All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

Chris Bruni-Lowe, who had switched his allegiance from Carswell to Farage, said it was Carswell’s disdain for the leader that encouraged him to return: ‘Nigel

had

 decided he was going to leave, but Douglas Carswell called him that morning and said to him, “Are you planning on coming back?” Nigel said, “Well, I’ve not really given it much thought, but I probably will now there’s going to be a referendum.” And Carswell says, “You cannot do that, you’re toxic. You’ll damage the cause.” And Nigel thought, “Well, fuck this.”’

But Carswell was adamant that the election campaign had undone the good work of the previous autumn: ‘During the campaign we talked about breastfeeding on LBC, we talked about HIV, we ran a general election designed to appeal to the base rather than attract support from beyond the base. It was a disastrous election strategy. After the general election, I thought to myself, “You can’t detoxify the Ukip brand under the current leadership.”’ He resolved to ‘switch my efforts to detoxify the Leave brand’ instead, aligning with Matthew Elliott’s operation to ensure that it became the official ‘Out’ campaign and to prevent Farage being a prominent part of it.

Carswell’s first move was to write an article for

The Times

 urging Farage to ‘take a break’, and arguing that the referendum campaign ahead should focus on the costs of EU membership ‘instead of feeding the idea that EU membership is synonymous with immigration’.

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Farage was baffled: ‘I read that and thought, “Fucking hell! I’ve spent ten years trying to do that!”’

The degree to which immigration should be front and centre of the referendum was a faultline that was to bitterly divide Ukip from Carswell and the Tory campaigners for the next thirteen months.

With the general election approaching, Matthew Elliott was under pressure to step up his campaigning and make explicit that Business for Britain would lead the ‘No’ or ‘Out’ campaign. In February 2015 he was approached by Richard Tice, a millionaire property financier who was a BfB signatory. ‘He was saying, “Come on, why isn’t BfB for Leave?”’ Elliott recalled. ‘I explained “change or go” had to be our position. It was a way we could keep as many business people engaged as possible. And there was always the possibility the PM would go for a more substantial deal than people thought he would, and we should therefore be urging him to push the boundaries of what renegotiation meant, rather than assuming it was a completely lame exercise.’ Tice went away dissatisfied, but would soon find someone willing to run a more aggressive campaign.

In April, the month before the general election, another important meeting took place at the Caistor Hall Hotel in Norwich. David Campbell Bannerman, a Tory MEP who had previously been the chairman and deputy leader of Ukip, was determined to ensure that different branches of the Eurosceptic family worked together if there was a referendum campaign. ‘I knew it was a bit like herding cats, and the real problem we were going to have was going to be fighting amongst ourselves,’ he said.

Campbell Bannerman set up a ‘Contact Group’, and invited Elliott and other prominent sceptics like the businesswoman Ruth Lea and Rory Broomfield of the Freedom Association. The gathering would later be described by the Electoral Commission as a ‘pivotal moment’, and a key reason why Vote Leave was designated as the official ‘Out’ campaign.

Campbell Bannerman was also involved in another development that spring, the creation of Conservatives for Britain, the parliamentary wing of Elliott’s operation. When Cameron won his majority in May, Elliott was shocked: ‘I realised, “Crikey, I’ve actually got to set up this referendum campaign.”’

At a lunch the following day Elliott met Campbell Bannerman, plus Nick Wood from the Westminster PR firm Media Intelligence Partners, a grizzled, chain-smoking former

Times

 and

Express

 political journalist who became Iain Duncan Smith’s communications director when he was Tory leader. Campbell Bannerman recalled Elliott’s shock: ‘Matthew looked horrified at winning his own election. I don’t think he expected it.’ The discussion quickly turned to how to put pressure on the newly elected government. The strategy agreed was to form a group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, MEPs and peers to turn the screws on Cameron during the negotiations. Campbell Bannerman agreed to become co-chairman and run the operation in Brussels.

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. Unlike Hannan, his inspiration was not a Latvian foreign minister, but David Cameron himself. Baker had flirted with the idea of joining Ukip, but decided the Tory Party was the vessel that would bring about Brexit: ‘One of the principal reasons I knew the Conservative Party could be relied upon on the EU is that in 2007 David Cameron went to the Czech Republic and made a speech in which he said the EU was the “last gasp of an outdated ideology, a philosophy which has no place in our new world of freedom”. David Cameron inspired me to join the Conservative Party.’

Cameron soon had cause to regret his own powers of persuasion. Friday, 5 June 2015 was the fortieth anniversary of the 1975 EU referendum, and Baker, Campbell Bannerman, Wood and Walsh decided it would be the perfect moment to launch Conservatives for Britain. Matthew Elliott was out of the country at the time, and was nearly as blindsided as the prime minister when the story announcing the creation of the organisation appeared on the front page of the

Sunday Telegraph

 on 7 June. By that point CfB had been meeting in secret for a month, and had already recruited fifty Tory MPs. Cameron admitted to Baker later that he was ‘spooked’ that no intelligence on the operation had reached him. Campbell Bannerman recalled, ‘It wasn’t expected, and we hit the Remain campaign very early and very hard. Steve did an excellent job of getting people on board.’

A week later, Baker had recruited 110 Tory MPs, thirteen peers and twelve MEPs. Sympathetic cabinet ministers privately signed up to the mailing list. Later that week Labour MPs launched a sister group, Labour for Britain, to escalate hostilities. Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Kelvin Hopkins and Gisela Stuart were all on board, along with the leading Labour donor John Mills, a veteran of the 1975 referendum campaign.

But there was a more seismic announcement to come. Elliott flew home and resolved to exercise greater control over the MPs. He had already secretly recruited just the man to do that. On 14 June the

Sunday Times

 revealed that Dominic Cummings had been charged with setting up the ‘Out’ campaign. For Eurosceptics their hour had come. And so, now, had their man.

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Dom and Arron

Few people would have given the scruffily-dressed man on the bicycle a second glance as he pedalled between offices and coffee shops in Westminster during May 2015. 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. The impression of dishevelled provincial mediocrity was hardly dispelled by the flat vowels of his native Durham or his preference for conducting business meetings in Pret a Manger. Only his penetrating eyes hinted that this was one of Britain’s most shrewd – and feared – political operators.

A former special adviser to Michael Gove, Cummings left the government in early 2014 after waging war on the educational establishment, the Liberal Democrats and the Downing Street machine in equal measure. He sat out the general election, not even bothering to watch the leaders’ debates on television. But as Parliament reconvened ten days after the election, his phone began to ring. He received a series of calls from Matthew Elliott, Bernard Jenkin and Stuart Wheeler, the former Tory donor who had defected to Ukip, asking him to set up the ‘Out’ campaign.

Cummings had form where Europe and referendums were concerned. He was campaign director at Business for Sterling, which helped to keep Britain out of the euro. In November 2004 he led the ‘No’ campaign in a referendum on whether to set up a north-east regional assembly, winning a crushing 78 per cent of the vote, a result so emphatic it persuaded John Prescott to abandon the idea altogether.

With Elliott’s success running the NOtoAV campaign, he and Cummings could muster three major campaign victories between them, but Elliott’s experience during the 2011 referendum had convinced him that he was not the right man to take day-to-day charge of the campaign: ‘I know my skillset is raising funds, organisation-building, gladhanding – which are very useful; it’s part of the campaign. But one of the things I learnt during NOtoAV is I didn’t really like and I’m not very good at running a war room. We needed somebody in there who was fearless, who was a warrior, who had a great strategic mind, who frankly had the appetite to take something on at a time when no one else thought it could be done. And Dom was the man to do that.’

Cummings is a Marmite figure, viewed by his allies as one of the most talented public policy professionals of his generation, a thinker with a Stakhanovite work ethic and a ruthless desire to promote his ideas, someone equipped with a rare ability to see around corners. For his enemies – who are legion – he is a raging menace, a Tory bastard love-child of Damian McBride and Alastair Campbell, a practitioner of the dark arts. Like all caricatures, there is some truth in both these portraits.

Those Cummings had angered in the past included David Cameron, most of his aides and Iain Duncan Smith, to whom he was briefly director of strategy before quitting and labelling IDS ‘incompetent’ as the Tory leader. When the coalition government was formed in 2010 Andy Coulson, Cameron’s director of communications, barred Cummings from any job in Whitehall. He continued to advise Michael Gove, for whom he had worked since 2007, from afar, but only became his special adviser once Coulson had fallen from grace as a result of the phone-hacking scandal. Craig Oliver, Coulson’s successor, was frequently infuriated to learn of Gove’s planned education reforms from the media, and developed a heartfelt detestation of Cummings which dulled his judgement. When it emerged that Cummings would run the ‘Out’ campaign, Oliver texted a journalist, ‘Quaking in our boots about Dominic Cummings. Not.’ That hubris would lead to nemesis a year later. When he left the government, Cameron himself labelled Cummings ‘a career psychopath’.

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 Nick Clegg called him ‘a loopy individual’.

But no other special adviser in the coalition years bent a department to their will like Cummings did; no other worked out their goals and drove through reforms as effectively in the face of widespread civil service opposition. No other special adviser wrote a 240-page thesis on their particular area of expertise (‘some thoughts on education and political priorities’) which offered learned observations about Thucydides and statistical modelling via

The Brothers Karamazov

. Cummings was a true Renaissance man, combining highbrow humanity with a taste for medieval Whitehall warfare. If no other special adviser sparked such loathing, none generated the same levels of loyalty either.

Cummings’ fearlessness in the face of authority had been forged in dark corners of the world. How many others, after graduating from Oxford with a First in Ancient and Modern History in 1994, would move to Russia for three years to help set up a new airline flying from Samara, on the Volga, to Vienna? KGB threats were issued, the airline only got one passenger, and the pilot took off without him. How many others after winning the north-east referendum would have retreated for two years to a bunker he and his father had built under their farm in Durham to read science and history in an attempt to understand the world?

2

One of Cummings’ heroes was James Carville, Bill Clinton’s legendary message man, who revelled in the sobriquet ‘the Ragin’ Cajun’ on account of his fiery temper and Louisiana roots, a man immortalised on film in

The War Room

, a documentary on Clinton’s come-from-behind win in 1992. ‘Dom watched

The War Room

, I would guess, forty to fifty times,’ a friend said. ‘He would sing the theme music. The missing Dom years were basically spent in a bunker under the Pennines watching

The War Room

 on repeat.’

There is much of Carville in Cummings’ approach. When his involvement in the campaign was revealed under the headline ‘Tory bovver boy leads “No” fight’, a Conservative aide remarked admiringly, ‘Dom knows how to win, and he doesn’t care who he pisses off in the process.’

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 The man himself put it this way: ‘I am not motivated by people in SW1 liking me. This is often confused with having a personality that likes fighting with people.’

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Cummings had never stopped being Eurosceptic, but his three years in government had radicalised him. The EU was, he believed, like much of Whitehall ‘programmed to fail’: ‘It’s a crap 1950s idea, it cannot work.’ It was also stifling his efforts to reform education. In a blog written in 2014, Cummings’ rage at the impotence of British ministers was vividly demonstrated: ‘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 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 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.’

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With Cummings’ appointment, Elliott had picked someone with an almost unique combination of Euroscepticism, organisational nous and the rage to fight a winning campaign. Douglas Carswell believed the nascent ‘Out’ operation had now found the third of its ‘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.’

When he arrived, Cummings knew exactly what he wanted to do with the campaign. In May and June 2014 he had been hired by Elliott to do polling and focus groups on how an ‘Out’ campaign might position itself. The paper he wrote one friend called ‘the

ur

 document of the campaign’. Cummings realised that the people and the views that would hold the key to a referendum victory were very far removed from the sensibilities of the London elite. He himself went to a fee-paying school, and in December 2011 had married Mary Wakefield, the deputy editor of the

Spectator

 and daughter of Sir Humphry Wakefield, of Chillingham Castle in Northumberland. They lived in some comfort in Islington, the north London borough synonymous with the metropolitan moneyed classes. But Cummings remembered his upbringing in the provinces, rooted in the Durham yeoman class, and constructed his campaign plan accordingly.

A close ally said, ‘He found that people in market towns in the Midlands hate London, hate the elites, think more money should go to the NHS, hate bankers and are not very keen on foreigners. He found that Europe was deeply unpopular, but that if you wanted to reach people you had to talk about immigration and the NHS. This was a campaign that would be ruthlessly focused on people as they actually are. 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.’

When Cummings met Elliott in May 2015, ‘There was a road map already done.’ His campaign blueprint, chillingly prescient of what would come to pass two years later, was outlined in an article for

The Times

 on 26 June 2014. He wrote: ‘The combination of immigration, benefits, and human rights dominates all discussion of politics and Europe. People think that immigration is “out of control” puts public services under intolerable strain.’ Crucially, the ‘biggest change’ Cummings noticed from when he was fighting to keep Britain out of the euro was that ‘people now spontaneously connect the issue of immigration and the EU. The policy that they raise and discuss most is “the Australian points system for immigration” and many realise that membership of the EU makes this impossible … The second strongest argument for leaving is that “we can save a fortune and spend that money on the NHS or whatever we want” … On issue after issue they side with “let’s take back control” over “we gain more by sharing power”.’ Cummings concluded that the referendum choice would come down to ‘Do you fear economic disaster?’ against ‘the prize of controlling immigration and saving all the cash’.

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 He saw the linkage between immigration and control as the key to a referendum victory.

And yet there are hints that he did not want to focus on migration to the detriment of other arguments. Four days later his blog appeared, in which the very first point he made was: ‘The official OUT campaign does not need to focus on immigration. The main thing it needs to say on immigration is “if you are happy with the status quo on immigration, then vote to stay IN”.’ Instead, he said, ‘The OUT campaign has one essential task – to neutralise the fear that leaving may be bad for jobs and living standards. This requires a grassroots movement based on small businesses.’

Cummings and Elliott were to work hard to enlist business support, but ultimately they failed to get the backing they hoped for. But Cummings did understand, even in 2014, that Cameron would struggle to neutralise immigration as an issue, and that outsiders like Nigel Farage might have a role to play alongside the formal campaign: ‘Immigration is now such a powerful dynamic in public opinion that a) no existing political force can stop people being so worried about it and … b) it is therefore not necessary for the main campaign to focus on it in a referendum (others will anyway) and focusing on it would alienate other crucial parts of the electorate.’

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Throughout 2015 Farage and Ukip complained that Cummings did not understand that immigration was the key to victory, and would not make it the centrepiece of his campaign. These writings show that he did understand the issue, particularly its linkage with strain on the NHS. But in 2015 his priority was to get a fair hearing from the media, and that involved downplaying immigration.

As Cummings moved to build a campaign team, he was quickly reminded of why he had stepped away from Planet Eurosceptic. He told Elliott that Business for Britain would have to become a full Brexit outfit, or he would leave. A source close to Cummings said he despaired at ‘dealing with a whole bunch of Tory MPs who were totally and utterly clueless about organisation, strategy, management and a whole lot of donors who were very reluctant to do anything’. Others told him, ‘There’s no way we can win.’

However, Cummings did develop a good relationship with Steve Baker – whom he judged ‘one of the very few honest MPs’ – which would prove useful in the months ahead. Though the two had a series of run-ins, Cummings never resorted to his most objectionable behaviour with Baker. Early in their relationship he said his approach would follow Bismarck’s ‘With a gentleman, a gentleman and a half; with a pirate, a pirate and a half.’

While Baker was a gentleman, Cummings was very soon butting heads with a fellow pirate.

On first inspection, Arron Banks does not have much in common with the man who would become his mortal foe. Short where Cummings is tall, brash where Cummings is cerebral, a fervent critic of ‘failed special advisers’ where Cummings was a serial creature of Westminster, a devotee of Mammon where Cummings is driven by the values of an Odyssean education. But look closer and the two might be cousins. Both share a fervent Euroscepticism, a loathing of most MPs, an ability to put other people’s backs up, an absolute conviction that they are right, and an utter refusal to back down.

Banks, who spent his early childhood in South Africa – where he owns part of a diamond mine – was a successful businessman who had made around £100 million from insurance firms like GoSkippy.com and Southern Rock, but was largely unknown outside politics until October 2014, when he abandoned the Tory Party and offered £100,000 to Ukip instead. When William Hague declared that he was ‘someone we have never heard of’, Banks promptly raised the donation to £1 million. To complete the portrait of an eccentric political berserker, he boasted about his stash of assault weapons in South Africa and about being expelled from school for what he called an ‘accumulation of offences’, including selling stolen communion wine to other boys.

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 He married a Russian model, had five children and bought a mansion north of Bristol previously occupied by musician Mike Oldfield, of

Tubular Bells

 fame.

After the general election, Banks went to Farage and Chris Bruni-Lowe and offered to make another major donation to turn Ukip into a more professional outfit. In the midst of the leadership coup, and convinced the party was unreformable, they sought to divert his enthusiasm and cash towards Europe instead. They were driven by a growing belief that Elliott and Business for Britain would not commit to campaign for Brexit. Bruni-Lowe said to Banks, ‘Why don’t you think about setting up a referendum campaign?’

Banks did not need much persuading. His views had been shaped by Maastricht – ‘I couldn’t believe John Major sold out the country in the way he did.’ Now he came to regard the Elliott operation as a similar establishment stitch-up. ‘We got started because Nigel asked us to,’ Banks said. ‘His opinion was that if the organisation didn’t get started quickly, we wouldn’t have the time to match what the Remain camp was going to do. It was apparent that Business for Britain had no intention of getting the campaign started until Cameron came back with his deal, and they had a lot of people who didn’t even want to leave Europe. Didn’t take us too long to work out!’

Divisions with Elliott hardened when Farage and Bruni-Lowe were invited on a cruise in June 2015 organised by the Midlands Industrial Council, a group of influential donors of whom the businessman David Wall was the prime mover. ‘Matthew was there to talk about his strategy,’ said Bruni-Lowe. He said, “I’m planning to do this big campaign, we don’t know what we’re going to name it yet, we don’t know when we’re going launch it yet.”’ Elliott’s hands were tied because some of the businessmen on the cruise were Business for Britain signatories, so he had to be careful not to exceed the terms of the campaign they had signed up to.

Bruni-Lowe said to Elliott, ‘If you’re going to do this campaign, why don’t you get Nigel and every other person in a room and divvy up what they can and can’t do? If you don’t do that and you let Nigel out into the wild, then you lose control.’

When the ship docked at Jersey Farage asked to see Elliott, and they went to a pub with Bruni-Lowe. Elliott talked about the people he was trying to hire, but the Ukip pair regarded his answers as ‘ill-defined’, and shared a concern that ‘there was no strategy’. They disagreed with him about the role of immigration and Farage in the campaign. Afterwards Farage turned to Bruni-Lowe and said, ‘Shit, we’ve got a problem. We need to get Banks going as quickly as possible.’

On 21 June Banks briefed a story to the

Sunday Telegraph

 announcing that he was going to raise £20 million to fund a campaign to leave, provisionally called ‘No thanks, we’re going global’, the first of several incarnations of his ‘Out’ campaign. ‘He went before Elliott,’ said Bruni-Lowe. ‘Banks basically gatecrashed it.’

From the beginning Banks had a brash role model in mind for winning votes and antagonising his opponents. He told Bruni-Lowe: ‘The only way I’m going to do this is by being slightly Trump-esque, which is attack everyone to the point where I can get parity with them – and then try and compete with them on quality. I’ve got call centres, I’m ten times better than them.’

The second ‘No’ campaign was up and running even before the first had got properly organised. Its goal was not, initially at least, to usurp the Elliott–Cummings effort, but to chivvy them along and give a platform for Farage. ‘Nigel and I effectively got Banks to set this up in order to give Nigel a voice,’ Bruni-Lowe remembered, ‘because it became clear when we sat down with Elliott that he didn’t want to touch Nigel with a barge pole.’

Once unleashed, however, Banks was not the sort of man to play second violin to anyone else. He quickly showed he was not messing about by offering Lynton Crosby £2 million to run the campaign. Banks had stood for election as a Conservative council candidate back in the early 1990s, and his first campaign had been run by Mark Fullbrook, now the ‘F’ in Crosby’s CTF Partners. Now he called Fullbrook to dangle the cash. ‘They thought about it for a week but then declined it,’ Banks recalled. ‘Said they couldn’t do that to Dave.’ Banks shopped around and hired Gerry Gunster, a US political consultant who had won more than thirty referendums across the pond.

In July the rival campaign chiefs held peace talks in Elliott’s office at 55 Tufton Street. Banks brought along Richard Tice, the property investor who had tried to get Elliott to declare for ‘Out’ in February. It was not a meeting of minds. As Cummings remembers the discussion, Banks announced, ‘Me and Richard have been thinking about this for a few months and we are going to set up the campaign for the Leave side. The MPs don’t know what they’re doing.’

With this, at least, Cummings could agree. But then Banks also attacked the men sitting on the other side of the table, who he saw as products of the SW1 establishment: ‘You guys don’t know what you’re doing, all these Westminster institutions are crap.’ This was particularly cutting for Elliott, since he ran several of the groups from the office in which they were sitting.

Elliott says, ‘Banks’s approach to that meeting was very much “I’m going to be doing this, I know what I’m doing, you guys are Tories in the pocket of Number 10 who have no intention of setting up a campaign, I’m going to get on and do this. Either come with me or you’ll be blown away.”’

Cummings recalls Banks saying, ‘I’ve got more money than any of you and I’m much more clued-up than any of you, so it’s really a question for you guys of, do you want to be part of what we’re doing or not?’

Banks looked at Cummings and Elliott, but all he could were the faces of two Westminster lifers. ‘They just looked at us across the table and said “You don’t understand politics,”’ Banks recalled, ‘We just said, “All right, let’s get going then. We’ll show you what we can do.” That kicked off the whole thing. I think both sides thought the other were idiots. I’ve made hundreds of millions of pounds in commerce, and from what I can see they’ve done absolutely nothing with their lives. 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. He also made it clear at the meeting that he was a great admirer of Nigel Farage, and believed he should be the front man for the campaign. Cummings concluded that judgement was a ‘massive strategic error’. Thanks to the work he had done in 2014, he believed that no campaign run and fronted by Farage could win. Banks could be useful, but Cummings had