David Cameron never intended to give the Bloomberg speech — the moment ten years ago when he committed to holding a referendum on Britain’s EU membership. It had been planned for Amsterdam. Cameron wanted the venue to echo Margaret Thatcher’s famous “Bruges speech” in 1988 when she set her face against EU federalism.
Rome and Berlin were both considered before the Netherlands was selected. But shortly before what was supposed to be the “Amsterdam speech”, heavy snow and a terrorist attack in Algeria forced No 10 to postpone and find an alternative venue. So it was that Cameron set Britain on a path to Brexit, not at the heart of the continent but in a subterranean atrium of the London HQ of a US media corporation. “It was a sliding-doors moment because when he said it, there was no going back on it,” says Sir David Lidington, Cameron’s Europe minister at the time. Did he have to do it? Could he have succeeded had he done it differently? What has it done to the party he once led?
In his memoir For the Record, Cameron quotes from an audio diary he kept to show he was mulling over a referendum as early as January 2012. “At some stage, altering Britain’s relationship with the European Union in some regards and then putting it to a referendum, I think, would be good Conservative policy for the next parliament.” This, he says, is his defence against those who believe the Bloomberg speech was driven entirely by the rise of Ukip and the panic it induced among Tory MPs.
“I am not apologetic about having been the prime minister who promised a referendum and delivered on the promise,” he writes. “I couldn’t foresee a possible future for the UK without a referendum and I thought it right to hold one and try and win the argument. I deeply regret my failure to do so and the consequences that have followed. But that’s not the same thing as believing that the whole thing was misguided. I strongly believed that it wasn’t.”
George Osborne, famously, was one of those who did believe “the whole thing was misguided”, as — more surprisingly, perhaps — did Michael Gove. But even critics among his inner circle concede that Cameron was motivated by more than party management. For one thing, the door appeared to be swinging open to the looser ties with Brussels that successive UK prime ministers had always wanted.
It appeared an “auspicious moment” for a big British play in the EU, a view shared by Lidington and a former close Cameron ally. The agonies of the Greek financial crisis and the wider eurozone malaise meant there was a recognition that the current structures were not working well enough. José Manuel Barroso, then the European Commission president, had made a point of calling for a new treaty in his 2012 state-of-the-union speech.
“There was a time that year when it looked like France, Germany and the commission were all on another treaty drive, looking to deal with the problems of the eurozone,” said Lidington. “Cameron thought, ‘Right, we can have this big, historic shake-up of the EU that every British prime minister has always wanted. We can use this treaty to our advantage and, actually, the in-out referendum will solve my party problem. And it will give me additional leverage to get the changes that I want’.”
The political calculation was more complex than simply shooting Nigel Farage’s fox. Cameron’s argument was based on two things, said Lidington. In the short term, “there was the first bits of the Faragist upsurge, we were losing by-elections to Ukip, Cameron was looking forward to the general election — he thought if we don’t do something dramatic to lance the boil, then Ukip will take enough votes off us to deprive us of a majority and possibly to give Labour a majority.” And there was a longer-term view: “Cameron also thought that whenever he decided to step down as prime minister, an in-out EU referendum would be central to the leadership campaign. There was not any way, ultimately, to avoid this politically.” Better to embrace it.
For Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University and an expert on the Conservative Party, the Bloomberg speech was part of a wider pattern of appeasement Cameron began when running for leader in 2005 and which has remained a feature of every Tory leadership since. The “original sin” was Cameron promising to take Tory MEPs out of the centre-right EPP grouping in the European parliament, says Bale. It helped Cameron win the Tory crown — and, says Bale, from that moment no Tory leader has ever taken on their party “and lived to tell the tale”.
Cameron was certainly “spooked by a series of big Conservative rebellions”, recalls one of his senior ministers. He also wanted to avoid the impression he was being forced into the referendum offer. It was William Hague who helped finesse Cameron’s thinking on the timing when he, the prime minister and Osborne as chancellor formed the “tiny circle” that started to discuss in earnest the strategy in the late summer of 2012. “Hague and he were of the view that if you were going to do this for electoral reasons you needed to do this well ahead of an election,” recalls one who was in the room.
Cameron calculated that he wanted it in place before the 2014 European parliament election to avoid the poll becoming a proxy for the issue of membership — to Ukip’s inevitable benefit. “He was saying, ‘Well, if we have to have it in good time before the 2014 Europe elections, let’s get it done now when it is clear it is something I am initiating rather than something being forced upon me at a point of weakness’.”
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The contrary view, advanced by Osborne and others, was that the economic damage of a Leave vote was so severe and long-lasting as to make the risk intolerable. Osborne also believed the Tories could be managed without one. “George was more sceptical about the whole idea — and had I been in the room I would have been on George’s side,” says Lidington. Had he been asked his view, the then-Europe minister would have argued that the fairly new “referendum lock” legislation, which mandated a referendum if there were serious treaty change, was already having an effect in Brussels. As the EU became more desperate for treaty changes it would have forced it to offer the UK better terms, changing the dynamic of any eventual referendum entirely. Lidington lost that argument but won another: Cameron had initially wanted the speech to include a list of specific directives he wanted repealed. Together with Denzil Davidson, Cameron’s chief EU adviser, he nudged the prime minister towards making a more general demand for structural changes.
Having made his mind up, Cameron delegated the task of writing the speech to his chief of staff Ed Llewellyn, now Baron Llewellyn of Steep and the UK’s ambassador to Italy. The key line read: “Simply asking the British people to carry on accepting a European settlement over which they have had little choice is a path to ensuring that when the question is finally put — and at some stage it will have to be — it is much more likely that the British people will reject the EU. That is why I am in favour of a referendum. I believe in confronting this issue — shaping it, leading the debate. Not simply hoping a difficult situation will go away.” (Even today these lines don’t appear in the official text, since they were not agreed coalition-government policy. “When Cameron told Nick Clegg he said he thought he was bonkers,” recalls a Tory minister of the time.)
The initial reaction, at least in the party and among most media commentators, was warm. Ironically, it was among Tory MPs that the celebrations were most marked. “There were Euro enthusiasts and hardline sceptics hugging each other in the voting lobbies saying, ‘However much we disagree, we can put all that behind us and accept the outcome’. There was this sort of relief in the party,” recalls Lidington. “Outside, well, I watched the speech with EU ambassadors and they were much more dubious from the start. They were saying, ‘This is a huge risk. Are you sure your prime minister knows what he is doing?’”
One of the key officials at the time recalls a vast operation to call nearly every foreign minister around the globe to explain the speech and reassure allies about its intentions. Cameron himself briefed Angela Merkel and Barack Obama. “He was saying to Merkel and the others, ‘Don’t worry, I’m a winner’,” recalls a senior minister of the time. Cameron, perhaps unwittingly, captures his hubris perfectly in his memoir, quoting from his diary entry recorded after a celebratory dinner at the Buffalo Grill in Davos, where he had travelled immediately after the speech. “The risks of playing with fire are now safer than sitting and watching the fire burn,” he intoned into his MiniDisc that night.
Cameron wasn’t the first to play with fire. Tony Blair promised a referendum on the EU constitution in 2004. “Let the people have the final say,” he said, before deciding they wouldn’t. Clegg may have thought Cameron “bonkers” in 2013 but in 2008 he supported a referendum on membership. That is one reason why the charge that Cameron only offered the referendum because he thought he could ditch it in subsequent coalition negotiations is wide of the mark. Robert Hutton, then political editor of Bloomberg, recalls a senior Lib Dem privately admitting that a party with “Democrat” in its name would find it hard to block the poll.
Even if one accepts that a referendum was necessary — or indeed, desirable — the question remains: might Cameron’s objective of a more flexible union have been achieved with different tactics?
The central flaw in his renegotiate-and-referendum strategy appears, in hindsight, blindingly obvious: Cameron was unable to say until the very last moment whether he would support Britain remaining in the EU. His negotiating stance required everyone to believe that without a good deal from Brussels he might vote Leave, an eventuality he was at pains in private to say would not come about.
This might not have mattered quite so much had it not been for immigration and the role it came to play. It was not a word he used in the Bloomberg speech. The vacuum was filled by his enemies almost every week leading up to June 23, 2016.
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“Why did the issue of free movement . . . not warrant a single mention in the 5,000-word Bloomberg speech?” he asks in his memoir. His answer: he thought immigration would continue to be driven by those arriving from outside the EU rather than from the new wave of east European accession countries. “It was a bad mistake that I would later try to correct.”
The warnings had been everywhere for a long time. Gordon Brown’s administration had been bedevilled by the consequences of Blair’s decision to allow full freedom of movement to people from Bulgaria and Romania. In his Bloomberg speech, Cameron frames the case for reform in terms of economic competitiveness, with the subtext that the UK needed to protect the City and its financial services. Did he also want to avoid a subject he knew was problematic?
A series of subsequent migration crises raised the salience and the poll leads for Remain started to narrow. Cameron would become “visibly upset”, recalls a minister, when discussing the advent of new arrivals from Romania. Unable to set the terms of debate, Cameron demanded changes to freedom of movement the EU was unable to deliver since it is so fundamental to the single market. The rest, as they say, is history.
Ten years on, Rishi Sunak faces many of the same issues Cameron thought he would solve for good — and some new ones. There is an ironic echo of Cameron’s Bloomberg blunder in omitting immigration from his referendum pitch in the controversy over small boats. Confronted with their failure to stop cross-Channel migrant crossings, ministers are unable to make a case that Brexit is helping.
Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Cameron have all fretted about attacks from the right. Bale says conservative and Christian democratic parties often get “incredibly concerned about their right flank”. “It’s not their raison d’être,but their one absolute must,” Bale argues, “is to prevent any such threat arising and if it does arise, to do something about it.”
Even Cameron would concede that Bloomberg did not end the Tories’ internal strife over the EU. Sunak is approaching his own high noon with his party over the Northern Ireland protocol. Will he face down the sceptics — or buckle, as every previous leader has?
Perhaps the most profound effect of the Bloomberg speech, in so far as it set the country irrevocably on the road to Brexit, was the consequence for the Tories’ reputation for economic competence. It tells its own story that senior Conservatives will only speak frankly about this off the record. “It has torn the party apart, as evidenced by people leaving,” says one. “It has dramatically undermined the quality of economic debate because there are certain truths that it is impossible to say. The entire economic record since 2010 is now dragged through the mud because of the experience since 2016. The economy was doing well in the years up to the 2015 election. There’s a reason why we won. However you cut it, the performance since 2016 has been terrible.”
Rather than blaming Brexit, the party has instead blamed austerity, meaning “it has ended up trashing its entire economic record — the truth is too off-limits”.
This could end up being the most pernicious legacy of the Bloomberg speech. When Jeremy Hunt appeared in the same venue yesterday to set out more details of his “growth plan”, the chancellor scrupulously avoided noting the anniversary or acknowledging its economic consequences. His “decade of black-swan events” didn’t include leaving the EU. Indeed, Brexit, he said, was energising a plan to make the UK one of Europe’s most prosperous countries.
Unable to respond honestly to the economic consequences of Brexit, Sunak, Hunt and others can no longer lay claim to “common sense” — for so long the first appeal of Conservatism.
Francis Elliott is former political editor of The Times
