Book Notes: All Out War by Tim Shipman

For my mother, who taught me to read, and my father, who taught me to think.

Timeline
1973 Ted Heath takes Britain into the EEC (Common Market)
1975 Referendum 67% vote stay in EEC
2016 Steve Baker calls Tusk's new settlement "polishing poo".
First Treasury document claims Brexit will cost famililes £4,300 a year.
Osborne claims house prices will be 18% lower. Unveils "emergency budget" to plug £30b black hole.
Boris Johnson auctions a cow, describing it as a "beautiful milker.

Introduction: Demons Unleashed

If this book in any way goes beyond journalism – and I make no such claims – it is unashamedly elitist history. It is a book about leaders and their closest aides, the decisions they make, how and why they make them, and how they feel when they turn out to be wrong. It is about dilemmas faced and confronted. It is about the battle between self and team. It is about principle and ambition, and how the two are sometimes so indivisible as to make divining motive pointless. It is about men who make decisions that are intellectually consistent and – by their own measure – morally sound, but which are simultaneously disastrous for themselves and those closest to them. It is about how doing what worked before doesn’t always work again. Most of all it is about asking the question: how far are you prepared to go to win? Politics is a results business. There are no hung Parliaments in referendums, only victory or total, irreversible defeat.

PART ONE: SKIRMISHES
From Bloomberg to Brussels (October 2011 to February 2016)

1 ‘My Lily-Livered Colleagues …’

p3 Osborne did not just think a referendum was a bad idea, he thought it was a disastrous idea...

p4 Osborne told friends, ‘My partnership with David Cameron has always been predicated on two things: one, he is the boss and I am number two. Second, that where we disagree, we disagree in private – I don’t flounce off or resign or anything like that.’ In the end Osborne could see the way the wind was blowing, and swallowed his doubts.

p5 Famously, when asked what was most dangerous for a politician, Macmillan had replied, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

p6 Daniel Hannan, the Conservative MEP who was the intellectual godfather of what would become the Leave campaign

p9 The veto affair showed all too clearly that, despite her warm words, Merkel would not deliver for Cameron if she thought Germany’s national interest and the good of the EU lay elsewhere... Merkel called Britain Europe's "problem child"... p16 Merkel had grown up under communism in East Germany. She was not prepared to compromise on the freedom to cross borders, which she had been denied for the first thirty-five years of her life. The leak torpedoed a secret plan

p13 Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said, ‘I have no doubt that the thinking in Downing Street … was that the outcome was likely to be a coalition government and … that this referendum would be traded away.’

p21 The speech, written by Nick Timothy, said asylum seekers who entered Britain illegally would be barred from settling permanently in the UK. It led one MP to describe May as ‘Enoch Powell in a dress’.18

p22 In the end, we actually got far-reaching changes to benefits to the surprise of many, even though it contravened every facet of EU law on non-discrimination. The Commission just found a way to bend the rules. But Tom [Scholar] had advised us that any substantial reform on free movement was simply not achievable and that free movement was a holy, inviolable principle. I regret that we trusted Tom too much.

2 For Britain

p24 ‘Maastricht was the moment that the EU extended its jurisdiction into foreign affairs, criminal justice, citizenship, the environment, and also the moment where it adopted all the trappings and symbols of nationhood: the flag, the national anthem,’ Hannan said. ‘You couldn’t con yourself any longer that this was a voluntary association of independent states, or a free-trade area.’

p25 Bernard Jenkin said, ‘If John Major had not forced through the Maastricht Treaty, and had not opposed a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, the Maastricht Treaty would never have become ratified. There would have been no euro, no eurozone, no eurozone crisis, no bailout, no European citizenship, no migration crisis, and we would probably still be happily a member of the European Communities.’

p31 Farage himself fell nearly 3,000 votes short in South Thanet, the seventh time he had tried and failed to be elected to Parliament.

p33 For the key post of co-chairman in the Commons, Elliott and Daniel Hannan approached Steve Baker, the MP for Wycombe. At forty-four, Baker had only been an MP since 2010 – but he was liked and trusted by all factions on the Conservative benches. An RAF engineer who retrained as a software engineer, Baker was devoutly religious – he was baptised during a full-body immersion in the sea – and had been gifted with the innocent face of a chorister. Behind the smile, Hannan and Elliott also saw a man prepared to take risks: Baker was a keen skydiver, with more than two hundred jumps to his name. When Hannan approached him, he had just one pitch: ‘There’s no one else to do it.’ Baker himself joked later that he got the job because he was a ‘cleanskin’, untainted by the battles of the past. Hannan remembered, ‘I thought, everyone likes Steve Baker, everyone trusts him, he’s a born-again Christian, he is just incapable of dishonesty.’ Baker was also a resolute Eurosceptic, who like Hannan had come into politics to get Britain out of the EU.

3 Dom and Arron

p36 Dominic Cummings never wore a tie, preferred Converse trainers to work shoes, and with his high forehead and wire-rimmed spectacles had the air of a middle-ranking civil servant on an awayday – if your idea of a civil servant is of a hedge dragged through a man backwards.

p38 ‘In order to continue the pretence that cabinet government exists, all these EU papers are circulated in the red boxes. Nominally, these are “for approval”. They have a little form attached for the secretary of state to tick. However, because they are EU papers, this “approval” process is pure Potemkin village. If a cabinet minister replies saying – “I do not approve, this EU rule is stupid and will cost a fortune” – then someone from the Cabinet Office calls their private office and says, “Did your minister get pissed last night, he appears to have withheld approval on this EU regulation.” If the private office replies saying “No, the minister actually thinks this is barmy and he is withholding consent,” then [Ed] Llewellyn calls them to say “Ahem, old boy, the PM would prefer it if you lie doggo on this one.” In the very rare cases where a minister is so infuriated that he ignores Llewellyn, then [cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy] Heywood calls to explain to them that they have no choice but to approve, so please tick your box and send in your form, pronto. Game over.’

p39 Douglas Carswell on the ‘three indispensables’: ‘There were three people who if they hadn’t been born or didn’t exist, or weren’t central in the referendum campaign, it means we would have lost. Number one is Dominic Cummings, number two is Matthew Elliott, and number three is Daniel Hannan. Every single other person played an important role, but those three were vital.’

p40 There are two sorts of political communications operators in this business. There are people who see the population as they would like them to be, and there are people who see the population, ruthlessly, as they actually are. There is the wishful-thinking element, and there is the winning element.’

p44 In life, you get people who are so clever they’re stupid. Dominic Cummings certainly falls into that category.’ Cummings did not know Banks, but he knew the type – cleverer than a lot of MPs but out of his depth in terms of politics, a man who ‘didn’t understand what he didn’t understand’. He had dealt with self-made men before. They believed in ‘my way or the highway’. Banks was the kind of bullish character who would create division rather than bring people together.

p48 Together, [Dominic] Cummings and [Paul] Stephenson would form the engine room of the Leave campaign. With guile and cunning they were to take on the might of the Tory establishment and the government machine, and win. Most people who were there say their double act was just as important as that of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Without all four of them it is likely that Remain would have won.

p49 When Cummings met Paul Stephenson in his garden he had outlined a stealth plan for the campaign – to downplay issues like immigration until the ‘Out’ gang had won the right to be heard by polite society, and then get more aggressive in the run-up to polling day:

p50 Cummings was delighted when Craig Oliver’s first major intervention in the Europe debate, at the end of October, was to brief a speech by David Cameron declaring, ‘Leave means leave … That option of “Let’s have another go” is not on the ballot paper.’ Cummings told friends, ‘You could tell from Number 10’s reaction they hated it.’

p52 Dreamt up over dinner at the Jenkin family home in Kennington, south London, it subsequently met once a week on Wednesday after PMQs at 12.45 p.m., often in Owen Paterson’s room. Regular attendees included Jenkin, Steve Baker and Paterson for the Tories, Kelvin Hopkins, Graham Stringer and Kate Hoey from Labour, Nigel Dodds from the DUP, and Ukip’s sole MP Douglas Carswell.

p56 Cummings declined the advice, saying that a focus on immigration would turn off undecided voters. He and others insist he always intended to use the issue nearer polling day. But he did not confide in the Kippers that day. They left in despair. ‘Our view was that most undecided voters don’t vote, and what we were going to need to do was motivate our base in the northern heartlands in order to get the turnout much higher,’ said Bruni-Lowe. ‘It was the number-one issue, and they just wouldn’t acknowledge it. It was a class-based thing. They thought it was unpalatable at dinner parties. They wouldn’t touch it. That was always the problem with Vote Leave.’ Farage vowed to go it alone again. As they left, he said, ‘F**k that, we’ve got to just go for it.’ Vote Leave and Leave.EU were now effectively at war.

4 Stronger In

p57 Britain was much more Eurosceptic than they had feared. ‘What we found was this very hard set view about why our hearts say we don’t like the EU and why we should leave it,’ Cooper said. ‘One, it costs a bloody fortune. Two, immigration: migrants coming here and taking our jobs and our benefits, putting pressure on our services. Three, it meddles in our lives in ways which we didn’t have before. The first two were much more important than the third.’ But here was the kicker, the real punch in the guts for a pro-European like Cooper: ‘Then you say, “OK, that’s what you don’t like. What are the positives?” And you’d usually get silence.’ The focus-group members would look at each other sheepishly, and someone would say, ‘Well, there’s the trade …’ But Cooper could tell their hearts were not in it.

p59 Over 80 per cent of them agreed with the statement ‘My heart says we should leave the EU, but my head says it’s not a good idea.’

p63 You cannot create a national campaign from a standing start a couple of months before polling day, especially when you are having to counter twenty years of relentless anti-European propaganda in Britain.’

p64 Cooper said. ‘The war book is everything we know: the segmentation, our strongest messages, “This is our message in a sentence”, “This is our message in a paragraph”, “This is our message in a page”, media strategy, campaign grid. That’s the Bible.’ The goal was to target the two persuadable groups, the ‘Hearts v Heads’ and the ‘Disengaged Middle’.

p67 ‘As with any successful business person doing political campaigning, it’s really hard. You’re used to answering factual questions about your business, not tricky political issues. So you answer what you’ve been asked directly, but don’t realise that how it is interpreted might trip you up.’ A politician involved with the campaign was less understanding: ‘You hear business people say things like, “Why aren’t politicians like us?” Well, business people discover that politicians have craft skills as well, like not saying stupid things while on public platforms.’

5 Cornering Corbyn

p72 Corbyn was a very unlikely leader. A rebellious backbencher, to the point of parody, for thirty years, he had only run because other members of the hard left like John McDonnell and Diane Abbott had already tried and failed. He only made the ballot paper because grandees like Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan had loaned him their nominations in order to ‘widen the debate’. Now he was barrelling to victory on a wave of support from enthusiastic young leftists who admired his plain speaking and apparent personal decency – a sort of ageing Forrest Gump – backed up by Bennites who learned how to fight procedural battles in the 1980s and entryists from Trotskyite fringe groups. Having found no candidate they thought could win a general election, Labour activists resolved to elect the one who made them feel best about themselves in defeat.

p76 ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he [Corbyn] told Falconer. ‘We’re going to be in a new era where you can all express your views.’

p77 The joint statement was written by Benn’s aide Imran Ahmed, who had devised a slogan to help frontbenchers memorise the case for staying in, which he called ‘JIGSI’ – jobs, investment, growth, security and influence in the world.

p78 One reason why Corbyn had been prepared to bow to the overwhelming pressure in the party to approve official support for Remain was that the trade unions were firm supporters of the EU.

6 Guerrilla Warfare

































7 The Coup



8 The Deal



9 Boris and Michael


PART TWO: BATTLE IS JOINED

10 Project Fear
11 The IDS of March
12 Designation’s What You Need
13 ‘Back of the Queue’
14 The Economy, Stupid
15 Blue on Blue
16 Turning Point
17 Aunty Beeb
18 Debating Points
19 Labour Isn’t Working
20 Immigration Crisis
21 George’s Monstrous Medicine
22 Breaking Points
23 Wembley
24 The Waterloo Strategy
25 Brexit Night

PART THREE: ALL OUT WAR

26 Fallout Friday
27 Jexit
28 The Dream Team
29 Anyone But Boris
30 Brexecuted
31 Mayniacs v Leadbangers
32 Iron May-den
Conclusion: Why Leave Won
















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Characters
Jim Messina - US vote targeting expert
Daniel Hannan
Dominic Cummings
James Carville - Clinton's message man (film The War Room)
Gerry Gunster - US political referendum consultant
Paul Stephenson - Comms director for British Bankers Association
Victoria Woodcock - Gove's Private Secretary (school reform's "secret weapon")
Len McCluskey - boss of largest union Unite
Christina McAnea - boss of 2nd largest union UNISON (public service workers)
Paul Kenny - former boss (now Tim Roache) of 3rd largest union GMB (general trade)


Words/Phrases
Stakhanovite work ethic
Psephological - Study of voting stats
NRS (National Readership Survey) Social Grades: ABC1 (up-low middle) C2DE (skill-not working)
5/20/30/20/15/10%