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Gambling on Europe: David Cameron and the 2016 referendum

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British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Membership of the European Union has divided British political parties for decades. On taking office, David Cameron hoped to move his Conservative Party beyond the electorally rather unwelcome focus on ‘Europe’. By 2013, he felt the best way to resolve the divisions in his own party was to try to renegotiate the UK’s membership of the EU and hold a referendum on continuing membership. This article argues that the gamble was Cameron’s to lose but that a combination of poor judgement and ill-timing on his part alongside the more potent message of the Leave campaign contributed to precisely the outcome Cameron did not want: he lost office; the country looked set to the leave the EU; and the divisions within his party were far from healed.

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Notes

  1. As Ashcroft and Oakeshott (2015, pp. 489–490) note, there was always a degree of uncertainty as to how Eurosceptic Cameron actually was, although they claim that in 2000, he actively sought to persuade researcher Sean Gabb that he was ‘sceptic’, recognising the importance among grassroots members of being seen to be so.

  2. Banks’s defection was treated so dismissively by Foreign Secretary William Hague that he rapidly increased his donation to UKIP to £1 m and his commitment to the Brexit cause was clearly cemented (Banks 2017).

  3. For further discussion of Cameron’s Chatham House speech and letter to the Council President, see Smith (2016, 2017).

  4. This was made clear in private conversations with the author.

  5. For an extensive analysis of the media coverage throughout the campaign, see Moore and Ramsay (2017).

  6. At the time, the sole block on such a decision seemed to be Theresa May in her previous guise as Home Secretary, in which post she had failed to get a grip of the problem.

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Donna Doerbeck, Geoffrey Edwards and David Yates for comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to the editors for their support. Any errors remain her own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

    Julie Smith

  2. House of Lords, London, UK

    Julie Smith

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  1. Julie Smith
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Correspondence to Julie Smith.

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Smith, J. Gambling on Europe: David Cameron and the 2016 referendum. Br Polit 13, 1–16 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-017-0065-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-017-0065-5

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