Unleashing Demons

by Craig Oliver

  For all of that, we have to face the fact that having realised the inevitability of a referendum, we failed to secure Boris Johnson or enough newspaper support. We were risking everything – with too many conditions set against us.

  More to the point, the closest thing to a law in politics, ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ turned out to be wrong for the first time in decades. Our destruction of the Leave campaign over the economy was complete – with international bodies, the Governor of the Bank of England and the overwhelming majority of independent economists warning repeatedly of the dangers of leaving. In the early stages of the campaign, it was almost alarming to see Leave fail to describe what life would look like outside the EU. Realising they had no answer, they bought into Nigel Farage’s UKIP agenda – something they always said they would never do. They were also prepared to mislead the public – refusing to let go of the claim that money that was never sent to the EU could be poured into the NHS, telling people millions of Turks would overrun this country, and claiming we’d be forced to join an EU army.

  Boris at least had the decency to try to distance himself from some of this nonsense. Gove, whom we should never forget had a picture of Lenin on his office wall, showed no such discomfort. Like Lenin, he believed the ends justified the means.

  Having worked with him for a number of years now, I’m not sure what he really believes. A senior Conservative once said of him, ‘The thing you’ve got to understand about Michael is that he is in love with rhetoric. He just loves arguing – he loves the idea of making a case … it could be anything.’ Having seen and heard him say and do so many things that seem so contradictory, I am still left with one simple question: Would the real Michael Gove please stand up?

  Finally, perhaps the most significant issue of all needs to be confronted.

  We made assumptions that were wrong about the type of country we live in and how people would react.

  We have all seen how the areas outside London, Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to Leave. Closer analysis of the results surprised me.

  There have been contradictory accounts about the level of turnout among young people. Analysis has settled on it being below forty per cent. In fact, turnout increased among every age-group except 18–24s: the group with the most to gain from remaining in the EU. Remain had a sophisticated, widespread and witty campaign that covered all fronts with the young – no one can say that why they needed to vote wasn’t made clear. And yet they did not turn out in big enough numbers. If 18–24 year-olds had voted in the same proportions as 35–44 year-olds, Remain would have won.

  Results were announced at a local authority, not constituency, level. I asked Andrew Cooper if it was possible to be specific to particular areas. He did some modelling for me. Breaking the results down to a constituency level, here is how the seats around the Nissan car plant, built largely to trade with Europe, voted:

  Washington & Sunderland West – Remain 32%, Leave 68%

  Houghton & Sunderland South – Remain 33%, Leave 67%

  The seat of Jo Cox, who had campaigned so passionately for Remain before she was killed, voted:

  Batley & Spen – Remain 38%, Leave 62%

  And the seat that contains the Tata steel plant, which many believed would not be rescued if we left the EU, voted:

  Aberavon – Remain 38%, Leave 62%

  It seems to make no sense for Sunderland and Aberavon to have voted Leave. Doing so threatened the economic livelihood of their area – and therefore the life chances of the people who live there. So why did they do it?

  Remain not having enough of an answer on immigration was certainly a major part of the problem. Tough controls on the welfare payments that European migrants could receive on coming into the UK were an achievement in the renegotiation. It meant that in some cases people would be losing a thousand pounds a month – a major disincentive to coming here. And yet even I, who am as metropolitan and liberal on immigration as they come, questioned being part of an organisation that insists on having unlimited freedom of movement to work. It seems to me it is an unsustainable situation that countries with such varying economies can continue with this system.

  In the face of the first rebellion against it, in the form of our renegotiation, the EU’s response was to pull up the drawbridge and resist. In 2014 Angela Merkel warned us there could not be an emergency brake on numbers – and even after Britain had voted to leave, she insisted that could never have been on the table. Her roots in Eastern Europe told – when the Iron Curtain came down, she and tens of millions of others were reassured they need never be second-class citizens again. That meant freedom of movement.

  For the popular press, the issue was simple: David Cameron said, ‘I will not take no for an answer,’ in his 2014 conference speech on immigration and the renegotiation. Our belief and claim that we had been true to that statement simply was not accepted and was widely ridiculed.

  Despite that, we continued to have faith in the view that our relentless campaign on the economy would see us through. It didn’t.

  Since the vote, Peter Mandelson has pointed out that he argued for a major intervention on immigration – including a speech by the PM – in the final fortnight of the campaign. The idea was widely rejected, because it would have simply acted as another mechanism to highlight that we could not give people what they wanted.

  A more important point is that no one believed that a section of society, which in many cases had not engaged in the political process since Tony Blair was first elected, would turn out in such great numbers.

  Turnout for the referendum was 72.2 per cent – up six per cent on the 2015 general election. But turnout in the three counting regions to vote Remain increased by much less than in the nine that voted Leave (where it increased by an average of 7.5 per cent).

  The increased turnout equates to about 2.8 million people who didn’t vote in the general election, but did vote in the referendum. Ironically, if the demographic profile of these extra voters had been more or less the same as that of the 2015 general election voters, Remain would have won by about 52.5 to 47.5. Most polls, which have to take some view on who will actually vote, made precisely this assumption. That explains why so many got it wrong, and crucially, why most people thought we would win.

  Those extra 2.8 million voters backed Leave overwhelmingly – and by more than enough to take them over the line to victory.

  On the night, Nick Robinson provided anecdotal evidence from Sunderland of lots of people there who hadn’t voted since the 1980s and were all turning out to vote Leave.

  So what inspired them to do so?

  When I was a child, my parents would pack me, my brother and sister into a VW camper van and take us on the twelve-hour drive to Torry in Aberdeen, where my grandparents lived. Their home was a tenement flat on a steep brae (hill) with a tiny bathroom, a kitchenette (where my grandmother would cook mince and tatties that I would struggle to eat) and two other rooms. The first of these rooms was kept special for when the church minister came. He rarely did. The second room was where they lived. It reminded me of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because it contained their bed, a table to eat at, two armchairs and a TV.

  They were at the bottom – struggling to survive. But they also believed they had a stake in society. My grandpa, who moved from job to job, often in shops, made a point of reading the paper every day and made sure that everything stopped when the news came on. They always voted – believing it was their duty and they should have their say.

  They were no different from others in their community. But somewhere along the line, people like them became disconnected from the political process. They felt betrayed – that politicians had feathered their own nests while they struggled. The world changed around them at an often alarming pace, with their communities feeling worse than they had in the past. TV programmes and social media showed the lifestyles of the rich and famous, which were a stark contrast to their own lives that felt insecure and a grind.
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  Anyone who has been to focus groups is familiar with people who feel angry about all of this. They are like the narrator of Joseph Heller’s brilliant but utterly pessimistic novel, Something Happened, struggling to put their finger on what changed, what went wrong, and looking for an answer.

  I suspect that for many of them the referendum was more than a straightforward question of whether or not it made sense to remain in the European Union. Instead it was a cipher that, encouraged by a cynical Leave campaign, allowed them to put whatever was worrying or angering them on the ballot paper: immigration, feeling let down, ignored, betrayed, a life that didn’t turn out as it should have done …

  Leave were ruthless in the exploitation of that with the slogan ‘Take back control’, which was powerful and vague enough to mean whatever you wanted it to. If we asked people who moderated the focus groups, ‘Surely they don’t believe what Leave are claiming … that we’ll be able to slip anchor, and float away from Europe, turning ourselves into the land of milk and honey …,’ they would respond, ‘Some do. Many don’t. But they’re sending a message.’

  The feeling in that group was too powerful. It persuaded them that for once it was worth voting, and they overwhelmed those who asked, ‘Don’t you realise, things will be worse not just for us, but for you, too, if we leave?’

  We didn’t do enough to understand them. Will politics find a way to properly engage them – rather than play cynical games, attempting to confirm their worst fears about the world? This question will and should trouble us in the coming years.

  In the weeks that have passed since the referendum, I have done a number of interviews and events on what happened and the reality of Brexit. There are a lot of despondent people out there who question, why did David Cameron have to call a referendum? Surely he should have left it? Can there be another one?

  I remind them that the question of our membership of the EU had been a slow train coming – with pressure not just from within the Conservative party, but UKIP and the popular press. That pressure had reached breaking point – and if David Cameron hadn’t dealt with it, someone would have come along who was prepared to take action.

  I go on to point out that you have to be around sixty to have been able to vote in the last referendum on Europe – and the mandate plainly needed renewing.

  David Cameron listened to the analysis of the problem, but then had the guts to answer the crucial ‘And so …?’ question by calling a referendum. It didn’t work out for him, but he showed real leadership in facing up to an issue and being prepared to deal with it.

  Two days before he left No. 10, David Cameron held a dinner for those who had been closest to him. Friends going back over the decades were there, so too were MPs who first supported his leadership bid, whom he said at one stage he could all fit into the back of a black cab.

  In his trademark casual clothing of jeans and an untucked navy blue shirt, he toured the giant table in the state dining room – still joking, caring that his staff find ways to land on their feet. I felt proud to have worked for a man who had always been able to take anything in his stride – and as Kipling put it:

  … meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two impostors just the same

  It fell to Kate Fall to make a touching speech about how much he meant to us all and then George Osborne to speak of his legacy. He described David Cameron as a ‘quiet revolutionary’ – a man who had been prepared to make the big offer of a coalition government that would provide the stability necessary to rescue our failing economy. He pointed out his education reforms, giving parents and teachers control so that pupils could have more of a chance in life; how he was prepared to reform welfare to make work pay and help give people a purpose.

  Then he spoke of allowing gay people to marry for the first time – helping people who loved each other to show the commitment that had been denied them … two and a half million people more in work … millions of apprentices … keeping his promise to the poor people of the world, by maintaining our international aid budget, despite the most intense pressure …

  I’d have added making the Conservative party electable again.

  Two days later, his closest team gathered in his study in Downing Street and we talked about the thousands of meetings we’d held here. Larry the cat wandered in, stretched nonchalantly and then found a place on the sofa to settle. Then came Sam and their children, who clambered onto his chair and insisted on writing a note to Theresa May and her husband on the pristine piece of blotting paper that had been put in place just an hour or two before.

  Someone came in and told us it was time to go. I walked out into the corridor with Ed, Kate and Graeme, surprised to see a couple of hundred civil servants lining the route. They began to applaud and cheer. I told them he wasn’t coming yet – but they kept going.

  We joined the end of the line – and DC, Sam and the kids came out a few moments later. Having toured the building saying emotional goodbyes earlier he was in a more ebullient mood, high-fiving a few people as he went by.

  His team watched his farewell speech from outside the door of No. 11.

  When he was done, he and his family turned to get in the cars that would take them out of Downing Street for the last time, and he turned to wave to us.

  I thought, I hope history will be kind to you.

  Acknowledgements

  The No. 10 media and strategy team.

  Back row: Richard Chew, Ramsay Jones, Graeme Wilson, Caroline Preston

  Front row: Giles Kenningham, Adam Atashzai, Craig Oliver, Ameet Gill

  Unleashing Demons could not have been written without the help of many people.

  Colleagues who became close friends at No. 10 and Stronger In took the time and effort to read the manuscript and offer constructive criticism. Ameet Gill, Graeme Wilson, Lucy Thomas and Adam Atashzai were particularly helpful. All the opinions and any mistakes or misunderstandings are mine and not theirs.

  Andrew Cooper, the pollster for Stronger In, was enormously helpful with the sections of the book dealing with polling. He also helped me to break down the results into digestible form.

  I would also like to thank the rest of the political media team at No. 10, Giles Kenningham and Caroline Preston, and the comms team at Stronger In, including Joe Carberry, Amy Richards, James McGrory and David Chaplin – all of whom set aside party differences to work for a common cause we all believed in.

  My agent, Sheila Crowley, has been supportive and encouraging throughout.

  Rupert Lancaster took a huge gamble commissioning this book. We had never met before and I had never written a book – let alone one that needed to be completed so quickly. He was kind, generous and insightful. He also led a great team at Hodder including Maddy Price, Karen Geary, Jason Bartholemew and Juliet Brightmore, all of whom were prepared to crash a busy schedule in order to get the book published in time.

  The unsung heroes of this book are the civil servants with whom I worked so closely in the run-up to the final month of the campaign, when I effectively resigned to join Stronger In. They are the backbone of Government, whatever its political stripe. I am in their debt.

  Picture Acknowledgements

  © AP/Press Association Images: 1 above/photo Frank Augstein, 6 above left/Kaname Muto, 8 below/Kirsty Wigglesworth. © Daily Mail/Solo Syndication: 2 below right. © Getty Images: 1 below/AFP/Niklas Halle’n, 3 above and 7 above/AFP/Stefan Rousseau, 4 above left/Matt Cardy, 4 below right/Carl Court, 5 above/Jack Taylor, 5 below/AFP/Oli Scarff, 6 above right/Rob Stothard, 6 below right/Dan Kitwood, Courtesy of Felicity Kane: 4 above right. © News Syndication: 2 above left, 3 below/Peter Brookes, 6 below left. © Andrew Parsons/i-Images: 4 below left. © REX/Shutterstock: 8 above/Jonathan Hordle. Courtesy of Sky News: 7 below.

 

 

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