Cameron’s verdict: Boris owed Britain better
Britain’s former leader, David Cameron, deplores the Brexiteers’ glib political culture.
Worried about Brexit division within the Conservative Party, I decided early in 2016 to work on a key waverer: Boris Johnson. He was the most popular politician in the country. One poll suggested that if Boris stayed on board, then “remain” would lead by 8 per cent, but if he went for “leave”, that lead would fall to 1 per cent.
I had a lot of time for Boris and respected his talent. While I found some of his political antics infuriating, there was a reason for his appeal to the public. He was a great communicator. He was a good mayor of London, and at his best he was ambitious for Britain; he had big ideas and the energy to drive them through.
Boris was famously Eurosceptic and had strongly supported campaigns for a referendum in the past. But he had never argued to leave the EU. I fixed a date at the American ambassador’s tennis court, where we would be able to play and talk privately. Boris’s style on the court is like the rest of his life: aggressive, wildly unorthodox and extremely competitive.
After our game, we sat together. I started by saying how similar our political outlooks were. We had had our disagreements and tensions, but fundamentally we were part of the same team.
I knew he thought the results of my negotiations with the EU were disappointing. But I wanted him to accept that getting out of ever-closer union — something he had often spoken about — was real progress. We were improving on the status quo. He accepted that, but still believed it was a missed opportunity.
Playing on ambition
“Assume ‘remain’ wins,” I said. “I’ll bring the government back together and make new appointments. You will be a key part of that. I told him he would have a “top five” job. He ruminated on what was in the top five, given that he knew I wouldn’t move George (Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer) for him. “Defence is a top-five job,” I said. I was sure the hint was heavy enough to sink in. I’m not going to be prime minister for ever. At the next leadership election, it will probably be between you and George. Obviously I’m a huge supporter of George, but you’ve got every opportunity to win it. This will give you the best possible chance.”
Our discussion continued by text. Boris had become fixated on whether we could pass legislation that said UK law was ultimately supreme over EU law. This was a long-running Eurosceptic campaign in parliament, and I had hoped it might be addressed by domestic legislation.
I saw a chance to find a win for Boris that would give him extra cover for coming down on the side of remain. (Cabinet colleague) Oliver Letwin got to work on this bugbear of the most evangelical Eurosceptics and embarked on a nightmare round of shuttle diplomacy between Boris and government lawyers. But those lawyers were determined to defend the purity of European law and kept watering down the wording.
This epitomised a problem at the heart of the UK’s relationship with the EU. Instead of pushing the boundaries to make the EU’s legal order more tolerable, our officials were determined to play strictly by the rules.
It soon became clear this issue was secondary to another concern for Boris: what was the best outcome for him? Whichever senior Tory politician took the lead on the Brexit side — so loaded with images of patriotism, independence and romance — would become the darling of the party. He didn’t want to risk allowing someone else with a high profile — (justice secretary) Michael Gove in particular — to win that crown.
At the same time, he was certain the Brexit side would lose. So backing it brought little risk of breaking up the government he wanted to lead one day. It would be a risk-free bet on himself.
Patriotic appeal
I kept saying: “Don’t take the course that you fundamentally think is wrong for the country.” To be fair, his agonising was genuine. But he argued that this chance — a renegotiation followed by a referendum — might not come again, so it had to be “seized”. When I challenged him that “seizing means leaving” and “out means out”, he countered there could always be a fresh renegotiation, followed by a second referendum.
This was a view he would repeat early on in the campaign, only to be silenced by his new allies.
The conclusion I am left with is he risked an outcome he didn’t believe in because it would help his political career. One of the greatest miscalculations I made was that I thought moderate Eurosceptics would see, like me, that staying in and fighting, with new reforms agreed, with all the opt-outs secured, with all the advantages over trade and co-operation, was the right course. Perhaps that is one of the biggest pitfalls in politics: thinking that others, particularly those you know well, think like you. Often they don’t.
At that time Boris had not yet declared. And there was still hope; he admitted to the press that he was “veering all over the place like a broken shopping trolley”. I was texting him furiously: if you’re not sure, do what is right.
I was at home in Oxfordshire when he texted me. He said Brexit would be crushed “like the toad beneath the harrow” but he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror if he campaigned to remain.
Nine minutes later he was on TV telling the nation that he had come out for “out”. I knew what a serious blow this would be. He was the only leading politician whose favourability rating was higher than mine and could have a crucial influence on the soft voters we were trying to attract. Boris and Michael, two of my key generals, had defected in the first few days of battle. By the end, they seemed to me to be different people.
Boris had backed something he didn’t believe in. Michael had backed something he did perhaps believe in, but in the process had broken with his friends and supporters, while taking up positions that were against his political identity. Both then behaved appallingly, attacking their own government, turning a blind eye to their side’s unpleasant actions and becoming ambassadors for the expert-trashing, truth-twisting age of populism. As for Michael, one quality shone through: disloyalty. Disloyalty to me — and, later, disloyalty to Boris.
We made some big mistakes in the campaign — I won’t deny it. I should have done more to mix criticisms of the EU with talking about its very real achievements. Nor will I play the blame game: this was a referendum of my making and a campaign of my choosing.
I think about it every day, turning it all over in my head. As there were only 600,000 votes in it, it’s not far-fetched to say that if I had done something differently, the result could have been different.
Throughout it felt as if a cloud were hovering over us. Gradually, every killer argument was drowned out and every advantage slowly sunk. Every trait of this age of populism — the prominence of social media, the emergence of fake news, anti-Establishment sentiment, growing unease with globalisation, frustration over the level of immigration — appeared to conspire against our cause.
The physics of politics seemed to have changed.
At the start of the campaign we felt like winners-in-waiting. While “remain” engendered cross-party consensus, “leave” spawned battles between the rival groups. They had Gove and Johnson, but they were also a cauldron of toxicity, including figures such as Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings and the businessman Arron Banks.
There was something of the night about them that would, we hoped, put off many voters.
While we were saying membership of the EU was worth £4300 to each family, the leave campaigners claimed Britain was spending £350m a week on it. On May 11 they unveiled their liveried battle bus, emblazoned with the words, “We send the EU £350m a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”.
It wasn’t true. As Boris rode the bus round the country, he left the truth at home. The bus was disingenuous, it was tenuous — but it was also ingenious. The fact that it was inaccurate actually helped the leave campaigners. They wanted the row, because it continually emphasised the fact that we sent money — however much it actually was — to the EU.
Boris also spoke out in an interview about “the scandal of the promise made by politicians repeatedly that they could cut immigration to the tens of thousands”.
It wasn’t any old “politicians” he was berating; it was me. This was open warfare.
Gove said that EU immigration would mean up to “5m extra people coming to Britain” by 2030, and pointed to the EU’s stated objective of admitting Turkey.
There was no prospect of Turkey joining the EU for decades, if ever. In any case, like every other EU member, the UK had a veto over any country joining. Yet when the armed forces minister, Penny Mordaunt, was interviewed the next day, she denied that the UK could veto the accession of Turkey. We were no longer in the realms of stretching the truth, but ditching it altogether. Leave was lying.
Dog whistle
Gove, the liberal-minded, carefully considered Conservative intellectual, had become a foam-flecked Faragist warning that the entire Turkish population was about to come to Britain.
Boris, too, who proudly trumpeted his Turkish heritage, and who had advocated Turkey’s membership, was now backing the false claims about its accession. It didn’t take long to figure out leave’s obsession. Why focus on a country that wasn’t an EU member?
The answer was that it was a Muslim country, which piqued fears about Islamism, mass migration and the transformation of communities. It was blatant.
They might as well have said: “If you want a Muslim for a neighbour, vote ‘remain’.”
I pulled my punches. Again and again the opportunity came to hammer Johnson and Gove.
“These are now your opponents. They’re killing you,” George said. “You’ve got to destroy their credibility.” Every time I was shown a mocked-up poster like one of Johnson in the pocket of Farage, I vetoed it.
I was being urged to rule out Turkey ever becoming an EU member while I was PM, but I felt that was irresponsible. Paralysis had me in its grip. I was caught between being a campaigner and being a prime minister, and chose the latter. It truly was asymmetric warfare.
At a crunch meeting with my team and George, many were saying: “Can’t we just try again with Angela Merkel and the EU? Can’t we tell them Britain is about to leave if they don’t give us more on immigration?” We kept coming back to the importance of maintaining message discipline about the economy, because, as strategist Lynton Crosby put it to me: “All ‘leave’ has is immigration.”
So by the time I talked to Merkel, I told her I was going to push on with our plan.
“But I want you to know,” I emphasised, “that this is the major problem — and if we lose, this is why we’re going to lose.”
Elites for remain
Nearly every voice that should have mattered backed our case.
The voice of our main industries: cars, aircraft, trains, food, pharmaceuticals, farming, fashion, film. Our allies around the world: America, India, Japan, Australia, Canada. The multilateral bodies of the world: the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Thirteen Nobel prize winners. The head of the NHS. The former heads of MI5 and MI6. The head of the Church of England. “Maybe it’s a conspiracy,” I would say. “Or maybe all these people are right.”
Our cross-party clout relied mostly on Labour, but it was AWOL. Jeremy Corbyn delivered a handful of desultory speeches about remain and then went on holiday. Perhaps Corbyn wanted remain to lose.
On polling day, Samantha and I went to vote at Methodist Central Hall. The City was broadly calling it for remain. Crosby told me it was going to be OK. Our pollster, Andrew Cooper, reported a 10-point lead for remain.
Craig Oliver, Number 10’s director of communications, was charging around in a “Stronger in” T-shirt, saying we’d won.
My draft victory speech was an “open, comprehensive and generous offer” to the nation for a way forward: a route map for healing our divided country after a brutal campaign, and an assurance that we would heed the message from millions of leave voters that the status quo with the EU was no longer acceptable.
I thought how dramatically my political life expectancy had been reduced by the brutal campaign.
I had already confessed to my core team that I’d probably have to go within a couple of years, even if we won.
The first results seemed to be all right. I thought, “This is going OK”. But then Sunderland declared for leave by a huge margin. At 2am, results poured in from a cross-section of the country.
“Dad,” said my 12-year-old daughter Nancy. “We’re losing.”
I lay on the sofa, knowing I wouldn’t sleep. It was clear to me that I would have to resign. Staying on would simply be delaying the acceptance of a political death that had already taken place.
So why had I promised I would stay on if we lost? If I had admitted that there was any chance of my stepping down if remain lost, I would have jeopardised the referendum entirely. Resigning meant going back on my word. But whichever way I looked at it, I was convinced Britain needed a new prime minister.
I had a shower and came back downstairs just before 6am. Everything had been planned very calmly. Samantha and I would go out into Downing Street together. She said, “I just don’t think I can go out there — I feel terrible”, and had a stiff gin at 10 past eight, just before we walked, hand in hand, out into the daylight and a wall of cameras.
For the Record is published by HarperCollins on Thursday.
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