All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
he had hurled the ‘BSE’ jibe.
But Cummings admonished him. When Thomas lost her rag, he told Oxley, ‘What you should have said was, “And as I was saying, the BSE campaign …” Just double down.’ That was Cummings all over. ‘Double down’ became Vote Leave’s internal motto. ‘If we’d started a row, you didn’t withdraw, you doubled down,’ says Oxley.
This uncompromising approach by Cummings was to spark an attempt to oust him which, had it succeeded, could have killed Leave’s chances of victory stone dead.
Cummings’ other instruction to Oxley that day was more obscure, but even more revealing of the kind of campaign he wanted to run. It was not just Steve Baker who had read classics of military theory. When Oxley returned to the office, Cummings told him, ‘You’ve got to get in their OODA loop.’
‘OODA loop’ is a term from American military strategy that stands for ‘observe, orient, decide, and act’. It was the brainchild of US Air Force Colonel John Boyd, a fighter pilot in the Korean War. Boyd believed that everyone makes decisions by following the four stages of OODA. He wrote: ‘In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries – or, better yet, get inside [the] adversary’s Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action loop. Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable) thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries.’ Cummings describes Boyd as ‘a brilliant guy, a modern-day Sun Tzu’.
In Cummings’ view, with Thomas disorientated and on the run, Oxley should have made her more so. Vote Leave’s strategy throughout the campaign was to disrupt and disorientate the enemy. Cummings’ grounding in strategic theory did not stop there: ‘If you’re serious about these things, the classics speak truth,’ he said. ‘Thucydides, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Mao on guerrilla warfare.’ Cummings had studied Otto von Bismarck at university under the historian Norman Stone, and had later read ‘a whole bunch of biographies and original sources’ on the nineteenth-century statesman after he stopped working for Michael Gove. He vowed to run the Leave campaign on the same principles as the man who unified Germany by means of war and exploiting the weakness of his enemies: ‘Of the people we’ve got good sources for, he’s undoubtedly the most extraordinary and most able political operator. He approached things with extreme flexibility. Always avoid being boxed in, always have two irons in the fire, wherever you can. Try to avoid dead ends, because you never know what’s going to come and bite you in the arse.’ Critics of Vote Leave’s campaign messaging might also recall Bismarck’s insight that ‘People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.’
Since Cummings knew many of the Downing Street and Remain chiefs well, he also knew their weak points. ‘Dom knew which lines would annoy the other side,’ a campaign source said. ‘He knew the pressure points of people.’ When Downing Street’s Daniel Korski was accused of bullying businesses, a dossier on Korski’s pro-European background found its way to the media. When Kate Rock, a Tory peer who worked for Cameron, found herself in the news, one paper was encouraged to use an unflattering photograph that she was known to hate – both examples of getting in the enemy’s OODA loop. ‘The Labour press office did not know how to hit the Tories like we did,’ the source said.
The happiest Paul Stephenson ever saw Cummings was on the morning he told the team to put the NHS logo on the side of Vote Leave’s bus: ‘He was literally jumping around saying, “We’re going to use the NHS logo and they’re going to hate it.”’ Health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s team had already sent a legal letter threatening to sue Vote Leave for putting the logo on their leaflets. Stephenson responded that if they wished to impound the bus he would be happy to arrange a media call for Hunt to come down and do it personally.
Cummings’ psychological warfare was good strategy, but it also caused a rift with MPs that was almost his undoing. From the moment he began briefing journalists in May 2015 about his approach to the campaign, he was clear that he wanted to take the Confederation of British Industry off the battlefield. He saw the CBI as irredeemably pro-EU, and as it was one of the most influential business voices in the country, he wanted it neutralised. Protests from Nationalists in the lead-up to the Scottish referendum had meant the CBI was forced to largely sit out that campaign. Cummings decided to stage a protest at the CBI’s annual conference in November. Stephenson suggested they should infiltrate the conference hall and get people to hold up something. Cummings embraced the idea, and told the team, ‘If there are not calls for me to be sacked after the CBI conference, then you haven’t done your job.’
The team found two students – Phil Sheppard and Peter Lyons – from Students for Britain, Vote Leave’s ‘militant wing’. They created a fake company and gained access to the event. When David Cameron got up to speak on 9 November they held up banners reading ‘CBI = Voice of Brussels’. The protest might have been even more dramatic. The usually cautious Matthew Elliott reminded people that Countryside Alliance campaigners had set off rape alarms during a protest at a Labour conference, though he denies suggesting their use at the CBI.
The stunt got huge publicity, but Eurosceptic MPs ‘hated it’ because they had been kept in the dark by Cummings. Steve Baker, by his own account, ‘went bananas’ and the two fell out ‘very badly’. Baker says, ‘I didn’t like that it breached the PM’s security. I didn’t like that it involved lying to the CBI. I didn’t like that it put those two young lads in a position where they’ll always be remembered as the lads who did the CBI stunt.’ Paul Stephenson rejects this argument: ‘They weren’t duped into anything. They were up for it. They knew exactly what they were getting into.’ Both Sheppard and Lyons worked for the campaign until the end.
Baker’s main beef was that the MPs had been frozen out. ‘What I really hated is that my permission was not asked and I was not trusted with that knowledge. It really hurt that my reputation had been played with.’ Peter Bone, the MP for Wellingborough, shared Baker’s concern that the students would ‘have a mark against them’, while Bernard Jenkin was also ‘very annoyed about it’: ‘Dominic became very much the focus of attention because he kept saying or doing very controversial things.’ Jenkin believed the stunt might imperil Vote Leave’s chances of winning designation as the official ‘Out’ campaign and put off voters: ‘The reputation of the Leave campaign would be intrinsic to its effectiveness. Unlike a plain “No” campaign, in this referendum we were the people making the proposition, to leave the EU, and people would need to be able to trust our campaign.’ When Baker refused to join Vote Leave’s board because he did not feel Cummings was prepared to be held accountable, Jenkin, ‘with some foreboding’, agreed to take his place. ‘The first thing I did was to ask the Compliance Committee to investigate the CBI stunt,’ says Jenkin. ‘It turned out there was nothing untoward, but the board needed to know that.’
The CBI protest might have upset the MPs, but it helped internal bonding in the campaign headquarters: ‘It was blooding everyone for the campaign to come,’ says Stephenson. ‘The office got into its warlike mentality that day.’ They would soon need it.
The event that sparked the anti-Cummings insurrection was the decision of Richard Murphy, Vote Leave’s head of field operations, to resign at the end of November. Murphy had been brought in by Matthew Elliott from Conservative campaign headquarters, where he had been director of field operations, but he quickly clashed with Cummings. Murphy objected to the campaign director wanting to focus on digital rather than ‘on the ground’ campaigning in the initial stages. Cummings believed Murphy was too set in his ways. Stephenson describes him as ‘old school’: ‘We created our own software for canvass returns and Murphy wanted to use this thing he’d been using for thirty years. It was a clash of cultures. He kept on threatening to walk out, and in the end he did.’
Cummings saw a man who was experienced but unwilling to adapt, and who ‘hated’ the questioning, data-driven campaign he was creating. At one point he told Murphy, ‘Just saying it’s what you’ve done for thirty years isn’t good enough. Haven’t you learnt that from Obama’s campaign?’ Murphy, he could see, found that ‘insulting’. According to one witness, he replied, ‘Why don’t we use stuff that British people know about rather than Americans?’