The exchange in the House of Commons chamber in late 2015 was quintessential Westminster politics. The Tory benches were packed for the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions. Boris had just asked David Cameron a forgettable question and received an innocuous reply. The backbencher sat down, pleased to have reminded the prime minister of his presence. As Boris waited for the session to end, Bernard Jenkin, a Tory MP since 1992 and prominent Eurosceptic, turned and asked, ‘What are you going to do?’ referring to the referendum.
‘I’m not a quitter,’ replied Boris. Jenkin believed him.
Around the same time, Boris had told Len Duvall ‘I’m marginally for staying.’ Both politicians believed that Boris would support Cameron to remain in the EU. The in-out referendum was due on 23 June 2016. Remain had a substantial lead over Leave. The unanswered question was the Labour Party’s position under Jeremy Corbyn.
Since 2009, Boris’s attitude towards Europe had been clear and principled. As an internationalist and European, he was appalled by EU federalism and the Brussels bureaucrats. He wanted Cameron to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership and submit the result to a referendum. As a long-term Eurosceptic, he was sympathetic to the complaints of the hard-line Tory critics but not, critically, to their ultimate ambition of leaving the EU regardless of any new agreement. The crunch meeting was on 18 February 2016, the deadline for Cameron and the EU to finalise the renegotiated terms of Britain’s membership. That would be the basis of the referendum.
Among the many seeking to influence Boris was Anthony Kenny, the Oxford philosopher and former master of Balliol: ‘I write to you now because at this moment you are in a remarkably influential position. Whatever happens at this week’s summit, the PM is bound to say that he has achieved a great deal, and the Eurosceptics will say that it is not enough. You are one of the very few people whose personal decision could affect the outcome. You are respected by both parties to the debate, and you have kept your stance impartial between them both. Please use your influence in favour of a vote to remain.’ Prophetically, Kenny urged Boris not to associate with the ‘populist and xenophobe tabloid’ Brexiteers. ‘Remember your Europhile youth,’ he concluded. Unusually for Boris, the letter remained unanswered.
In his pledge on 23 January 2013, Cameron had declared that a referendum by the end of 2017 would be about a ‘full-on treaty change’. The Commons voted in 2015 by 544 to 53 in favour of a referendum and all three major national parties campaigned in that year’s election to implement the referendum result. The unravelling began with the final deal Cameron presented to Parliament in February 2016.
On every issue in the draft deal, Cameron had failed. France and the Euro MEPs were blocking meaningful concessions. Worse, contrary to Merkel’s explicit promises in April 2013 to Cameron during a family weekend in Schloss Meseberg, her official country residence outside Berlin, the German Chancellor at a critical moment had refused to support Britain. The result was dire for Cameron. Europe’s leaders refused to substantially change migrants’ welfare rights, limit the European Court of Justice’s infringement of Britain’s sovereignty and respect Britain’s veto over ever closer union. Cameron had been outwitted, even betrayed, by Merkel. These were not the ‘fundamental’ changes which Cameron had promised in 2015. ‘It’s a crap deal,’ Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff and a friend from Eton, told Rodney Leach, a leading Eurosceptic, at an Open Europe dinner. ‘The dilemma in a nutshell’, wrote Boris, was the EU’s refusal to reform. Staying in a reformed EU would be good, he continued, but to escape an increasingly federal Europe where Britain was constantly outvoted was the alternative for ‘a great future outside’.1
Fearing Boris’s opposition could be fatal, Cameron invited him for a game of tennis at the American ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park in the last week of February. Cameron described Boris’s tennis as ‘aggressive, wildly unorthodox … and extremely competitive’. Jonathan Marland, an old ally, was less complimentary, and could have been describing more than just his game: ‘Keen but not very good. He runs everywhere, chases every ball, has bad footwork and occasionally serves underarm to make a good shot look effortless.’
In their conversation after their match, Cameron acknowledged that Boris might find the negotiations were ‘disappointing’ but urged him to support Remain to allow a ‘fight for more change in the future’. If he supported the government, suggested Cameron, Boris was promised a key job in the government, probably Defence.2 Cameron could not grasp the consequence of his failed negotiations. ‘I’m deeply conflicted,’ Boris told journalists and promised to ‘come off the fence with deafening eclat’.
Just before that tennis match, Boris had met Lynton Crosby, Jonathan Marland and Eddie Lister, now employed by Marland in a property development company, for dinner in the alcove of ‘M’, a restaurant in Victoria Street. The Brexit campaign, he was told, needed him as a leader. ‘It will show the difference between you and Dave,’ said Crosby. ‘You’re the next leader after Dave.’ Conflicted, Boris said: ‘I’m not going to do it. I can take Dave and George down anytime.’ Interrupted by bottles of champagne sent over by other admiring diners, the conversation ended after four hours with no resolution. Boris, Crosby decided, could be persuaded but he would need Marina’s approval.
Boris had not resolved his dilemma when, shortly after the EU summit, Iain Duncan Smith, a veteran leading Eurosceptic, spoke to Cameron in Downing Street.
Duncan Smith had watched Cameron and Osborne rush, botch and misjudge the negotiations. On civil servants’ advice, they had restricted their demands to what they were told was possible, and even they were rejected. Neither really understood the EU’s historic intransigence or their own MPs’ opposition to the deal. In the class divide which characterised the debate within the Tory Party – the Notting Hill Gate leadership versus the red-brick arrivistes – Cameron relied on Ed Llewellyn to report on the mood of Tory MPs. But Llewellyn rarely spoke to MPs. He preferred to relay what Cameron wanted to hear. And that week, he confirmed Cameron’s belief that Boris, the metropolitan moderniser, would not want to associate with right-wing proselytisers like Bernard Jenkin, Bill Cash and Iain Duncan Smith. Boris, Llewellyn was convinced, could be persuaded to support Cameron. That reassurance inspired Cameron’s reply to the warning from Ken Clarke, the veteran Tory former minister and Remainer. Clarke foresaw that Cameron could lose the referendum: ‘Don’t worry Ken, I always win.’ Llewellyn had failed to report that the majority of Tory MPs either supported Leave or were undecided. Duncan Smith surprisingly also urged caution. ‘You don’t need to hurry,’ he told Cameron. ‘You have another year to say to the EU “Give us a better deal”.’
‘I’m not prepared to let this issue dominate my legacy,’ Cameron replied.
‘You’ll be astonished by the emotional outbreak the referendum will have,’ warned Duncan Smith.
Cameron dismissed the advice.
‘Cameron’s drunk his own Kool-Aid,’ Duncan Smith told his fellow Eurosceptics. Having won the Scottish referendum, the prime minister believed that he could win again. He was a lucky man. Blessed by family wealth, a good education, a happy marriage and natural charm, Cameron had slain his foes – Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, and was now trumping Jeremy Corbyn. Neither Cameron nor his advisers could anticipate a potential leader of the Brexit campaign. Relying on Crosby’s assurance that Michael Gove was unelectable as Tory leader, Cameron firmly believed Gove’s repeated assurances despite being a well-known Eurosceptic. ‘I won’t campaign against you,’ Gove promised. He relied on similar promises about Gove from Sarah Vine, Gove’s wife and a Daily Mail columnist.
‘What do you think Michael will do?’ Boris asked Oliver Letwin, the Old Etonian Eurosceptic. Gove’s position, Letwin acknowledged, was truly important for Cameron. As close friends, Cameron expected Gove to place loyalty above ideology and support Remain. ‘I feel the same,’ Letwin told Boris. Despite being a lifelong Eurosceptic, Letwin could not bring himself to vote against Cameron. ‘I’ll live with the deal,’ Letwin said. Most commentators assumed that Boris would also support Remain. Similarly, Cameron made the same assumption. That certainty was shaken when, to his surprise, Marina spelled out the case against Europe in a well-argued article in the Spectator.
The lawyer focused on the European Court of Justice. Cameron’s deal, she wrote, ‘raises more questions than [it answers]’. In plain prose, she described two identical and phoney promises. Both Blair in 2007 after the Lisbon treaty was agreed and Ken Clarke in 2011 as Justice Secretary had assured Parliament that the European Court of Justice could not enforce the European Charter of Fundamental Rights on Britain. The opposite, Marina wrote, had happened. Contrary to their express assurances, British employment, immigration and asylum laws had been overruled. Acting capriciously, the European Court had thwarted Acts of Parliament and crushed British sovereignty. Cameron’s proposed deal did not reverse the court’s opaque and uncontrolled accumulation of power against which there was no appeal.3 Those close to Boris would say that Marina’s article and their conversations had a profound influence on him.
Ever since he had witnessed Margaret Thatcher being handbagged in Rome in 1990, Boris had argued for a legal guarantee of Parliament’s sovereignty. Over twenty-five years, there had been repeated examples of British influence in the EU being eroded. The latest was the ‘Five Presidents’ Report’ written to save the euro. Britain would be outvoted 27 to 1 and thus was unable to veto centralised EU economic decisions even if they damaged British interests.
Greece’s plight had intensified Boris’s antagonism towards the EU. His love for the country, not only through his study of ancient Greece but from the many holidays he spent in his father’s house on the Pelion peninsula, had intensified his shock about what he regarded as a conspiracy between the European Commission, the European Bank, Goldman Sachs and the German government to protect the euro at Greece’s expense. Consequently, 40 per cent of young Greeks were unemployed. Seeing their suffering led to a Damascene conversion towards Boris favouring Leave. This influenced his discussions with Oliver Letwin, Cameron’s intermediary.
‘What can you do to bring Boris round?’ Cameron asked Letwin. Boris was invited to Downing Street to discuss a bill to enshrine Britain’s sovereignty into law. The principle issue for Boris, Letwin discovered, was to define the relationship between Britain and the European Court of Justice. How, Boris wanted to know, could British courts prevent ‘ever closer union’? In the course of five meetings, Boris, advised by Martin Howe, a lawyer specialising in EU law, debated the precise words of a new law empowering British courts to reject the European Court’s rulings and interpretation of treaties. Letwin, by turns charming and emotional, did not give up, but to no avail. ‘I don’t think there’s much there,’ Boris reported to friends. The obstacle, as Cameron acknowledged, was that each time Letwin and Boris agreed the terms, Whitehall’s Europhile lawyers ‘kept watering down the wording’ to protect the European Court. Cameron weakly refused to overrule the officials, a familiar predicament throughout Britain’s membership of the EU. In the countdown to the official launch of campaigning on the referendum, Boris’s imminent decision became crucial.
In one last attempt, Letwin called Boris at home on Tuesday evening, 16 February. To his surprise, Boris was eating a dinner of slow-roasted lamb with Gove and Sarah Vine. With a government lawyer on speakerphone, they discussed once again Britain’s sovereignty: could the European Court overrule Cameron’s deal on migrant rights? ‘Boris was agitated, genuinely tortured as to which way to go,’ reported Vine. Letwin noted the opposite. During their conversation, the inflections of Boris’s voice suggested that he was considering his own and not Britain’s interests, and that was Leave. Letwin’s next call was to Cameron. Boris and Gove are together, he reported. That was, he concluded, a game-changer. He was unaware that Evgeny Lebedev was also at the dinner. The son of a former KGB officer who had been close to the Kremlin, was an intimate observer of a British government crisis.
Cameron, the architect of the crisis, was struggling to find a solution. Gove was a close friend (they were godfathers to each other’s children), but he had fired Gove as Education Secretary in July 2014 on Lynton Crosby’s advice that Gove was unpopular with the electorate. Gove was outraged that his success against the teachers’ unions should be rewarded by Cameron’s disloyalty. As for Boris, Cameron could not believe that Marina’s legal arguments had conclusively swung her husband against the deal. The truth would probably never be known but that is what the eyewitnesses in Islington were reporting. The danger, Cameron feared, was Boris as a Leaver. He would ‘legitimise the cause and help detoxify the Brexit brand’.4
Cameron’s disbelief that Boris could be guided by principles was shared by the Guardian. Just as Zoe Williams predicted in 2008 that London would be destroyed by Boris as mayor, Rafael Behr accused Boris of ‘cunning and cowardice’ to suggest he faced a dilemma. As a pro-EU politician, wrote Behr, Boris ‘recognises that complete severance is neither possible nor desirable … The unappealing alternative is diminished status as a quitter and saboteur.’ Boris, Behr concluded, ‘does not want to be on the side of the mavericks and also-rans’. His ambition would ‘not trump belief’ just ‘to reap the career dividend’. Boris would choose, Behr concluded, to remain in the EU although the idea that Boris’s ‘opinion matters at all … is absurd’.5 Underestimating Boris had become a media illness.
Over the following hours, Boris was bombarded by messages and telephone calls, especially from the group of MPs organising his leadership bid. In an email, Ben Wallace warned Boris that support for Leave would class him with ‘a cast of clowns’ including Nigel Farage, and would damage his chance of becoming leader.6 Jake Berry also urged him to support Remain. If Boris campaigned for Leave and Remain won, Berry warned, ‘you won’t recover’. Not all the Brexiteers were fans. Bernard Jenkin told a newspaper: ‘He’s dishonest, a philanderer and unpredictable.’ If Boris became leader, he added, he ‘would be a disaster’.7
During conversations with allies on the morning of 17 February, Boris sounded to Berry ‘genuinely torn. His desire was to be loyal to Cameron but he genuinely believed in Leave.’ Their conversations were interrupted by a summons to Downing Street.
Cameron was baffled, even angry when Boris arrived. One of the prime minister’s weaknesses was to project his own values onto others, a failing he later admitted.8 Convinced he understood Boris, he interpreted his rival’s motives as political calculation rather than principle. Boris, he believed, was primarily motivated by ‘the best outcome for him’. Boris would not want to risk Gove usurping his bid for the crown. With Leave certain to lose, Cameron suspected that Boris would take ‘a risk-free bet on himself’ and, ‘making doubly sure he would be the next leader’, would go for Leave. Even if Remain won, Boris would be the champion of the party’s Leavers, a majority of party members. And, in Cameron’s opinion, if Leave won, Boris expected to renegotiate a better deal with the EU. Either way, it was win-win.9
Pertinently, Cameron failed to understand how Boris in recent years had learned to deliberately conceal his lodestar. As a loner, his character had become impenetrable to other men. He revealed his true feelings only to a few selected women, namely Marina and his secret girlfriends. Accordingly, during their forty-minute conversation, Cameron dismissed Boris’s despair about Greece as irrelevant. In trying to persuade Boris to support the deal, Cameron did not mention the economic and social advantages of EU membership, especially for the City’s access to the single market. The conversation focused on the unaccountable power of Brussels and the European Court. ‘People want to feel they have control,’ said Boris. Fifty-nine per cent of British laws are EU regulations and directives, he added. No, countered Cameron, ‘It’s just 15 per cent.’10 Nevertheless, Cameron promised, Parliament would enact a bill to allow Westminster and the British Supreme Court to overrule Brussels and the European Court. Cameron’s proposal did not alter the supremacy of Brussels. As a final throw, Cameron promised that after Remain won, he would appoint Boris as the Foreign Secretary. ‘No deal as far as I know,’ said Boris as he left Downing Street.
Soon after, Boris called Gerard Lyons, his economic adviser. Usually their conversations lasted two minutes but this one continued for fifty minutes. Methodically, Boris recited each argument made by Cameron to support Remain. On each point, Lyons gave the rebuttal – ‘I hit a six on everyone,’ he would later say. ‘Exactly,’ Boris exclaimed at the end of their conversation, convinced by the Leave argument. ‘Why don’t you write two articles,’ Lyons suggested. ‘One for Remain and one to Leave, and at the end you’ll see that Leave is right.’ ‘Exactly,’ Boris repeated.
Two days later, Gove declared that he would campaign to leave. Cameron was horrified. A real friend had forsaken their friendship and lied to him. All eyes swung onto Boris, the stardust in any campaign. Although the polls showed that Remain’s lead was 15 per cent, the polls also reported that Boris was the key to Cameron’s certain victory. The arch-Brexiteers including Bill Cash and Iain Duncan Smith had no contact with Boris but both did expect him to join their cause. They wrongly assumed that unlike Gove, Boris did not meet Cameron and Osborne socially and the same dilemma would not arise. The following day, Boris drove to his Oxfordshire house to write the two articles.
Boris had reached a Thatcher moment. For years he had praised her for showing absolute ruthlessness in defence of British interests: dispatching the Royal Navy to liberate the Falkland Islands in 1982, confronting the Marxist-led miners in 1984, and abolishing the socialist state economy. ‘She was a liberator,’ Boris later wrote. Her opponents were intellectually thrashed. To survive, the rival parties had changed their names to New Labour and Liberal Democrats. Boris lauded her bravery to break ‘the conspiracy by cowardly politicians to dodge the hard questions’. She did not fear dividing the people or her party.11 Few other British politicians would have quoted Samuel Johnson to argue the cause of liberal capitalism: ‘How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.’12
Some would say that Thatcher defined herself by choosing her enemies. Boris was not in that league. He disliked confrontation and was more sensitive to criticism of himself. Unlike Thatcher, he did not invite critics into his inner circle in order to thrash out ideological positions. That did not mean that his antagonism to the EU was not ideological. It was, but he needed to write it down to be certain.
During Saturday, writing the two articles, Boris was in constant contact with Cameron about British sovereignty. ‘It looks like Out,’ said Cameron reading a message on his BlackBerry. Another message suggested Boris felt tortured and feared he would be crucified by the ‘hate machine’ but he would ‘go with his heart’ although Leave would lose. Late that night, Cameron had new hope that Boris might after all decide to remain. Boris is ‘genuinely in turmoil’, concluded Craig Oliver, Cameron’s director of communications. In Cameron’s opinion, Boris ‘seemed to change his mind substantially at least twice’ and he had told a journalist that he was ‘veering all over the place like a broken shopping trolley’.
As he wrote the Remain article favouring loyalty to the party, he later explained, it ‘came down overwhelmingly in favour of leaving. I then thought I’d better see if I can make the alternative case for myself so I then wrote a sort of semi-parodic article in the opposite sense.’ Set side by side, Leave was ‘blindingly obvious’. The Remain article ‘stuck in my craw to write’.13 On Cameron’s deal with the EU, he said ‘We got absolutely zilch, effectively.’14 The two articles were sent to Will Walden and Ben Wallace. ‘It’s not worth the paper it was written on,’ he told Walden about the Remain article. ‘This is going to make me vomit. I just don’t think it’s good enough.’
On Sunday morning, Rachel Johnson arrived to read the articles. As a Remainer, she asked him ‘Why would you want to associate yourself with Farage and Brexit types?’ Boris replied that any decision would be dictated by what was right and not his ambition. Moreover, while he believed the opinion polls pointed conclusively to a Remain win, Cameron’s failure to get a deal had finally converted him to become a Leaver. Holding a referendum is what he had said since 2009. He was consistent. Throughout his life he had gambled – either for his career or with women. This time, the stakes certainly appeared high, but either way he felt he had little to lose. With that, after lunch – burned lasagne – he drove back to London.
‘Al is about to do something stupid,’ Rachel told Guto Harri, who was abroad skiing. ‘You’re the only person who can stop him.’
‘I’m still deciding,’ Boris told Harri a few minutes later.
‘Are you happy to be known for the rest of your life as the fellow traveller of [John] Redwood and [Bill] Cash?’ asked Harri. ‘You can lead Europe rather than leave Europe. You’d be doing something for the wrong reason.’
Subsequently, Boris told Harri that his call had been counter-productive: ‘You pushed me because you suggested that Britain could not stand alone, and that’s a defeatist attitude I reject. We’re a great country. Britain should believe in self-rule.’
At 4.40 p.m. on Sunday afternoon Boris texted Cameron that Brexit would be ‘crushed like the toad beneath the harrow’ (an adaptation of a line from Kipling), and ‘It’s not about you, it’s about doing the right thing.’
At 4.49 p.m., Jake Berry called again to urge Boris to side with Remain. ‘Too late,’ said Will Walden. ‘He’s just gone outside to say Leave.’15
In the scrum outside his house, the snatches caught by the media of Boris’s announcement that he would join the Leave campaign included, ‘The last thing I wanted was to go against David Cameron … once in a lifetime chance to end the erosion of democracy … I want a better deal for the people of this country, to save them money and to take back control … people are enraged by the inability of British politicians to control immigration.’
‘He’ll need balls of steel,’ Rachel texted Marina. ‘A career-shattering move,’ Stanley puffed. In Boris’s mind, he was the decisive politician at a defining moment in the battle between the people and the elite. ‘I accept there will be a risk,’ he had written in his Leave article, ‘This is the moment to be brave – not to hug the skirts of the Nurse in Brussels.’16
‘He’s ruined my life,’ Cameron was heard to say. Cameron and Letwin were certain about his motives: Boris was thinking what was best for Boris. ‘He always thinks how do I get some advantage out of this?’ Letwin mused. Politicians, Letwin believed, were bound to consult their own interests but should also think what is the right thing to do. Boris was not part of the team and therefore did not consider compromise. His leadership ambitions were at the heart of that decision. Cameron agreed. Boris was an opportunist. He did not believe that erecting tariffs against the EU would benefit Britain. He supported Leave to advance his own career, Letwin believed.
On Monday 22 February, Boris’s article in favour of Leave was published in the Daily Telegraph. Many realised that it could change the course of Britain’s history.
The same morning, Boris was shocked to find crowds seething with hatred outside his front door. Curses were yelled at him. As he cycled away, he looked hurt. Later he would say the abuse was ‘water off a duck’s back’, but that was untrue. His destination was a meeting of the London Enterprise Panel. He was visibly surprised by the businessmen’s frosty reception. Unanimously, he was criticised as an opportunist. The businessmen who highlighted his constant praise of London as the centre of Europe were shrugged off. He departed without making any attempt to justify himself.17
Overnight, his enemies had lined up – especially at The Times – to demolish the man. Leading the pack was Jenni Russell. Characterising Boris as a bad-tempered, deceitful, failed mayor whose only successes – the bikes and Crossrail – were inherited from Livingstone, Russell lambasted what she said was his failure to build any homes and wondered how he hoped to get deals with Putin and the EU if he was beaten by the RMT union. As a passionate Remainer, Russell appeared to be particularly outraged that Boris had told unnamed ‘friends’ that he would support Remain, which proved his inability to ‘distinguish truth from fantasy’.18
‘I know for a fact he’s not an Outer,’ raged Nicholas Soames, ‘because he told me.’ Cameron, he suggested, should treat Boris like a growling Alsatian and ‘kick it really hard in the balls, in which case it will run away’.19 In similar apoplexy, Michael Heseltine attacked Boris for destroying the City and jobs.20
That afternoon in the Commons, Cameron asked peevishly how the City’s champion could destroy that golden egg. Boris’s notion, mocked Cameron, of new negotiations followed by a second referendum was ‘one for the birds’. ‘Rubbish,’ retorted Boris, already 2/1 favourite as next prime minister. Cameron’s anger was personal. ‘I’ve known a number of couples who have begun divorce proceedings. But I don’t know any who have begun divorce proceedings in order to renew their marriage vows.’ Amid the laughter, Boris puffed, shook his head and waved off an attack on a position he had long abandoned. In the aftermath, some criticised Cameron for ‘bigging up’ Boris.
Convinced that Leave would lose and he would play only a minor role in the referendum campaign, Boris was ‘downbeat’ in conversations with friends. But since he was committed to Leave, he refused to countenance defeat. That was his special quality: his determination to smash down the most intimidating wall. He summoned his self-belief: ‘We can win.’
Boris’s prospects rose after the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on 18 March. George Osborne was blamed by Duncan Smith for cutting welfare benefits, hurting the poor and helping the rich. In reply, Osborne highlighted contradictions in Duncan Smith’s protests and accused the Eurosceptic of incompetence during his six years as the minister. Boris supported Duncan Smith. In the climax of the Tory Party’s defining battle, Osborne revealed their rivalry. In an after-dinner speech, he mentioned an exchange between Boris and George W. Bush. Spotting that Boris was wearing a watch with Che Guevara’s image on its face, the president chided, ‘Boris, in Texas we execute people who wear Che Guevara watches.’ Osborne jibed, ‘Unfortunately Bush was bluffing.’21 With the Chancellor’s leadership hopes faded, the public scrutiny of Boris intensified. The first venue was at Westminster’s Treasury Select Committee, chaired by Tory MP Andrew Tyrie.
Boris repeated his line that 59 per cent of British laws emanated from Brussels. ‘This is all very interesting, Boris,’ said Tyrie. ‘Except none of it is true.’ The committee focused on his claim that an EU regulation had banned the recycling of teabags. ‘Can you remember which country asked the EU to issue it?’ asked John Mann, the Labour MP. Boris looked baffled. ‘It was Britain,’ said Mann, explaining it was part of the anti-foot-and-mouth regulations imposed in 2002. Boris replied, astonished: ‘Then I’m sure the French have never obeyed it.’ Carelessly, he threw in that the EU forbade sales of bananas in bunches of three. The EU edict said four bananas, a silly mistake by a tabloid journalist clearly not concerned that his enemies would highlight any slip. The MPs concluded that Boris’s only consistency was his inconsistency. He also adopted an old habit of speaking without pause, with the odd joke thrown in, to delay their questions.22 Following that disastrous performance, he fell into more traps in bruising TV interviews. ‘This is very hard, very hard,’ he confessed to an MP.23
His car-crash appearances led to The Times renewing their attack, this time by Matthew Parris. Appalled that Boris was playing to win, Parris, who had been a Spectator columnist during Boris’s editorship, wrote ‘Where else in politics can such self-validating, self-inflating nonsense be found that Britain could ever want Boris Johnson as prime minister? … There’s a pattern to Boris’s life: it’s the casual dishonesty, the cruelty, the betrayal and beneath the betrayal, the emptiness of real ambition: the ambition to do anything useful with office once it is attained.’ Parris’s evidence for that damnation was ‘almost no mayoral achievements at all’. He concluded, ‘If Mr Johnson had the sense of nemesis I suspect he has, he should stop now.’24 Fearful that the Brexiteers would destroy moderate Conservatism and hand the party to right-wingers, Parris saw in the ‘zealots a streak of madness’.25 Four days later, walking in St James’s, Jake Berry spotted in a window a quote by Pericles: ‘Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.’ He sent Boris a copy of the quotation.
In the battle of Boris’s reputation, his old friend Petronella Wyatt was lured to defend her ex’s ‘gamble of his career’. Boris, she wrote, ‘isn’t lazy. The suggestion is preposterous … Boris works hard.’ He was also ‘entirely without malice [and] both soulful and a man of strong beliefs’ blighted only by occasional ‘erratic judgement’. But, she did admit, ‘he will do anything to avoid an argument, which leads to a degree of duplicity … His untruths are generally harmless and get him into more trouble than the person he directs them at.’ She concluded that his ambition to be prime minister was motivated by a desire to be loved by more people.26
To his critics’ fury, the greater the attack, the more popular he became. After letting the criticism ‘kick around in his head’, as Will Walden observed, he did not dwell on his plight but simply moved on. The critics underestimated his credibility among electors, and his resolve.27 In retaliation, Boris became emboldened and personal. Cameron and the pro-EU campaigners, he said, were the ‘Gerald Ratners’ of British politics. (In a self-destructive joke in 1991, Ratner had said in a speech to his employees and others that some of the products his company sold were ‘total crap’.) During April, the Remainers’ worst fears materialised. Trust in Cameron plummeted among Tory voters and the referendum’s outcome became less certain.
In desperation, Cameron asked President Obama to visit London and warn about the dire consequences if Britain voted Leave. Boris’s favourite American politician was Ronald Reagan, a conservative former actor with a winning, folksy manner. In 2008, Boris had supported Obama as the next president because ‘He visibly incarnates change and hope’ in the wake of the Iraq War and the banking crisis. But eight years later after a disappointing Obama presidency Boris concluded that Obama was fluent but phoney.28 Introducing Obama into the debate, exploded Boris, was a ‘piece of outrageous and exorbitant hypocrisy’ because America refuses to ‘kneel to almost any kind of international jurisdiction’. America would never accept rule by the EU.29 One week later, Boris attacked Obama again for having removed Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and returning it to the British Embassy. ‘Some said it was a snub to Britain,’ complained Boris. ‘Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.’ In his autobiography written in 1995, Obama had criticised the imprisonment of his Kenyan grandfather by the British colonial administration. Nicholas Soames carped that Boris’s ‘deeply offensive’ remarks showed ‘remarkable disregard for the facts, the truth and for all judgement’. Boris, he declared, was unfit to be prime minister. John McDonnell, the senior Labour politician, called it ‘dog-whistle racism’, and Andrew Gimson, Boris’s biographer, denounced ‘a disaster for Boris because Obama is pro-British’.30
Obama was furious. He had replaced Churchill with a bust of Martin Luther King, appropriate for America’s first black president. But there was another Churchill bust in his private quarters. ‘I love the guy,’ he said.
To Cameron’s delight, during his visit to Britain, the president warned that if Britain left the EU, the country would wait ten years ‘at the back of the queue’ in the trade negotiations with the USA. In another setback for Leave, President Macron of France sniped that outside the EU, the UK would be reduced to the status of Jersey and Guernsey. The putative Leave campaign could not produce a single report proving that Britain would be richer outside the EU.31 ‘The Remainers think the game is over,’ snapped Boris, and have ‘bombed us into submission … They are crowing too soon.’32
Boris was right. Leave supporters were repelled by Obama’s interference and believed that the president disliked colonial Britain. The ‘racist’ jibe against Boris was bogus. The next polls showed an increase of support for Leave and more trust in Boris.33 ‘We’ll win,’ Boris texted Jake Berry. The MP went immediately to William Hill and bet on Leave at 5/2.
Two months into the campaign, Boris was in full flow. At the outset, he had assumed a minor role but Leave’s organisers deployed him as their front man. On the stump, in town centres, Boris was gold dust. ‘Like taking Harry Styles into the school yard,’ swooned Nigel Adams, a Tory MP. Unexpectedly popular in the north, he appealed to Labour voters to break the deadlock. ‘What’s it like driving Boris round?’ an MP asked the driver of Leave’s battle bus. ‘It’s like going around with Beyoncé,’ he replied.
Standing by the side of a bright red bus covered with the slogan ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead’, Boris adored the adulation. He knew the Remainers’ protests about the inaccuracy of ‘£350 million’ were justified. That was a gross figure ignoring the money returned to Britain by the EU. The net payment to the EU estimated by the Treasury for 2015 varied between £160 million and £248 million a week.34 Even Iain Duncan Smith and Andrea Leadsom, a Brexiteer MP, disapproved of the slogan. ‘I will not campaign on a lie,’ protested Leadsom. But Boris cared only about winning and expected others to follow. After watching David Davis tell a televised parliamentary committee ‘I’ve never used that figure,’ Boris immediately texted the Brexiteer, ‘Dont dis the Leave campaign’. Hyperbole stole the oxygen from the Remainers’ arguments. The battleground was cleared against a foe without anyone equal to Boris to argue their case. During a conversation with Gove, Boris agreed to intensify the pressure. The issues would be immigration and the single market.
In mid-May, the Office of National Statistics revealed that between 2010 and 2015, possibly 1.4 million more migrants had settled in Britain from the EU than the 1 million they had registered, making the official total 2.4 million. Even that was a considerable underestimate according to Migration Watch, the lobby group. In 2015, 630,000 migrants had arrived in Britain, including 77,000 from the EU without a job. The backdrop to the record net increase of 333,000 migrants arriving in Britain that year was the daily media footage of thousands of young Africans being pulled out of the Mediterranean and taken to Italy after their small boats sank. Thousands of others were crossing from Turkey to Greece. Theoretically, all of them could eventually be eligible to live in Britain. Recalling Tony Blair’s deceit which admitted millions of migrants after 1997, Boris accused Cameron of equal ‘terrible dishonesty’ and the ‘corrosion of popular trust in democracy’ by claiming he would cut immigration to ‘tens of thousands’.35 ‘It’s depressing beyond belief,’ said Cameron, insulted by the slur against his integrity. ‘Deeply maddening.’36
In the exchange of insults in interviews and open letters, Boris accused Cameron’s descriptions of the single market as ‘increasingly fraudulent’ while Cameron called a vote against the EU ‘immoral’ and likely to trigger ‘war’. In what Boris called ‘Project Fear’, Cameron approved the Treasury’s forecast that Brexit would cost Britain 820,000 jobs in the first two years, the pound would drop 15 per cent, house prices would fall by 18 per cent and GDP decrease by 6 per cent. Boris called that forecast ‘scaremongering’ because there were ‘no good economic arguments’ against Brexit. On the instructions of Leave’s strategist, Dominic Cummings, Boris avoided offering a detailed economic argument in favour of Brexit.
Iain Duncan Smith had been the first Tory to spot Cummings’ abilities. In January 2002, after a brief spell as a would-be entrepreneur in Moscow, Cummings became Duncan Smith’s director of strategy at Business for Sterling, a lobby group opposed to the euro. Their relationship collapsed after eight months and Cummings departed. He redeemed himself by organising the successful opposition to Labour’s proposal for regional governments. Then, as chief of staff to Gove both as Shadow education minister and later in the Department of Education, he challenged the left-wing educational establishment’s belief that schools should be vehicles for social engineering rather than to champion excellence in classrooms. Running the department as an autonomous wing of the government, Cummings redesigned the education curriculum and planned to expand the number of academies and set up free schools. Exposure to incompetent and lazy civil servants turned him into a coruscating opponent of Whitehall’s ‘dodgy accountancy’ and their officials’ failure to manage projects. He also scoffed at Cameron who, in response to Cummings’ personal aggression, labelled him a ‘career psychopath’. With an impassioned sense of vengeance, he became Leave’s strategist and turned the tables on Cameron. His slogan ‘Take Back Control’ was hailed as the game-changer but his personality deterred many Tory Brexiteers joining Leave’s campaign. Boris took the opposite view. Cummings had qualities he admired. In particular he liked Cummings’ advice to avoid difficult arguments. Leavers, said Cummings, were under no obligation to produce a post-Brexit scenario. ‘Creating an exit plan that makes sense,’ wrote Cummings, ‘and which all reasonable people could unite around seems an almost insuperable task … There is so much to be gained by swerving the whole issue … The sheer complexity of leaving would involve endless questions of detail that cannot be answered in such a place even were it to be 20,000 pages long, and the longer it is, the more errors are likely.’37 That was exactly Boris’s criticism of Blair’s invasion of Iraq – that there was no plan for the aftermath and the result was catastrophic. But like Blair before the invasion, Cummings’ advice to say as little as possible suited Boris. Brexit’s advantages were restricted to slogans – except when Boris approved a nuclear option.
To halt more refugees coming to Europe, Angela Merkel had offered Turkey visa-free access to the Schengen area. On that basis, Vote Leave warned that 77 million Turks could come to Britain if their country joined the EU. Cameron was outraged. Boris knew that Turkey had no chance of joining the EU, not least because Britain could veto Turkey’s accession. Moreover, in 2008 Boris had made a TV documentary which advocated Turkey’s accession to the EU. In combination with the Leave slogans ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘We want our country back’, the campaign was pitched against immigration. Nigel Farage entered the fray. Standing by a poster headed ‘Breaking Point’, the photo showed thousands of swarthy migrants walking across fields. Although Farage was not part of the official Leave campaign, Boris did not protest. He was now damned for leading a right-wing nationalist, populist movement. Boris would dispute that immigration had become the key issue. Rather, he said, it was about ‘control’ – the sense that British democracy was being undermined by the EU.
Remarkably, in the midst of their bitter war, Cameron appeared at the London Transport Museum to celebrate the end of Boris’s mayoralty. Surrounded by a collection of old buses, Cameron spoke warmly of his rival and mentioned their struggle on the floor in Downing Street over the briefing paper. ‘That came as a great surprise to my PPS [principal private secretary],’ said Cameron, ‘who walked in to find two grown-up men wrestling on the floor.’ He added, ‘I’m not quite sure who got the piece of paper.’ ‘I did,’ Boris yelled. In his speech, Boris acknowledged he had not been Cameron’s favourite candidate to be mayor and relations had not always been perfect. Glancing at Cameron, he allowed a pause for laughter. No one would have guessed that the two were immersed in a struggle to decide the country’s future.
After the speeches, the two spoke briefly. Cameron’s hope that the referendum would unify a modernised party had failed, yet he was encouraged by Andrew Cooper, his pollster and co-founder of Populus, that Remain would win 59 per cent of the vote. Cooper had also predicted that Cameron would lose the 2015 election. Boris began to doubt Cooper’s figures, which aligned with Lynton Crosby’s prediction that Remain would win. Outside London, Boris had discovered, Cameron had misjudged the electorate and the working class trusted him more than Cameron. They were not moved by Cameron’s warning that leaving the EU would cost Britons money. Either they were prepared to suffer the loss or had no money to lose.
Tapping into working-class anger against the elite, especially Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Street banks who urged Britain to remain, Boris reminded his audiences that the fat cats did not face the overcrowding in the NHS and schools, or suffer from overcrowded homes and low wages, because of immigration. In tabloid language, he ratcheted up the vitriol by drawing historical comparisons to EU officials in Brussels seeking to unify Europe: ‘Napoleon, Hitler tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.’38 Once again, the Boris haters sprayed their scorn. Boris has ‘gone too far’, snarled Nicholas Soames. Boris’s ‘preposterous, obscene political remarks’, said Heseltine, meant he would be ‘very surprised’ if Boris ever became prime minister. Martin Selmayr, Jean-Claude Juncker’s German chief of staff, described the prospect of Boris as prime minister as a ‘horror scenario’, like Trump and Marie Le Pen as possible leaders. Others called Boris ‘desperate and offensive’.
‘It’s an artificial media twit storm,’ replied Boris, adding to the opprobrium after reading that prosecutors in Germany had indicted a local comedian for accusing Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s leader, of bestiality. In a limerick, Boris ridiculed Erdogan: ‘There was a young fellow from Ankara / Who was a terrific wankerer / Till he sowed his wild oats / With the help of a goat / But he didn’t even stop to thankera.’ Boris would win a £1,000 prize for the poem in a Spectator competition.
In the closing weeks before the vote, politics became dirtier, even venal. As Boris became the linchpin of the Leave campaign, unethical personalities in the Remain camp sought revenge against a man they reviled as an unprincipled, opportunist turncoat. To take down the star of the show, a wholly untrue story was spread that Boris was very close to the drunken female barrister who had been caught the previous summer in a daytime clinch with a fellow lawyer under a bridge near Waterloo station.39 Marina, who is not a serious drinker, knew precisely the source of that lie: ‘It’s a Downing Street black ops,’ she confidently told her friends.
The nastiness became blatant. A TV audience mauled Cameron as a ‘hypocrite’ and ‘scaremonger’ for praising the EU’s contribution to Britain’s prosperity. In retaliation, John Major screeched on TV: Boris ‘is a court jester’ leading a ‘fundamentally dishonest … squalid campaign’. Moments later, Boris sat in the same TV studio chair. He refused to engage in ‘blue-on-blue’ soap opera to question Major’s credentials – a prime minister who in 1997 left behind a wrecked party, and who launched a moralistic ‘Back to Basics’ campaign while secretly enjoying an adulterous affair.40 The vitriol intensified in a TV debate just days before the vote. Boris was pitched alongside five women politicians. The poison was spread by three women opponents led by Amber Rudd, a plausible and appealing Tory MP. Before her election to Parliament, Rudd’s business career was linked to offshore tax havens and the imprisonment of a co-director of a suspicious internet company. In normal circumstances, Rudd’s conduct in the City would have disqualified her from questioning Boris’s infidelity. But normal rules did not apply if the accused was Boris. He was on trial. The result was hysteria.
Unashamedly, Rudd tried to destroy Boris’s character. In her prepared lines, she quipped, ‘The only number Boris is interested in is Number 10’; ‘Boris is the life and soul of the party, but not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening’; and ‘If you want an expert on jokes, I’ll ask Boris. If I want an expert on the economy, I’ll ask an economist.’ When cued about the £350 million on the bus, Rudd joined the women’s chorus ‘lie, lie, lie’. Calmly, Boris refused to ‘reduce the debate to a lot of personal stuff’. To his followers, Rudd was desperate.41 She represented Jean-Claude Juncker and the sterile Eurocrats who had sacrificed millions of young Europeans to unemployment to save the discredited euro. She promised neither reform nor an exciting vision of Britain within the EU.
‘Let Thursday be our Independence Day,’ Boris shouted as he zipped around country in a helicopter on the last days.42 ‘When I think of the champagne-guzzling orgy of backslapping in Brussels that would follow a Remain vote on Friday, I want to weep.’ In London’s Billingsgate Market, he resisted a fish merchant’s urge to kiss a large fresh salmon, and at a warehouse in Kent, he said, ‘Thanks for coming’ to a woman in the audience who replied, ‘We have to come. We work here.’ On the eve of the vote, exhausted but still fighting, he sighed ‘We’re on the verge of an extraordinary event.’
On polling day, Andrew Cooper, Cameron’s pollster, called Downing Street to report that Remain had a 20 per cent lead. Other polls predicted Remain leads of between 4 per cent and 7 per cent. Some bookies gave 3/1 against Leave. Only the Tory leaders of the Brexit campaign – Bill Cash, Iain Duncan Smith and Bernard Jenkin – expected to win, but they were disbelieved by the media.
Boris had spent the day at his daughter’s graduation ceremony at St Andrews University in Scotland. After a delayed flight back to London, he rushed to vote in Islington at 9.30 p.m., just thirty minutes before the polls closed. By the time he returned home to watch the result, a casual conversation he had had with a passenger on the train from the airport was on the news. Boris had told the undeclared Labour activist that he expected Leave to lose. Along with other Leave MPs, Boris had signed a letter to Cameron urging him to remain as prime minister and reunite the party.
A large group had gathered in the Johnsons’ den overlooking the garden, including Ben Wallace, Ben Gascoigne, Will Walden and some of the Johnson children. At 10.03 p.m., Nigel Farage appeared on the big TV screen to concede defeat. Unlike general elections, there was no exit poll. In Downing Street, there was satisfaction that Boris and Gove were finished. Glued to his seat over the following two hours, Boris was following the spread betting. ‘A good indicator,’ he said, as the odds improved. At twenty minutes past midnight, the dye was cast. Sunderland voted overwhelmingly to leave. ‘Holy shit, we’ve done it,’ shouted Boris, genuinely happy; 17.4 million voted for leave and 16.1 million to remain. On a 72.2 per cent turnout, Britain was near evenly divided. ‘The mood was celebratory but not over-the-top euphoric,’ according to one eyewitness. At 4 a.m., Boris was ordered to get some sleep in anticipation of a big day ahead. Forty-five minutes later he reappeared wearing a Brazilian football shirt and shorts: ‘I can’t sleep.’
In Downing Street, Cameron did not conceal his anger. Boris and Gove, he cursed, had ‘behaved appallingly’ for betraying him and the government, and for aligning themselves with liars and racists.43,44 As the victor, Boris was poised to seize the prize.45,46,47