A review of five of the best EU referendum books offers up some surprising insights into the campaigns and landmark vote

This has been a bumper autumn for political publishing. I’ve recently finished five of the main books on the EU referendum campaign and, although some of the key revelations have already been serialised in newspapers, there is plenty of material in them worth reporting that hasn’t yet been flagged up anywhere. So, as a Christmas service for anyone who has not read enough about the EU referendum already this year, here are 30 things about it that you might not know.

First, the books.

All Out War by Tim Shipman: Shipman is the Sunday Times political editor and this is his indispensable account, 624 pages covering not just the referendum campaign but the Conservative leadership contest too. Shipman seems to have spoken to everyone and he is commendably even-handed. It really is superb; taking into account the speed with which he turned it around, the volume of exclusive detail and the quality of the writing sets a new standard for the writing of contemporary political history.



The Bad Boys of Brexit by Arron Banks: Banks became a key player through his alliance with Nigel Farage and the £8m he spent on Leave.EU and leave campaigning generally, and this is his campaign “diary” – reconstructed after the event with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott co-writing. Much of the book is about his feuding with Vote Leave and, although the book is not very good on the high politics of the referendum, or even on what really motivates Banks himself, for anyone interested in low campaign skulduggery it’s hard to put down.

The Brexit Club by Owen Bennett: Bennett, deputy political editor of the Huffington Post, has written a book just covering the leave campaign, and the Vote Leave/Leave.EU rivalry. He published before Shipman and his account is thorough, revealing and very readable.

Breaking Point by Gary Gibbon: Gibbon, the political editor of Channel 4 News, has written a book that combines campaign diary with reflections on what happened. At 82 pages it barely qualifies as a book, but it’s well crafted and contains some lovely quotes.

Unleashing Demons by Craig Oliver: Oliver was David Cameron’s communications director and this is the story of the referendum as told from within the No 10 remain camp. Some of the reviews (like this one) have been very harsh but it is the first insider account from a member of the Cameron inner circle and it contains quite a lot of juicy detail. It is also good on the physical and mental ghastliness of working full-on for a losing campaign.

One of the best things about Oliver’s book is the title. It is taken from something Cameron said to him in 2015, when asked if he could see the case against a referendum. “You could unleash demons of which ye know not,” Cameron replied. Oliver says he thought this might be a quote from the Bible or Shakespeare, but couldn’t find the source. Knowing Cameron’s cultural hinterland, Oliver might have had better luck checking with Game of Thrones. It crops up quite a lot in these books. For the Blair administration, The West Wing was the TV reference point of choice. In the Thatcher era it was Yes, Minister. For Cameron and his colleagues it was a fantasy epic noted for its violence and its cruelty. That may sound inappropriate, but the EU referendum certainly did unleash very strong passions.

Anywhere, here are 30 new revelations about it.

The Vote Leave campaign

1. Vote Leave came close to losing the contest to be designated the official leave campaign, Shipman says. VL was up against the Ukip-linked Grassroots Out, and Shipman says VL only realised at 10.30pm on the night before it had to submit documents to the Electoral Commission saying why it should get the designation that its draft was missing key information. Staff stayed up until 3.30am rewriting it.

2. Nigel Farage tried to get Vote Leave to stop claiming that the UK was sending £350m a week to the EU, Banks says. In a diary entry for 12 June he writes:

Nigel had dinner with Michael Gove a couple of weeks ago and begged them to drop it [the £350m claim]. He pointed out that the net figure is impressive enough, and has the benefit of being accurate.

Gove shrugged, and claimed it was too late, as the figure was “already out there”.

Bennett quotes John Mills, who at one point was VL’s deputy chair, as saying that he also told VL colleagues they should stop using the £350m figure. Mills told Bennett:

Their response was that we’re better off with a big number because, even if it’s disputed, just in tactical terms it keeps the size of the contribution in front of everyone.

3. Vote Leave’s campaign director Dominic Cummings once described hardline anti-European Tory MPs as “flying monkeys”, Shipman reports.

After Michael Heseltine’s attack on Boris Johnson, [Paul] Stephenson [VL’s communications director] remembered a conversation he had had with Cummings weeks before about how some of the more hotheaded Eurosceptics would have their uses at points in the campaign. Cummings, with his usual delicacy where MPs were concerned, had said, ‘We just need to kick the flying monkeys in the cage and release them at the right point.’ Now Stephenson went in search of a flying monkey to turn up the pressure on Cameron. He called Steve Baker [chair of Conservatives for Britain] ...

The concept of “flying monkeys” is quite a useful one when trying to understand why Theresa May is wary of announcing anything that sounds like a move towards a “soft” Brexit. The “flying monkeys”, and the flying monkey press, are a potent force.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dominic Cummings. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

4. Vote Leave asked Chris Grayling to intervene with Farage after the killing of Jo Cox to get him to stop releasing more inflammatory posters, Shipman says. Grayling subsequently met Farage in a pub and Farage said Ukip would be refocusing its campaign on sovereignty. Shortly before Cox was killed, Farage had released the infamous Breaking Point poster.



5. Some Vote Leave campaigners were never aiming for a win, Gibbon says. He quotes what he was told by a pro-leave Tory who worked closely with Michael Gove and VL in a conversation three weeks after the referendum. The source told him:

We weren’t meant to win. That line, ‘you were only meant to blow the bloody doors off’, it’s true. The plan was to run the remain side close enough to scare the EU into bigger concessions. None of us thought we were ever going to win. With the possible exception of Dominic Cummings, who just wanted to drive a car into the Camerons’ living room. It’s all such a mess. I want a second referendum now.

Britain Stronger in Europe

6. Britain Stronger in Europe feared Theresa May could be trying to help the leave campaign because she was so reluctant to support remain. Oliver’s book is particularly good on this, and he quotes Will Straw, Stronger In’s executive director, as saying in a text after she briefed details of a speech in an unhelpful manner:

Are we sure May’s not an agent for the other side!?

7. Cameron came under intense pressure to announce a new immigration strategy in the final days before the referendum, with Labour’s Lord Mandelson even drafting policy he could announce. Shipman records the six pledges Mandelson wanted Cameron to announce: new money for areas affected by high immigration; a law to prevent wages being undercut by EU migrants; a new move to get the EU to cut welfare migration; agreement with France and Germany to review free movement; a cross-party review of immigration; and an affordable housing programme, with new arrivals excluded. Oliver also writes at length about how No 10 considered changing tack to try to win the argument on immigration, but decided against it on the grounds that this approach would lack credibility. He also recalls how, at a postmortem meeting after the referendum, Mandelson attacked No 10 for not taking his advice. Describing Mandelson’s argument, Oliver writes:

It’s not even coded – David Cameron and George Osborne (and their pathetic lackeys) should have turned to me.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Cameron (left) with Craig Oliver in Downing Street. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

8. Cameron refused to announce that he would veto Turkey joining the EU, even though this would help the remain campaign, because this might jeopardise Turkish counter-terrorism cooperation with the UK. Shipman quotes a No 10 figure saying Cameron put the national interest first “although it arguably lost him the referendum”.

9. President Obama may have had a grievance against Britain before becoming president, but not because of the way his grandfather was treated under the British empire, Oliver suggests. Oliver quotes David Cameron telling him:

[Obama] once joked that before he was president his main impression of Britain was formed when he lost his luggage on a British Airways flight.

10. Cameron told Nicola Sturgeon she should be involved in the Brexit negotiations, Oliver says. He says Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, was one of three people Cameron spoke to by phone on the Friday morning before he announced his resignation; the others were Michael Gove and John Major. Cameron told Sturgeon “he wants her to be involved in any negotiations”.

Labour

11. Labour remain campaigners thought Jeremy Corbyn’s office was actively trying to sabotage their efforts. Shipman’s book is particularly good on this because he has interviewed so many of the key figures and he quotes Lord Mandelson saying:

We were greatly damaged by Jeremy Corbyn’s stance, no doubt about that. Not only was he most of the time absent from the battle, but he was holding back the efforts of Alan Johnson and the Labour In campaign. At times they felt actually their efforts were being sabotaged by Jeremy Corbyn and the people around him.

And Shipman quotes Alan Johnson, chair of the Labour In For Britain campaign, saying:

Jeremy’s advisers – Seumas Milne, Andy Fisher – absolutely wanted to leave.

Milne, who is serving as Corbyn’s director of communications and strategy while on leave from his job as a Guardian journalist, is cited again by Shipman in a quote from an unnamed Stronger In press officer, who told the author:

The shadow cabinet was banned from doing anything for us by Seumas. Even when people like Heidi Alexander or Seema Malhotra would approach us they’d get slightly threatening calls from the leader’s office, and their offers would be quickly retracted. They couldn’t even do quotes for us.

Craig Oliver also writes in detail about how frustrated No 10 was with the contribution Corbyn’s office was making to the remain campaign. Oliver says:

To us, the Labour leader’s office resembles a madhouse, where the patients have taken over the asylum. There’s also the real possibility they don’t care if we win or not.

And Gary Gibbon recalls meeting Milne in the Commons the week after the leave vote, and being surprised by his reaction to the result.

‘What did you feel when you heard the result?’ I asked. ‘Shocked, really shocked,’ came the reply. ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Others say “horrified”, “sad”.’ ‘Shocked, really shocked,’ [Milne] repeated. ‘You’re not really like the general London demographic, are you?’ I said. He walked off with his pastry and coffee, laughing.





Corbyn and his team object to the way their conduct during the campaign is presented in Shipman’s book, I understand. They say Shipman did not speak to Corbyn or anyone in his immediate circle during his research and believe claims that they were out to “sabotage” the remain campaign come from people opposed to Corbyn’s leadership. Corbyn did not use all the Britain Stronger in Europe messages because his argument was different, they say. They also reject the allegation that shadow cabinet members were banned from helping Stronger In.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Corbyn at a Labour In for Britain event. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

12. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, argued in 2015 that Labour should stay neutral in the EU campaign until David Cameron secured his EU deal in February 2016. Shipman quotes a source who worked with Corbyn saying:

John McDonnell was most hostile to the EU, and would have been pleased if we’d been campaigning to leave. John argued forcefully that we should say nothing until February.

At another point, Shipman quotes an unnamed Labour official saying McDonnell refused to go on the Labour In battle bus “because it’s too ‘New Labour-ish’ to be on a bus”.

13. Corbyn’s office kept removing a line from Corbyn’s speeches saying he was campaigning to remain in the EU, Shipman says. He quotes Alan Johnson saying:

We kept trying to get [Corbyn] to say, ‘That’s why I am campaigning to remain in the EU.’ It’s a simple sentence. It kept going into speeches, and it kept coming out. It would be taken out by Seumas Milne, it would be taken out by Andrew Fisher.

14. Corbyn’s office proposed getting Corbyn to visit Turkey during the referendum campaign to meet refugees, Shipman says. Corbyn was supposed to be using the visit to promote the benefits of open borders. Shipman quotes Johnson as saying the proposal was a “disaster” and James McGrory, Stronger In’s head of communications, as saying:

If I’d been making up what is the worst possible thing that Jeremy Corbyn could do right now, I might not have been able to come up with something that shit.

The plan was eventually dropped, but Shipman says that for three weeks it was under consideration and that Labour officials saw the fact that Corbyn’s office was pushing for the visit, despite knowing that highlighting immigration from Turkey would help leave, as further evidence that Corbyn’s aides were trying to undermine the remain campaign.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alan Johnson. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

15. Corbyn’s office ordered a Labour In press release to be rewritten to remove a mention of Tony Blair, Shipman says. The original mentioned the fact that Blair and other former Labour leaders were engaged in coordinated campaign activities. Later, a video for use at a Labour rally was edited on the orders of Corbyn’s office to take out a mention of Blair.

16. Gordon Brown was blamed for sabotaging attempts to get three former prime ministers, Brown, Blair and John Major, to join David Cameron at a remain rally. Shipman quotes various sources saying Brown objected to sharing a stage with both Cameron and Blair.

17. Katy Clark, Corbyn’s political secretary, told a colleague on the night of the referendum that leaving the EU had its advantages, Shipman says. He quotes a source who recalls Clark telling a fellow Labour staffer:

It was the right thing to do, because we distinguish ourselves from the capitalist case for leaving, and even if we leave, we’ll be out of that capitalist thing.

The Conservatives

18. Boris Johnson privately agreed to do five campaign events alongside Nigel Farage in the final weeks of the campaign, Banks says. But those events never took place. Vote Leave thought Farage had a negative effect on undecided voters and refused to campaign with him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Gove (left) and Boris Johnson on the Vote Leave bus. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

19. Cameron used to treat the idea of Michael Gove running the country as a joke, Oliver says. He recalls a conversation with Cameron:

As I walk into DC’s office, he is commenting on a line in one of the papers that Michael Gove should be made deputy PM. He turns to me, knowing I will wholeheartedly agree with his view: ‘Can you imagine him ever being left in charge of the country.’

At another point Oliver writes this about Gove’s unsuitability to be prime minister:

[Gove’s] set of friends agreed he wasn’t the man for the job, saying he was not worldly enough, and claiming, ‘This is the man who had to be stopped trying to unblock his loo with a hoover.’

Oliver is damning about Gove, essentially accusing him of being phoney.

The more I looked at [Gove], the more everything he did appeared to be an act or a performance ... Having worked with him for a number of years now, I’m not sure what he really believes.

It is not clear how much this is just a personal view, and how much Oliver is channelling the thoughts of Cameron himself. No doubt we’ll find out when Cameron publishes his own memoirs.

20. However, Vote Leave focus group research suggested that people trusted Gove precisely because they knew he was campaigning against Cameron, who had been a close friend. Bennett’s book quotes Matthew Elliott, the VL chief executive, recalling the results of focus group research. Elliott told Bennett:



One thing that did come up with Michael Gove [in the focus group research] was ‘I may not particularly like him, I don’t like what he did with schools, that sort of thing, but he basically let down his best friend, he’s followed his conscience, he’s friends with the PM yet he’s campaigning for leave and the PM is annoyed about that and, if he’s done that, he must be serious about what he is saying, he must be telling the truth.’

21. Priti Patel was labelled the most “obnoxious” leave campaigner by fellow Tories on the remain side from No 10, Oliver says. He describes this conversation shortly before the EU referendum:

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.

Patel, who is now international development secretary, particularly angered No 10 because she was willing to put her name to Vote Leave statements attacking the government’s record, such as one saying immigration was to blame for parents not getting their first choice of primary school.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Priti Patel at a Vote Leave event. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/REX/Shutterstock

22. Banks, a Ukip supporter, decided to use his Leave.EU organisation to try to help Andrea Leadsom win the Conservative party leadership. In his diary, in an entry for 30 June, he writes:

We’ve decided to get behind [Leadsom]. We’ve now got a million supporters, many of them Tories. We could make a real difference.

23. Leadsom told Graham Brady, chairman of the Conservative 1922 committee, that she was thinking of pulling out of the leadership contest on the Thursday when she made it on to the final shortlist of two, Shipman says. Most people assume she did not start thinking of withdrawing until a Times interview published on the Saturday backfired badly. But Shipman says on Thursday she was already thinking of standing aside because Theresa May had such an overwhelming lead among MPs.

24. Leadsom’s Times interview contained an unpublished remark about how it might be sensible for abused children to be adopted by gay couples, Shipman says. The interview damaged Leadsom because she told the Times that having children gave her an advantage over May. But Shipman says the Times chose not to publish her suggestion that it might be helpful for abused children to be adopted by gay couples of a different sex from the abuser because that might be “therapeutic” for the children. “The comment may have been intended to demonstrate that Leadsom was not homophobic, but it was notably eccentric,” Shipman writes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrea Leadsom in one of the EU referendum debates. Photograph: Matt Frost/ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

25. Boris Johnson refused to commit to campaigning for Leadsom for the leadership, and this helped to persuade her to withdraw, Shipman reports. Johnson backed Leadsom for the leadership. But he did not want to campaign against Theresa May.



What is certain is that Johnson helped Leadsom to decide to throw in the towel. She called Boris on the Monday morning [the day she announced her withdrawal] and said she would continue if he was prepared to campaign for her around the country and Lynton Crosby would run the campaign. Crosby had already refused, and Johnson said he was not prepared to spend his entire summer on the stump.

Ukip and Arron Banks

26. Douglas Carswell wanted an assurance that he would be compensated if he lost before he defected from the Conservatives to Ukip and triggered a byelection in Clacton, Banks claims. Bennett’s book reveals that Carswell’s defection to Ukip was partly motivated by a desire to “neutralise” the “toxic” impact of Nigel Farage, which Carswell feared would damage the leave campaign, but Banks’s diary has further insights into quite how poisonous relations between Carswell and the Farage faction were. On Clacton, Banks writes:

Only [Carswell] knows whether his heart was ever really in leaving the Conservative party, but it is interesting that he went to great lengths to ensure that if his great gamble backfired, he would be well looked after. Arrangements were put in place for him to receive a considerable sum of money from Ukip if he failed to win the byelection triggered by his defection.

Banks also implies that Carswell was giving the Tories Ukip election data from South Thanet during the 2015 general election to help them stop Farage becoming an MP.

Long after polling day ... my own forensic post-mortem examination of South Thanet revealed something quite remarkable: Carswell was routinely downloading data and sending it to an anonymous computer server. He did so on six separate occasions. While there were files on every target seat in the country, curiously, only the information from South Thanet was shared. Quite where the information went once it left our offices, nobody knows, but I can make an educated guess: the Tories.

Asked about these claims, Carswell told me that Banks’s book was “a work of fiction” and that there was “absolutely no basis for any suggestion” that he passed election information on to other parties. But on the Clacton allegation he just said that he risked his career when he triggered the byelection and that: “I don’t think anyone can fairly accuse me of doing so for personal gain.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Douglas Carswell. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

27 Russia’s security service sent an agent to the Ukip conference last year, Banks believes. In his diary he records a meeting with the Russian ambassador and describes how it was set up.

We’d been invited by a shady character called Oleg we’d met in Doncaster at Ukip’s conference. He was introduced to us as the first secretary at the embassy – in other word’s, the KGB’s man in London.

The KGB has now been replaced by the FSB, but never mind. Banks says the Russian ambassador wanted “the inside track on the Brexit campaign” and that the pair of them “hit it off from the word go”.

28. Richard Tice, the businessman who co-founded Leave.EU with Banks, thought No 10 ordered HM Revenue and Customs to launch an investigation into his tax affairs because of his support for the leave campaign. Describing how angry Tice was about an HMRC probe in January 2016, Banks says:

[Tice is] convinced he detects the hand of No 10. ‘You and I were the first business people to stick our heads above the parapet on the referendum last year. Bet someone in Downing Street’s encouraged HMRC to have a little look,’ he said darkly.

29. Banks claims that two small parties asked for money in return for backing the Grassroots Out bid to be the official leave campaign. He claims that the DUP asked for £30,000 a month for four months, which was not paid, and that, in a meeting in a pub, the New Communist party asked for £2,000 in cash, which was handed over. In response, the DUP, which backed Vote Leave’s bid to win the official campaign designation, denied asking for money and said it was Banks who offered cash. The New Communist party was listed as a Grassroots Out supporter, but its general secretary, Andy Brooks, told me that the party was not meant to be affiliated to any leave group and that Banks might have muddled it up with another communist group, or that the pub meeting was with readers of its newspaper who were not authorised to make commitments on behalf of the party.



30. Relations between Banks and Vote Leave got so bad that in March Banks served a writ on Matthew Elliott, VL’s chief executive, for defamation. But he dropped the legal action “extremely reluctantly” because he thought it would damage the leave campaign.