Tim Shipman - All Out War - The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

In April, the month before the general election, another important meeting took place at the Caistor Hall Hotel in Norwich. David Campbell Bannerman, a Tory MEP who had previously been the chairman and deputy leader of Ukip, was determined to ensure that different branches of the Eurosceptic family worked together if there was a referendum campaign. ‘I knew it was a bit like herding cats, and the real problem we were going to have was going to be fighting amongst ourselves,’ he said.

Campbell Bannerman set up a ‘Contact Group’, and invited Elliott and other prominent sceptics like the businesswoman Ruth Lea and Rory Broomfield of the Freedom Association. The gathering would later be described by the Electoral Commission as a ‘pivotal moment’, and a key reason why Vote Leave was designated as the official ‘Out’ campaign.

Campbell Bannerman was also involved in another development that spring, the creation of Conservatives for Britain, the parliamentary wing of Elliott’s operation. When Cameron won his majority in May, Elliott was shocked: ‘I realised, “Crikey, I’ve actually got to set up this referendum campaign.”’

At a lunch the following day Elliott met Campbell Bannerman, plus Nick Wood from the Westminster PR firm Media Intelligence Partners, a grizzled, chain-smoking former Times and Express political journalist who became Iain Duncan Smith’s communications director when he was Tory leader. Campbell Bannerman recalled Elliott’s shock: ‘Matthew looked horrified at winning his own election. I don’t think he expected it.’ The discussion quickly turned to how to put pressure on the newly elected government. The strategy agreed was to form a group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, MEPs and peers to turn the screws on Cameron during the negotiations. Campbell Bannerman agreed to become co-chairman and run the operation in Brussels.

For the key post of co-chairman in the Commons, Elliott and Daniel Hannan approached Steve Baker, the MP for Wycombe. At forty-four, Baker had only been an MP since 2010 – but he was liked and trusted by all factions on the Conservative benches. An RAF engineer who retrained as a software engineer, Baker was devoutly religious – he was baptised during a full-body immersion in the sea – and had been gifted with the innocent face of a chorister. Behind the smile, Hannan and Elliott also saw a man prepared to take risks: Baker was a keen skydiver, with more than two hundred jumps to his name.

When Hannan approached him, he had just one pitch: ‘There’s no one else to do it.’ Baker himself joked later that he got the job because he was a ‘cleanskin’, untainted by the battles of the past. Hannan remembered, ‘I thought, everyone likes Steve Baker, everyone trusts him, he’s a born-again Christian, he is just incapable of dishonesty.’

Baker was also a resolute Eurosceptic, who like Hannan had come into politics to get Britain out of the EU. Unlike Hannan, his inspiration was not a Latvian foreign minister, but David Cameron himself. Baker had flirted with the idea of joining Ukip, but decided the Tory Party was the vessel that would bring about Brexit: ‘One of the principal reasons I knew the Conservative Party could be relied upon on the EU is that in 2007 David Cameron went to the Czech Republic and made a speech in which he said the EU was the “last gasp of an outdated ideology, a philosophy which has no place in our new world of freedom”. David Cameron inspired me to join the Conservative Party.’

Cameron soon had cause to regret his own powers of persuasion. Friday, 5 June 2015 was the fortieth anniversary of the 1975 EU referendum, and Baker, Campbell Bannerman, Wood and Walsh decided it would be the perfect moment to launch Conservatives for Britain. Matthew Elliott was out of the country at the time, and was nearly as blindsided as the prime minister when the story announcing the creation of the organisation appeared on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph on 7 June. By that point CfB had been meeting in secret for a month, and had already recruited fifty Tory MPs. Cameron admitted to Baker later that he was ‘spooked’ that no intelligence on the operation had reached him. Campbell Bannerman recalled, ‘It wasn’t expected, and we hit the Remain campaign very early and very hard. Steve did an excellent job of getting people on board.’

A week later, Baker had recruited 110 Tory MPs, thirteen peers and twelve MEPs. Sympathetic cabinet ministers privately signed up to the mailing list. Later that week Labour MPs launched a sister group, Labour for Britain, to escalate hostilities. Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Kelvin Hopkins and Gisela Stuart were all on board, along with the leading Labour donor John Mills, a veteran of the 1975 referendum campaign.

But there was a more seismic announcement to come. Elliott flew home and resolved to exercise greater control over the MPs. He had already secretly recruited just the man to do that. On 14 June the Sunday Times revealed that Dominic Cummings had been charged with setting up the ‘Out’ campaign. For Eurosceptics their hour had come. And so, now, had their man.

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