Unleashing Demons

by Craig Oliver

  There is one ray of hope. An online poll by BMG puts us 11 points behind, but they have also done a phone poll that puts us 7 points ahead. Andrew Cooper has pointed out consistently that the failure to sample enough time-poor, busy professional people was shown to be one of the biggest reasons why the voting polls had been wrong at the general election. So this poll, which has made efforts to include such people, ought to be among the most accurate.

  I go for a run to clear my head, get home to take a few calls and hear the ‘news notification’ going off on my phone. I am standing by my desk and the message imprints itself on my brain.

  ‘Thomas Mair, charged with MP Jo Cox’s murder, gives his name as “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”.’

  The significance of this is immediately clear – even though I am hit by a torrent of emotions, ranging from disgust to anger.

  I call a few people, including Peter Mandelson, whose reaction to the news seems to be one of relief and a hope it will give people pause for thought.

  The PM takes a while to get back to me. He has been walking down Chipping Norton High Street. I am buying some lunch in M&S when he calls. He tells me he is feeling much more positive. People are coming up to him and wishing him well, from all walks of life. He can feel it moving.

  A leading Sunday newspaper journalist texts me, ‘It’s over. You’ve won.’

  The rest of the day is a blizzard of calls – working hard on shaping the papers for tomorrow. The most significant conversation I have is with Tim Shipman to find out where they are in terms of who they will support.

  He says it’s been a tough day at the Sunday Times – with the editor, Martin Ivens, saying the paper is going to recommend that we leave the EU. Interestingly, the splash will be a line from our interview: ‘Cameron warns there’s no turning back if we leave.’

  Late on I have a conference call with the team. The papers are landing well for us. I tell them how proud I am of them.

  As things stand – I think we are going to win.

  Chapter 30

  This Truly Is a Leap in the Dark

  IT’S CLEAR THE Jo Cox killing has dampened the Leave campaign, to the extent that Gove’s headline in the Telegraph is the assertion that there won’t be a recession if we leave. That fails on two levels:

  They’re playing on our turf (the economy) because they can’t play on their own (immigration).

  Using the word ‘recession’, even to deny it, should make people worry.

  The daily tracker poll gives more reasons to be cheerful:

  Today’s headline voting figures: Remain 52.0%, Leave 48.0%. That’s a slow but steady and unmistakable reopening of a lead for Remain. This is consistent with the published polls.

  The YouGov poll indicates that the move back towards Remain started before the murder of Jo Cox.

  I watch Corbyn on Marr, who by accident or design is utterly hopeless as far as persuading people to vote Remain goes. He says some warm words about Jo Cox, but completely fails to say anything that would be helpful for the campaign, before actively harming it by stating freedom of movement does not need reform. He is completely at odds with the views of traditional Labour voters, but seems blind to it. No wonder many of his MPS fear losing the north of England, the way they lost Scotland.

  Alastair Campbell sends me a text: ‘Jesus God almighty.’

  It arrives just as I am sending one to Ryan and Will, saying: ‘Oh God.’

  Will makes a general point about all politicians failing on immigration throughout this campaign. I respond – maybe, but this is a key interview and some of us are managing to give the right line. (The Sunday Times splash has been described as ‘a thing of beauty’ by Ryan Coetzee, because it nails the crucial ‘no going back’ point.)

  I watch Gove. He is typically articulate, rattling out perfectly formed sentences like a debating machine. He claims to have ‘shuddered’ when he saw the Farage ‘Breaking Point’ poster. But when asked if he still stuck by the Vote Leave statement claiming a million Turks would be here within a few years and we should be careful because of their high birth and crime rates, he says he does. My jaw drops. I feel genuine anger listening to him, as he stands by something so inflammatory.

  DC calls me to get my estimation of what’s gone on. I tell him there’s no point varnishing it, Corbyn was hopeless. I also tell him Gove was a disgrace.

  I race out to pick up my kids to have a Father’s Day brunch, before getting in a car to Euston. I have a train to catch at 12.40. There’s no way we’ll make it. I ask the driver to turn the car round and drive me to Milton Keynes instead. Inevitably we end up talking a bit more about the referendum. He’s for Out. He’s a decent enough bloke, but it’s staggering how much Leave propaganda he’s swallowed without question. I take him through why each bit is wrong. He wants to listen.

  We pull up to some lights and I spot a Remain campaigner. I wave him over and take one of his stickers, placing it on the headrest of the passenger seat. He takes it in good heart.

  He gets me there on time and I shake his hand. He’s precisely the kind of person who should be concerned about leaving – the shrinking economy countless experts warn about, impacting his trade and the opportunities of his children. He says he’ll think hard, but I doubt I converted him.

  We’re rehearsing in a hotel that is twenty minutes outside Milton Keynes and has seen better days. The decor is tired and the rooms feel municipal.

  As I walk in the door, DC arrives. He asks me to go up to his room and not the conference room where we will be rehearsing. He tells me he thinks he’s landed Baroness Warsi, the former co-Chair of the Conservative Party – defecting from the Leave camp.

  He calls her and as he speaks, I survey a giant platter of fruit. I stab the tiny pomegranate seeds with a black, plastic pick. DC tells Sayeeda Warsi that he has always thought this is where she’d end up – and that she couldn’t go with Leave. He tells her I will call with a media plan in ten minutes.

  When he hangs up he leans forward and does a downward fist pump.

  I walk outside the hotel – telling Francis Elliott of The Times that I want to give him a chance to redeem himself, having buried the Sarah Wollaston story.

  I call Sayeeda. She tells me she watched the morning political programmes, hoping that the change in tone of the campaign would continue after the murder of Jo Cox, but she was shocked to see Farage and Gove out there, ‘doing it all again’.

  She is incensed, telling me she is horrified by the xenophobia and lying.

  An hour later she calls me saying she has spoken to The Times. I also ask her to talk to the BBC.

  The prep for tonight’s Question Time event takes place in a room with an overly large table. There are several bowls of fruit chews on the white table cloth.

  The key thing to get straight is how DC deals with the inevitable Jo Cox question.

  I think he needs to sum up the horror, pay tribute to her values, and then move on to the horrible nature of the UKIP poster and the motives behind it. We have several stabs at this before he gets it right. It’s clear he is walking a tightrope.

  We spend a lot of time finding ways to get ‘Don’t risk it’ and ‘No going back’ into his answers. I emphasise that the objective of tonight’s exercise is to put doubt into the heads of people who consider themselves to be wavering.

  After about an hour we get restless and stare out of the windows at a wedding party gathering in the sunshine below.

  DC decides he wants to go for a walk. A group of us join him – there’s plenty of gallows humour about what the hell we thought we were doing calling this referendum, and who has been the most obnoxious on the Brexit side. Priti Patel is a popular choice.

  I travel with DC to the MK Dons stadium for a brief look at the set. It’s a unit in the middle of a vast, windowless room.

  The podium DC is to stand on is a giant ‘Q’ and I worry it is a trip hazard. David Dimbleby has been positioned with his back to the audience
and in the PM’s eyeline, so that he can intervene when he wants.

  We are taken to a room in the adjoining Hilton hotel. There are two giant plates of biscuits and a bed. He’s got half an hour to get his mind straight, so Ed, Kate and I go for a drink.

  I’m reminded of the line in Paradise Lost, ‘They found no end in wandering mazes lost’, as we walk along an endless corridor that seems to stretch into infinity. We finally find reception, where we are pointed to an empty bar, with a TV tuned to the BBC News Channel. All of us agree, ‘This is such a campaign experience,’ lost in an anonymous hotel, which could be anywhere in the country, waiting, part-bored, part-anxious, part-desperate to be put out of our misery.

  I am so exhausted now that I don’t even feel tired. Each new task feels like a mountain to climb and I steel myself to do it.

  We go back to meet the PM and take him into make-up. Unusually for him, he is showing his nerves. We run through his key points.

  With a few minutes to go, Liz and I walk the PM to the programme – into the great dark room, with the set like a beacon in the centre of it all.

  We stand in the wings. It feels as if a lot is riding on this. Liz and I make banal remarks in an attempt to ease the tension. ‘Tie all right?’ he asks and we make a show of checking, though of course it is fine. The music strikes up and he strides on to audience applause. He is alone. We’ve done all we can. Only he can do it.

  Liz goes back to the dressing room. I watch from the wings – somehow feeling better about seeing it in the flesh.

  David Dimbleby introduces the programme. He says the first question is from Jo Cox. My brain tries to calculate this. How on earth have they picked someone with the same name? Why would they be so crass? Of course, it’s the question that is about Jo Cox. He apologises – saying it is a terrible thing to say.

  DC follows the script of making sure he gets his tribute across, before raising the ‘Breaking Point’ poster. He uses one of our pre-scripted lines, suggesting you have to question the motivation behind that poster.

  Dimbleby skilfully moves it to questioning our motivations for certain actions. Was it right that John Major referred to the Leave campaign as ‘squalid’? Surely it was wrong to say ISIS would be cheering Brexit. DC deals with it well enough.

  I am standing just a few feet from a man in the audience with a bushy beard and red Converse shoes. Any time anybody says anything that vaguely supports Brexit, he cheers and claps, before thrusting his hand in the air hoping for a question.

  The audience is full of people keen to assert themselves. One man declares that we should not listen to experts, before declaring himself to be one.

  The programme moves on to immigration. There’s no doubt that DC is on the ropes, tripping over his lines on the ‘tens of thousands’ migration target. I watch – nerveless, like a trainer in the corner, realising his fighter could go down or he could twist off the ropes and start punching back.

  The key moment comes when an angry, older Brexiteer accuses DC of being Neville Chamberlain. Something snaps in the PM – outraged by being compared to an appeaser. I wonder if this will lead to triumph or disaster. He tells them his desk in Downing Street is two yards from the Cabinet Room where Churchill made the decision to fight on in the Second World War. He makes the point that Churchill wanted the support of the French and the Poles, which wasn’t available to him – but he didn’t give up on European democracy. It sounds barnstorming. The audience claps and cheers. It’s clear so many people want their leaders to show some fight.

  The programme glides in to landing.

  DC is visibly rattled when he comes off. I tell him he did well and I’m sure it will clip down well on the news. He asks me if I am sure. As he gets into the car, I put my hand on his forearm, ‘It was better than all right – it was really good. You will see on the news.’

  Before we get back to London, I have a call from him asking again how it went. He really is troubled by the skirmishes on immigration.

  I call an Uber from No. 10 and share it home with Kate. She’s worried that if and when we win, there are votes on the Finance Bill that the Brexiteers will use to hold us to ransom as soon as next week. Both of us express our hatred for this situation – and disbelief that it all came to this.

  Everyone I run into asks how on earth we came to call a referendum. The truth is it was unavoidable. The reality is we are in the trenches, out of ammunition, bayonets fixed, ready for yet more hand-to-hand conflict if we survive this skirmish.

  We are nearly there. We have no clue where we will land.

  This truly is a leap in the dark.

  The next day the Sayeeda Warsi story lands well. It’s the splash in The Times and the lead on the BBC – calling out the xenophobia and hatred, with a special kicking for Gove. Leave are claiming they didn’t even realise she was supposed to be one of theirs. This is garbage. She was clearly associated with them.

  This morning we’re doing an interview with the Sun. It feels like a gamble, because they’ve attacked us so hard for so long.

  I get in a car to No. 10. It is pouring with rain. Standing by the road is a solitary Stronger In supporter, holding up a sign. I want to get out of the car and give him a hug for caring so much.

  I link up with the PM and we get in the car. He’s feeling upbeat about Sayeeda. He’s also seen that Question Time did clip down well for him.

  We meet Harriet Harman and huddle under an awning watching the rain, while the events team sort things out. There’s a bit of an awkward conversation, before they settle into talking about Jo Cox.

  On the train, I mention to the PM how rattled Boris appears to be that he is getting so much criticism for the Leave campaign going so hard on immigration. He’s been on stage talking about supporting an amnesty for illegal immigrants. We are the liberal ones on this, but neither of us is convinced about creating a magnet for illegal immigration.

  Tony Gallagher and Tom Newton Dunn from the Sun squeeze into the seats opposite the PM as the train leaves and I sit next to him. Tony is saying how odd The Times splash on Sayeeda is – we don’t want to tell him how delighted we are.

  The interview is fine. We give them a line on petrol prices rising and a line on how reform isn’t over. It feels like everyone is sticking to the deal that they’ll do it straight. I watch them dash through the rain for shelter at the next station.

  I get in the car with DC and we talk about the lie of the land. He’s not sure of victory, but says, ‘Hypocritically, Leave MPs now want me to stay.’

  Some Brexit people have asked to see him at 10 p.m. on Thursday. It’s plain this is just drama and he should avoid it. I wonder what he thinks will happen in the party. He suspects there won’t only be people saying we stole it if they lose, ‘There’ll be plenty of people who feel it’s been dragged away from them by Boris, who has been a Johnny-come-lately in all of this.’

  We consider a message sent from Andrew Cooper: ‘Encouraging new poll out tonight: ‘Remain 53%, Leave 47%. It will have a lot of credibility with the media, because it’s from John Curtice.’

  Today we are to be followed around by Laura Kuenssberg. The idea is that we visit a series of factories to show the supply chain – and how a small part, the moulding around the buttons in the door of a Mini, moves through a number of factories, employing a lot of people and resulting in us being able to sell a lot of cars, tariff free, into Europe.

  We arrive at the final factory, where the Mini is assembled. The PM leads a small press group, including Laura Kuenssberg, around the production line. It’s an impressive sight – almost like seeing a jigsaw puzzle being put together. The PM looks like he’s bordering on the eccentric, as he goes along the line doing his own piece to camera, designed to tell the story.

  As he carries on, Laura asks me how it’s going. I tell her and ask her the same question. She tells me it’s all been very unedifying on both sides. I try not to be too pissed off, because I just don’t accept we’re even close to what Lea
ve is doing. My main point though is, ‘When will journalists take responsibility for their role in this?’ They want clean, simple, preferably confrontational stories – and reject stories they consider too subtle or nuanced. It makes political organisations of all stripes be more hyperbolic, just to get on the news in the hope we will be heard.

  She seems never to have considered this. Something that seems so clear to us is far from obvious.

  Filming done, we race back to Parliament, where the PM is to join the statements about the death of Jo Cox.

  I’d like to see them. But I have to go to North House for the preparations for the Wembley debate.

  When I arrive, things are already in progress. Sadiq Khan, Ruth Davidson and Frances O’Grady, the General Secretary of the TUC, are at their lecterns, with the Stronger In rebuttal team playing Boris, Gisela Stuart, and Andrea Leadsom, the Energy minister.

  I sit in the front row, with Alastair Campbell behind me.

  Our team is wordy, leaden and slow. They take forever to get warmed up – eventually stumbling on the right lines. They should be killing on the economy, but they are being killed. And immigration is a mess. The key question is put once again: does the panel agree there should be a limit to the level of immigration? Frances stumbles, then crumbles. She doesn’t know the answer. Ruth has a confident stab, then falls flat on her face, saying, ‘Oh bollocks!’

  I press pause several times and give them the basics – passionate attacks about Leave not having a plan; pointing out they are all over the shop on immigration (and that we need to get out of our defensive crouch and start fighting back).

  They’re also poor on sovereignty – knocked back by claims of how much laws are forced on us by Brussels. It’s a revelation to some that this is rubbish and that we have total sovereignty on defence, setting taxes, schools, hospitals, and so on. Just as in the last debate, I tell them they need to call them out and attack.