The Brexit Club Read online

  For Lucia Florence, an example of

  a successful European union

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘At the moment, Farage and UKIP are the only people speaking up for Brexit. All these Tory Eurosceptics, including yourself, you can’t even admit that you are actually voting out. Why should we be listening to you? That’s exactly why Farage and UKIP are the leading voice in this campaign.’

  Many of the 200 or so people in the room, including UKIP MEP Tim Aker, applauded the man’s comments.

  But John Redwood, the Conservative MP on the panel and the person at whom the question was aimed, simply folded his arms and spoke softly into the microphone.

  ‘I’ve been careful not to make any criticism of Mr Farage or even UKIP,’ he said.

  I’ve been working very hard to get you all to understand that we need to get together and we need to speak in a tone and in terms that address the many people out there who don’t yet agree with us, rather than constantly talking to each other about whether our doctrines and views are pure enough or not. I really would urge you to think carefully about that sound advice.

  Apart from a smattering of applause, the majority of the audience were unconvinced by Redwood’s plea.

  They wanted a full-throated attack on Prime Minister David Cameron’s plan for renegotiating the UK’s relationship with Brussels.

  They wanted Redwood to lambast the political establishment for its dedication to a European project that had slyly stolen sovereignty from Britain since 1973.

  They wanted to be told that the Out campaign was going to win the upcoming referendum, which many had been awaiting for forty years.

  They did not want to be told to ‘think carefully’.

  Tim Aker, who less than a month earlier had failed to win a seat in Parliament at the 2015 general election, did give the audience of Eurosceptic campaigners what they wanted.

  In his grey double-breasted suit – which made him look a generation older than his thirty years – Aker decided now was the time to kill his idol.

  ‘It saddens me that someone who’s so learned about the European Union can be so half-hearted in their approach at this point in time,’ he began, before raising his voice along with his rhetoric:

  I grew up in politics and so on, reading your books, John, and you were a great inspiration, but to be on a panel where now, after the Lisbon Treaty, after every battle that you have fought against and lost, you still say, ‘We might stay in the European Union; I might vote to stay in’, I find that absolutely ridiculous and disingenuous to the people listening here tonight and the people who will see it on YouTube.

  He wasn’t finished: ‘To see that you can say, after everything, after 300,000 net immigration, after the complete reduction of our fishing waters, of everything else, for you to say, “I might just think about staying in and not commit,” I think that’s very disingenuous and I’m very disappointed.’

  The room broke out in applause. Redwood, who had let out a loud sigh during Aker’s speech, was in an unfamiliar situation: he was being accused of not being Eurosceptic enough.

  It was not a claim often levelled at him.

  John Redwood – the man who at the height of Conservative divisions over Europe in the mid-1990s challenged Prime Minister John Major for the leadership of the party.

  John Redwood – the man who repeatedly attacked the European super-state through numerous books, such as Just Say No!: 100 Arguments against the Euro and The Death of Britain?.

  John Redwood – the man who as a 23-year-old campaigned for a ‘No’ vote the last time there was a referendum on the UK’s European membership, in 1975.

  John Redwood – the archetypal Conservative Eurosceptic.

  And yet, on 1 June 2015, the 63-year-old Wokingham MP was deemed to be not Eurosceptic enough by the majority of the audience at a meeting of the Bruges Group.

  Formed in 1989, the group was inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s speech in Belgium the previous year attacking the creeping powers of the European project.

  The group holds regular events, mainly in the plush surroundings of the Royal Over-Seas League House, located a stone’s throw from St James’s Palace.

  The Bruges Group had kept the Eurosceptic flame burning ever since its creation – through the knifing of Thatcher, the turmoil of the Tory Party in the mid-1990s, and the virtual irrelevance of the Conservatives in the noughties.

  Speakers addressing meetings would often deliver their anti-EU musings from a podium that had a signed black-and-white framed photograph of Thatcher attached to the front.

  The Iron Lady was always looking out at the group’s members, who could derive solace from her gaze.

  But that night’s meeting, titled ‘The EU and the Future of Britain’, was proving a tough ride for Redwood – one of Thatcher’s favoured sons.

  Much of the evening had involved Aker talking up the brilliance of UKIP leader Nigel Farage, insisting that the only reason an EU referendum was now going to happen was because of him.

  For Redwood, this was not a point worth debating – climbing the mountain to victory was what mattered now, not how the Eurosceptic supporters had reached base camp.

  The surprise general election win by the Conservative Party twenty-five days earlier meant the EU referendum would now have to happen before the end of 2017.

  The pledge had been included in the Tory manifesto, and the party’s unexpected win meant it had not been horse-traded away in coalition agreement discussions. The Tories were ruling alone, so the referendum was on.

  But before the vote, there was the small matter of Cameron’s renegotiation of the terms of the UK’s membership.

  During his speech before the question-and-answer session, Redwood told the audience:

  I know there are some here who would rather just leave the European Union tomorrow. I have to tell you, you have not attracted enough support for that proposal and there is no majority in the House of Commons for that proposal, and that should be of interest and concern to you. The route we have chosen may take a little longer, may be more subtle than some of you wish, but it is meant well and I ask you to hear me out and to understand the journey we are embarked upon. If, as many of you think, there is no such sensible deal on offer, do you not see that it would be much easier to persuade our fellow citizens that we must leave the European Union because a serious-minded and intelligent Prime Minister had done his best to try and deal with the obvious difficulties that many British people find with our current membership? If he is unable to deal with those issues then it would be that much easier to persuade the necessary number of people to vote ‘no’ in a referendum.

  The subtlety of the argument was lost on many, including Aker.

  Redwood en
ded up almost pleading with the audience to think beyond how to appeal to just those in the room.

  ‘If you spend your whole time shouting at people that they’ve got to leave tomorrow, you are not going to win,’ he said.

  Looking on from the back of the room was Michael Heaver, the 25-year-old recently appointed by Farage to be his right-hand man. For him, the reaction of the audience at the meeting confirmed what he had long thought: Nigel Farage should lead the Out campaign.

  Over a glass of wine in the reception area of Over-Seas House once the meeting had ended, Heaver batted away alternative names put to him as potential leaders – including the Tory rising star Priti Patel.

  As far as he was concerned, it was only Farage who could appeal to the millions of undecided voters across the country.

  During the meeting, Aker was asked: What happens if Farage does become the leader of the Out campaign?

  ‘We win. It is that simple,’ was his reply.

  What he didn’t know was that plans were already afoot – plans with roots stretching back long before the general election – to make sure that didn’t happen.

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘Gentlemen, I fear we’re being hijacked. Reload!’

  Chris Bruni-Lowe and Raheem Kassam smiled. When Nigel Farage bellowed ‘reload’ it was usually because his pint glass was empty and another ale was needed quick-sharp.

  But this time Farage was not issuing the order in the Marquis of Granby pub in Westminster, or any of the other taverns and clubs he had drunk in over the previous few months as part of his campaign to get elected to Westminster.

  This time, Farage was in his office in UKIP’s London headquarters, moments away from telling the party’s National Executive Committee whether he still intended to quit as leader – as he had vowed three days earlier – or had changed his mind and would lead the party into the EU referendum.

  Farage was a political gambler – a man who always liked to raise the stakes in order to make any victory taste extra sweet. In September 2013, when he first predicted UKIP would win the following year’s European Parliament elections, not many people took him seriously. But his party did win – and he helped to push the Conservatives into third place in a national election for the first time in the Tories’ history.

  A year after that prediction, he persuaded Conservative MPs Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless to defect to UKIP, and the pair won the subsequent by-elections under their new party colours at a relative canter.

  Farage was unstoppable – or so he thought.

  With the polls indicating UKIP was on course to finish third in the popular vote in the 2015 general election, Farage decided to up the ante again.

  In his book The Purple Revolution, he vowed to quit as party leader if he did not win the seat of South Thanet in Kent. ‘So over to you, dear voter. It’s all down to you now,’ the book ended. The plan was for the good people of South Thanet to heed their leader’s call and carry him to victory on a wave of Eurosceptic populism.

  The gamble did not pay off, and Farage failed to get elected to the Houses of Parliament – finishing second to Conservative candidate Craig Mackinlay.

  In bright morning sunshine on 8 May, while David Cameron was celebrating his unexpected general election victory, Farage told a horde of journalists that he was honouring his promise and quitting as UKIP leader.

  Three days later, in his Mayfair office, he decided to ‘reload’.

  The NEC had already told him he didn’t have to resign. Thousands of UKIP members and supporters had emailed the party asking Farage to reconsider his resignation, and donors such as Arron Banks were desperate for him to stay on. There was, after all, a referendum to fight and, for many, Farage was the one who could lead the Eurosceptic movement to victory.

  Farage didn’t take much persuading, but any doubt over whether to stay on was swiftly removed after he received a phone call from Douglas Carswell – the only Ukipper who had managed to win a seat in the general election.

  Farage said:

  I had the bizarrest phone call with him. Deeply unpleasant, really deeply unpleasant. Even if I tried I couldn’t behave that nastily. It reminded me of the sort of chap that put a pistol in your back and said: ‘If you don’t go over the top I’ll shoot you.’ ‘You are going, you absolutely have to go, blah blah blah … the referendum was too important and you can’t have a voice in this referendum campaign.’

  Carswell does not remember making such remarks. As far as he can recall, he praised Farage for the ‘fantastic job’ he had done in making UKIP the third biggest party in vote terms in the UK and simply agreed that he should now step down.

  ‘I thought we needed a new leader to take us to the next level and I think I’m right in saying I said it would be wonderful if I could buy him lunch so we could talk about his ideas of who should take over,’ Carswell said. ‘That was my recollection of it. I can be quite outspoken and I can be quite critical but he says it’s one of the nastiest phone calls – if someone says they are leaving as leader, why would I have an incentive to be unkind towards him?’

  Farage called his close advisor, Chris Bruni-Lowe, who was with the UKIP leader’s chief of staff Raheem Kassam and party director Steve Stanbury looking at new offices for the party in Westminster. Farage told Bruni-Lowe: ‘You won’t believe what Carswell’s just said,’ before going on to claim that UKIP’s only MP had branded him ‘toxic’ and told him if he didn’t quit as leader, he would lose the referendum for the Eurosceptics. Bruni-Lowe and Kassam hurried back to UKIP’s offices to discuss the turn of events.

  Not long after that call, Suzanne Evans, deputy chairman of UKIP and the person Farage had announced should take over as interim leader while his permanent successor was found, walked into his office.

  ‘There was a lot of speculation [about] what was going to happen at the NEC meeting and Suzanne said: “Nigel, you can’t be involved in the referendum campaign,”’ said Farage. ‘I realised then that something was going on.’

  With the ‘reload’ order issued, the UKIP leader strode into the meeting room, told the NEC he would not be resigning, and immediately turned his mind to the EU referendum.

  Farage’s fear was simple: the ‘posh boys’ wanted to run the Out campaign – and they would lose.

  Sitting in his office, smoking his Rothman cigarettes – the smoking ban did not apply in UKIP HQ, apparently – Farage would wind himself up as he contemplated Carswell and Tory MEP Daniel Hannan’s desire to exclude him from what should be the greatest political fight of his life.

  To the UKIP leader, Hannan was the ultimate posh boy. A multi-linguist who was born in Peru, Hannan was educated at Marlborough College in Wiltshire and then Oxford University – as was UKIP’s former Rochester and Strood MP Mark Reckless.

  Despite Reckless passing through the same educational establishments as Hannan, Farage never classed him as one of the ‘posh boys’ – even though the future UKIP MP studied that most clichéd of university courses for aspiring politicians: philosophy, politics and economics.

  It was at Oxford that Hannan and Reckless formed their first anti-European group in November 1990.

  ‘It was the period between the deposition of Thatcher and John Major putting his initials on Maastricht, so between 22 November and 6 December 1990. I and Mark Reckless and a fellow undergraduate set up the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain in the Queen’s Lane café in Oxford,’ recalled Hannan.

  Despite also attending a fee-paying school – Dulwich College in south-east London – Farage did not go to university. He jumped straight into the ‘real world’, and at the age of eighteen became a trader in the City of London. But, like Hannan, the formative political moment of his life came when John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty – the document that created the modern-day European Union and set the wheels in motion on the euro.

  It wasn’t just Eurosceptics outside Parliament who were motivated to act by Maastricht, and Major faced numerous rebellions
from his own backbenchers as he tried to get the treaty adopted into UK law.

  In 1993, after losing a Commons vote on a technical aspect of the Treaty, Major took the bold step of calling for a vote of confidence in his own government. The gamble paid off, and Major secured the backing of Parliament by forty votes.

  While both Hannan and Farage were motivated by the same aim – getting the UK out of the EU – they chose different routes to pursue their shared goal. Hannan sought to influence Conservative Party and ‘establishment’ thought from the inside and, after graduating from Oxford, became a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and a speechwriter for then Tory leader William Hague.

  Farage, after seeing an advert in the London Evening Standard for a meeting of the Campaign for an Independent Britain (not to be confused with Hannan’s Oxford-based organisation) in 1993, helped form the United Kingdom Independence Party, and became its first ever election candidate when he stood in the 1994 Eastleigh by-election.

  While Hannan spent much of his time writing about the EU, democracy and political philosophy – he has produced at least thirteen books on the subjects – Farage focused on grassroots campaigning, building up UKIP into the third party in British politics and honing his public image as a man of the people.

  Hannan, who on Twitter would often respond to a particular news item with a quotation from a Shakespeare play and the hashtag #nothingescapesshakespeare, clearly saw himself as a man for the people more than a man of the people.

  ‘It was perfectly clear on 11 May where everything stood,’ Farage said, and he was determined not to let the ‘posh boys’ destroy everything he had worked so hard for by running a referendum campaign based on issues that appealed to privately educated university graduates – rather than the millions of people who had voted UKIP at the general election.

  Luckily for Farage, he already knew the man who could help make sure he would get a platform on which to play a key role in the campaign; a man who had deep pockets, a huge sense of mischief and would be up for the challenge of taking on the establishments of not just Downing Street, but Hannan and his friends too: Arron Banks.