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A Nervous Breakdown as Britain Votes ‘Out’

A much-diminished David Cameron said an emotional farewell to the twenty-seven other heads of European governments in Brussels on 28 June 2016. It was a sombre occasion for the man who will go down in history as the leader who took Britain out of the European Union, and possibly broke up the United Kingdom. Five days earlier a chastened Cameron, along with George Osborne, his chancellor, watched their dreams turn to dust as Britain voted against their wishes, and the odds, to say goodbye to Brussels.

As the leader who gambled on a referendum that the country was not demanding at the time he announced it, Cameron knew that it was his fault. Within three hours of the final result he stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street and resigned. He was gone three weeks later. Osborne’s chances of succeeding Cameron, already slim because he was felt to have overstated his economic warnings during the referendum campaign, disappeared. He was not a candidate in the leadership election that followed. And his humiliation was not complete.

On the day of the vote, Cameron and his aides, and Osborne, had discussed what would happen if they lost, although at that time they were expecting to win. The chancellor, I was told, said there was a case for Cameron staying on to bring stability, as well as one for him going. Cameron was adamant that he must depart in those circumstances and his aides did not try to dissuade him. He went to bed for a few hours after the result became known; his mind was made up. Twenty days later – after a vicious but truncated leadership election – he was succeeded by Theresa May, who became Britain’s second woman prime minister at the age of fifty-nine.

Within hours she had stamped her authority with a ruthless reshuffle that saw few ministers stay in their jobs, and many of Cameron’s closest allies purged. Osborne was sacked, as was Michael Gove, the justice secretary. The ‘chumocracy’, the name given by detractors to the tight group of friends around Cameron which was reputed to take most government decisions, was brutally slain.

Britain woke up on 24 June, the morning after the referendum, a divided nation. We were a country split between young and old, better off and poor, north and south. The young, rich and parts of the south, particularly London, had voted ‘In’. The old, the angry and disadvantaged, and the north, had voted ‘Out’.

The kingdom was divided, with Scotland and Northern Ireland voting to stay in the EU, England and Wales opting for out. Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, said a second referendum on independence was highly likely. Scotland could leave the UK within years, and Brexit, as our departure will forever be known, will be to blame.

Apart from the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the irrepressible Nigel Farage – whose referendum and victory it was – few of the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign offered outward signs of jubilation. They had not expected to win, and secretly many had probably hoped they would not. Many who had voted to leave wondered what they had done. Some recanted on the airwaves within hours. It was too late. Out was out.

In the days that followed, British politics descended into a form of insanity. The two men who had led the campaign to leave, Boris Johnson (the former London mayor) and Michael Gove, killed each other’s chances of leading their party – the latter accused of committing an act of treachery without parallel in modern political history; Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, was pushed to the brink of resigning from his party; Farage stood down in triumph, his job done; and for a few days it looked as if the country was running without a government or opposition.

Andrea Leadsom, the energy minister who became the main Brexit candidate as Johnson and Gove fell away, was chosen by MPs to go into a run-off with Theresa May. But then she stunned an already shell-shocked Westminster by suddenly withdrawing only an hour after May formally launched her campaign, leaving the home secretary the victor without the need for an election by party members. After starting her own campaign, Leadsom had suffered a torrid weekend, fiercely criticized by the Conservative press and MPs after claims that she had exaggerated her CV, questions over her tax return, and an interview with The Times in which she appeared to suggest that as a mother she had an advantage over the childless May.

The rest of Europe, and much of the world, looked on in horror and amazement. The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, not known for hyperbole, suggested: ‘England has collapsed politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.’

The bloodletting was by no means over, and the twists and turns in this fast-moving epic continued. First May called in Osborne and told him she needed a new chancellor after using her leadership campaign to distance herself from his economic stance. As the principal architect of ‘Project Fear’, the name given to the torrent of gruesome economic warnings that emanated from the Treasury during the campaign, and which was felt to have backfired, he harboured little hope of surviving.

Then she revived Johnson’s tottering career by making him foreign secretary. She had texted him expressing sympathy on the morning when he had been suddenly deserted by Gove. Boris claimed to be ‘humbled’ and his elevation surprised him and most of the political world, which had started to write him off.

The next morning May called in Gove, with whom she had sharply clashed in government, and sacked him as well in what friends called an ‘impeccably polite’ exchange. So Boris was in the Cabinet for the first time and Gove, who had struck him down just days earlier, was out.

Nicky Morgan, the education secretary who had made the mistake of backing Gove, was shown the door as well. The speed of events was startling and May, having watched a fortnight of political assassinations, proved to be a brutal axe-woman when her time came. In just forty-eight hours the old guard had retired from the fray, with Cameron and Osborne spotted having coffee in a Notting Hill cafe, and the new regime was in place.

Until 2016, Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1962, when the then prime minister ejected seven ministers from his Cabinet, was deemed the most ferocious exercise in prime ministerial power in history. No longer. May culled Cameron’s team and sent nine of them to the back-benches. Cabinet executions are normally done by telephone. But May looked them in the eye as she did it. Her aides said it was a matter of courtesy, but some of the victims wished they had not been put through the ordeal. She even gave Gove a lecture in loyalty as she despatched him. May had shown herself to be fearless and not a leader to be messed with. But her Commons majority is tiny and one day she may regret making so many enemies in one fell swoop.

The nervous breakdown that gripped Westminster overshadowed the gravity of the decision that Britain had taken and the mess that the departed leaders had left for others to clear up. Yes, Britain now had a new prime minister. But this was of much less significance than what else had happened. After forty-three years, the United Kingdom was cut adrift from the organization with which it had always lived uneasily but which, until the referendum dawned, people had seemed prepared to accept.

Now we were on the outside, and the nation was in shock, most not having expected the outcome even if they voted for it. The pound slumped to its lowest level in a generation, firms voiced doubts about investing here, young people marched on Parliament complaining that their futures had been compromised by what they called the lies of the ‘Leave’ campaign, and Osborne was forced to drop his plan to take the economy into surplus by 2020. At the same time, there was a disturbing rise in racially motivated attacks, with Polish and other migrants saying they no longer felt welcome.

Europe had killed another prime minister. But far more important than that, the vote had left Britain with a deeply uncertain future, facing at least two years of negotiations about its relationship with the body it had abandoned.

In truth it will be years before the full impact of cutting formal links with our biggest market can be assessed, but the Treasury is fully expecting a bleak 2017, and the outlook for future years is not much better. A friend said of Osborne: ‘George fears that an awful lot of hard work by the country and us has gone up in smoke.’

This is a chronicle of events in a nutshell. The details, however, bear much closer examination.

I have known Boris Johnson and Michael Gove for years. I remember little of Boris’s brief spell on The Times as a young reporter, but got to know him pretty well on my regular trips to European summits when he was the Brussels chief for The Daily Telegraph. I knew Michael well from his time as comment editor and news editor at The Times, when we would have several conversations every day about the political stories of the moment.

I got on very well with both of them but neither I nor anyone who worked with them could have dreamt that one day they would have the destiny of the nation in their hands. Boris made us laugh and was wonderfully indecisive, as I describe in a later chapter. Govey, as many in the office called him, was bookish, polite, deeply knowledgeable about politics, humorous. We knew that Gove, a Conservative, was looking for a parliamentary seat. But political leaders? It never occurred to us.

Yet here they were, on the morning of 24 June, squinting into the cameras, speaking in hushed, statesmanlike tones about the seriousness of the decision that had been taken. They together had been the public face – along with Farage – of the ‘Leave’ campaign. And here on the dawn of victory it was obvious they had no idea what would happen next. That ignorance was shared by most of the rest of the Government. As the markets tumbled, and as recriminations broke out between the rival campaigns, government came to a stop and it was clear that there had been little planning for a Brexit outcome.

As the Government floundered, Her Majesty’s Opposition fell apart. The campaign to stay in the EU, dubbed ‘Remain’, lost because millions of traditional Labour supporters in its heartlands voted to leave, rebelling at last at what they saw as a southern elite telling them what was good for them and failing to heed their worries about excessive immigration. Many saw themselves as the victims of what the southerners called globalization and what they saw as foreigners taking their jobs.

Labour was distraught because as a party it was strongly in favour of staying in. But Jeremy Corbyn had a long history of animosity towards the EU and was felt at best not to have pulled his weight during the campaign and at worst to have allowed his hard-left aides to undermine it. His shadow Cabinet and front-bench walked out on him, a motion of no confidence was easily passed against him, and senior figures dithered over challenging him. He refused to step down and vowed to fight on. Angela Eagle, shadow business secretary and shadow first secretary, who had excelled during the previous year when standing in for Corbyn at PM’s Questions, announced she was running but then pulled out, leaving Owen Smith, former shadow work and pensions secretary and an MP for only six years, to take on Corbyn. A leadership contest – for the second summer in succession – was under way as this book went to the printers.

Within a week of the referendum the Tory party was in complete chaos. Johnson was briefly and magically transformed from the assassin of the Prime Minister into the unity candidate best able to uphold the values of liberal Conservatism. Gove promised to be his campaign manager for what looked likely to be a relatively straightforward victory. We should have known, however, that nothing is simple in the Tory party.

Gove, his campaign team, and his wife, the journalist Sarah Vine, began – according to their side of the story – to have doubts about Johnson’s ability to be prime minister, leading Gove, just a week after the vote, to withdraw support from Johnson, announce he was standing himself and decry the leadership qualities of his friend and colleague.

The betrayal stunned Johnson, who swiftly pulled out, leaving May, the home secretary, the clear favourite, and his team went to war on Gove. One suggested there was a ‘deep pit reserved in hell’ for Gove, Johnson’s sister Rachel accused Gove of being a political psychopath, and Ben Wallace, another Johnson campaign aide, said Gove could not be trusted to be prime minister because he has ‘an emotional need to gossip, particularly when drink is taken, as it all too often seemed to be’. The governing party was in turmoil.

How did the two men who had done more than any, apart from Farage, to bring Brexit about fall out so spectacularly and so quickly?

Friends told me that Johnson had asked Gove to be his campaign manager on the Friday after the vote. Gove asked for twenty-four hours to think it over and was approached by several colleagues to run. He pointed out that he had always said he did not want to be prime minister and felt that Boris was the man.

Gove’s friends said that, although he had known Boris for twenty years, he had never worked closely with him. Johnson had risen to the occasion during the campaign and Gove assumed he was ready for the top job. But that confidence was to be swiftly shattered. According to friends, he found that Johnson had only a ramshackle leadership campaign operation in place and did not appear to be taking seriously the coming moment when he switched from the populist ex-mayor liked by the voters to the serious job of prime minister. Little work had been done on setting out a programme or vision for leadership.

For three days Gove campaigned for Johnson, growing more and more concerned that he seemed unfocused on the task in hand. For Boris, it was vital to have Andrea Leadsom, who had won plaudits for her role during the referendum campaign, on board. I have learnt that on the morning of Wednesday, 29 June, an astonishing meeting took place in a Commons office. Three of the leaders of the Brexit cause met privately to discuss what jobs would be allocated if Johnson won.