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How Remain edged it: winning the future by the skin of your teeth
the guardian, 5th July 2016

“If we had let them talk about immigration closer to polling day, we’d have been toast,” Roland Rudd tells me as he empties a sachet of Splenda into a cup of coffee. By ‘them’, he means Leave.EU. “Lucky for us, they fought us on immigration from before the date was even set, so we could talk out their arguments and make the last two weeks about the economy.” By ‘we’, he means Britain Stronger In Europe, the first centre-left campaign to win a national contest in the UK since 2005.

It may seem odd to characterise a campaign led by a Conservative Prime Minister and run by his chief of staff as ‘centre left’, but BSE (they foresaw and embraced the mad cow jokes) was an unholy alliance of centrist politicians that can easily be called centre left compared to what it was up against. Rudd is the brother of the Energy Secretary, but dines with Peter Mandelson and was close to Blair in the later years of his premiership and the years immediately following it. Right now, he’s avidly explaining how BSE made it their paramount priority every day to “hit the six and ten”. Referring to leading the six and ten o’clock news bulletins, it’s the creed of the man who stepped in to captain a ship that – just – steered clear of rocks in the final moments.

There had been talk of Will Straw, son of Jack, running the show. Rumour has it a late-night call from a nervous Cameron put the kibosh on that, and with hindsight it was an odd idea to expect a thirtysomething failed parliamentary candidate to run what the government considered the most important cross-party campaign group in modern history. Straw took the pre-demotion well, serving ably as communications director while Craig Oliver, Cameron's director of communications and a key ally since Andy Coulson's 2011 departure, was talked into the top job at the eleventh hour. The high-flying Oliver was highly reluctant to take the job when he realised he would need to relinquish his Downing Street pass, something which very nearly derailed proceedings, but a personal and heartfelt appeal from Cameron over a private dinner changed his mind.

"Something like 12% of people think Brexit means staying in the EU."
Straw-for-Oliver wasn’t the only early shake-up in personnel terms. It’s forgotten about now, but Lord Stuart Rose was briefly the chair of what quickly earned the nickname ‘Stronger In’. His public reasons for stepping down from such a frontline role after only eight days were vague and family-related, but Rudd confirms what is now an open secret that a brief media training session led to dropped jaws and a “quick chat” about his future in the organisation. Rose was relieved to be offered an ‘out’, and proved much better at wooing big business backers to fund the Remain campaign behind closed doors.

“One thing I was never sure about was the letters,” Rudd says, referring to BSE’s beloved practice of setpiece letters, often published as advertising on page 5 of the Times or Telegraph, informing readers that captains of industry or celebrities were dead against what the Remain campaigned ‘Brexit’ at every opportunity. It’s easy to see why – it’s an ugly word, and focus group data suggested its similarities to the word ‘toxic’ made it far less popular than ‘Leave’. This approach had its limits – during the ‘Wobbly Weekend’, where the polls seemed to show Leave surging into the lead for two days, some bright spark who had worked on the AV campaign suggested it might be safest to explicitly campaign against the option on the ballot that we didn’t agree with. “Something like 12% of people think Brexit means staying in the EU. I think that lad saved our bacon – he must have remembered what it was like working for a campaign that wasn’t named after the bloody thing they wanted.”

It all added up to a lean, mean rebuttal machine that was always in pole position to dominate the day's headlines with a positive story about Europe or a negative warning from a respected figure. But as Rudd went to great lengths to inform me when we first sat down, there was genuine fear that no real answer on immigration was being offered. Cameron's renegotiation had failed to get anything subtantive on the subject, and the Leave campaign knew it was their trump card. The campaign took the huge gamble of encouraging them to play it early. "We tactically vacated the field on immigration, so to speak," Rudd tells me, "we encouraged them to throw all their muck at us and at the issue, gambling that it wouldn't stick and make them look amateurish and racist. I thought the online advert that said 'no Czechs please, we're British' was our jackpot, but then I saw that bloody bus with David Cameron dressed as an Ottoman Sultan..."

The gamble paid off, and the machine that had been created around Oliver, Straw, Rudd, Peter Mandelson and others was ready to strike at just the right moment. For more on Stronger In’s internal successes, I recommend last week's excellent article in the Sunday Times by Tim Shipman, whose book Hold The Line promises to be an exceptional inside story of both campaigns. The rest of this story owes more from the Leave campaign’s failings than it does from Stronger In’s strengths, just as Remain’s eventual win did. Most Stronger In campaigners I spoke to agreed with that analysis.

Hard though it may be to believe now, the lawsuit-riddled and teetering organisation registered with Companies House as ‘Leave.EU LIMITED’ was just one month ago the most terrifying opponent the British establishment had ever faced. Like Churchill and the U-Boats in the Atlantic, Cameron admitted to friends that Leave.EU, with its unapologetic vulgarities and flirtation with Trumpism, was “the only thing that truly frightens me”. The 52-48 result proved it was a formidable opponent, but the mark it has left on our democracy will run deeper. Its posters still line our streets, its paid-for adverts on social media still scream about Muslims at people who just logged on to see their friends’ wedding photos. Its impact on UKIP, with which it seems all but certain to merge, is a smaller concern to David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn than the impact it has had on discourse in this country. Both men now lead parties with MPs openly calling for immigration “to come back onto the table” and for the Remain vote not to be used as an excuse to maintain what one backbencher called “the swarm”.

Cummings' valedictory speech quickly entered legend
It didn’t have to be this way. Leave.EU’s rival for the official designation as ‘the Leave campaign’, Vote Leave, started with real promise. ‘Vote Leave, take control’ seemed a slightly off-piste slogan but data suggested it was testing extremely well. The appointment of Dominic Cummings, mastermind of the No2AV campaign and the successful rejection of a North East Assembly in 2004, brought huge skill to the table and, via Cummings’ personal links to Michael Gove, appeared to promise a plethora of big beasts who would get behind the campaign. Cummings quickly recognised that with virtually everyone the public had heard of lining up behind Stronger In, Vote Leave’s best chance was to position itself as the totally anti-establishment choice. Rabble-rousing social media and public performances became the order of the day.

It would be this that made certain Cummings’ – and thus Vote Leave’s – downfall. Concerns over abrasive behaviour and damaging stunts led to Eurosceptic MPs and internal figures revolting against Cummings in January. The ambush by two students of the PM’s speech to the CBI played particularly badly, with one MP disavowing the campaign altogether on the grounds that he could not be seen to be associated with a group that "put the Prime Minister in danger". After a short struggle, Cummings left the campaign, his valedictory speech to staff quickly entering legend. No footage of it has emerged, but witnesses insist it would have made Malcolm Tucker blush.

The nervous MPs must have kicked themselves within days, when confidence in Matthew Elliott, Cummings’ de facto successor, disappeared and half the campaign staff answered the siren song of Leave.EU. Many of the MPs themselves swiftly followed suit, harbouring doubts over the rival campaign’s aggressive focus on immigration and obsession with using Nigel Farage as a frontman, but unable to ignore its deep pockets and – now – organisational clout. Vote Leave didn’t wrap up as an organisation – Bernard Jenkin and a handful of old school Eurosceptics who could not countenance aligning with what they had labelled ‘the "I’m not racist but" campaign’. But it was a shadow of its former self in both scale and – crucially – funds. All but two of its major donors switched to Leave.EU, which already had at least one personal fortune behind it.

While Cummings was not a silver bullet, there’s little doubt his continued leadership would have kept Vote Leave a distinct entity far longer, and possibly made them competitive in the contest to be the official campaign. In the event, the official designation went to Leave.EU by a landslide, the rump Vote Leave scoring only 8 points out of a possible 32. Leave.EU scored 29. Cummings, who is currently living in an converted pillbox in Albania and will publish a new translation of Livy next year, was unavailable for comment at time of writing.

"I didn’t know what ‘pugilistic’ meant until six months ago when people like you started calling me it."
The irony of jumpy Eurosceptics abandoning Vote Leave for its poor taste and vulgar stunts and then aligning with Leave.EU is not merely something that can be observed in hindsight. At the time, sources close to prominent frontbenchers looking to align with Leave were saying they knew that if Vote Leave was the respectable end of Euroscepticism, Leave.EU was the proudly unrespectable end. Originally called ‘In The KNOw’ back when the two options on the ballot paper were going to be ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, Leave.EU changed its name but kept its puerile and pugilistic style when the Electoral Commission made its recommendations. “You say pugilistic, but that’s exactly the reason we acted like that,” a senior Leave.EU organiser tells me as he dabs barbecue sauce from his cheeks, “I didn’t know what ‘pugilistic’ meant until six months ago when people like you started calling me it in Guardian articles. Neither did millions of people. I’m sure millions of people still don’t. So why is it people like you get to run the country?”

I try to explain that I’m not running the country, but my dining companion (who agreed to be quoted in full, but declined to give his name due to “some legal trouble at the moment”) shuts me up. “No, you know what I mean. We had a chance to do something here, a real chance to get back at the powers that be, so we did everything we could. Did we break some rules? Yeah, probably. Do I care? Not a monkey’s. Did he bring any mayo?”

The two of us are sat in a Wetherspoon’s in Southend. Leave.EU paraphenalia still hangs behind the bar. The pub chain’s CEO publicly supported Leave, but the chain itself took no official position. I would guess the leniency shown to this local landlord would not have been replicated if he’d put up a Stronger In poster. At least this isn’t the one with Calais refugee children holding Kalashnikovs.

“The message was our way of cutting through. People know this country’s full up. The crooks on the other side made people worry more about their mortgage than whether their kids will be able to get a job. Fair play, it’s what I’d do. But it’s dishonest. There’s no point celebrating the banks being stable and the pound being strong if we’re just paying billions to permanently pregnant Syrians.” I ask if that was a rejected poster slogan, but he ignores me. “It’s a lie. And like all lies, it’ll fall apart in the end. They’ll try to take us into the Euro now. Cameron will be doing it before the end of the decade. You watch.”

"We'll keep fighting until we get what we want."
Cameron has repeatedly said that further integration of any kind is off the table, and that his new deal (quietly ignored during much of the referendum campaign) is now a lasting blueprint for the UK’s relationship with the EU. As for the Euro, he reverts to his favourite phrase of the moment: “Remain means Remain. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The man some call ‘Mr Leave’ scoffs at this and just tells me to wait and see. He wants to get back to what he calls his ‘war stories’. “The media thought they had us over a barrel because the other lot had the PM, all the actors, musicians, the bankers, all that, while we had Nigel and a bunch of people they thought they could call racist and get away with it. Well, we showed them.”

You didn’t win, though, I remind him.

“Enoch Powell – and you can stop right there, I know exactly what you think I’m about to say, and you’re not leading me down that road – Enoch Powell, right,” Mr Leave continues, “said on the day of the 1975 referendum that the country had a result for now and it would stand until there was another one. That was pretty obviously the case – we got another referendum, and so we fought again. And we’ll keep fighting until we get what we want.”

What’s the difference between that attitude and the EU’s habit of offering “you got it wrong, try again” referendums? Mr Leave shrugs with the air of a GCSE student being asked where his pencil case is. “Not my problem,” he says, as if that answers the question, “but I’ll say this – it’s 2-0 right now, no denying it. But we came back to 4-2 in 1966, and that seems a good metaphor.”

I have to confess I had to look up the 1966 final when I got home to check the score, and sure enough, the Germans were never 2-0 up. But I have a feeling it wouldn’t have mattered to my pugilistic new friend. If Leave.EU extricates itself from its current legal mess, or even if it doesn’t, its key personnel will be back. If they can get Dominic Cummings out of whichever mountaintop monastery that he’s translating Zola in to pass the time, the establishment will have every cause to fear another referendum.

“There isn’t going to be another referendum,” Chuka Umunna tells me as he breaks the seal on a bottle of sparkling water. I’ve managed to catch him in the ‘green room’ of a panel event with the inspiring title ‘Europe, Britain, and Unity: What next beyond division?’. The event is being held in a large office space in Battersea, and by the looks of it, the green room is normally used to store printer paper.

“David Cameron called the referendum to get his party to ‘stop banging on about Europe’. Do you remember that? They did bang on, but now, at least, he can draw a line under the whole thing. That’s what he’s done, and it’s not in his interests to give even an inch to the Sore Leavers.” That last turn of phrase is one that isn’t popular with many of the self-described ‘second referendum campaigners’. Umunna isn’t concerned. “If they want to talk about unkind turns of phrase, they’re welcome to come look at my email inbox from any day during the campaign.”

As he takes another sip, I ask if he’s about to go back into campaign mode, which almost gets me showered with sparkling water. “There isn’t a vacancy,” he says when he’s recovered, and I don’t point out that I hadn’t actually mentioned the Labour leadership.

“I’m not here to talk about the Labour Party, I’m here to talk about the country”
In another world, the state of the Labour Party would be the number one story in the Westminster village. Jeremy Corbyn’s foes were sharpening their knives throughout the referendum campaign, with increasingly unsubtle whispering campaigns that the socialist firebrand was not pulling his weight and seemed to be relapsing back into the Euroscepticism of his youth (or, some say, of last year). The day after the result was known, rumours of a leadership challenge to Corbyn, using the “far too close” referendum result as a casus belli, began to circulate. At time of writing, they have come to nothing, though there is talk of mass resignations from the shadow cabinet if Corbyn does not agree to some kind of written ultimatum about the direction of his leadership.

“I’m not here to talk about the Labour Party, I’m here to talk about the country,” says a slightly irritated Umunna. I apologise, but he can’t blame me for trying. I ask one more question about the party – did Corbyn campaign enough? “Jeremy made the case to a section of our core vote, and anecdotally I came across people with whom his arguments resonated. But the result was much, much too close, and all the evidence shows that many of the people who went the wrong way were C2 Labour voters. It showed Jeremy isn’t connecting with those people, that they don’t respect what he has to say, and that’s a concern.” A concern that requires a change in leadership? “It’s a concern,” he repeats, then he’s tapped on the arm and within ninety seconds, he’s talking to two hundred people about the “historic opportunity for people and for markets” offered by “last month’s decisive result”. I think I’ll be interviewing him again soon.

One interview I wasn’t able to secure was with the man some think could have swung it. Not Boris – though the foreign secretary is out of the country more than he’s in it these days – but his cabinet colleague at the DWP. However, in a typically polite and charming email, Michael Gove informed me that he was unable to find any time to meet, but was happy to go on-record and say he supports and supported the Prime Minister’s decision to maintain collective responsibility.

The decision was both shocking and predictable, depending on who you asked. Those with long memories pointed out it was the opposite of Harold Wilson’s famous suspension of collective responsibility during his referendum in 1975, and Wilson’s own neutrality in the campaign. By openly campaigning for Remain and telling his cabinet colleagues they would need to resign to oppose him, Cameron threw away what many saw as vital to his survival to 2020 – a sense that he would be above the trenches. To stretch the metaphor in a manner Michael Gove would doubtless enjoy, the PM had been expected to be an observation balloon at best, but instead he donned a tin hat, grabbed a bayonet, and charged in with the rest of them. It was this that shocked people who had got used to the usually statesmanlike and collegiate Cameron of the Coalition years.

“I think Boris's dad dreams of him becoming a sort of virile Ken Clarke someday.”
It’s unclear what made Cameron dig in his heels, but the Spectator recently pointed readers towards the departure of Dominic Cummings from any and all Leave operations. The theory goes that with Cummings, a close Gove ally, out of the picture, the then-Justice Secretary would not jump to the Leave campaign. The sensitive and self-described intellectual Gove also had little chance of gelling with the ‘all out war’ being pursued by Leave.EU. The further gamble Cameron is alleged to have taken was the bigger, and far more dangerous one: he believed that no Gove meant no Boris.

Boris Johnson sold the British public the myth of the straight banana and of banned prawn cocktail crisps. To outsiders, therefore, it was a surprise when in February he came out quietly for Remain, couching his support for the cause almost entirely in terms of loyalty to Cameron and belief that the PM’s deal opened the door to Boris’ much-loved “two-speed Europe” and “Associate Membership”. That remains to be seen, but insiders knew the real story: Boris isn’t an outer.

“His dad’s a devout Remainer, always been pro-European, I think he dreams of Boris becoming a sort of virile Ken Clarke someday,” says a Boris ally. It’s not the most pleasant image, but it’s the backdrop on which Boris made his now-famous “I am not an Outer” statement to colleagues in January. It was meant to stop the speculation about which way he would jump, but the mere fact he was talking about it at all added fuel to the fire. This unnerved Cameron, who had calculated he could withstand the departure of Theresa Villiers, Chris Grayling, John Whittingdale, and Priti Patel. But Boris, whose entry to the Leave camp would have been made much easier by the arrival of fellow big beast Gove, scared the PM.

A late-night phone call – actually, several late-night phone calls, depending on who you talk to – put Cameron’s mind at rest that Gove wasn’t going to go to Leave. Attempts were made by Samantha Cameron to reach out via Gove’s wife Sarah Vine and talk him into declaring for Remain, but that proved a bridge too far. Considering the result good enough, Cameron made his announcement at Cabinet the next morning, apparently looking directly at Boris throughout.

Those who were there say it was the most nervous Cameron had ever looked, which makes sense as the simple words “I resign” from Michael Gove might have doomed his premiership there and then. But they never came, and instead there were assorted murmurings from Grayling, Villiers, Whittingdale, and Patel. Bolstered and no doubt feeling ten feet tall, Cameron then delivered the cruel coup de grâce – he required his colleagues to state immediately if they wished to resign. Of the four, only Grayling had foreseen this possibility and prepared a few words. Cameron cut him off after half a sentence, curtly informing him that the Cabinet table was not the place for speechmaking against the government’s agreed course of action. The Leavers filed out of the room, Cameron stood in silent triumph, and Steve Baker's phone began to ring.

"Available in the traditional blue."
Steve Baker gained a somewhat towering reputation among Leavers during the campaign. Handsome, bright, deeply Christian and with a forces background, he expertly ran parliamentary ‘ops’ for the Leave-supporting backbenchers in the Commons. This earned him plenty of admirers, and he’s been quiet since the result. Sources close to him believe that since 24th June, he’s become the central organiser of what has been unambiguously termed “Cameron Fucking Cheated”. CFC (as they are known in Parliament’s WhatsApp groups) don’t allege ballot boxes being dumped in canals by MI5, but they do consider the PM’s conduct to be unbecoming and a betrayal of principles apparently agreed around the time of Tory conference. “That stunt with the passports, it was circus buffoonery, for crying out loud,” one Conservative MP tells me, “it wasn’t the way a PM behaves, and it made all his backroom warnings about Boris look ridiculous.”

The ‘stunt with the passports’ might have angered some in his party, but new data suggests it might just have won him the country. The key group of ‘Brexit waverers’ identified in YouGov focus groups reacted very well to Cameron’s announcement in his live Question Time appearance with David Dimbleby on 20th June that British passports would, from September, be available in “the traditional blue” to anyone who wanted that, at no extra cost. The confidence with which Cameron then produced a blue passport and proudly held it up for all to see might have looked like showboating to some. To 81% of eventual Remain voters, it looked like a triumphant British leader showing he had made his deal with Europe work.

Of course, it soon came out that we have been allowed to print blue passports for years, we just chose not to. Europe didn’t have anything to do with it. But Cameron’s ‘fork’ (to borrow the chess terminology) worked perfectly – the anti-EU tabloids could choose to call him a liar on the eve of a referendum (even though he hadn’t said anything that implied the passports were an extra concession from Brussels), but in order to do so, they would need to admit that the EU had never taken away our ‘right’ to have blue passports in the first place. They took the only other option available – trying to ignore the story. In the age of viral videos, that didn’t work.

Maybe things would’ve been simpler if we’d just voted Leave.
“I’ve never been convinced the passports were what did it,” Roland Rudd says to me as he throws his cardboard cup into the recycling, “it was the economic message, and it wasn’t ‘project fear’. We had a very positive message too, about the possible growth and future jobs – the ones we might have thrown away. Thank Christ we didn’t.” He then remembers something he wanted to show me, and we spend five minutes trying to get a video called “Iain Duncan Smith is on the BBC referendum coverage and every time Remain wins somewhere he gets redder” to load on his phone. He mutters something about having a word with Dave about wider 4G coverage, and we part company.

“It was the passports, on top of everything else, and he’s going to fucking pay.” The Conservative I’m standing next to by the Thames is pretty clear on that point. “In the mean time, look at what’s happened – we went in good faith to the public and said they’d get a real choice on Europe. This stitch-up wasn’t a real choice. Farage is a Nazi, so who was the face of the campaign? Chris fucking Grayling? These next two are on you.” We stride to the bar and I make my excuses.

“There simply wasn’t appetite to damage ourselves like that,” Chuka Umunna tells me after his panel performance, “I could talk about how strongly diverse Britain is, or how open and outward-looking we are, but when it comes down to it, what colour people’s passports are isn’t important. What matters to people in this country is the colour of money.” His Uber arrives at that point.

“I triggered the passports thing,” Mr Leave insists, a forkful of Ultimate Burger halfway to his mouth, “we’d done a really racy number with a Photoshop of the PM’s wife and a burka, hijab, whatever you call it, and it had gone viral that morning. Would’ve been all over the news for the last few days unless he pulled something out of the bag. Credit where it’s due, he did. But it won’t work long term. We’ll be back here in three years, and it’ll be because there’s been blood in the streets.” Juice runs down his chin.

He may be right. The picture that emerged on referendum night was not that of a united country taking a decision with one voice, as happened in 1975. Urban/rural, rich/poor, internationalist/nationalist, all can now be projected onto counting units as small as towns. As Umunna said, Jeremy Corbyn might have won over some old reds who distrusted the EU as a capitalist bloc, but neither he nor Cameron broke through with the white working class voters who tend to decide elections. By a percentage margin that would be automatically rounded in some financial spreadsheets, those voters, who turned out in greater numbers than have been seen at general elections in two generations, have been silenced by an imperious metropolitan elite that cruelly turned the tables on them by… also turning out in high numbers. And it’s less of an imperious metropolitan elite than it is the urban poor. But to the tabloids, that’s unlikely to matter. “Would you have voted for freedom were it not for Project Fear?” is a Facebook poll paid for by a group known as ‘Leavers For Round 2’. We’ll see whether they are a flash in the pan or a spark that makes us think that maybe, just maybe, things would’ve been simpler if we’d just voted Leave.

Maybe it would have been. David Cameron would likely have resigned, rather than be publicly bolstered but privately marked for death. Boris Johnson would probably be in Downing Street by the autumn rather than making a mess at the foreign office. We’d at least have some idea of what our future relationship with Europe will be, because I did ten days of interviews for this article and didn’t get one certain answer on whether we would never, ever join the Euro, or even never hold another referendum. We’d have a parliament with a clear programme for government, not one where petition upon petition is being sent to MPs demanding either a second referendum or a “ban immigration anyway” bill. But we are where we are, and whether the questions facing Britain are about immigration, integration with Brussels, or the colour of our passports, our Prime Minister is absolutely clear as ever: Remain means Remain.

What that means depends on who you talk to. Leave.EU says Remain means going onto the next stage (to use the accurate Powell quote). ‘Mr Leave’ says Remain means joining the Euro and then doing it all again. Chuka Umunna says Remain means Britain is back in business. Michael O’Leary says Remain means cheap flights for everyone forever. Jeremy Corbyn says Remain means people have had enough of austerity. Friends of Steve Baker insist Remain means David Cameron will face a no confidence motion before Christmas. Roland Rudd says Remain means “we’re probably going to get a few more quid back via the rebate”. Jean-Claude Juncker says Remain means Europe’s century has come. And, of course, Nigel Farage says Remain means voter fraud.

Or Remain might just mean Britain remains in the European Union. But that would be much too simple, wouldn’t it?​
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