Not long before David Cameron moved into Downing Street he spent some time with an old friend, a man very successful in his own field but who regarded the prospect of his old mate Dave becoming the head of government with some bewilderment. ‘Isn’t it odd,’ he said, ‘that by the next time I see you, you will be the prime minister?’ The friend asked whether he was ready, whether Cameron felt up to the job. With the insouciance that became his trademark, Cameron replied, ‘How hard can it be?’

By 10 o’clock on the evening of 23 June 2016, a little over six years later, Cameron knew the answer to that question. The polls had just closed on the third major constitutional referendum of his premiership, a vote in which he had placed Britain’s membership of the European Union and his own career on the line. At that point Cameron was still expecting to win. His pollster and friend Andrew Cooper had published a poll that day putting the Remain campaign ten points ahead. Cooper’s internal tracking poll had things closer than that, but most of the twenty-five aides and allies gathered on the first floor of 10 Downing Street, eating moussaka and drinking bottled beer, expected to scrape a win. David Cameron was a winner. He had been in trouble before, but he had emerged triumphant from the 2011 referendum on electoral reform and again in the Scottish independence plebiscite in September 2014. Just 413 days earlier friend and foe alike had doubted him, but at the 2015 general election he had won the first parliamentary majority by a Conservative leader in twenty-three years.

Nevertheless, as Cameron circulated in the Terracotta Room, aides could see he was nervous – the calmest man there, but nervous nonetheless. With several of them he found time to joke ‘I’ve got both of my speeches ready!’ One for victory, one for defeat.

Nerves in the room were eased somewhat at 10 o’clock as the BBC announced that YouGov’s final poll had given Remain a 52–48 lead. Within three minutes the pound had risen on the currency markets and Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party and the man who had done most to force Cameron into calling a referendum, had all but conceded defeat.

At around midnight, as the first results approached, Cameron and a smaller group of friends and aides moved to the Thatcher Room, a book-lined study where the former prime minister had liked to work. Cameron looked as if he was working too, peering down at a laptop. ‘I’d never seen him on a computer before,’ one friend said.

Cameron was poring over a list drawn up by Jim Messina, the US voter-targeting expert who had helped both Barack Obama and Cameron get re-elected. His model showed how well the Remain team would have to do in each area of the country to win. When Newcastle was first to declare at midnight, voters there backed Remain by the slenderest of margins: 50.7 per cent to 49.3 per cent. The Downing Street staff looked at Messina’s model and saw that they needed a 52–48 win. A hoped-for four-point lead had evaporated into a margin of less than two points. Pulses quickened. Twenty minutes later, Sunderland delivered a stunning Leave victory, by 61 per cent to 39. Messina’s model said Remain needed a 60–40 loss there to be on par. Two points short again.

Peering at the laptop like Downing Street’s in-house psephologist, Cameron began commentating on his own downfall. ‘He was comparing the results on Messina model,’ an aide said. ‘He’d say, “Well, that’s three points short,” or “That’s two points short.” He was incredibly calm.’ And that was the story of the evening. At each turn, Remain was falling two to four points below expectations. Cameron’s inner circle pinned their hopes on good results in Scotland and London. When they started to come in, Cameron said, ‘We could still pull this back.’

But while Remain was winning big in its heartlands, turnout was lower than required. In Leave’s strongholds, three million people who never usually voted had turned out. Gradually, and with a minimum of drama, hope began to fade. ‘There was no panic,’ one young adviser remarked, just a strange and creeping realisation that everything was going wrong, that the gamble had failed.

As Cameron sat at the laptop, others in the room thought back to the key moments that had brought them here – the rebellion of eighty-one Tory MPs over a referendum in 2011; the announcement that Cameron would offer one in the Bloomberg speech of 2013; the pledges to deal with migrant benefits; the election victory in May 2015 that made it inevitable; the renegotiations with other EU countries which fell short of his previous pledges; the decisions by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson to put their principles and their ambitions before their loyalty to Cameron; the immigration figures; the debates; the posters; the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox – a reminder that some political lives end much more tragically than in defeat at the ballot box.

For Craig Oliver, the director of communications, the memory that stuck in the mind was of a conversation with Cameron in the back of a car after the general election, when the prime minister had weighed up the pros and cons of the decision to hold a referendum. Cameron laid out the reasons in favour: the public’s democratic right to decide, the need to placate his party, to lance the boil that had spread across British politics since the public were last asked their view on Europe in 1975. Asked for the case against, the prime minister said, ‘You could unleash demons of which ye know not.’1

A Cameron confidant with whom Oliver discussed the moment said, ‘I am sure he was thinking of the demons within the Tory universe, and whether they may take control and finish him off. The demons he’d been fighting hard to control all along. The demons that had played a huge role in making the Conservative Party unelectable for a generation.’

The demons were the forces of Euroscepticism that had been growing in the Conservative Party for three decades; they were the Eurosceptics who had forced Cameron to abandon his pledge to stop ‘banging on about Europe’; they were the ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ of Ukip he had once dismissed; perhaps also they were Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, whose decision to oppose him had put the result on a knife edge. Cameron also believed in the demons of economic disaster in the event of a Leave vote, the upsurge in nativist sentiment during the campaign, even the willingness of campaigners on both sides to stretch the truth to make their point during the campaign.

Draped across Cameron’s knees, fast asleep, was his daughter Nancy. Numerous people remarked on her presence that night. Cameron was always a father as well as a politician. However hard he worked – and he worked much harder than his critics liked to pretend – he had always found time to go up to the flat and see the children. His ability to compartmentalise may have led people to label him a ‘chillaxer’, but it also meant that he was that rare species of prime minister not driven slightly mad in office.

Those searching for meaning and significance in the night’s events might have looked down at the table they were sitting around, a beautiful circular piece of elm that was commissioned for the G8 summit in Lough Erne in 2013, a time when Cameron was top dog, playing host to Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and the rest. If he had paused to think of the German leader, did he thank her for the help she had proffered in securing a renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Brussels, or did he think – as several of those present that night did – that he had never asked her for enough, never put her on the spot, never forced her to choose between Britain’s place in Europe and her precious free movement of people?

They might have considered the room they were in, the Thatcher Room, named after the prime minister who fell because her growing scepticism had offended the pro-Brussels establishment within her own cabinet. Cameron was on his way out because he had come to embody that establishment at a time when voters were never more inclined to thumb their noses at it.

For more than one of the people in the Thatcher Room in those small, dark hours, it was the figure who did not sit at the elm table that struck them most. George Osborne, the closest of the prime minister’s allies, sat off to the left, alone and contemplating. Osborne had served Cameron, but he had hoped for a career that would outlive his friend’s. Cameron at least had been prime minister. Still just forty-five, Osborne had every expectation of another decade at the top. Now he might soon be looking for work. Not only had he opposed the referendum as potentially disastrous for the country and the Conservative Party, he had to watch now as the career he had so meticulously constructed over the previous fifteen years turned to ashes. Osborne was usually talkative, quick with a joke, many of them with a razor-sharp edge. Not that night. He sat separately, his eyes fixed on a point ten yards beyond Maggie Thatcher’s bookshelves. As the first result came in he said simply, ‘This is going to be a very long night,’ and returned to his meditations.

When hope, finally, was extinguished, just after 3 a.m., there was no moment of despair or rage. Cameron is nothing if not steady under fire. He had been the ‘essay crisis’ prime minister, never better than with his back to the wall and a short time in which to turn events around. But there would be no turning the referendum around, not five hours after the polls had closed. ‘David Cameron takes good news the exact same way he takes bad news,’ one aide present that night said. ‘He just smiles. In his head he’s made his mind up. But only when you’ve known him a while can you see the telltale signs.’

They all watched, and those of them who knew him well, who could read the eyes and the angle of the smile, knew the time had arrived. But because it had been done subtly, with little fanfare, they only slowly became aware that Cameron was no longer there. They looked around and registered the absences: Cameron, Osborne, Ed Llewellyn and Kate Fall. There was no sign of Samantha Cameron either. The prime minister, the chancellor, the chief of staff and his deputy. The ‘Quad’ which ran the coalition government had become well known. This was the real quad, which ran the Notting Hill set for fifteen years and had commanded a Conservative majority government for just one.

Those who noticed knew what it meant. ‘At about 3 o’clock in the morning I went to the loo, and when I came back he’d gone downstairs just with George, Ed and Kate and we knew it was over,’ one said.

Five hours later Cameron walked out into Downing Street with Samantha – for those who did not know what was coming, her presence was the clincher – and announced that he was resigning. Nineteen days later he left Number 10 for the last time. At just forty-nine he was the youngest man to walk out of the famous black door as an ex-prime minister since the Earl of Rosebery in 1895.

What followed was the most remarkable moment in British politics since May 1940, when Neville Chamberlain was ousted at the point of the nation’s greatest ever peril and replaced by Winston Churchill, its maverick saviour. For a moment it looked as if Churchill’s biographer, the Brexit cheerleader Boris Johnson, would inherit the crown as his hero had done seventy-six years earlier. But in the fashion of previous revolutions the revolutionary leadership began to consume themselves. Driven by admirers who believed him the most significant Conservative thinker of his generation, and the dawning realisation in his own head that he could do the job himself, Michael Gove plunged the knife. He plunged it so hard and so deep that he wounded himself and left Johnson, once more, the recipient of a nation’s good wishes. They were not the first victors in war who conspired to lose the peace.

It all now seems so inevitable. Britain had always been sceptical about Europe; it was now just expressing a historic feeling. Yet through it all, one fact screams loudest above all. Had just 600,000 people changed their vote, David Cameron would be hailed as the political escapologist of his generation. This book would be – even more than it is – about the mistakes and infighting of the Leave campaigns. Cameron would have been able to depart at a time and in the manner of his own choosing.

When the country voted Leave, the political class took it rather more literally than perhaps even some Brexiteers expected. Of the main parties’ leaders who went into the 2015 election – Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Farage – not one remains. Of the six cabinet-level supporters who signed the Vote Leave pledge the morning after Cameron’s deal in Brussels, only Chris Grayling and Priti Patel still have cabinet jobs – and in January 2016 Grayling looked the one least likely to keep his post. Of the four dominant modernising Tories of the last decade – Cameron, Osborne, Gove and Johnson – only one remains at the apex of politics, and even that was a close-run thing. Boris Johnson went from a popular campaign hero, to startled whipping-boy of the furious 48 per cent, to prime minister in waiting, to political oblivion, and then back to one of the four great offices of state, all in the space of a fortnight. Theresa May went from submariner during the campaign to the captain of the ship at its conclusion, then promptly consigned the ruling class of the Conservative Party to the backbenches, and the austerity economics that had dominated political discourse for six years to the dustbin of history.

These were events populated by a cast of characters who might have been created by Wodehouse or Trollope. In these pages you will find a championship-winning basketball player, an adventurer who smuggled himself into rebel-held Benghazi, a millionaire owner of assault weapons, a scholar of Bismarck who idolises James Carville – and more MPs and aides than is healthy who learned their trade from reading classic volumes of military strategy.

I’m not a sociologist or a political scientist. This is not a study of the decline of the post-industrial working class, ‘post-truth’ politics or the psychology of anger. You won’t find a detailed psephological breakdown of which streets backed Brexit in Sunderland. It is not the story of the little guy, the canvassers and doorknockers who man a campaign. 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.

There is a good case that four decades of Euroscepticism, coupled with the eurozone crisis and the mass migration from the Middle East, were more important than what happened during the campaign in determining the result. But this is a book that begins from the premise that the actions of key individuals, at hinge moments in history, are magnified out of all proportion. For the thirteen months between the general election and polling day, what David Cameron, George Osborne, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and Dominic Cummings thought and did decided the fate of the rest of us.

Two points of style and taste.

Anyone who has watched The Thick of It – the television comedy which is viewed by some in Westminster as an instruction manual rather than a satire – will know that British politics can be a profane business. Many MPs and their aides swear like troopers, and the rhythms of their speech often require expletival emphasis. I have censored these efforts where the profanity is simply used as punctuation – not least because the spin doctors from both main campaigns asked me to spare their mothers’ blushes – but where it is essential to the emotion of the sentence I have left it in. Be warned.

Secondly, throughout the book I have ignored the prefix ‘Lord’ for political peers. This is not a pointed comment about the honours system, but I know of no one in Westminster who refers to Peter Mandelson, Rodney Leach or David Sainsbury as Lord This, That or the Other. So, if he will forgive me, outside the acknowledgements the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham will be plain old Peter in these pages.

Those looking for a clear delineation of good guys and bad guys have come to the wrong place. I am not here to explore the rights and wrongs of Brexit, or to pass judgement on the questionable claims of the campaigns, but to explain why both sides used them. I hope that by the end, if you think it was moral to support Remain, perhaps you will appreciate that there was also a certain nobility on the Leave side, in doing everything possible to win a battle they regarded as existentially important. If you felt it was moral to vote to Leave, perhaps you will agree that the intensity with which David Cameron and George Osborne fought the campaign was proof of their passion and belief, not of the widespread view that all politicians are lying bastards who will say or do anything to hang on to power.

PART ONE

SKIRMISHES

FROM BLOOMBERG TO BRUSSELS

October 2011 to February 2016

‘My Lily-Livered Colleagues …’

It says much about David Cameron’s relationship with George Osborne that they kept a lid on it. The decision to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was the most important Cameron made as prime minister – and his closest political ally, friend and adviser opposed it. Not just a little bit, but profoundly and wholeheartedly – and yet the disagreement did not leak.

It was late May 2012, and Cameron was just back from a NATO summit in Chicago. In a pizza restaurant at O’Hare Airport on the way home he had called a council of war with Ed Llewellyn and William Hague, his chief of staff and his foreign secretary, and decided he had no choice but to go into the 2015 general election with a pledge to hold a nationwide vote on the UK’s relationship with the EU by the middle of the next Parliament.1 Just before he became prime minister, Cameron had remarked, ‘I don’t want Europe to define my premiership.’2 He had already discovered that was a forlorn hope.

‘The biggest advocate of the referendum was William Hague,’ a senior Downing Street official said. The foreign secretary told Cameron, ‘You need to do this. I got killed by Europe. A Tory leader needs to nail this once and for all.’

George Osborne did not agree at all. The idea that the chancellor was concerned about the prospect of a referendum became known later, but few have appreciated quite how serious was his opposition. Osborne did not just think a referendum was a bad idea, he thought it was a disastrous idea. In successive meetings he was ‘pretty hostile’ to pressing ahead because he feared the vote would be lost. He warned Cameron he was taking a major risk that several uncontrollable forces would combine in a referendum campaign: ‘anti-government sentiment, opportunism, genuine concern – and then you lose’. The picture Osborne painted was stark and prescient.

Strategically, Osborne saw three problems. The first was that the in/out question was an all-or-nothing proposition. This was not a referendum on integration or membership of the euro – Britain’s membership was on the line. There was no way back if it was lost. The second, he told Cameron, was that the campaign would ‘split the Conservative Party down the middle’. A senior Downing Street source recalled, ‘George’s view was that there’s a good chance we’ll lose, and it will destroy the Tory Party.’ Thirdly, the chancellor had what now seems a more parochial political concern, that with Labour’s Ed Balls and Ed Miliband making overtures to business, Tory support for a referendum would undermine business backing for the Conservatives in the run-up to the 2015 general election. A cabinet colleague said, ‘George’s view was, “Don’t allow your entire premiership to be held hostage to this.”’

Osborne’s plan on Europe was to do what they had done for seven years since 2005, and avoid talking about it. When forced to give firm commitments they would say, ‘No more integration, no bailouts,’ and then hold out the idea of securing some extra powers for the UK as and when the eurozone needed a new treaty change. ‘It’s not perfect, but I reckon it’s better than the alternative,’ he argued.

Given the gravity of the decision and its implications, this was the most important political disagreement Cameron and Osborne had during their six years in power. It is a testament to the strength of their political partnership and their friendship that it never became front-page news, as even minor spats between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did. 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. A Downing Street aide said, ‘George is essentially a real pragmatist, so he understood that that’s where we’d end up.’ But the decision would eventually send Osborne over the top in a fight that would define his career, but which he had opposed from the start.

Cameron was a pragmatist too. In opposition, the most prominent portrait on his wall was of Harold Macmillan, the one-nation Tory who had tried to take Britain into what was then the Common Market, until France’s President Charles de Gaulle – the first and most disputatious in a long line of Gallic protagonists – said ‘Non!’ Most Conservative leaders wanted to be Winston Churchill. Most Tory Eurosceptics wanted David Cameron to be Margaret Thatcher, whose best-known sentence on European integration was ‘No, no, no.’ But Cameron wanted to be Macmillan, a common-sense healer of divisions and manager of the nation’s interests. Famously, when asked what was most dangerous for a politician, Macmillan had replied, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ In his approach to Europe, David Cameron was never more like his hero. Temperamental incrementalism, a propensity to tactically manage rather than strategically plan, and a tendency to be driven by events would all define his response to the issue that now bookends his premiership.

At around ten minutes past eight on 23 January 2013 David Cameron took to the stage at the London head office of Bloomberg, the financial news service, and said to the expectant audience, ‘This morning I want to talk about the future of Europe.’ What followed was the most significant speech given by a British prime minister since Tony Blair made the case for the Iraq War. In its consequences for Britain, it was more far-reaching than that.

In bald, spare words, Cameron sought to confront the issue which more than any other had derailed the careers of Conservative leaders in his adult lifetime. In 1975, when the British public had last been asked its opinion about Europe, Cameron had been too young to vote, and the Tory Party had been broadly united in supporting membership of what was then the Common Market. Yet now, Cameron looked down the lens of the television-pool camera and said, ‘The next Conservative Manifesto in 2015 will ask for a mandate from the British people for a Conservative government to negotiate a new settlement with our European partners … and when we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice. To stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether.’ Cameron made clear that he personally wanted an outcome ‘that keeps us in’. He concluded by saying, ‘It is time to settle this European question in British politics.’

The speech marked the end of a long, hard road for David Cameron which began with his speech to the 2006 party conference, less than a year after he won the Tory leadership, when he urged his parliamentary colleagues to stop ‘banging on about Europe’. Even at the time this was naïvely optimistic, since Cameron had already given ground to the Eurosceptics during the leadership election, matching a pledge from his Eurosceptic rival Liam Fox to take the Conservatives out of the European People’s Party (EPP), the main centre-right (but devoutly federalist) grouping in the European Parliament. The promise helped him beat both Fox and David Davis, the former Europe minister known to colleagues as ‘the Old Knuckleduster’. But in the capitals of Europe, leaving the EPP was Cameron’s ‘original sin’, proof that he was another British leader unwilling to play by the rules of the club. Eleven years later it would be a factor, albeit a minor one, in hampering his renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Brussels. At home it was evidence for the Eurosceptics that, if they pushed him hard enough, he would retreat.

Cameron was no EU enthusiast. When seeking selection as the Tory candidate for Witney, the Oxfordshire seat he was to win in 2001, he characterised his views as ‘no to the single currency, no to further transfer of powers from Westminster to Brussels, and yes to renegotiation of areas like Fish where the EU has been a disaster for the UK’, before adding for good measure, ‘If that is being a Europhile, then I’m a banana.’3 But for the Eurosceptics his heart was not in it. To Cameron, Europe was ‘the E word’. In 2006 he described members of the UK Independence Party as ‘a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists’. That not only made a mortal enemy of Ukip’s leader Nigel Farage, but contributed to a belief among the Palaeosceptic – a term I hope describes their longevity without implying that they were old-fashioned – old guard (not unfounded) that he viewed them the same way. Daniel Hannan, the Conservative MEP who was the intellectual godfather of what would become the Leave campaign, first met Cameron when he was running the Conservative Research Department in the early 1990s. ‘I think his view then was that Eurosceptics were like the ancient mariner,’ Hannan said. ‘They were disagreeable bores who would hold you with their skinny hand. I think he approached the European issue through the prism of party management. I don’t think he ever sat down and did a cost–benefit analysis of EU membership. He began from the position, probably true in the 1990s, that a lot of the Eurosceptics were quite difficult and obsessive people.’ Whatever concessions were extracted, the Palaeosceptics came back for more. This was the era when, as the columnist Danny Finkelstein so memorably put it, the Eurosceptics ‘wouldn’t take “Yes” for an answer’.

The issue that calcified Eurosceptic suspicion of Cameron was his ‘cast-iron guarantee’ in September 2007 that he would hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which greatly deepened EU integration. Once the treaty was ratified in every EU country, including by Gordon Brown’s Labour government, Cameron ditched the pledge, arguing that a referendum was pointless. He sought to placate the Eurosceptics with a speech in November 2009 announcing a ‘referendum lock’, ensuring a vote on any future European treaty ‘that transferred areas of power or competences’ from Britain to Brussels. It was a poor substitute for the in/out vote the sceptics craved. More importantly, as the then Tory MP Douglas Carswell observed, Cameron’s original promise, ‘although we reneged on it, established the legitimacy of a referendum’.

Even pro-Europeans look back on Cameron’s decision with regret, since it meant that if there was to be a referendum in future, it would be an all-or-nothing proposition. Tory MP Alistair Burt said, ‘I argued that the first chance the British people were going to get to vote on the EU they’d vote “No”, no matter what the question was. I would far rather have had a question on a constitutional issue than “In” or “Out”.’

With hindsight, the moment a referendum became inevitable occurred in October 2011. When more than 100,000 members of the public signed a petition demanding a nationwide vote, Conservative backbencher David Nuttall – whose name was regarded by Downing Street as eloquently descriptive – proposed a Commons motion calling for a referendum. Instead of letting the sceptics sound off in a vote that was not binding, Cameron unwisely turned the showdown into a trial of strength, ordering his backbenchers to vote it down. ‘We cannot lie down on this,’ he told his closest aides.4 It is understandable that he felt like imposing some order. By that point, seventeen months into the coalition government, Cameron had already endured twenty-two backbench rebellions on Europe, involving a total of sixty MPs.5 He ordered an ‘industrial-scale operation’ to rein in the sceptics.6 Word spread that anyone voting for the motion would be barred from ministerial office for four years, or even face deselection. Despite the threats, and to Cameron’s consternation, eighty-one Conservatives backed the motion, the biggest rebellion on Europe since the Second World War. At John Major’s worst moment during the passage of the Maastricht Bill in 1993 only forty-one Tory MPs had defied the whip. Without the heavy-handed whipping the rebel leaders could have mustered 150 votes against their own government. As young MPs, Cameron and Osborne had seen loyalty as the currency of promotion; now they were confronted by people who put principle first.

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