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Across the country, bitterness lingers as people try to comprehend a future apart from their European neighbours. "We are at the early stages of our leap in the dark and don't know where we will land," said a Tory MP.
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My People:
A fascinating report below of the Brexit Night that Shook Britain.....whose outcome is the classsic warning of "Beware what you ask from God, in case you get it."
The political "civil war" in the United Kingdom has just begun....Conservative David Cameron is going, Labor Jeremy Corbyn. facing a revolt, is on his way out, even UKIP's Farage is not over-joyed...and "King" Boris Johnson will not have a Kingdom to inherit ....it is a warning that political gambles often have disastrous consequences....
And there you have it.
Bolaji Aluko
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Cameron's bad bet: the drama of a night that ripped Britain apart
For the leaders of Remain, Thursday night's early optimism soon shifted to despair as it became clear the PM's gamble had failedAs they waited for the first results to come in on referendum night, members of the Stronger In campaign were sipping water and wine in a stiflingly hot room at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The Remain camp had reason to believe that a good night was in prospect. Final polls had shown them ahead, though not by enough to dispel the butterflies in their stomachs. The TV cameras and crews had been invited in and everyone was on edge.
"It was a strange atmosphere," said a Tory MP who was there. "It was halfway between a party and a spin room. In the middle of a nice conversation, Kay Burleywould suddenly butt in and say, 'Hi! Kay Burley, Sky News, so what do you think of that then?'"
Up the road at Westminster Tower, the Vote Leave team was holding its own deliberately low-key party. Some among its number were fearing the worst. "When the ComRes and Ipsos Mori polls at the end of voting at 10pm went against us, we thought, 'Oh shit'," said one campaigner. "But we'd had darker moments than that. We just had to be patient and have faith."
Cameron, Johnson and Gove had all been briefed on how to read the early results. Newcastle, which they knew was likely to come first, was a big one in every sense. The number crunchers said that, for Remain to have a good night, Newcastle had to vote strongly in favour. The leader of Newcastle's Labour-run city council, Nick Forbes, had predicted that if it was much less than 60:40 for Remain in his city, the UK would be heading out of the EU because surrounding rural areas and towns were so pro-Brexit. Just after midnight, the mood at the Festival Hall and No 10 darkened. Newcastle had gone Remain, but by only 51% to 49%. It was way worse than they had expected.David Cameron was in Downing Street with his political team, including chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and Tory chairman Andrew Feldman, while Boris Johnson andMichael Gove were holed up in their respective homes, pacing around their sitting rooms awaiting the most important decision by the British people in a generation.Sunderland and others followed, developing a trend. Leave was outperforming expectations – consistently. "The samples we were getting suggested we were five, six, seven percentage points ahead of where we had thought," said a Leave source. John Curtice, doyen of election analysts, said it was time for Remain to "put the champagne back in the fridge". Remain was said to have done well in London and in parts of the Tory south, but not well enough to counter what was happening across the north in Labour strongholds.
"There was gloom everywhere," said a Tory Remainer. "The despair was lightened only by great joy and laughter when Epsom and Ewell (the constituency of the pro-Brexit cabinet minister Chris Grayling) and then Wokingham (that of veteran Eurosceptic John Redwood) went to Remain. They were the only fun parts."
The country was splitting. For brief periods the overall outcome seemed nailbitingly close. At 2.51am the BBC monitor showed both sides on 50.0% of the vote. But it became clear that Labour areas had done for Cameron. Sensing the game was up, the prime minister slipped away from the rest of his political team to have discussions with the chancellor, George Osborne. The pound continued to plunge. By 3.30am, Cameron knew his fate was sealed. His communications team, including Craig Oliver and press officer Graeme Wilson, who had gone to the Festival Hall hoping to raise glasses to victory, headed back to Downing Street to prepare for defeat. Vote Leave's campaign director, Dominic Cummings, and communications director Paul Stephenson tried to stay calm before ITV called it for Leave. "Everyone started to chant 'Dom, Dom, Dom'," said one of his team.
Cummings emerged from his office, jumped on to a table and punched out a panel in the ceiling above him. Stephenson took himself to an office with air conditioning, wanting it "all to end". Nigel Farage – who, bizarrely and prematurely, had accepted defeat early on in the evening – was the first politician to declare it for Leave: "Dawn is breaking on independent United Kingdom." It was, the Ukip leader claimed, "a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people".
But as Leave celebrated the pound went south, and as Farage realised his dream of 30 years much of the population was in despair. The referendum had delivered an outcome and a change to UK governance more momentous than any in living memory, by 52% to 48%. It left the country split along geographical, generational and class lines. The United Kingdom had fractured.
Scotland had voted heavily for Remain, by 62% to 38%, and was now on course, according to SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, for a second independence referendum. It could soon be shorn off from the union with England, as a consequence of the UK-wide Brexit vote – a separation that Tories such as Gove and Johnson will look forward to with dread. So will the main parties. White working-class areas in the Labour-run north of England had ignored Jeremy Corbyn's calls to reject Leave. But Labour London, home to the metropolitan elite, had given thumping majorities to Remain, with 59.9% of people in the capital voting to stay in the EU against 41.1% who backed Leave. Labour Wales went to Leave by 52.5% to 47.5%.
The generations went their different ways, too. Some 73% of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 had chosen Remain, while 60% of those over 65 had voted Leave. "Those who have least time left on this Earth gave young people the very result they did not want. That will be a source of real anger among young people," said one Downing Street official. Rosie Warin, co-founder of a pro-EU campaign group called We are Europe, said: "The referendum has torn this country apart in a way that will have consequences for years to come, across class, age, race and religion." She added: "Today we feel like our world is collapsing."
The despairing Labour deputy leader, Tom Watson, declared – in a reference that applied equally to his country and his party: "We end this referendum more divided than when we started it."
If Cameron's intention in holding an in/out referendum had been to heal the Tories' decades-old divisions over Europe once and for all, it had backfired spectacularly. His resignation statement at 8.15 on Friday morningadded him to the list of Tory prime ministers and leaders who had fallen in the Tories' never-ending European civil war. More than 40% of Conservative supporters had supported staying in the EU, creating rancour between Conservatives that will take years to heal, if it ever does. As he spoke, with his frowning and tearful wife Samantha looking on, Cameron blended dignity in defeat with defiance. He would go by the party conference in October. Eighty-six of his MPs had signed a letter asking him to stay on to negotiate the terms of Brexit with Brussels. No, was his response. He had been furious with his old friend Gove for many weeks, for the way he had campaigned against him, and saw Johnson as motivated purely by ambition to take his job. Why should he bail out the traitors who destroyed him? Cameron's statement was careful but deliberate. "A negotiation with the European Union will need to begin under a new prime minister and I think it's right that this new prime minister takes the decision about when to trigger article 50 and start the formal and legal process of leaving the EU," he said. Brexit was their victory – and now it was their problem.
Cameron knows that this appalling end to his six years as prime minister is to a large extent of his own making. He gambled on a hugely risky referendum under pressure from Ukip before the last election, knowing it could go disastrously wrong. In terms of the campaign, he was hobbled by his own Eurosceptic poses in the too recent past, including his threats to lead the Leave camp during his attempt last year to renegotiate British EU membership. In the past few weeks friends say he has had numerous "dark nights of the soul" and has often wondered why on earth he put himself in such a position. In the referendum campaign, he was the sceptic turned firm believer, but somehow it did not convince. He never once spoke passionately about the raison d'être of the EU in binding nations together and hardly mentioned its successes in speeding the advance of democracy, the rule of law, press freedom, and western economic thinking across the previously moribund former communist states of central and eastern Europe. Instead of telling a positive story, he had focused on the negatives of leaving – and did so often in hyperbolic terms. As veteran Eurosceptic Bill Cash said, "they just didn't buy the Armageddon arguments".
But as Tory Remainers analysed their catastrophic night in the early hours of Friday, it was Labour they blamed as much as Cameron. "If we had any other Labour leader than Jeremy Corbyn, we would have done it," said one Remain MP. With his qualified support for the EU, Corbyn (who said he was not a "catastrophist" and had ranked the issue seven out of 10 on his scale of priorities) failed to shift people in Labour areas who were worried about immigration and fed up with austerity to Remain. Remain won in Labour Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle (very narrowly), but Leave triumphed in Labour Birmingham and Sheffield and a host of stronghold towns such as Salford, Wigan, Lancaster, Bolton and Oldham.
As the Tories head into another leadership contest, Corbyn now faces a possible vote of confidence from MPs in his own party. Labour pro-Europeans are angry and some criticism is vitriolic. Novelist and well-known north London Labour activist Linda Grant tweeted on Friday: "And a special circle in hell for that foolish bumbling vain incompetent tosser Jeremy Corbyn, King of the selfie and signed apples."
Across the country, bitterness lingers as people try to comprehend a future apart from their European neighbours. "We are at the early stages of our leap in the dark and don't know where we will land," said a Tory MP.
When he emerged from his London home after his triumph, early on Friday, Boris Johnson did not appear overjoyed. He was jeered and insulted, not greeted as a liberating hero. Some applauded him, but more hurled abuse. Later, when he and Gove held a victory press conference, both men looked shell-shocked. Their short speeches were funereal in tone, no smiles.
As the stock market nosedived, Johnson addressed a message directly to young people, as if he was terrified of their anger, assuring them they would still be able to travel and find jobs in other European countries. The future, he said, was still bright. "To those who may be anxious, whether at home or abroad, this does not mean that the United Kingdom will be in any way less united, nor, indeed, does it mean that it will be any less European … that this decision involves pulling up a drawbridge or some sort of isolationism – I think the opposite is true," he said. "We cannot turn our backs on Europe. We are part of Europe."
On Friday night, hundreds of young people protested at the result close to Tower Bridge in central London. Gove paid a flattering tribute to David Cameron, who would go down as a "great prime minister" and adopted a soothing tone.
"We can now, calmly and united, take our country forward in the spirit of the warm, humane and generous values that are the best of Britain."
The message was very different from the ugly, hard rhetoric of the campaign. Emphasis on the need to get out of the EU as soon as possible had morphed into a reassurance that nothing would change in a hurry. Only slowly would they loosen the chains of the superstate that shackle the UK. Neither man took any questions, having been willing to do so at every turn in the weeks before the vote.
The referendum is over. The UK is heading out of the European Union against the wishes of 48% of the country and most of its youngest generation of voters. But the men who told us how important it was to "take back control" did not look to be relishing the prospect of exercising it. Or to be very keen to get on with the job.
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