Back in the autumn of 2016, I had played a game of tennis with David Cameron at Winfield House, the US ambassador’s residence in London. He won, as usual (he’s a left-hander, and very hard to outfox).
Afterwards, he said magnanimously: ‘Come on – go with the campaign to stay in and I’ll make sure you get a top-five job in the Cabinet.’ Wow, I said, that sounds great – and tried swiftly to work out what ‘top-five’ might mean.
Hmmm… 1 PM; 2 Chancellor; 3 Home Sec; 4 Fgn Sec; 5 …er… Defence? Health?
Whatever it was, it sounded great. But still I hesitated and havered.
Then prime minister David Cameron and then mayor of London Boris Johnson warm up for a tennis match during the International Paralympic Day at Trafalgar Square in 2011
Mr Johnson on the Brexit campaign trail in 2019 at at Jimmy Egans Boxing Academy in Manchester
Then, only a few weeks back, the PM had rung me one evening at City Hall, urging me to make up my mind. I was torn, I said. I wanted to back him, but over the years I had written hundreds if not thousands of articles attacking the undemocratic features of the EU. I felt I had to be consistent.
‘This isn’t about articles!’ he spluttered. ‘It’s about… the future of the country!’
Well, I said, we were agreed on that but I was still thinking of voting Leave.
‘If you do that,’ he said – and these were his exact words – ‘I will f*** you up for ever.’
I relayed the conversation to the family when I got back home to Islington that evening. ‘You’ve got no choice,’ said [my son] Milo instantly. ‘You’ll have to vote Leave.’
But I had to admit that the threat sounded serious. Did I want to be f***ed up? For ever? By a prime minister equipped with all the f***ing-up tools available to a modern government, and thousands of f***er-uppers just waiting to do his bidding?
It looked as though we were going to lose, and once we lost the failed and defeated Leavers would of course be crushed like bugs: dismissed as Powellite cranks and misfits who had been rejected by the people.
The smart thing to do was stick with Dave, knuckle under, take the ‘top-five’ job, avoid the grief, and vote cravenly for Remain.
But how could I?
This was the moment of truth. The UK would never again have a chance to be free, to be truly democratic, to make its own laws.
It was early December 2020 and in a few short weeks we faced the calamity of a so-called ‘hard Brexit’. Unless we did a deal agreeing the terms of our future relationship, the EU and the UK would become total economic strangers.
Tariffs would spring up around the EU like a ring of sharpened stakes. Every British product could in theory be eyeballed and dismantled at the border, every traveller subject to body-cavity probes – and the result would be a total disaster, or so people had been prophesying for years.
Our supply chains would seize up; planes would choose to fall from the sky rather than disobey EU directives. The queue of honking juggernauts would coil from Kent to London, and from Calais to Paris, with lorry drivers forced to sleep for weeks in their cabs. Still reeling from Covid, the global economy would fall flat on its face.
Mr Johnson with EU president Ursula von der Leyen and the EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier
We can’t let it happen, I said to Ursula von der Leyen, EU president. We have been negotiating for long enough, and the fact is that the UK and the EU don’t really have anything to negotiate.
After more than 45 years of EU membership, we are fully congruent with every jot and tittle of Brussels legislation. We are two peas in a pod! Let’s get this done.
She seemed to agree, and for a surging moment I thought that this was going to be the decisive dinner, the moment of statecraft, of hope. Then I became aware of a commotion at the door, and voices outside. At length a flustered-looking official came in and handed a piece of paper to the president of the European Commission.
Ursula rose and switched her beaming smile back on. ‘I think we must now go into dinner,’ she said. ‘M. Barnier is here.’
Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, had been outside the whole time, getting more and more agitated. He suspected he was being deliberately cold-shouldered, that Ursula was selling him out – doing some sweetheart deal with the dreaded Johnson. Finally, he could take it no more.
The note he had written was an ultimatum to Ursula: ‘If you do not let me join the meeting now, I will resign.’
Now, he marched in and took over the conversation, and the result, as UK officials later described it, was the dinner from hell.
Ursula had been emollient and fun. Though we disagreed about Brexit, we both wanted to get it done and rebuild as fast as possible. Barnier was the opposite; prickly, Cartesian and suspicious. As he glared at Ursula it occurred to me that he might not want a deal at all.
There is a long tradition, going back to de Gaulle in 1963, of French negotiators deciding that Britain can fiche-moi le camp*; and if Barnier was thinking about the interests of Barnier, and the interests of France, as he assuredly was, then he might not be averse to some kind of bust-up in which les Britanniques were punished.
The French, after all, had beaten us up on the way into Europe, and it felt as though Barnier was determined to ensure we were beaten up on the way out.
Dictionary corner
*Fiche-moi le camp: Get lost
There was an extraordinary moment in the 2016 referendum campaign when Kate Hoey and Nigel Farage and others decided to highlight the plight of Scottish fishermen by bringing a flotilla of boats up the Thames to Parliament. With exquisite lack of good sense, the Remain campaign sent a counter-flotilla of pleasure craft to make fun of them, including a boat crewed by Sir Bob Geldof, the pop star, and (inevitably) my sister Rachel.
The sight of the multi-millionaire rock star taunting and mocking these fishermen – flicking V-signs at them and shouting ‘fook off’ (not to mention Rachel laughing gaily beside him) - was almost as big a boost for the Leave campaign, in retrospect, as Barack Obama’s pledge that Brexit Britain would have to get to ‘the back of the queue’.
After I decided to vote Leave, I rang my father Stanley, who had come to Brussels in the early 1970s as one of the first wave of Brits to go to the Commission.
There was a pause. He coughed.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose you’ll get some brickbats for that, but I suppose you might also get some plaudits as well.’
It can’t have been exactly what he had been hoping to hear, given everything he had done in his own career, and the corpus of European environmental law that he had personally helped to produce.
But you know what – from that day to this, he never once complained, moaned, whinged; far from it. Nor has he been anything less than completely personally supportive.
He may have campaigned for Remain, and he may go around on his bike wearing a B****cks to Brexit bobble hat. That is entirely his prerogative.
But he has been relentlessly good-humoured and backed me up in every other conceivable way. No son could ask for more.
Hammond wanted me to tell old grumpy- knickers her time was up
Philip Hammond proposed a partnership where Boris would take the wheel at No10 and he continued to be his economic co-pilot
In a fit of almost superhuman electoral incompetence in 2017, the Tories under Theresa May managed to throw away our poll lead and lose the Conservative majority in Parliament. We had not only missed an open goal, we had made Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn look like Diego Maradona.
My majority in Uxbridge was sawn in half, to no purpose whatever. As I told my troops, we were still alive but, like the Earl of Uxbridge himself, I had seen one leg shot away in battle.
In the early hours of the morning I got a message from Phil Hammond, the Chancellor – dry as dust but with an excellent political brain – and we talked. He thought it was all very unfortunate but Theresa’s goose was cooked. She would have to go sooner or later, and it might as well be now.
What he was proposing was a Hammond-Johnson partnership, by which I would take the wheel at No10 and he continued to be my economic co-pilot. I thought about it briefly, as dawn started to break, and then said no.
Perhaps it was selfish of me. Perhaps I should have accepted the responsibility that morning and gone in with Phil to tell old grumpy-knickers that her time was up. I hesitated partly because it all seemed so rancorous and febrile.
The media was already full of stuff about how I was ‘on manoeuvres’, and even though that was untrue I could see that if Phil and I launched some breakfast coup, people’s general fury would immediately be turned on me.
And I continued to believe – perhaps naively – that she had finally come up with the right formula for Brexit. I believed that as a Remainer – transvestite or otherwise – she was in a powerful moral position to deliver that vision and keep our party together, even if she had ballsed up the election and shredded her own authority.
I’m afraid I was totally mistaken in that second calculation. The election fiasco had robbed Theresa of her mojo and also, it seemed, of any trace of a belief in Brexit.
Adapted from Unleashed by Boris Johnson (William Collins, £30), to be published on October 10. © Boris Johnson 2024. To order a copy for £25.50 (offer valid until October 12, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
Boris Johnson will be in conversation with Gyles Brandreth at The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on October 12.