Two prime ministerial resignations, 10 years apart: ‘Brexit represents a kind of faultline in British history’
Keir Starmer’s announcement on Monday was the latest convulsion since the Brexit vote. This week, as we marked 10 years since the referendum, our former national news editor Dan Sabbagh looked back to the start of Britain’s ongoing political chaos
Our political sketch writer John Crace has dubbed it the “podium of doom”. Just before a British prime minister steps out of 10 Downing Street to announce their resignation, a lone lectern takes centre stage and casts an ominous shadow across the ground. This week’s resignation of Keir Starmer was the seventh such lectern moment in a decade.
The first and longest of these shadows was cast 10 years ago this week, when David Cameron resigned after the UK voted to leave the EU. Before then, departing prime ministers mostly made do with a basic mic stand. Before then, prime ministers generally didn’t depart after mere months in the job.
Starmer’s resignation on Monday made the 10-year anniversary of the Brexit vote, and the long shadow it cast across the nation, feel all the more ominous. So after his speech, I caught up with Dan Sabbagh, our defence and security editor, who was the Guardian’s national news editor in 2016. I asked him what it was like in the newsroom that day – and whether he felt a sense of deja vu this week.
Dan, did Monday’s resignation outside Downing Street take you back to 2016?
Yeah, there was lots of deja vu when I saw the lectern this week. You realise you’ve seen a lot of them and you have different reactions each time. With David Cameron, it was a shock. He’d been prime minister for six years and, until that moment, he felt like a strong and dominant figure in British politics. Since then, his successors have come and gone – with none of them going from a position of strength or on a point of principle.
I remember Boris Johnson said “Them’s the breaks” during his resignation speech. It was much more dignified from Keir Starmer this week but, as with all the others, it felt like he’d reached the end of the road. So Cameron was more unexpected. In retrospect, it might seem obvious he had to resign, because he would have had to implement Brexit – which he’d campaigned against and didn’t believe in. In the small hours of that morning, it was clear he’d lost all authority, but it still wasn’t clear that he would resign. That’s what I sometimes call the moment after the moment, where you crash into the next news cycle immediately after the one you’d been focusing on concludes.
And yet that morning, the prime minister’s resignation wasn’t even the biggest story of the day
It certainly wasn’t. I remember having discussions in the newsroom because the UK was faced with all this uncertainty about how we would actually leave the EU. And there was a lot of anxiety about the constitutional questions regarding Scotland, which had voted to remain in the EU, and Northern Ireland. I remember that being at the forefront of my mind because we’d had the Good Friday agreement, the Troubles had gone away – which was perhaps the greatest political achievement in the UK in the previous quarter of a century – and now Brexit might reopen that can of worms. So there were just so many questions swirling and we were looking at all these gaping holes. And then there was the sheer drama of it, the pace of it.
Walk me through that morning, or rather that long night
I remember waking up in the middle of the night, finding out that the UK was basically out and this extraordinary scenario was going to come to pass, and then getting a taxi to work at 3am, picking up Rebecca Allison, the deputy national news editor, en route to the office. We had lots of senior journalists working at 4am – a full home news staff, senior editing staff, and a range of key reporters. And you knew right away that you were in this extraordinary moment of profound political uncertainty.
By the time Cameron came out and resigned, at around 8.15am, you were in a state of nervous exhaustion. Normally, with an election, there’d be someone else taking over and you’d focus on that. But Boris Johnson and Michael Gove [the Conservative politicians who had led the Leave campaign] held a press conference at 11am and they looked shell-shocked, kind of like: “Oh, my God, what have we done?” They were in no sense ready to take over. The idea seemed to be that we would just leave. And the debates about the customs union and the single market felt as if they were for sometime in the future. So everyone, even members of the Leave campaign, were in this shock event.
Was it difficult to keep your emotions out of it? What did your job entail?
The job of the national news editor is to run things on a practical and day-to-day basis. I recall having conversations with colleagues and saying: “I’m not sure we expected to be here but, what happens next?” You can have emotional reactions to events such as Brexit, but none of those things mattered to the essential task of just cracking on with the job, which was to tell our readers what had just happened, to make sense of it, to interpret it, and clarify it. Whether you’re a news editor or a reporter, that’s always the job – you have to respond to what’s in front of you and make sure we report with energy and focus, and give people truth, clarity and insight.
You mentioned the Leave campaign’s lack of a plan for Brexit. Many voters also didn’t seem particularly interested in technical debates about customs unions and fishing quotas. As a news editor, was that frustrating for you?
A lot of the coverage of the campaign was very driven by personalities – whether people were for or against David Cameron or Boris Johnson. That was a dominant drama. But these kinds of events and campaigns move very fast, even when you’ve got a month or six weeks for a campaign. That sounds like a lot of time, but it isn’t. Things move quickly. Certain issues come to the fore, certain issues come and go. Some issues aren’t picked up on.
The big thing was the tragic murder of Jo Cox [the Labour MP who was killed a week before the referendum by a far-right English nationalist who shouted “Britain first” as he shot and stabbed her. In his victory speech eight days later, Nigel Farage said Brexit had been achieved “without having to fight, without a single bullet being fired”]. It was a profoundly shocking event that disturbed everyone, and affected people on all sides of the divide. There was a feeling of revulsion that the campaign had been so divisive. One of the emotional reactions to her murder was a feeling that the UK surely wouldn’t vote for Brexit now because it had unleashed these darker forces.
Arguably, a lot of the rightwing press had been campaigning against the EU for the better part of a decade and the referendum campaign was just a culmination of all that. Do you think that put the rest of the media at a disadvantage?
Yes, on the right Europe was a passion issue, an issue of ideology. Whereas for the left, Europe hadn’t been a totemic issue at that point in time. People had been more focused on issues such as inequality, the environment and social justice. We at the Guardian all had a role in giving people the truth and reporting events accurately, clearly and appropriately. We had to show people what was really going on.
That reminds me that the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016 was “post-truth”. How conscious were you of the role of disinformation at the time?
I don’t think there was a feeling then that there was any sort of online disinformation campaign. A lot of that came out later on as people engaged in a kind of intellectual archeology about how it had come to this. But there was a lot of worry about the simplistic slogans such as “take back control”. It was obviously effective, and the Brexit campaign had done a good job of giving people catchy riffs and tunes to hum . Not just “take back control”, but also the claim about saving £350m a week to spend on the NHS.
Donald Trump immediately saw the power and possibilities of Brexit. So we were certainly at the beginning of a new kind of politics. You could see that things were changing, but you couldn’t quite see the scale and profundity of the change. We were between the 2011 Arab spring, when the feeling was that social media was a tool of freedom and democracy, and the end of the decade, when we had a different view about how social media had been colonised and manipulated with extraordinary potency by the right.
Do you think that divisiveness and dysfunction in British politics has now basically become normalised?
Brexit hasn’t brought the things the Leave campaign claimed it would and it certainly hasn’t brought better economic growth. So the country has been left with this massively pent-up frustration about British politics, and no economic growth to offset that. So it’s hard not to conclude that Brexit represents a kind of faultline in British history. We’ve traded away a much more stable politics for a messy panoply of resignations. Each prime minister since David Cameron has had a habit of becoming the most unpopular prime minister. And always in the background there’s Nigel Farage …
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