Book of the dayPolitics books This article is more than 7 years oldReviewUnleashing Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit by Craig Oliver – review
This article is more than 7 years oldDavid Cameron’s spin doctor faults everyone but himself and his boss in this flat account of the EU campaign
It is the morning after the shock of the night before. David Cameron comes down from his flat at 7am to discuss his next move with his closest aides. Some of them have been in tears over a referendum result that will eject them and their boss from No 10. It will also, and rather more importantly, wreck more than four decades of British economic and foreign policy. And what does he say to them? He says: “Well, that didn’t go to plan!”
I would have found Cameron a more sympathetic figure had he greeted defeat by showering the room in profanities, by roaring with rage or howling with despair. The man has just immolated his premiership and accidentally amputated Britain from the European Union. He responds by sounding no more troubled than had he singed a few sausages on his barbecue.
Craig Oliver, who was his spin doctor for five years, furnishes several more examples of Cameron’s nonchalance on the road to nemesis. At the beginning of the year, when they begin to grasp how difficult the referendum is going to be, Cameron lamely jokes: “Remind me whose idea this was?” When Michael Gove declares for Out, Cameron greets this act of personal and political betrayal by shrugging: “That’s him off the Christmas card list.”
Oliver does not report this with intended malice. He is never less than adoring about the man he refers to as “DC”. He wants us to admire his boss and share his pride to “have worked for a man who had always been able to take anything in his stride”. But in this reader – and, I suspect, many others – it simply provoked fury that Cameron greeted each disaster with a flip remark. It had me wondering whether he found it so easy to sound untroubled by the unplanned consequences of his reckless actions because he was never really all that bothered about anything much.
“The inside story” of the most seismic campaign in Britain’s postwar history ought to make for a highly compelling read. Yet this book weirdly contrives to drain it of drama. This is partly because Oliver, being a spin doctor, is obsessed with things that only really interest spin doctors. He details his spats with various journalists, which will probably gratify their egos, but is of little interest to anyone else. Someone seems to have told him that this sort of book needs “colour”. The author interprets this as an instruction never to leave the reader uninformed about what he ate. Sometimes this is as exciting as a Pret sandwich. To help us understand how gruelling life is at the coalface of the campaign grid, he gives us a stream of bulletins about his health. “Monday begins with a throbbing head, toothache and low-level sore throat.” “I go to bed with a low-level headache.” “I feel knackered.” “I am so exhausted now that I don’t even feel tired.” “I feel physically sick.” “I’m dehydrated.” “The campaign is making me ill – my chest is wheezy and I have the early symptoms of an ulcer.” For God’s sake, man, see a doctor. There is a lot of regurgitation of “lines to take” that he drafted for this or that media squall. There are long and unrevelatory accounts of what one staffer you’ve never heard of said to another staffer you’ve never heard of. Funnily enough, it is usually Oliver who comes over as the shrewdest person in the room. When the other side makes a mistake: “I am on it in a flash.” When he suggests a course of action: “I can see DC nodding along with this.”
He finds out what it was like to be Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg and hasn’t a clue what to do about itMichael Gove is the vain, scheming and treacherous villain of the campaign, but then I think we have all gathered by now that it wouldn’t be sensible to trust him with a pencil. Boris Johnson swithers all over the place before coming out for the Outers, but then we knew that too from his description of himself as “veering around like a shopping trolley”. We learn surprisingly little about Cameron’s true feelings towards the friends turned enemies who eviscerated him. His emotions about Gove and Johnson must surely be more vivid than the tepid observations reported here. So it is with some relief when we occasionally bump into a personality who springs off the page. One is our old friend Peter Mandelson. He steals every scene in which he appears, including the occasion when he chides Oliver for drinking too much coffee on the grounds that it will be bad for his skin. How very Mandelson. The book would have been enlivened by more Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Tories in Scotland. She is briefed that, for one of the TV debates, she may be teamed up with Labour’s Angela Eagle. Davidson responds: “Angela and I are very similar. Are you sure you want two shovel-faced lesbians?”
The author never tires of telling us that his team is “amazing”, which leaves him with the problem of explaining why he was at the heart of the campaign that lost. For much of the book, it is the fault of everyone except him and the boss. The EU ought to have given more in the negotiation. Tories are untrustworthy. Labour is useless. The other side has more money. The other side constantly lies. The other side’s deceits aren’t being properly challenged by the BBC. The Out newspapers are a nightmare, “becoming more and more personal, more and more destructive”. Here, he alights on one of the reasons they lost. At election after election, including the most recent one, the Tories could rely on the rightwing press to assassinate the characters of opponents and megaphone Conservative messages. Cameron had clearly not thought enough about having that firepower turned against him. He finds out what it was like to be Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg and hasn’t a clue what to do about it.
It is only towards the conclusion that the author brings himself to reflect on the mistakes made by his side and the book is worth reading for that. The In campaign staked everything on the belief that “the economy would trump immigration”. He realises now that many Britons didn’t think they had much to lose from Brexit and “we didn’t do enough to understand them”.
What he can’t bring himself to admit is that Cameron, the insouciant gambler, was a fool to make the referendum promise when he wasn’t certain that he could get a deal from the EU that he could sell to the voters nor sure that he could bind in the support of key colleagues. He miscalculated again by calling the vote even when it was obvious he had secured neither. Even if we accept the contention that a referendum was “inevitable” at some point, it was Cameron’s choice to hold it at a time when the chances of winning were most dicey. Oliver laments that “we struggled to communicate a complex truth in the face of simple lies”. They sure did, not least because his boss gave himself just a few weeks to build a case for EU membership after decades in which he and other Tories had trashed it.
When Cameron leaves No 10 for the last time, his faithful retainer says to himself: “I hope history will be kind to you.” It won’t.
Unleashing Demons is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.40
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