Biteback Publishing. Hardback and E-book editions.
These are the diaries of Arron Banks, the leader of the "Leave.EU" campaign, from September 2015 to June 23 2016, with an epilogue to cover Banks and Farage being guests of the Trump campaign in America.
The author Arron Banks presents entries as if written when they happened and he has resisted the temptation to edit them with the gift of hindsight to make himself look better. Although controversial, his campaign drew on his marketing skills as a businessman and was quite scientifically designed in that context.
A long battle is depicted, not just with the Remain campaign (which is not presented as a very competent threat to hopes for Brexit) but also with the largely Tory "Vote Leave" campaign. Banks becomes convinced that many in Vote Leave don't actually want to leave the EU: they just want to use the threat of Brexit (or a second referendum) to extract a few comforting reforms. It is obvious that the EU isn't actually going to concede any reform at all, and this is proven with the debacle of David Cameron's non-existent "deal". Banks also complains that Vote Leave sees things from an almost completely Tory point of view, when in his view the most important group of voters the Leave campaign needs to reach out to are Labour voters whose voice is being ignored by their own party. Vote Leave became the officially designated (by the Electoral Commission) campaign despite missing the first deadline for submitting its application and submitting a cobbled up application just in time for the extended deadline they were granted. Banks had been told to expect this by Mrs Thatcher's former private secretary, who knew that the Electoral Commission was always going to choose the establishment option.
Banks made several attempts to merge the campaigns, but Vote Leave weren't really interested in that. He also begged them not to use falsehoods in their campaign, such as the £345M extra figure for the NHS, which Vote Leave stuck to even when it was discredited. Banks's own Leave.EU campaign was extremely blunt, sometimes rude, but also sought to be truthful.
Leave.EU have a close relationship with Nigel Farage, who likewise deplored the use of falsehoods by Vote Leave, but several times Farage thinks that Banks and his colleagues have gone too far. Banks works on the principle of always saying exactly what he thinks. Leave.EU amassed many more members than the other campaigns and it is noteworthy that this was always the priority for Banks: he was determined to invoke "people power" rather than having just another meaningless battle between elite politicians.
Superior American polling and data analysis techniques, which Banks paid for largely out of his own money, allowed him to predict the narrow Leave win in the referendum when others, including Nigel Farage, thought that Leave had lost.
There are also some diversions, as Banks goes rallying in East Africa and visits Belize. He also conveys some of the enthusiasm he has for finding diamonds in the output of the mines he owns in South Africa: he's thrilled to find an 8 carat diamond with his own hands when the price of this is small compared to the income from his main businesses in the UK.
Banks does describe (largely in passing) some dirty tricks by the Remain campaign, as well as scandalous treatment of Labour pro-Leave politicians by the "official" Vote Leave campaign, which was determined to favour Tory has beens rather than current Labour politicians who could reach out to the Labour voters needed in order to win! In particular, the HMRC accuse one of his (studiously upright) colleagues of tax fiddling. The colleague, suspecting that Downing Street put HMRC up to this, demands to see his file under the freedom of information act, but this is bitterly resisted by HMRC.
This book is important and will remain so as the Brexit saga moves on to the courts and probably Parliament, because it documents a campaign based on articulating what the public thinks, instead of smugly telling the public what it ought to think. Leave.EU did much more polling and analysis than the other Leave and Remain campaigns precisely because it was concerned to know what the public actually wanted!
There was one unmitigated disaster for Banks: the seductive idea of a pop concert which never got off the ground and which was finally scuppered by the Electoral Commission. If he was going to edit any of the story to make himself look better, that would be it, but he doesn't.
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