Tom Richmond: No wonder that David Cameron's clique lost the Brexit vote

IF THERESA May wants some advice on how not to run a government, she should read the inside account of the Brexit referendum written by her predecessor David Cameron's newly-knighted press secretary Sir Craig Oliver.
Prime Minister David Cameron with is team including Craig Oliver (right) share a joke before the Witney count at the 2015 general election - and then a disastrous EU referendum campaign.Prime Minister David Cameron with is team including Craig Oliver (right) share a joke before the Witney count at the 2015 general election - and then a disastrous EU referendum campaign.
Prime Minister David Cameron with is team including Craig Oliver (right) share a joke before the Witney count at the 2015 general election - and then a disastrous EU referendum campaign.

Called Unleashing Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit, it provides extraordinary insight into the extent to which Mr Cameron’s team took the country for granted because they were obsessed with everyone from Michael Gove to the BBC rather than understanding the flaws in the Remain case.

I was, frankly, shocked when Tory grandee Ken Clarke revealed in his own memoir that the Cabinet had not been informed – never mind consulted – over the decision to hold the totemic vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

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The one-time Chancellor has described the strategy as “the single most disastrous decision of any Prime Minister in my lifetime” (Mr Clarke was born in 1940, ruling out Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler). I summise, from his perspective, that the campaign itself was the second worst.

Yet, irrespective of one’s views on Brexit, this is what happens when Prime Ministers put more faith and trust in their aides and closest supporters than members of their Cabinet. Press officers and their like should take their lead from Ministers, not vice versa.

Mrs May should note this. In Margaret Thatcher’s era, Cabinet meetings lasted three hours and principles were put before the opinion polls. Hangers on, like press officers or the “think-tank lads” derided by Mr Clarke, were not welcome.

If the new PM’s Brexit strategy is to work – and not undermine her laudable aspiration agenda – she will have to involve her Cabinet and not allow cliques to form. She also needs to keep Parliament informed.

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Contrast this with Mr Cameron’s modus operandi. According to Mr Oliver, his boss spent Christmas 2015 discussing Brexit with the aforementioned Mr Gove and – wait for it – the then Justice Secretary’s newspaper columnist wife Sarah Vine.

He writes: “DC says he had several conversations with Sarah Vine – during each of which she told him she was sure Michael would support him. It was clearly emphatic enough to assure DC that would be the case.” Sorry, what did this have to do with Mr Gove’s spouse?

At least George Osborne realised there was a problem – the then Chancellor mocked Remain’s effort in a New Year email. Yet, believe it or not, he never met ex-Labour minister Jack Straw’s son Will who was leading the Britain Stronger In Europe campaign, until the beginning of this year.

It gets even more farcical – Mr Cameron comes bounding down the Downing Street stairs for his New Year interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr with a sports bag because he’s preoccupied with an upcoming tennis match with Boris Johnson.

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And this is just the first week of January – the campaign continued in a similar vein right up until June 23, despite Germany’s leader Angela Merkel proposing that EU migrants to Britain would have to pass a self-sufficiency test and be capable of earning at least £20,000 a year. Yet the potential significance of this was lost because Mr Cameron and his team were obsessing over every newspaper headline, BBC report and the motives of Messrs Gove and Johnson.

Take the morning when the BBC led on the fact that eight economists had backed Brexit – Mr Oliver accused its economics editor Kamal Ahmad of not pointing out that the ‘experts’ are “wildly out of synch with mainstream opinion”. He then bemoaned Priti Patel, the then Employment Minister, for announcing that workplace regulations will be stripped away if the country votes to leave the EU.

“I arrive at my desk fired up,” writes Mr Oliver. “We need to combat this message and get some people saying with moral authority, ‘How dare they claim to speak for working people?’ I’ve invited John Witherow, the editor of The Times, to see the PM.”

Why is this significant? It shows the extent to which the Government were out of touch with those hard-working families who did not appreciate the benefits of globalisation.

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Peter Mandelson, one of new Labour’s architects, did. At one point, he told Mr Oliver: “You need to be exposed to hard-core Labour voters in Hartlepool and Doncaster, who think we have nothing to offer them on immigration. If we don’t do this, we will have problems.”

Yet what did the two spin doctors agree? To put forward Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister who led Britain from boom to bust, to reassure the working clases. By then it was too late – the referendum was already lost.

Moving forward, what are the lessons for Mrs May? The first is don’t over-promise and under-deliver. The second is to take a firm stance with the EU – further concessions would, by all accounts, have been made to keep Britain in the EU. The third is the need for the Cabinet to take collective responsibility for the agreed Brexit blueprint. The fourth is not to trust Michael Gove’s wife. And the fifth is to remember that there’s no substitute for statesmanship, experience and empathy.

Finally, there must be no rewards for failure. I can’t be the only person shaking my head at the fact that Craig Oliver’s 
title is the same afforded to Winston Churchill towards the end of the wartime leader’s career. This honour shows the extent to which David Cameron, and his clique, lost touch with reality.