On Friday 10 June, five men charged with keeping Britain in the European Union gathered in a tiny, windowless office and stared into the abyss. Just moments before, they had received an email from Andrew Cooper, a former Downing Street strategist and pollster for the official remain campaign, containing the daily “tracker” – the barometer of support among target segments of the electorate. It had dropped into the defeat zone. The cause was not mysterious. “Immigration was snuffing out our opportunity to talk about the economy,” Will Straw, the executive director of Britain Stronger In Europe, recalled. Earlier that week, the top Tories fronting the leave campaign – Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – had dominated the news with promises to control the nation’s borders. The remain side’s message, that Brexit entailed deadly economic risk, was being drowned out, particularly in areas that traditionally supported Labour. Polls showed that many voters were unaware that a remain vote was the party’s official position, a confusion exacerbated by Jeremy Corbyn’s manifest ambivalence about the entire European project. The vote was less than two weeks away, and the team of former political enemies needed to jump-start the stalled campaign machine. Straw was a… Read full this story
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