Without the unbelievable modesty of one Tory, Brexit would’ve been impossible

If you had been in St Margaret’s, Westminster, on Thursday, you’d have seen what looked like a quintessentially Establishment rite. The ancient church was full of Conservative MPs pausing their election campaigns to attend a memorial service for Lord Spicer. The drum corps from Spicer’s old school, Wellington, rapped out a sombre salute. His grandson sounded the Last Post. This, you’d have thought, is what it looks like when the Tory tribe masses to honour one of its chieftains.

On paper, Michael Spicer was the most traditional of Conservatives: public school, Cambridge, a minister, Chairman of the 1922 Committee, a knight, a Privy Counsellor and a peer of the realm. But the bare facts of a man’s CV can be misleading. Under those well-cut grey suits breathed a fierce radical, a serial disrupter. When he was at Wellington, Spicer took so strongly against one of his headmaster’s decisions that he organised a prefects’ strike, forcing the man to back down. At Cambridge, he founded Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism (Pest), which stood for what were then considered highly liberal positions on social policy, though they are nowadays pretty mainstream. He went on to create the world’s first economics modelling consultancy. Always the innovator, he was the only Conservative MP whose ministerial career began when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and ended on the day she left office.

As much as anyone, Spicer made Brexit happen. He led the Eurosceptic movement from the early Nineties until the 2005 general election, founding the European Research Group in 1993. You didn’t know that? I’m not surprised. The characteristic of his career was an almost unbelievable modesty.

Ronald Reagan, the former US president, had a sign on his desk: “There is no limit to what a man can achieve in politics, provided he is indifferent as to who takes the credit”. Spicer took that dictum further than any politician I know. He wasn’t just indifferent as to who took the credit. He actively thrust the credit at others, knowing that it was the best way to bind them to his agenda.

I worked for him during the slow collapse of the Major government, and was forever getting requests for him to appear on Newsnight, the Today programme and so on. He would almost always say, “Let’s give this one to so-and-so. Once he has gone on air and defended our position, he’ll think of it as his position”. That humility allowed him to rebuild the anti-EU movement from the ruins of the Maastricht rebellion and turn it into the force that eventually won the referendum.

If you’ve ever wondered why the European Research Group has such a bland name, the answer tells us a great deal about Spicer’s approach to politics. When we were about to launch – he was the first chairman, I the first employee – I kept suggesting suitably stirring titles, involving words like “independence”, “democracy” and “freedom”.

“Daniel”, he told me, with a patient smile, “if you’re setting up a campaign to take over the world, you don’t call it The Campaign to Take Over the

World. You give it a dull, generic name like, I don’t know… European… Research Group.”

He was a walking lesson in how to get things done in politics. He grasped how valuable it is, in a world full of blabbermouths and serial leakers, to be known to be discreet.

He understood that, in order to convince the Tory party, it helped to fit in, at least superficially. “You have to dress like them,” he told me not long before he died. “You have to talk like them. You have to tell funny stories about when you played rugby against them at school. If you want to do anything radical, for heaven’s sake don’t look like a radical.”

Above all, Michael knew that you had to pick your battles. “I have a very simple rule,” he explained to me at the height of the Maastricht rebellion.

“Only go over the top if you have some chance of success. If it’s just a futile gesture, everyone will say how tough you are, but you’ll have weakened yourself for the next time – and that’s when it might really have mattered.”

When the time came, he went over the top – dutifully and discreetly, but with deadly effectiveness. The public at large might not have known it, but the MPs who piled into that church were well aware that the vote for Brexit would not have happened without him.

Thank you, Michael. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.