Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman

Around 90 per cent of that cash was funnelled to ‘defensive seats’, those Labour already held. After the campaign this was to become another source of division between LOTO and

The meeting began with air kisses on the steps of Number 10 between May and Juncker but then descended into an awkward standoff. The Commission group were perturbed that neither Nick Timothy nor Fiona Hill was present at the talks, which they took to be a snub, little realising that the chiefs had been banned by the civil service from attending, since they had formally resigned their posts to join the election campaign. When May enjoined her guests, ‘Let’s make Brexit a success,’ Juncker pointed to Britain’s planned withdrawal from the single market and the customs union and said, ‘Brexit cannot be a success.’ When the Commission president pointed out that Britain would become a ‘third country’ state at the point of Brexit, further outside the customs union even than Turkey, May seemed surprised, giving rise to concerns that she was not fully briefed.

Another flashpoint came when May demanded that a ‘detailed outline’ of a future free-trade deal be in place before the UK agreed to pay any money to Brussels as part of the Brexit divorce deal. An EU diplomat said, ‘This was a rather incredible demand. It seemed as if it came from a parallel reality.’ The prime minister’s stance that trade must come first was met with incredulity by EU officials, who said her chief EU sherpa, Oliver Robbins, had already agreed that the methodology for agreeing the Brexit bill would be ironed out first – along with the rights of EU citizens in Britain and the issue of the Irish border. ‘She took a firm position against something we thought we had agreed,’ an EU diplomat said. ‘It was completely unreal.’

May ploughed on, saying Britain did not owe the EU any money under the treaties. Her guests said the EU was not a golf club where financial obligations ended upon leaving, and that failure to pay up would mean national parliaments getting involved, who would be more likely to block a trade deal than other EU governments, a warning that German officials had repeatedly made to Robbins – a further alarm bell that the nuances were not being passed on to May.

By the halfway point of the meal, the Commission president had remarked, ‘The more I hear, the more sceptical I become.’ At the close of the meal, Juncker told May, ‘I leave Downing Street ten times as sceptical as I was before.’ At seven o’clock the next morning, having concluded that the talks were as likely as not to fail, Juncker picked up the phone to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and declared, ‘It went very badly. She is living in another galaxy. Based on the meeting, no deal is much more likely than finding agreement.’

Hammond’s banishment meant the Tories downplayed the economy. But campaign officials are also adamant that Hill and Timothy regarded economic differentiation as part of the Cameron–Osborne playbook from which they were keen to distance themselves. That meant no letters from hundreds of businessmen saying the Tories could be trusted, a favourite Osborne tactic, which Hill felt had failed the Remain campaign in 2016. ‘At the beginning of the campaign, the steer we got was: no dossiers or letters this time,’ a research department source said. ‘No one believes them any more.’

By the end of the campaign, Corbyn’s 120,000 Instagram followers approached ten times May’s reach. Conservative campaigners looked with envy at Corbyn, eight years May’s senior but light years ahead of her as a social media campaigner. ‘They’re good at it, he likes it,’ a Tory official said. ‘They’re not afraid to take a few risks. They did a few good stunts.’ Corbyn’s best coup came on 15 May, when he ambushed a ‘Facebook live’ interview with May conducted by ITV’s political editor, Robert Peston. The Labour leader posted a question as ‘Jeremy Corbyn of Islington’, asking May, ‘Do you not think the British people deserve to see us debate, live and on TV?’ May’s face darkened with the combination of irritation and terror with which the public were to become familiar as the campaign went on, and claimed that people would rather the leaders ‘take questions directly from the voters’. A story about the PM doing her first ever Facebook interview became instead a headline about Corbyn’s audacity and May dodging televised debates.

Unused to the pace of a national election campaign, the prime minister complained when she had to memorise ‘yet another fifteen-minute speech’, and was constantly nervous of performing. Towards the end of the campaign one adviser went to collect her from the room where she was preparing for a rally and found Philip May pacing around outside. ‘I went to move towards the door and he looked at me and said, “No, no, no, no. Even I’m not allowed in there right now.” I was really surprised that she had kicked him out of the room. That was the level of focus she deemed necessary to have. It felt a bit odd to me.’

Despite clear signs that the Tory campaign was not operating at full capacity there existed at CCHQ a blithe assumption that the result would go their way. A close ally of Nick Timothy said, ‘I had conversations with Nick and Fi, where they used phrases like, “We will win a load of seats we’ve never even won before.” Bishop Auckland was always mentioned, and Bolsover. People were getting excited about the prospect of unseating Dennis Skinner.’ At that point the Labour veteran had a majority of nearly 12,000. ‘Fundamentally, people assumed it was in the bag and all decisions stemmed from that,’ a senior figure said.

While it might be legitimate for a politician to keep their religious views to themselves, the media smelt blood, questioning Farron at every event about his views on homosexuality. Privately, one of Farron’s MPs revealed that the leader had indeed once confided that he believed gay sex was a sin. Farron’s position was that his votes had never been determined by his religious views. Yet because he failed to close down the issue it began to freeze out even Brexit as the dominant theme of his campaign.

The collapse of Ukip and Farron’s ‘gaygate’ distractions ensured that if protest voters were looking for a home, or if Theresa May faltered, Jeremy Corbyn had political space to offer working-class Brexiteers and metropolitan Liberals something different to believe in. It was an opportunity Labour was to seize with both hands.

The forty-three-page document was explosive. The Mirror highlighted ‘eye-catching measures’ to ‘renationalise Britain’s energy industry, railways and the Royal Mail’, and spending pledges of ‘£6 billion a year extra for the NHS and £1.6 billion a year for social care’. Describing it as Labour’s ‘most left-wing election manifesto in a generation’, the paper reported, ‘University tuition fees will be abolished entirely, and town halls ordered to build 100,000 new council houses a year under a new Department for Housing.’ The Telegraph characterised the policy platform as taking Britain ‘back to the 1970s by nationalising industries, forcing wage caps on businesses and giving huge power to the unions’.

An aide recalled, ‘The headlines were, “Jeremy Corbyn cracks down on high pay, economists say it’s mad”. Perfect! That will mean millions of people will hear something they like and that some experts are opposed to it.’ Polls soon showed the policy was popular. Donald Trump could not have hijacked a news cycle better. LOTO’s new strategy had worked. When the manifesto leaked, Corbyn’s team remembered the relaunch and vowed to run towards the gunfire.

On 11 May, the day of the manifesto leak, Labour’s own pollsters BMG projected the likely Tory majority would be 158.

For Theresa May’s campaign to implode, the Conservatives would have to publish a disastrous document of their own. Which is what they now did.

In the three days since the publication of the Conservative manifesto, both men had been bombarded with calls from MPs expressing dismay at the policy, which their opponents had branded the ‘dementia tax’. On the doorstep the policy was toxic, and the widespread goodwill towards May had evaporated almost overnight. Something had to be done, but what? The situation was complicated by the fact that divisions over the policy had spread beyond the familiar tensions between May’s chiefs of staff and the Australians. Fiona Hill, who felt politics deep in her bones, found herself pitched into opposition with Nick Timothy. She had a very bad feeling about the policy. It was to be the most important disagreement of their careers, one that led to a brief but painful rupture in their relationship and ultimately to their departure from government.

Yet Timothy and Gummer, ensconced in monk-like isolation on the fourth floor of Central Office, had other ideas – for two reasons. Manifestos perform an important constitutional role in Britain. Policies for which the government obtains a mandate cannot, under the Salisbury Convention, be blocked by the House of Lords.

Timothy held discussions with May on her vision for the manifesto with Hill and Jojo Penn, and then talked to Gummer. Timothy alighted on the idea of framing the manifesto around five big challenges facing Britain: capitalising on Brexit; making the free-market economy work for everyone; combating the injustices which remained in society; tackling intergenerational unfairness; and the challenges posed by the digital world.

The secrecy left Philip Hammond highly agitated and ‘pushing very, very hard’ to see the sections on the economy. ‘He was profoundly frustrated and not a little humiliated by it,’ a fellow minister who discussed the issue with the chancellor revealed.

Over a period of three days between 11 and 13 May each secretary of state was called up to the fourth floor of CCHQ to see their sections of the manifesto and provide their comments. Many were content. Liam Fox glanced at his section, said ‘Great,’ and was gone. Hammond, happy that he had got his way on tax, ‘didn’t kick up very much of a fuss at all’. But others found the process humiliating. ‘We were treated as if we were going in to MI5 to see top-secret documents,’ said one minister. ‘I was ushered into a sealed box, told I could read my bit while someone watched to make sure I didn’t take notes, and then told to leave the paperwork behind. It was ridiculous.’ A senior cabinet minister said later the process should never have been tolerated. ‘We are all complicit. We were spineless.’

While the final details were being thrashed out, Gummer worked hand-in-glove with David Gauke, the chief secretary to the Treasury, to cost every pledge. Down to the tens of millions – a rounding error in Treasury terms – the manifesto was cost-neutral. The figures were double-checked by Douglas McNeill. Gummer went home and proudly told his wife, ‘The price is zero!’

The document Timothy had penned baffled the press team. One adviser saw it as an ‘over-intellectualised’ product of ‘Red Tory’ philosophising, rather than a series of sellable proposals: ‘There was no flesh to any of it. I went upstairs thinking there would be some kind of road map to removing the public sector pay cap. Instead we got gruel yesterday, gruel today, and here’s a bunch of gruel for tomorrow. I expected a rabbit out of a hat on housebuilding. All it said was “We’re going to build some houses.” Well fine, but how?’

Tom Swarbrick, the head of broadcasting, had BBC producers on the phone close to tears begging to be told where the launch would be, since they would normally set up their equipment the evening before a big event. Eventually CCHQ settled on an old mill in Halifax, a marginal seat the Tories expected to win. When the journalists arrived the next morning they were kept waiting outside. ‘People were still building the set until five minutes before we let them in,’ a special adviser recalled. Even then there were more people than seats. ‘How the fuck can they not have counted the number of seats?’ a member of the press team complained. The cabinet travelled up to Halifax together by train and bus. It came to resemble a magical mystery tour as they finally got to see the whole manifesto. Justine Greening was shocked to discover the free school breakfasts policy had been included. ‘The first thing she knew about universal free school breakfasts was when she saw a tweet from a journalist,’ a senior source said. For his part, Ben Gummer felt sick, knowing the whole world was about to mark his homework. Light relief was provided by Boris Johnson, who returned from the restaurant car with sandwiches for his colleagues, bacon butties wedged under his chin and a vat of coffee swinging from his arm, chattering like a demented steward, ‘Bacon and egg. Sausage and egg. You’re a veggie? Veggie bacon and egg?’

That evening May faced the BBC’s most fearsome inquisitor, Andrew Neil, and in a performance that had campaign staff at Tory headquarters watching slack-jawed, continued to deny the obvious. She said the Tories had ‘not rewritten’ the manifesto, because ‘nothing has changed from the principles’. When she insisted that the Conservatives’ ‘credibility is not in doubt’, Neil snapped, ‘Your ability to answer this question may be in doubt.’ Even then Tory high command did not realise the long-term impact of May’s performance. ‘We saw it was a bump in the road, not something that would fatally wound us,’ a senior official said.

Theresa May claimed nothing had changed. In fact, everything had changed. She had shown that in the eye of the storm she was a poor candidate. A day after the U-turn, terrible events were to engulf the election that would ensure she would now be tested as a prime minister as well.

Ariana Grande had not long completed her set when Salman Abedi detonated his suicide vest with what horrified witnesses remembered as ‘a deafening bang’. It was 10.31 p.m. on Tuesday, 22 May, the day after May’s U-turn, and more than 14,000 people were heading home from Manchester Arena. If this was a general election about young people it was never more so than at that moment.

The Labour leader claimed his stance on terrorism was to support peace and dialogue in conflicts around the world, but his political opponents pointed out that all too often this involved talking to the representatives of terrorist groups that opposed Britain, America and Israel, which he saw as imperialist nations. Newspaper readers were already familiar with the fact that Corbyn had referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’ during a meeting in Parliament in 2009, and also with his longstanding association with Sinn Féin, which had brought him into contact with convicted IRA terrorists. Most notorious was the occasion in 1984, two weeks after the Brighton bombing – in which the Provisional IRA attempted to murder the entire British cabinet in their beds at the Conservative Party conference – when Corbyn invited convicted IRA volunteers Linda Quigley and Gerry MacLochlainn to the House of Commons. In the years after that he was frequently pressed to condemn IRA violence, but refused to do so without bracketing it with that of loyalist paramilitaries.

Jeremy Paxman was supposed to be the tough one, but it was the audience who landed the blows. It was the laughter that did it. Theresa May, under fire over cuts to school funding, said, ‘In the Labour Party’s manifesto we know the figures don’t add up.’ At that point the audience began laughing. The prime minister was momentarily frozen by panic. Then the heckling started. Someone in the audience yelled that Labour’s plans were costed. Another shouted, ‘You’ve clearly failed.’ It was 29 May, and the first televised showdown of the campaign for the prime minister – a joint Sky News/Channel 4 production.

With two weeks to go until election day, most Conservatives knew that the product they were selling was not as good as they had hoped. They only realised later that the way they were selling it was not working either.

The location was Prenton Park in Birkenhead, home to Tranmere Rovers football club. The occasion was the Wirral Live Music Festival, and the Libertines were due to play before a crowd of 20,000. It was the evening of 20 May, and the Labour leader had dropped in to make a brief speech on sport and music. Now he was topping the bill. British politics had never seen anything like it. As he finished, Corbyn shouted, ‘Thank you for giving me a few minutes. And remember, this election is … about … you!’ That was when the crowd found its voice.

What was happening was what came to be known as ‘the Corbyn surge’ – yet many thought it was a mirage founded on the false hope that young people would vote. The British Election Study, the most authoritative source, found that just 47 per cent of under-twenty-fives voted in 2015, compared with 85 per cent of over-sixty-fives. The figures were comparable during the EU referendum.

Corbyn was a natural campaigner. Four decades of pressing the buttons of left-wing audiences at protest rallies stood him in good stead. While May seemed contorted by shyness and hauteur, in the words of one Labour aide, ‘Jeremy just seemed happy on the television.’ Corbyn’s personal approval rating climbed from minus 42 to minus 2, and had even overtaken May’s by the end of the campaign. But he remained less popular than his party, while May was more popular than hers.

Momentum was essentially a force multiplier. Ed Miliband had vowed to cut tuition fees, but he did not have Momentum. By vowing to abolish fees altogether just as the interest rate was raised, Corbyn energised young activists. ‘Miliband was offering a similar thing on student fees and yet it had a completely different effect,’ a Tory cabinet minister reflected. ‘The increase in the interest rate, no one had really clocked that in Westminster, and it really electrified the issue in young people’s minds.’

Corbyn travelled more than 7,000 miles during the campaign, appearing at ninety rallies. The formula meant that LOTO did not have to overthink his public appearances – a trend that had afflicted Ed Miliband’s 2015 campaign, culminating in the leader unveiling the notorious ‘Ed Stone’, an eight-foot-tall slab engraved with his pledges. One of those who helped run Miliband’s campaign observed, ‘The rallies gave them a platform every day. They didn’t have to think about the backdrop, the event, the crowd, or whose building it was, or one of the things we spent hours thinking about.’

Where Momentum could claim to have made a significant contribution was where they decided to put their resources. ‘We targeted seats that regional Labour parties thought weren’t winnable,’ Klug said. ‘Some of the candidates or sitting MPs were pessimistic. In Battersea, for example, the local party thought it wasn’t worth putting resources into it. In Kensington there was a big Momentum presence.’ Both were Labour gains on the night. Many moderate candidates had cause to thank Momentum afterwards.

Faced with the sheer volume of Momentum activists, the Tories were overmatched. Some Conservative associations, even in seats classified as winnable, had as few as three members.

During the campaign the Tories spent around £2 million on paid-for advertising, up from £1.3 million in 2015. That compared with £1.2 million for Labour. Three-quarters of the spend went on Facebook adverts.

Labour’s great advantage was that their army of young supporters, inspired by Corbyn, were far more willing to share campaign materials with their friends via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. One of the most remarkable statistics of the entire campaign is that one in three Facebook users saw Momentum content during the campaign, yet Momentum spent just £2,000 on Facebook adverts, because they could rely on their supporters to distribute campaign materials for free.

‘The content was so accessible,’ said Klug. ‘It resonated, it was creative and it was clever.’ Among the successful videos was a satirical take on austerity, with a young daughter asking her father why she got no free school meal, her class sizes were larger and she couldn’t afford to go to university. He replies, ‘Because I vot...

Momentum’s Facebook page reached 23.7 million views, and videos were watched by 12.7 million unique users.

The apogee of Labour’s online audacity came on the Monday of election week, when the party paid £100,000 to place an advert with all seven million users of Snapchat, the most popular app with young voters. More than one million clicked on the link provided which told them where their polling station was. ‘It was just a turnout mechanism. We’ve never spent that money before on a single thing aimed at young voters,’ a Southside source said. ‘It really worked.’

Corbyn’s digital outriders included keyboard warriors like Zarb-Cousin, Aaron Bastani of Novara Media, The Canary, Sqwawkbox, and Thomas Clark of Another Angry Voice. Some were members of a WhatsApp group called Digital Fightback. Their points of contact included James Schneider and Karie Murphy. Most simply did their own thing. Clark was just a thirty-something from Nottinghamshire who posted 163 articles in seven weeks from his home, with headlines such as ‘How many of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies do you actually disagree with?’, but nonetheless had the same reach online as the Sun newspaper. Zarb-Cousin said, ‘I think this election is the first where social media played a pivotal role. The top ten links shared on Facebook during the general election campaign were either pro-Labour or anti-Tory, achieving roughly half a million shares each.’15

On YouGov’s model, the Tories had dipped below the threshold needed for a majority on 22 May, nine days earlier. They were never to move back above the line. In the six days after the publication of the Conservative manifesto, their expected tally of seats fell from around 350 to around 312, the difference between a majority of fifty and fourteen seats short.

The polling mistakes in 2017 were less serious than in 2015 because they resulted from clearly underestimating youth turnout, rather than because pollsters had found it impossible to build a representative sample of voters. In short, their data was right but the tweaks they made to it were wrong. In 2015 both had been wrong. ‘The problem in 2015 was sample,’ Wells explained. ‘The problem in 2017 was people trying to solve sample through turnout.’

More than one Tory cabinet minister later confessed that their own children voted Labour.

The SNP’s dominant wins in the last two Holyrood elections had disguised another key fact: only thirteen of Scotland’s fifty-nine Westminster seats had backed their call for independence. That left forty-six where a Unionist message could be dominant.

Reconstructing those final hours before the exit poll dropped has something of the quality of imagining England on the eve of war in 1914. It is to glimpse a world we no longer recognise, inhabited by a political class overconfident of their achievements, marching optimistically towards events they did not understand which would leave their careers in ruins and their country changed forever.

Timothy was back in the war room when, at 9.56 p.m., staff saw Hill come into the room, phone in hand, ‘not looking very happy’ and searching for her fellow chief. When she finally spotted him she beckoned him into a small office off the main war room called the Derby Room: ‘You just noticed in the corner of the room Fi dragging Nick into one of the side rooms.’ ‘I just got the exit poll result,’ Hill told Timothy. ‘They’re saying it’s a hung Parliament.’ ‘Are you joking?’ asked a shocked Timothy. ‘I’m not fucking joking about this.’

Philip May took the prime minister in his arms. As the realisation hit her that her gamble had gone disastrously wrong, May was first stunned, and then began to cry. ‘My husband watched it for me and came and told me, and I was shocked at the result,’ she said. ‘It took a few moments for it to sink in, what was really going on. My husband gave me a hug.’ She let slip ‘a little tear at that moment’.1 May felt an overwhelming sense of loss, and ‘a responsibility’ to others. ‘I felt, I suppose, devastated really. I knew the campaign wasn’t going perfectly. But still the messages I was getting from people I was speaking to … were that we were going to get a better result than the one we did.’ She added, ‘You’re a human being: you’ve been through that experience. But I was there as leader of the party and prime minister, and I had a responsibility, as we went through the night, to determine what we would do the next day … I got on the phone to CCHQ.’

In a trend that was to be repeated across the country, his vote had gone up since 2015, but he saw Labour support soar on the backs of students and previous non-voters turning out.