Guerrilla tactics to reverse the vote to Leave
Peer delivered pitch to Tory donors and senior businessmen at dinner hosted by George Soros
ON A Monday evening in late January, a group of wealthy Tory donors and senior businessmen arrived for dinner at a town-house in Chelsea. The building, two Victorian properties knocked into one, belonged to one of the world’s wealthiest, and most influential individuals: George Soros.
The guests had been invited to listen to a pitch to launch a campaign to convince the British people to overturn their vote to leave the European Union.
Mr Soros, the 87-year-old host, became famous for making more than a billion pounds betting against the pound before Black Wednesday, in 1992. He had since dedicated much of his fortune to fighting nationalism and promoting democracy.
However, the Hungarian-born businessman had made himself a persona non grata to regimes and governments across Eastern Europe, and been accused of having a hand in the fall of several governments. In recent months Mr Soros had shifted his sights to the UK, and Brexit.
Joining him in his home were six Conservative donors, and three other key figures: Lord Malloch-brown, a former Labour minister and United
The strategy paper made clear that the entire plan hinged on bringing down a Tory prime minister
Nations deputy secretary-general; Stephen Peel, an Olympic rower turned financier; and Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of the world’s largest advertising agency, WPP.
Mr Peel, a Cambridge graduate who worked his way up to executive director at Goldman Sachs in the Nineties before leaving to join the private equity firm TPG Capital, was already familiar with the evening’s topic.
He had previously donated £25,000 to Best for Britain, an anti-brexit campaign group whose board members include Gina Miller, the lawyer who led the legal challenge for Parliament to be given a vote on triggering Article 50.
The reason the six Tory donors were there, however, was to listen to Lord Malloch-brown.
Lord Malloch-brown, who now sits as a cross-bench peer, made his name at the public relations firm Sawyermiller Group, where he pushed privatisation in the former Communist bloc, and aided the campaigns that brought down Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
He ended up as “the right-hand man” of Kofi Annan, the former UN director-general, before moving into British politics.
Now though, his focus was on Brexit. He had recently been appointed chairman of
Best for Britain, and was aiming to create a coordinated Remain campaign. Tonight, he would deliver his pitch; an audacious plan to keep Britain in the EU.
Lord Malloch-brown explained to the guests that Britain had not yet turned against Brexit. He had spoken publicly on the topic before, arguing that the public believed that a decision had been made on Brexit and so that decision should not be gone back upon, and that it was still a sore enough point that people didn’t want to pick open still fresh wounds.
However, all was not lost for the Europhiles, argued Lord Malloch-brown. As a strategy paper he brought along with him documented, Parliament had voted to give itself a meaningful vote on the Brexit deal, a chance to strike a blow against leaving the EU, and so that vote would be the campaign’s target. Bringing together the disparate Remain organisations into a coordinated campaign – although not a unified entity – they would use the strengths of each organisation to their best effect.
A marketing blitz would be put in place that would heavily target young people and assert to the British public that Brexit was not a done deal, while, according to the strategy paper, they already had “a range of guerrilla marketing tactics in preparation” to seize attention and indicate a building momentum. Meanwhile, business and union ties would be harnessed to provide both public and financial backing. At the same time, European Movement, a pan-european organisation that promotes European integration, would be supported to create pro-remain pressure by creating, as Lord Mallochbrown’s strategy document put it, “a national field presence, concentrated on seats whose MPS need to be brought into the Remain column”.
Combined with the general economic difficulties that would start as Brexit neared, they would turn the population against Brexit altogether.
Thus, when the meaningful vote finally arrived, enough pressure could be exerted on parliamentarians that the Government would lose. Defeated, either Britain would have to be offered a new referendum on Brexit – to renew the mandate for leaving or remove it for good – or a fresh general election would be called, inevitably hinged on the question of Europe, and would allow so decisive a pro-european victory as to assure the Continent that our return was permanent.
And that was how Brexit would be halted in its tracks. “The time is now,” declared Lord Malloch-brown.
Except he seems to have misread his audience.
Mr Soros and Mr Peel had already given money towards Best for Britain. They were committed. The other guests, however, were rather less enthusiastic. It’s unclear what Sir Martin thought, but the Tory donors were unmoved, if not a little perturbed.
The strategy paper made clear that the entire plan hinged on bringing down a Conservative prime minister, and even a Conservative government. Being brought together secretively in the night to plot such a move did not go down well.
No money was pledged to the scheme, nor, it seems, was any interest expressed in doing so. And so, with the evening ended, the guests filed out into the damp, dark London evening to ponder the plot they had just been asked to join, and had rejected.
Defeated, either Britain would have to be offered a new referendum on Brexit – or a fresh general election