In the fall of 2015, I played a game of tennis with David Cameron at Winfield House, the residence of the U.S. ambassador in London. He won, as always (he is left-handed and it is very difficult to outsmart him).
Then he magnanimously said, “Come on, campaign to stay and I’ll make sure you get a top-five Cabinet position.” Wow, I said, that sounds great, and quickly tried to figure out what “top five” could mean.
Hmm… 1:00 p.m.; 2 Chancellor; 3 seconds start; 4 Fgn Sec; 5 …eh… Defense? Health?
Whatever it was, it sounded great. But still I doubted and feared.
Then-Prime Minister David Cameron and then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson warming up for a tennis match during International Paralympic Day in Trafalgar Square in 2011.
Johnson on the 2019 Brexit election campaign at the Jimmy Egan Boxing Academy in Manchester
Then, just a few weeks ago, the Prime Minister called me at City Hall one night, urging me to make a decision. I was torn, I said. I wanted to support it, but over the years I had written hundreds, if not thousands, of articles attacking the undemocratic features of the EU. I felt like I had to be consistent.
‘This isn’t about articles!’ he sputtered. ‘It’s about… the future of the country!’
Well, I said, we agreed on that, but I was still thinking about voting leave.
“If you do that,” he said (and these were his exact words), “I will fuck you up forever.”
I relayed the conversation to the family when I returned home to Islington that night. “You have no choice,” he said. [my son] Milo instantly. “You will have to vote leave.”
But I had to admit that the threat seemed serious. Did I want to be screwed? Forever? By a prime minister equipped with every fucking tool available to a modern government, and thousands of fuckers waiting to do his bidding?
It looked like we were going to lose, and once we lost, the losers and losers would drop out, of course, they would be squashed like bugs: discarded as eccentric, misfit Powellites who had been rejected by the populace.
The smart thing to do was to stay with Dave, give in, accept the “top five” position, avoid the pain and cowardly vote Remain.
But how could it?
This was the moment of truth. The United Kingdom would never again have the opportunity to be free, to be truly democratic and to make its own laws.
It was early December 2020 and within a few weeks we faced the calamity of the so-called “Hard Brexit”. Unless we reach a deal agreeing the terms of our future relationship, the EU and the UK would become complete economic strangers.
Tariffs would emerge across the EU like a ring of sharp stakes. In theory, all British goods could be examined and dismantled at the border, and every traveler subjected to body cavity probes, and the result would be a total disaster, or so people had been prophesying for years.
Our supply chains would come to a standstill; Planes would rather fall from the sky than disobey EU directives. The queue of honking giants would stretch from Kent to London and from Calais to Paris, and lorry drivers would be forced to sleep for weeks in their taxis. Still reeling from Covid, the global economy would collapse.
Johnson with EU President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier
We cannot allow this to happen, I told Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU. We have been negotiating for quite some time and the fact is that the UK and the EU really have nothing to negotiate.
After more than 45 years of EU membership, we are fully consistent with every jot and tittle of Brussels legislation. We are two peas in a pod! Let’s do this.
She seemed to agree, and for a moment I thought this was going to be the decisive dinner, the moment of statecraft, of hope. Then I noticed a commotion at the door and voices outside. Finally a nervous-looking official came in and handed a paper to the president of the European Commission.
Ursula stood up and showed her radiant smile again. “I think we should go to dinner now,” he said. ‘METRO. Barnier is here.
Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, had been away the entire time, growing increasingly agitated. He suspected that he was being deliberately ignored, that Ursula was betraying him, making some sweet deal with the dreaded Johnson. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore.
The note he had written was an ultimatum to Úrsula: “If you don’t let me join the meeting now, I will resign.”
Now, he came in and took over the conversation, and the result, as UK officials later described, was one hell of a dinner party.
Ursula had been emollient and fun. Although we disagreed about Brexit, we both wanted to get it done and rebuild as quickly as possible. Barnier was the complete opposite; prickly, Cartesian and distrustful. As I looked at Ursula, it occurred to me that maybe she didn’t want any deals.
There is a long tradition, dating back to de Gaulle in 1963, of French negotiators deciding that Britain can fiche-moi le camp*; and if Barnier was thinking of Barnier’s interests, and of France’s interests, as he surely was, then perhaps he would not oppose some kind of revolt in which the Britanniques would be punished.
After all, the French had given us a beating on the way to Europe, and it seemed as if Barnier was determined to ensure that we took a beating on the way out.
Dictionary corner
*take me away: Get lost
There was an extraordinary moment in the 2016 referendum campaign when Kate Hoey, Nigel Farage and others decided to highlight the plight of Scottish fishermen by taking a flotilla of boats down the Thames to Parliament. With an exquisite lack of common sense, the Remain campaign sent a counterflotilla of pleasure boats to mock them, including a boat crewed by Sir Bob Geldof, the pop star, and (inevitably) my sister Rachel.
The sight of the billionaire rock star taunting and taunting these fishermen, giving them the V sign and shouting “get out of here” (not to mention Rachel laughing happily beside him) – was almost as big a boost to the campaign as pro-Brexit, in retrospect, like Barack Obama’s promise that Britain’s Brexit would have to come “to the back of the queue.”
After I decided to vote Leave, I called my father Stanley, who had arrived in Brussels in the early 1970s as one of the first Britons to go to the Commission.
There was a pause. He coughed.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you’ll get some applause for that, but I guess you’ll get some applause too.”
It cannot have been exactly what he expected to hear, given everything he had done in his own career and the body of European environmental law that he had personally helped to produce.
But you know what? From that day to this, he never complained, nor groaned, nor complained; Nothing of the sort. Nor has he been anything less than completely personally supportive.
He may have campaigned for Remain and cycled around in a B****cks to Brexit bobble hat. That is entirely your prerogative.
But he has always been in a good mood and has supported me in every way imaginable. No son could ask for more.
Hammond wanted me to tell the grumpy old woman that her time was up.
Philip Hammond proposed a partnership in which Boris would take the wheel of the number 10 and remain its economic co-pilot
In a fit of almost superhuman electoral incompetence in 2017, the Conservatives under Theresa May managed to squander our lead in the polls and lose the Conservative majority in Parliament. Not only had we missed an open goal, we had made Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn look like Diego Maradona.
My majority at Uxbridge was halved, to no purpose. As I told my troops, we were still alive but, like the Earl of Uxbridge himself, I had seen a leg taken down in battle.
Early in the morning I received a message from Phil Hammond, the Chancellor – dry as dust but with an excellent political brain – and we spoke. He thought it was all very unfortunate but Teresa’s chicken was cooked. He would have to go sooner or later, and it might as well be now.
What he proposed was a Hammond-Johnson partnership, whereby I would take the wheel of the number 10 and he would remain my economic co-pilot. I thought about it briefly, as it began to dawn, and then said no.
Maybe it was selfish of me. Maybe he should have accepted responsibility that morning and gone to Phil to tell the grumpy old man that his time was up. I hesitated partly because everything seemed so rancorous and feverish.
The media was already full of stuff about me being “on the move,” and while that wasn’t true, I could see that if Phil and I launched any breakfast coups, the general fury of the people would immediately turn against me.
And I continued to believe – perhaps naively – that I had finally found the right formula for Brexit. She believed that as a Remainer (in drag or not) she was in a powerful moral position to convey that vision and keep our party together, even if she had ruined the election and shattered her own authority.
I’m afraid I was totally wrong on that second calculation. The electoral fiasco had stripped Theresa of her charm and also, it seemed, of any trace of belief in Brexit.
Boris Johnson will talk to Gyles Brandreth at The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on October 12.
