The Foreign Service Journal, March 2019

78 MARCH 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL point of obsession, seemingly having read every WhatsApp text, email and Facebook message ever written between the warring parties, whom in many cases he also knows personally. But Shipman’s tale is just half the Brexit story. If British politics is often a tale of class conflict, Shipman focuses on the “Upstairs” part of the Brexit story. Downstairs, where the vast majority of Leave voters dwelt, the negative effects of immigration from other European coun- tries had steadily eroded working class support for the E.U. Why Britain Voted explains the impact of this erosion. Clarke, Goodwin and Whiteley explore the data behind the outcome, which ended up a cliffhanger whose con- sequences disturb our work today. While economics and ideological consider- ations motivated elite Brexiters, the voter numbers pushing Leave to victory owed far more to working class discomfort with soaring immigration. As immigra- tion rose and rose again, E.U. rules on free movement rendered controlling it impossible. Shipman explains what happened next. Cameron sought E.U. flexibility on migration. Believing a referendum could be a win-win, Cameron would show skeptical Tories that leaving the E.U. was a fringe idea while using the vote as a tool for exacting more concessions fromBrussels. For Cameron, Brexit began as a bluff because he thought he’d win it. He didn’t know he wasn’t bluffing about the risks of a Leave vote. He didn’t think voters could be persuaded to leave. Neither did his E.U. counterparts understand how unpopular immigration was in the U.K. In the nearly three years since then, Britain’s political bandwidth has been Decoding Brexit All Out War:The Full Story of HowBrexit Sank Britain’s Political Class Tim Shipman, William Collins Books, 2017, $16.99/paperback, $15.99/Kindle, 662 pages. Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Whiteley, Cambridge University Press, 2017, $19.99/paperback, $9.99/Kindle, 256 pages. . Reviewed by Andrew S.E. Erickson Given the oceans of ink already spilt on Brexit, what more can we learn? Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union and All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class show us. The former book wonkily dissects the polling of changing British attitudes toward the European Union. The latter compulsively documents how British politicians thought and fought about the United Kingdom’s relationship with the E.U. Both works richly comple- ment each other. As recently as 2014 Tory luminary Lord Peter Carrington said leaving the E.U. would be “a very stupid thing to do.” David Cameron, the Tory prime minister who called the 2016 Brexit referendum, strongly supported E.U. membership. So why did Cameron initiate a referendum on Europe? Why did senior Tories—key among them Boris Johnson—use the vote to take a wrecking ball to Britain’s relationship with Europe? Tim Shipman’s All Out War is a nail- biting tale of intrigue. Political editor of the Sunday Times , Shipman was uniquely well-placed to chronicle the behind-the- scenes machinations of the referendum. The prolix Mr. Shipman is thorough to the BOOKS completely absorbed by Brexit even as other issues fester. Shipman tells the tale in dogged detail: Confident of victory, the prime minister ran a lackadaisical campaign focused on safeguarding Tory interests. Opposing him, Team Leave knew simple and memorable messaging could deliver a victory more important to them than message accuracy. Leavers claimed Brexit would enable immediate sharp reductions in migration, a post-Brexit repatriation of hundreds of millions of pounds sterling from Brussels every week and—crucially—would preserve all the benefits of E.U. membership with none of its costs. Repatriated funds would bolster the National Health Service. Reducing migration would improve the lives of working class voters. Against this “unicorn farm,” as some critics called it, Shipman shows how the Remain campaign offered only cerebral and nuanced messages about Britain’s relationship with Brussels. Brexiters dismissed Remain’s arguments as “Project Fear” and condemned them as elitist hooey. The electoral post-mortem is clear: Brexiters’ messages of reducing immigration, taking back money from the E.U. and returning “control” to Britain decisively beat complex economic argu- ments delivered by Remain-supporting tycoons, nebbish economics professors and President Barack Obama, whose carefully orchestrated anti-Brexit inter- view during a visit to London backfired rather spectacularly, as Tim Shipman explains in his book. Why Britain Voted ’s academic authors provide further context: “Many people were deeply worried about immigra- tion and concluded that the U.K. would