The inside story of how the Vote
A military-style operation homed in on grassroot anxieties and prompted likely backers to go to polls
AT 7AM on Friday, Michael Gove was still in a state of shock when his mobile phone started to ring. It was the Prime Minister.
David Cameron was calling to congratulate his friend on steering the Vote Leave campaign to a victory that almost no one saw coming in the EU referendum.
The two men – who have been close for more than a decade – spoke briefly.
After a campaign that had been bitter – and highly personal towards the end – Mr Cameron’s gesture was poignant. “Michael was very respectful,” one source present recalls. “He didn’t say much, other than, ‘Thank you Prime Minister’. That call was when it really hit home for him – the realisation that it had been a heartfelt campaign for people who believe in their causes, but it has consequences for friendship.”
The Prime Minister told the Justice Secretary he would be making a statement in Downing Street in the next hour. What Mr Gove did not know, but must have suspected, was that Mr Cameron’s statement would be to announce his decision to resign.
After his announcement, a tearful Mr Cameron returned through the black door of Number 10 with his wife Samantha and embraced his closest aides and friends. George Osborne was there. So too was Ed Llewellyn, his long-serving chief of staff.
They applauded their Prime Minister as he stood in the famous hallway.
There were tears in his eyes and tears in theirs. After hugs with each member of the team, Mr and Mrs Cameron left in order to be alone.
The end for David Cameron’s political career came swiftly. But his final defeat marked the conclusion of a war with Tory Eurosceptics that stretches back a quarter of a century.
As a young special adviser working for the then Chancellor Norman Lamont, Mr Cameron had seen firsthand how the Tory party liked to tear itself apart over Europe. He witnessed the rebellions over the Maastricht Treaty which led the then prime minister, John Major, to call members of his own Cabinet “bastards”.
When he won the Tory leadership in 2005, Mr Cameron declared that the party must stop “banging on” about Europe because voters were far more interested in issues like childcare and school places. Yet it was a subject from which he could never escape, and one that ultimately will define his own legacy.
In his first act upon entering Downing Street as head of the Coalition in 2010, Mr Cameron appointed one arch Eurosceptic in the Cabinet – the famous Maastricht rebel, Iain Duncan Smith – as well as Owen Paterson, Liam Fox and Michael Gove. These men became the most senior figures at the head of a crop of Tory Eurosceptic MPs.
Successive revolts by backbench MPs culminated in the summer of 2012 when more than 80 Tory MPs publicly demanded a referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU.
Anxious at the rise of the Ukip, which many Conservatives feared could cost them their seats, they pressed the Prime Minister repeatedly to take a harder line on Europe.
Mr Cameron eventually agreed in January 2013. He promised in his famous “Bloomberg speech” to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU to get a radical new deal in the country’s interests before putting the new contract to voters in a referendum.
“Democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer thin,” he said. “That is why I am in favour of a referendum. I believe in confronting this issue – shaping it, leading the debate. Not simply hoping a difficult situation will go away.”
Mr Cameron decided to give voters a referendum while sharing a pizza with William Hague, who was foreign secretary at the time. The two friends were waiting to fly home from a Nato summit in Chicago in 2012 when they sat down to eat a fast food meal at the airport. They agreed that a referendum was the only way to counter the rise in support for Ukip.
It was enough to keep the Tories united and help them win their first majority since John Major’s success in 1992. However, as the Prime Minister and his senior team basked in their unexpected election victory over last summer, the Eurosceptics in his Cabinet and on his own benches were already plotting their campaign.
Last June, 50 Tories formed the proBrexit campaign, Conservatives for Britain. Within days, it had doubled in size to more than 100 MPs and peers.
This group eventually led to Vote Leave, which was to become the official campaign to take Britain out of the EU. Mr Cameron was on the back foot. It took six months before a rival Tory In campaign could get under way. By this time, the Prime Minister was locked in difficult talks with other EU leaders in Brussels. During the course of two sleep-deprived nights, fuelled by Diet Coke and Haribo sweets, he finally reached a deal on his “renegotiation” of Britain’s EU membership in February.
He returned to London to chair an unprecedented Saturday meeting of his Cabinet, asking each of his ministers around the table whether they would back his mission to keep Britain in a “reformed” EU or campaign against him. Six Cabinet ministers told him they wanted out: Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel, Theresa Villiers and John Whittingdale.
The “gang of six” – who were later buoyed by the “box office” signing of Boris Johnson – drove to the headquarters of Vote Leave, Westminster Tower, across the river from Parliament.
There, they posed for a photograph and launched what became the Leave campaign’s potent slogan for the next four months: “Vote Leave, take back control”.
The phrase was the brainchild of the man who masterminded the Brexit campaign: Dominic Cummings. Vote Leave insiders say that Mr Cummings, more than anyone else, is responsible for delivering the result for Brexit.
A former special adviser to Michael Gove, Mr Cummings was already a controversial figure in Westminster. Combative and fiercely intelligent, he clashed repeatedly with the Prime Minister’s advisers, and was blamed by Number 10 for a succession of critical briefings to the media. He was adamant that Vote Leave would not work with Nigel Farage or the other Leave campaign groups which had formed – Leave.EU and Grassroots Out – both of which had Ukip support and money from the wealthy Ukip backer, Arron Banks.
But in February, Mr Cummings faced a crisis. Vote Leave was battling against the rival groups to win official recognition from the Electoral Commission watchdog as the designated Leave campaign. At stake was the entitlement to a free nationwide mailshot, TV referendum campaign broadcasts and a higher spending limit of £7 million during the campaign.
Kate Hoey, the pro-Brexit Labour MP quit Vote Leave to join Grassroots Out, saying she could not work with Mr Cummings or Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of Vote Leave. She accused the pair of spreading “lies” about fellow activists and said they had deliberately undermined attempts to unite the rival Brexit groups.
Yet, Mr Cummings won the battle for designation as the official campaign – and went on to win the referendum.
With a group of only 60 staff inside Westminster Tower and minimal resources, Mr Cummings virtually single-handedly plotted an “asymmetric” campaign against almost the entire political and financial establishment.
“He is a great guy,” one Vote Leave insider says. “He inspires fierce loyalty from everybody who works with him but he rubs people up the wrong way because he has got no time for fools.” As a trained scientist, Mr Cummings bases everything he does on rigorous research. He commissioned detailed surveys, ran “quizzes” on commercial websites to test voters’ views, and oversaw focus groups that tested Vote Leave’s key campaign messages.
By early May, he had settled on the three key points that would form the basis for the final weeks of the campaign: a promise to take back control of £350 million a week of taxpayers’ spending from Brussels; a promise to take back control over immigration; and warnings that countries such as Turkey and Serbia were in line to join the European Union in the years ahead. All these points had been rigorously
‘When Turkey [entering the EU] comes up, light the blue touch paper and take a step back’