All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

"All Out War is brilliant. It’s one of the best political books I’ve ever read. It’s 200,000 words and he wrote it in something like ten weeks. Just to produce that amount of words that quickly and for it to be so good is really phenomenal. There’s the old cliche about journalism being the first draft of history. This really is. What’s really good about All Out War is firstly, that he clearly has amazing access to all sides. His contacts book must be pretty much the best in British politics. Also, you can tell that he is a Sunday Times journalist, because as a Sunday journalist, you can take your time and actually find out what’s really going on, you’re not forever reacting to what’s happened that day. He is very even handed and he’s very comprehensive. He makes you feel that you’re there. You’re in the negotiations with them, you feel that frenzy of a campaign, the thrill of putting one over on the opposition; of reacting to things very, very fast. He makes it exciting. He also makes the characters very human. With the exception of Jeremy Corbyn—who comes out vacillating, a very lukewarm Remainer whose sentiments are probably the other way deep down—everyone else in the book comes across as better than their public image. Cameron does; Johnson does; Gove does. “It’s this domino effect of Brexit. A simple binary Yes/No choice has so many ramifications in so many areas. And often areas people didn’t really think of.” You also get a sense of the pressure they were under. It’s very easy to armchair quarterback after the event and say, ‘they should’ve done this and this and this.’ It’s a slightly facile analogy, but like soldiers you’re having to make very quick decisions with imperfect information. It makes you understand the personalities and the struggle. It’s not just about the referendum but also that amazing bit afterwards where the Tory leadership campaign became a Game of Thrones spinoff. Michael Gove knifed Boris Johnson in the back and then everyone knifed Michael Gove and then Andrea Leadsom said something about Theresa May and suddenly Theresa May is the last woman standing. He’s very good on that and you get invested in it. It is. It deliberately doesn’t go into why Scotland or Northern Ireland voted this way or why Newcastle voted this way and Sunderland the other way. That’s not his brief. It is an elitist view. Often those things can be very, very dry and boring and wonky and it’s not at all. It’s absolutely riveting because he writes it like a thriller, which actually it was a lot of the time. He’s a great storyteller. Perhaps the role of Dominic Cummings, who was head of Vote Leave. He’s someone only political wonks would really have known before, but he’s fascinating. He’s very divisive, a real slash-and-burn figure; an incredibly effective agitator and dictator. He reminded me slightly of a Lenin or a. Trotsky. Here was someone just mashing it up. The 350 million quid on the bus. Cummings’s point—and he’s entirely right—was that it doesn’t matter what the figure is, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, what matters is that it’s up there. It matters that people are thinking about it. Cummings was perhaps the only person who understood what made ordinary people tick. That I found really fascinating, that here was this guy who was arguably as much to do with Leave winning as anything, who was, in his own warped, narrow way, a total genius. Leave were very, very good at pushing emotional buttons because people do vote emotionally. No one’s got the time to sit down and look through political manifestos, unless they’ve really got nothing else to do. People do vote with their hearts. He understood this. The other thing I found interesting and I put this in The Bluffer’s Guide to Brexit was the language on the ballot paper. Originally the question was ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ And it was the Leave campaign who objected, saying that that wording implicitly favoured the status quo. So they went for ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’. I remember thinking at the time that ‘Remain’ is a terrible word. It sounds like remainder, what’s left over. Stay is much better. Stay is strong and steadfast. People talk about how these small things could have made a 2 or 3 per cent difference. Well, a 2 or 3 per cent difference would have swung it the other way. That idea, that you fight for absolutely everything, was really, really instructive. You don’t let anything go."