Unleashing Demons

by Craig Oliver

  DC rattles through some points:

  clear instruction from people.

  no Brexiteers or Remainers any more, just one Government.

  the machinery he plans to set up and how it will report to Cabinet straight away.

  we still have a mandate and manifesto we should deliver on.

  people think the party conference is a natural break for the new leader to be in place (some think longer, some shorter, ‘I’m not particularly fussed!’).

  Chris Grayling is the first to speak. He does not pay tribute to the PM, instead saying there must be no perception of a vacuum. He dispirits the room by saying it’s imperative the Cabinet meets throughout the summer.

  Philip Hammond is next. His main point is that we should use the debate about when we trigger Article 50 (the formal process for leaving the EU) as a major bargaining chip. He says there is fear in Europe – particularly among the Poles, who believe they will be made to pay as now being the largest non-Euro country.

  George is the first to praise the PM for his ‘good sense and dignity’. He says, ‘Conservatives deal with the world as it is, rather than how they want it to be.’ He says there is an ‘economic adjustment’ underway as the more exposed FTSE 250 has fallen dramatically. There will be hiring and investment freezes.

  Gove writes all of this down. Especially when George says, ‘We need to brace ourselves for ongoing volatility.’

  He concludes, ‘There will be damage and people will see it. But can you imagine the situation if we had not taken the action on the economy we have done?’

  Theresa May notably does not pay tribute either. She speaks in her usual no-nonsense way about the need to ‘competently and practically’ get the best result.

  Jeremy Hunt shows real grace and emotional intelligence. ‘You have done your country proud and we are all very proud of you.’

  Do I detect a little shame on the faces of others who have failed to pay tribute?

  The person next to me nudges and asks, ‘Is Gove going to speak?’ He certainly hasn’t indicated he wants to.

  Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, makes the rather good, but sensitive point, ‘This was a Government that was elected under the “Competence versus Chaos” strapline.’ She believes our international standing is at stake and we should get on with having a new leader soon, rather than having ‘myopic discussions’.

  It’s only when Michael Fallon is speaking that Gove finally puts up his pen to speak. Again it is in an overly emphatic way, pinching the end between thumb and forefinger, so that all of it is held aloft. There are still a few left before it gets to him.

  Sajid Javid makes an alarming intervention. Yesterday he raised eyebrows with a Pollyanna-ish approach on Marr. Today he is blunt. ‘I’ve been talking to business non-stop since Friday and I am not going to sugar coat it. The situation is very bad. Confidence is bad. Many companies will announce the freezing of recruitment and redundancies. Fresh produce is likely to rise in price by three to four per cent. Inward investment deals will collapse.’ He repeats, ‘It is not right to sugar coat this.’

  Gove raises his eyebrows rather theatrically. Finally Sajid warns about universities in chaos, not knowing what the situation is around foreign students.

  Michael Gove is finally invited to speak. He gives an effusive tribute, saying history will be generous to DC. He goes on to acknowledge the divisions in our society – saying nearly half the population will have felt robbed and ‘we need to be unified in stopping those who seek hate and division.’ There’s then some guff about needing to work together. Anyone hoping for some flesh on the bones will be disappointed. He looks to me like a seagull holding a fish in its beak that is too big to swallow – eager to keep hold of it, but also not sure it can carry the burden.

  I go over to the House for the PM’s statement. Politics feels like it is in utter chaos. A prime minister going, no opposition. Dozens of Labour MPs are making clear that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer acceptable. He has to keep appointing new people to his shadow cabinet, and even they feel they have to resign soon after.

  We hear that the new MP for Tooting is being introduced to the house. Someone says, ‘I’d advise her to keep her mobile phone on – she might end up in the shadow cabinet at this rate.’ DC uses the line during his statement and brings the house down.

  Corbyn chides his backbenchers. Some of them shout ‘Resign!’ back at him.

  A friend of mine who has a senior job in media in the United States comes into No. 10 for a coffee that ends up being a three-hour chat.

  She tells me she has watched the referendum campaign with interest and is currently wrestling with how she is going to deal with Trump vs Clinton in the race to become President of the United States. She sees that there are direct parallels between Trump and the Leave campaign:

  Both with official status (the Leave campaign given the stamp of approval by the Electoral Commission; Trump to be the Republican party nominee).

  Both prepared to say extreme and outrageous things that are deeply misleading and often straightforwardly wrong as a matter of fact.

  Covering that as an impartial journalist reporting on a campaign is tough. I reflect on how important the BBC’s role was – especially when parts of the press were campaigning so vigorously for Leave – and how they struggled to get it right in a heavily regulated environment where balance is a requirement.

  It was certainly hard for them and I would not have expected them to be anything other than impartial. But ultimately they should have done better. The BBC is such a key player in terms of scale and influence and they fell short.

  So how could it have been different? Too often BBC output led on stories that were simply wrong – particularly on its morning and online output. Senior editorial figures needed to step in and say, ‘Yes, we will do this story, but we will make clear that it is factually inaccurate from the outset.’ Too often the Remain campaign’s rebuttal, which was inevitably seen as partial and therefore suspect, was tagged on as an afterthought, when BBC editors should have been stamping their own, independent authority and analysis on the output. Again, the key phrase is ‘due impartiality’ – people and organisations should get the impartiality that they are ‘due’ and have earned.

  Similarly, it took them too long to realise that reporting two sides of an argument is hopeless if you can’t help people to understand where the weight of opinion lies. As Paul Johnson, the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies put it in a recent article in The Times, ‘We really will find that we have “had enough of experts” … if all we are presented with is spurious disagreement from which we cannot disentangle what the experts are actually saying, and why.’

  Finally, the BBC did not do enough to set the agenda themselves. Looking back, I am shocked by the number of times they took their stories – particularly on morning bulletins – from newspapers with an axe to grind, sometimes on things that even those papers didn’t consider worthy of putting up in lights.

  They could, for example, have done some proper journalism on why the university sector felt it would be badly damaged, providing stories that could and should have been at the top of the news.

  In short, if you are the biggest beast in the media jungle – and the BBC is by a mile – it is incumbent on you to confront a serious issue. It’s not as if the referendum presented a new problem for the BBC. As Paul Johnson pointed out in the same Times article, a review of the use of statistics, commissioned by the BBC and written before the referendum, but published after it, found a huge frustration in experts and the audience at being presented with rival claims, with no guidance on which has more merit.

  It recommended, ‘the BBC needs to get better and braver in interpreting and explaining rival statistics and guiding the audience.’

  The BBC needs to recognise it is an issue and address it.

  Chapter 34

  What Went Wrong?

  ON THE TUESDAY after the vote, we head to
Brussels for the PM’s final European Council.

  On the flight over he says, ‘My strategy is going to be not to get them not to kick off. I’ll read them a few home truths on immigration. And say it might have all been different if there’d been an emergency brake.’

  The common view is that the pivot point in all of this was in October 2014, when Merkel made clear that the simple, obvious solution, an emergency brake on the number of migrants, could never work and would never be given. A journalist from the Daily Mail has told me they honestly don’t believe the paper would have campaigned for leaving if that emergency brake had been granted. What became obvious is that the European Union has as its core belief that the freedoms of moving goods, services, money and people are inextricably linked as a package. They thought the UK benefited massively from the first three – so it should and could cope with the fourth.

  DC says, ‘We got things in renegotiation that in years to come we will bitterly regret not having. Making sure the pound was protected and ensuring it was clear it’s a multi-currency union was crucial. They fought hard against it.’ It’s true, but the kind of thing that just didn’t translate as a serious advantage to typical voters.

  We go in to the UKREP offices, and laugh at the sign outside saying, ‘From the magma of chaos, order is restored time after time.’ I always thought it was a crap quote – and I’m convinced now.

  There is a lot of hanging around.

  Merkel comes to see him for a one-on-one. He calls me, Ed and Simon Case in when he is done.

  The headline from the meeting is clear. Merkel was adamant, ‘There could never have been an emergency brake on the number of migrants.’ The fear is that history will write that we should have got more from the renegotiation. It’s evident that was not true. DC takes comfort from knowing this. He could not have achieved more.

  The Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman, Helen Bower, and I head over for dinner with the lobby while the PM is with the other leaders. I tell her to stab me in the leg with a fork if I end up in an argument, but the truth is they’re all rather morose, not quite sure how the hell we got here.

  After very little sleep, I arrive at North House for a board meeting.

  The agenda is essentially two items:

  what went wrong?

  where, if anywhere, do we go from here?

  David Sainsbury has, as ever, been generous. There are pots of tea and coffee and platters full of sausage and bacon rolls.

  Exhausted after little sleep, I grab some coffee and two rolls, which I smear with brown sauce, and take a seat at the end of the table.

  I say, ‘Hello,’ to Peter Mandelson, whose body language could not be more obvious, his torso is twisted away from me and he only grunts grudgingly.

  I sense something is up.

  Andrew Cooper is not here. This seems unusual, but his wife has a hospital appointment.

  Stuart Rose calls the meeting to order and Will is invited to sum things up. He was at the Stronger In wrap party last night and his voice is rough.

  He has had an update from Andrew Cooper and this forms the basis of his initial remarks.

  We had believed that a high turnout would work for us, but it didn’t: ‘There was a large number of angry people who hadn’t voted for a long time that came out – and that was fatal for us.’

  He also believes that we did not have a credible answer on immigration – arguing that the Conservatives were hamstrung by their commitment to bringing net migration down to the tens of thousands – and Labour faced criticism for allowing vast numbers of people in from the ‘accession countries’ – the Poles and other eastern Europeans.

  He goes on that we had believed that undecideds would naturally swing to us, but the evidence is that they were prepared to choose less immigration and ‘more control’ over a stronger economy.

  There’s been a lot of argument about why we weren’t more positive, but he says we discovered time and again positive stories just didn’t cut through with the media, or work with crucial swing voters.

  He points out that Leave spent way more money than we did, specifically referring to the wrap around the London Metro in the last few days of the campaign, funded by the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party. Why was it done in their name? Moreover, Arron Banks spent £11 million without putting a penny into Leave.

  Most interestingly, he says, ‘We have not reflected on quite how poor Labour’s leadership was.’ He points out that in a recent poll there was a twenty-one per cent net support among members for sharing a platform with other political parties – yet the leadership refused. He then points out the problems of not getting them to be part of our grid – and when we allowed them days, they simply did not deliver.

  Finally he argues, ‘Their campaign has disappeared in a puff of smoke. They are the campaign that got away with talking nonsense, because for them, there was no return to the political fray where they would have to live with their claims.’ He concludes, ‘Legislators need to think about the regulation of referendums.’

  Stephen Gilbert is invited to speak next. He underlines that we wrongly assumed the undecideds would turn to the status quo.

  All of us assumed this would happen. It had been the case at the general election and the pattern of the vast majority of referenda around the world. The reason for this is that the status quo is almost invariably the less risky option – the alternative, in our words, ‘a leap in the dark.’

  So why didn’t that happen in this case, especially as we held a lead among voters as a whole of eight per cent at the end of the campaign on whether Leave or Remain was riskier for them personally?

  Among the two key swing segments – ‘Heads vs Hearts’ and the ‘Disengaged Middle’, whose decisions were always going to decide the referendum – a narrow majority thought that remaining was more risky. They believed that staying in the EU meant continued uncontrolled immigration and spending £350 million a week on the EU, not the NHS.

  Stephen is also certain that we were right to focus on economic risk.

  I had not intended to speak much. But Stuart Rose indicates to me a number of times that he will be seeking my view.

  I hastily scribble some notes, before making a few points, starting with a tribute to the Stronger In team, who I believe handled themselves and the campaign with great skill. I go on:

  We called a referendum on a complex issue that many didn’t fully understand and as David Cameron said to me, it became about ‘immigration levels they didn’t want and an EU they didn’t love.’

  As a result, the referendum became a proxy for so many other issues. So immigration, general anger at ‘the way things are’ and the opportunity to give the establishment a kick all proved crucial.

  No one has done any effective public relations for the EU for a generation and so we were left trying to undo all the nonsense from bendy bananas to claims they make all of our laws, in a few short months.

  Our great strength was also our great weakness – we were a grand coalition of parties, each with a different agenda and emphasis. The backbone of any effective campaign is finding a message and sticking to it remorselessly. We did our best, but it was impossible to control all our constituent parts. The SNP and the Labour party always made clear they were not bought in to Stronger In. There will always remain a question about how many senior figures in the Labour leadership actually wanted us to win. Leave were a small group with a core message they stuck to.

  Leave also ran a mendacious campaign based on a series of lies: £350 million; Turkey; EU army; the scale on which Brussels interferes in our daily lives. And that was just the air war. The leaflets and social media interventions were infinitely worse.

  Finally, our reading of the polling was the economy would trump immigration. It didn’t – at least not in the way we thought it would. Many found the big government numbers too big and too specific to be believable. We deployed a parade of experts, which should, in a rational world, have been more than e
nough to make the economic case for remain and against leaving. But it obviously wasn’t. It is hard to think of how else we could have made the argument: these people really know what they are talking about, and they all see leaving as a risk.

  As I say all of these things, I am aware of nodding around the table from the likes of Brendan Barber and June Sarpong.

  At this point Peter Mandelson spins to me, his face no more than eighteen inches from mine, and says, ‘That is a heck of a statement – saying our polling was completely wrong.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ I point out, but allow the conversation to continue.

  Mandelson has his attack sorted and I can feel it coming. He praises the campaign as doing everything right. This is his way of intimating that he is blameless. He then goes on, ‘But the politics were not right.’ His point is that we should have realised that the economic argument was not landing properly and shifted. He makes the same point about immigration. ‘We should have asked ourselves: why is this not landing?’ His conclusion is that, ‘There was an exclusive, not an inclusive discussion at Number Ten.’

  It’s not even coded – David Cameron and George Osborne (and their pathetic lackeys) should have turned to me. They didn’t and now everyone is paying a very heavy price. He says, ‘We should have asked ourselves why it wasn’t working. We should have discussed it and we didn’t.’

  I feel my hackles rise. I raise my hand so that Stuart might ask me to speak after.