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.