05/01/2016
On
3 October last year, the
Telegraph was announcing that a grassroots "out" campaign had won "business and Tory backing".
This was Leave.eu, which had attracted the support of Toby Blackwell, owner of Blackwell's bookshops, and the Tories' oldest think-tank, the Bow Group. At the time, it was expected that this would boost Leave.eu's chances of being designated as the lead campaigner, "amid bitter rivalries between competing Eurosceptic groupings on the Right".
Now, three months later, almost to the day, we have reported
the launch of another "major new campaign" to mobilise support for the "leave" proposition. And this one is also a grassroots "out" campaign, only it is called "Grassroots Out", or GO for short.
Despite its name, however, the only declared supporters at this time are MPs "from across the political spectrum", including Tory MPs Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove, Labour's Kate Hoey and UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
Previously, Kate Hoey has been listed as co-chair of Labour Leave, and a fully paid-up member of Vote Leave. Farage, on the other hand, has pledged his support to Leave.eu and also hinted that he could support the Tory "posh boys" of Vote Leave.
Bone, who has previously not declared attachment to any particular group, was in
November 2014 talking of campaigning from within the Conservative Party. But he now aims to bring together "people from the disparate anti-EU groups to knock on doors".
Bone, MP for Wellingborough, and his Corby neighbour Tom Pursglove, and the others in his little band, also aim to "draw up a series of campaign plans for individual constituencies across the country".
He says: "At the moment, every day that passes while we are not organised at the grassroots is a wasted opportunity to spread our message on the ground, gifting the advantage to our referendum opponents. GO will help to redress that imbalance".
Pursglove adds: "I know that all those out there in our country who want the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, have a simple message: get together and make it happen".
Remarkably, he then asserts that, "At the moment, the activity on the ground is needlessly fragmented, handing the advantage to those who wish to keep us in". Despite adding to that fragmentation, he tells us, in the true style of a politician, "GO will help put a stop to that and shift the emphasis firmly onto grassroots Brexit".
Kate Hoey says that it is "essential that people from all parties put aside their political differences and work towards the common end, which is to get the UK out of the European Union", and Farage calls on politicians from different parties to "work together and speak with one voice".
Politicians, one assumes, are his idea of the "grassroots", enabling him to declare: "I wholly support GO and its ethos of bringing everyone together at grassroots level". Yet, since there are no indications of any alliance with Vote Leave, once can assume that there is no Cummings in GO.
However, this has not prevented six
Tory MPs from the class of 2105 not getting together to work with Mr Farage. Instead, organised by Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Berwick-upon-Tweed MP, MPs James Cleverly, Craig Mackinlay, Royston Smith, Paul Scully and Scott Mann do seem to have linked up with Vote Leave.
This might be a little unfortunate for the group, reinforcing its image somewhat as a Tory group. This is more so with the apparent loss of Kate Hoey, one of the few Labour MPs in the group. Even with Douglas Carswell who, according to
The Sun, has been forced to deny plotting to kill his leader, the group can scarcely call itself cross-party.
But, with Leave.eu also in the field â and the Leave Alliance planning to launch officially in March - we seem to have something of a surfeit of leavers. Unlike the EU, though, we are supposed to regard competition as a good thing. Dare one suggest that the best leaver should win?
