeful, melodramatic memoir he’s produced with such unseemly haste.