Westminster insiders reveal what really happened after Vote Leave claimed victory in the referendum
By the time Boris Johnson graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, at the age of 23, his irrepressible character had been largely forged, a character that would propel him to the very top of politics. Once at the pinnacle, the seeds of his decline and fall began inevitably to flower.
His three core character traits were evident by the time he left university:
● A skill exceptionally rare among political leaders to communicate with charisma and humour with the public far and wide, to read the mood and currents of politics, and to raise people’s sights about what could be achieved.
● An all-consuming self-centredness that impelled him to be the most important and visible person on every occasion, with the minimum effort required, and to be impatient of any person, precedent or procedure getting in the way of that quest. “I want it all and I want it now” was an impulse he found difficult to overcome.
● A lack of moral seriousness not mitigated by his intellect and rhetorical skills. Causes, commitments, colleagues as well as pledges, policies and partners were regarded as transitory and transactional. Any could be picked up only to be jettisoned when they no longer served his interests or pleasure.
These added up to three flaws that, unaddressed, would prove fatal: an inability to value truth and to set or pronounce on moral boundaries; to recognise merit, appoint the best people and trust them to do their jobs; and to stick by any decision or person without changing his mind.
The Conservatives, to the surprise of many, won the 2015 general election outright, ending the coalition with the Lib Dems. The in-out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was announced by David Cameron for June 23, 2016. The key influencer on voters, as No 10 was all too aware, would be Boris Johnson. He knew it too, and loved the power it gave him. He had one overriding question in his mind: would his chances of making it to No 10 be improved by voting Remain or voting Brexit?
“He was absolutely determined to become prime minister,” says election strategist Mark Fullbrook. Johnson would say, “I’ve watched Dave doing it and I’ve seen George wanting to do it. Why can’t I do it? If they can, I can.”
Boris Johnson and Allegra Mostyn-Owen, Oxford Town Hall, 1986
Johnson‘s decision on whether to back Remain or not was always going to be guided by his personal calculus. At this time, like most people, he assumed Cameron would win the referendum, if closely, and Britain would remain in the EU. Should he be a loyal lieutenant to Cameron and Osborne, or be leader of the side that lost? “1,000 per cent cynical”, was the judgment of Osborne. “I think it was a straight calculation,” says Oliver Lewis, who became his Brexit right hand. “He reckoned it was win-win. ‘If I come out for Brexit and we lose, I position myself as a hero Eurosceptic, from which I can win the leadership at the next contest. If we win, then I’ll be clear favourite for prime minister.’ ”
Most of the running on Vote Leave had been down to Dominic Cummings. Johnson’s value, as it was to prove again in the general election three years later, was as a figurehead, an orator and booster of morale. The ideal partner, Vote Leave believed, for Michael Gove, seen as bringing intellectual gravitas and credibility to the Brexit cause, in contrast to the populism of Nigel Farage.
Until he gave up being mayor of London in May, Johnson was only able to devote Fridays and weekends to the campaign. So Cummings deployed him like a battering ram in the areas which research told him could be won. Johnson was mostly happy to delegate to Cummings, in awe of his bravura, not least the slogan “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”. But he became anxious when the words unleashed fury, and was straight on the phone to Cummings: “Don’t worry, Boris,” he replied, “everyone knows the real figure is not £350 million after rebates, but every time a journalist tells you that it’s only £170 million, all everyone thinks is £170 million is a f*** of a lot of money. The more they ask, the better. It’s great for Vote Leave.”
Johnson’s worst clash with Cummings was over another Vote Leave slogan on a poster suggesting that Turkish accession to the EU would put Britain at risk of being swamped. “He was incandescent when he saw it and wanted to have it out immediately with Cummings,” recalls his aide Will Walden. “It was the closest I saw him to quitting. He wanted to come down to London and apparently punch Cummings.”
“It wouldn’t look good. It’ll seep out,” the adviser told him. Johnson, who had been a liberal mayor of metropolitan London and had championed inclusivity, was selectively uncomfortable about anything that smacked of racism or xenophobia. But there were to be no fisticuffs, nor row, nor slogan change, despite Johnson’s sounds and fury.
The referendum result was declared at 7.20am on June 24. Cameron and Osborne had been right to see Johnson as the trump card. With the margins so tight, his backing they believed “without question” carried Vote Leave over the line because, says Osborne, “Boris made it respectable for middle of the road people to vote Brexit”. Most in the UK and across the world were shocked by the result.
Just after 8am that Friday, Cameron with his gin-reinforced wife Samantha by his side announced on the steps of Downing Street: “I do not think it would be right for me to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination,” finishing, “I love this country.”
Johnson in front of the Brexit Battle Bus, 2016
Johnson was finding it hard to think straight. He had been up all night watching the television at his Islington home. Only towards dawn did he realise that Vote Leave would actually win. He disappeared to bed for 20 minutes but came back and paced around in a Brazilian football shirt and misfitting shorts looking ashen-faced and distraught. “What the hell is happening?” he kept saying. Then a pang of guilt struck him when he saw pictures of Samantha on the television looking utterly distraught. “Oh my God. Look at Sam. God. Poor Sam.” Soon after, stopping in his tracks, a new thought struck him: “Oh shit, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I didn’t think it would happen. Holy crap, what will we do?” Still muttering, he went off to write the speech he knew he would in no time have to deliver.
Those who knew Johnson intimately say they had never seen him more frightened and dismayed than at this moment of triumph. Crowds were shouting angrily outside his house: “People who had patted him on the back when he had been mayor were now screaming at him.” He made it out to the car and his driver shot off down the road but had to stop at a red traffic light at the end. Aides by his side screamed for the driver to shoot straight through the lights, but he refused. “The crowds began banging angrily on the windows and roof. Boris looked terrified. He stared dead ahead, sensing that from this moment on, everything had changed.”
It was to change still more. Within just hours of the result being declared, cracks began to appear between the two frontrunners to succeed Cameron, Johnson and Gove.
The power behind their throne, Cummings, decided that the former stood the better chance of beating Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, with the latter doing the hard yards as chancellor. The calculus was a mirror image of Blair versus Brown in 1994 after the death of the Labour leader John Smith. Then as now, one had the superior intellect and command of detail, the other the popular appeal, the looks and the ability to put across the big picture.
Like Johnson, Gove liked to listen to the views of his court of trusted advisers. United during Brexit, now on the verge of the ultimate prize in politics, the teams around the principals fumbled the keys over who would step through the door of No 10. Both wanted to maximise their own futures in the Brave New World they had unleashed. Gove weighed up the arguments before deciding to take Johnson head-on.
Johnson was absolutely stunned by the news. “Boris cannot provide the leadership or build and unite the team in order to take this country forward,” Gove announced to a dumbfounded public. Never before had a colleague turned against him like that. He withdrew from the leadership contest. His trust in others, never in great supply before, would not recover: it scarred him. “It was one of the very few times I saw him in tears,” says one of his colleagues. “He didn’t trust anyone again,” says a close family member. “I don’t know if he ever quite trusted his old friends or even his family in the same way.”
Had Gove not struck out, had Johnson not stood down, had he won the crown there and then, the next few years would have been very different. Theresa May would never have become prime minister. Without the three years of bitterness that ensued, tearing the party apart, Johnson would have had the chance in July 2016 to pick a much stronger and more broad-based cabinet team. His former wife Marina Wheeler would have been by his side in No 10, a mature woman and a strong restraining hand on her husband, ready to rein him in when needed. Full-ahead Gove rather than pro-austerity and pro-Remain Philip Hammond would have become chancellor, and the momentum and verve of Vote Leave would have remained unbroken.
Many who knew Johnson best believe he would have been a much better prime minister three years earlier. Gove’s decision to take him out is thus one of the most momentous in the political history of the century so far.
Most likely, however, Johnson would have been even more exposed than he was in 2019. His tendencies towards chaos, grandstanding and inability to govern consistently day-to-day may have been containable when mayor of London — not so when prime minister. His difficulty in either grasping the levers of government or entrusting power to those who could would have been no less evident. Factionalisation within No 10 would have erupted still, Cummings’s coarseness and centralisation of power making infighting an inevitability. There is little to suggest Johnson’s fatal flaws could have been mitigated if only the timing were different.
In my beginning is my end.
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