Fury that triggered explosive response
AFTER a gruelling return flight from the G7 summit in Japan, David Cameron was back at Chequers on Saturday– and then the bombshell dropped.
Downing Street officials phoned to tell him about the extraordinary letter from Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, attacking viciously him over immigration.
The carefully crafted statement is the most direct challenge to the Prime Minister’s authority from a serving Cabinet minister since he was elected in May 2010.
The hostile tone is all the more remarkable as before the referendum campaign began Mr Cameron regarded Justice Secretary Mr Gove as one of his closest political friends.
Back in March, when Mr Johnson, then the London Mayor, declared he would back the Leave side in the referendum, he gave Mr Cameron ten minutes’ warning in a text.
This time there was no warning. The first No 10 knew about the letter was when officials caught sight of the front page of a Sunday newspaper on Saturday night.
A source close to Mr Gove and Mr Johnson explained the secrecy: ‘In a general election campaign you never give notice to your opponents or the enemy of what you are planning next. Surprise is an important weapon in battle. We are taking this as seriously as the general election. We are in it to win it.’
But the Gove/Johnson letter was not the only surprise manoeuvre from Vote Leave. Employment minister Priti Patel, seen by many MPs as a future Tory leader, chose the same day to launch her own Exocet in the form of a thinly veiled attack on Mr Cam- eron and George Osborne. Miss Patel, a leading Leave campaigner, may not have named them, but it was clear the PM and Chancellor were in her sights when she said the Remain camp’s leaders, with their ‘luxury lifestyles’, were insulated from the effects of immigration.
The reason for this co-ordinated surprise attack appears to have been Mr Cameron’s response to the latest immigration figures that came out on Thursday. While admitting that they were ‘disappointing’, he said: ‘I do not believe that the right way to control immigration is to wreck our economy.’
This flippant dismissal of Britain’s immigration problems – straight from the pages of Project Fear – was the final straw. Mr Gove and Mr Johnson were already outraged by Mr Cameron’s comment last week that it was ‘immoral’ to campaign to leave the EU.
As a source in Vote Leave says, the Brexiteers had been subjected to personal insults and doomsday projections – now Mr Cameron had turned his back on the holy grail of solving immigration. They decided to hit back.
The unprecedented challenge to the PM is the clearest sign yet that Vote Leave is putting immigration at the heart of the campaign.
Parliament is in recess and a Cabinet meeting is not scheduled until the middle of next week when Mr Cameron and Mr Gove will be present. At G7, Mr Cameron said he was ‘taking a vow of self-denying ordinance’ in a tacit admission the Remain side’s attacks on Mr Gove and Mr Johnson had gone too far.
But that was before this open letter. The ‘blue-on-blue’ skirmishes look like turning into full-blown war.
Flippant dismissal of Britain’s problems