20-21 February 2016

David Cameron, having promised in 2013 that a future Conservative government would offer a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, announces the date of the vote: 23 June 2016. The next day, Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, says he will campaign for leave.

Bernard Jenkin, a senior Conservative backbencher, campaigned for leave: The starting gun was really fired in the [2013] speech. I went to see David Cameron after that and begged him not to hold an in/out referendum, simply because it would smash the Conservative party. He said to me: “I know 50 Conservative MPs may vote leave, but we can live with that.” And I immediately realised he didn’t really understand the Conservative party at all.

David Lidington, minister for Europe 2010-2016 and a close Cameron ally, campaigned for remain: [Holding the referendum] was very much a prime ministerial decision. I didn’t think it was the right one, but I understood David’s reasoning. He was the prime minister, and his view was that this was an opportunity to lance the boil of disaffection within the Conservative party over Europe.

I always felt that it was like chucking lumps of red meat to pursuing wolves from the sled. They would gobble up the lump, and then they would sure as hell come back for more.

Craig Oliver, director of communications for No 10 and for the official remain campaign, Britain Stronger in Europe: The feeling for me at the start of the campaign was that we were in real trouble – not because we thought we were going to lose the referendum, but because it was such a battle inside the Conservative party. The beating heart of the party felt very, very much around leave, and anybody who had fought on the side of remain was not going to be acceptable as a prime minister.

So I entered into the campaign with a fairly bleak view of our prospects. I thought we probably would just about get over the line, but very quickly after it the Conservative party would come for David Cameron.

Will Walden, director of communications for Boris Johnson: I was with [Johnson] that weekend in almost its entirety. For the vast majority of the country, people were unsure which way to go. I don’t think Boris was any different.

Was there any political calculation in his eventual decision? Probably there was, but I think the truth is he was genuinely divided. He was pro-European. He just had problems with the EU.

He spent the weekend at his Oxfordshire farmhouse, being buffeted from all sides – Cameron, [George] Osborne, family. By the time he arrived back in London to the press pack sitting outside his house, he genuinely hadn’t made up his mind. He veered all over the place like the proverbial shopping trolley. He was very stressed.

At one stage, he looked at me and said: “What should I do?” And I said to him, in fairly colourful language: “I’m not making the most consequential decision you’ll ever make. You need to make that decision.”

He went: “You’re right, let’s get on with it. Let’s make the decision.” It took him another hour of prevaricating to reach the decision. He went outside, and I think that announcement changed the course of history.

DL: David Cameron and his political team were pretty shocked and fed up at Boris Johnson’s decision. Though I think David was more upset by [justice secretary and close friend] Michael Gove’s decision to opt for leave. That represented the breach of a much closer personal friendship.

I don’t think there was ever much belief on David Cameron’s part that Boris Johnson was doing this out of some issue of high principle. I think it was recognised that ambition and a desire to position himself as the favourite son of the hard right of the Conservative party – with a view to the eventual succession – was very much in his mind.

Jess Phillips, Labour MP, campaigned for remain: I can’t say that I remember thinking that Boris Johnson was a particular danger, and that is foolishness on my part. To me, Boris Johnson was just a fool, and I genuinely couldn’t believe why anybody would think that anything he said was anything other than a lie. So, I just thought, does it really matter which [campaign] he backs?

1-13 April 2016

Campaigning begins in earnest when a government leaflet about the dangers of Brexit is sent to every household. Leave campaigners dismiss this as part of “project fear”.

Jess Phillips: I quite quickly got involved with the remain campaign, but it wasn’t like any campaign I’d ever been part of. It was very disorganised. Trying to knock doors in my constituency, for example, became an impossibility, because you had no base to go from. We were making up what we were doing. We were [thinking], OK, we’ll go to people who are Labour [supporters], who maybe are more likely to be remain. That was absolutely not the case.

I remember feeling that the campaign was quite elitist. I thought people would have an affinity with the fact that we were going to lose the ability to have free mobile roaming when we were off to Málaga – I was trying to make it more retail, because for the people who I live among, the demonic things that were being suggested would happen in the wake of Brexit didn’t really mean anything.

Ivan Rogers, Britain’s permanent representative to the EU 2013-2017: I was probably always regarded – rightly – as the gloomiest person anywhere near Cameron and thought that leave were quite likely to win. I said repeatedly that it was an absolute knife-edge vote. And in those circumstances, the prime minister, I thought, would have to resign.

The leave campaign was very much better organised than remain. So it seemed to me the writing was on the wall quite early.

Tom Watson, Labour MP and deputy party leader, campaigned for remain: I was very fearful that the Brexit campaigners were going to win quite early on, mainly because I rang all our Labour MPs to ask what they thought the outcome would be, and they said they were certain [remain] was going to win. But then I asked them how it was going in their constituency and they said, oh no, they’re all going to vote for Brexit in my constituency.

It just seemed to me that the whole campaign was based on hope and vapours.

Caroline Lucas, Green MP and board member of Britain Stronger in Europe, campaigning for remain: It was very strange to be on the same side as the prime minister. I have to say, I think it was a mistake – given there is such a temptation between elections for electorates to punish whoever is prime minister – to have put David Cameron as the head of the campaign.

I think the remain side ran an absolutely awful campaign. I tried as hard as I could to ensure that we had far greater diversity of voices – it was infuriating that it was practically all white establishment men. The focus was almost exclusively on the economics, while the leave campaign was speaking quite viscerally about what it means to take back control.

22 April 2016

On a visit to London, the US president, Barack Obama, says Britain will be “at the back of the queue” when making trade deals if it leaves the EU.

Craig Oliver: Barack Obama came to Downing Street, and it was clear he thought it was a mad idea for the UK to leave the EU, so there was discussion about what he might say at his press conference with David Cameron.

George Osborne said: “In terms of getting an international trade deal with the United States, we would have to get to the back of the queue.” And Obama said: “Would it be helpful if I said that?”, and there was a mood that broadly it would. So he used the words in the press conference, and people said: “Well, that sounds like somebody’s told you to say that because you used the word ‘queue’ instead of ‘line’.” My view is that Obama saying that had a real impact in terms of making people think twice.

Paul Stephenson, director of communications for Vote Leave: That week of Obama saying “back of the queue” was the peak of No 10’s campaign. We felt very on the back foot.

I had lots of people saying we had to get MPs out defending us against Obama, but he is the president of the US and it’s legitimate for the BBC to carry what he said. But I remember Dom Cummings [director of Vote Leave] and Dominic Raab [Eurosceptic Tory MP] saying it would play badly that people were being told what to do by a US president. Was it a strong card to play? Yes it was. It was one of the big stories of the campaign.

11 May 2016

Senior members of the Vote Leave campaign begin a tour on a red battlebus with the slogan: “We send the EU £350m a week. Let’s fund the NHS instead.” The figure has been widely debunked.

Will Walden: [Boris Johnson] has always been a great campaigner, and Vote Leave played a blinder by putting him on the bus repeatedly, sending him to places where they felt he would make a discernible difference. It was like his mobile talking shop.

On day one I remember him looking at [the £350m slogan] and sort of cocking his eye and being like: “Hang on a minute, how are we going to justify that?” Journalists spent the whole time on the bus arguing about the £350m. I think the view of Vote Leave was, let them ask the question, because even if they say it’s £170m after the rebate, people are still sitting at home thinking: “That’s a hell of a lot of money.”

Caroline Lucas: The blatancy of the lies I found shocking, and [the fact] that there was no recourse to be able to correct some of this stuff. It was absolutely clear that the leave campaign didn’t care that they were lying, they just wanted us to be talking about it. From their point of view it was a masterstroke, but it added so much to the corrosion of politics.

Every time there was any kind of media coverage of the leave campaign, that bloody bus was in the background. You couldn’t get away from it. And it felt like we didn’t have a strong enough argument on our side.

20 May 2016

In coordinated statements and on a poster, Vote Leave state that “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU”. Critics say the claim is “complete fantasy” and appeals to prejudice.

Jonathan Faull, a senior British official in the European Commission: Penny Mordaunt [Eurosceptic Tory MP] saying on television that Turkey was going to join the European Union and we won’t be able to stop it – it’s simply a lie. Any member state can block an enlargement. I nearly threw something at the television. Probably every day I nearly threw something at the television, because somebody said something outrageous.

Will Walden: The [Turkey] poster was nearly a turning point for Boris on this campaign. He said himself that he, at that point, nearly considered quitting.

He had Turkish ancestry, and he was a pro-immigration mayor of London. When he saw this poster – and he was not consulted on it beforehand – he went apoplectic. I was at my in-laws’ house in Wiltshire; I took the call outside and I put the phone on the farm gate and I stepped back three or four feet. It wasn’t on speakerphone, and I could still hear him shouting and swearing. He was furious, and I think what he really wanted to do was go back to London, and probably lamp Dominic Cummings, but I persuaded him not to do that.

15 June 2016

Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey join a group of anti-EU fishers on boats sailing up the Thames to parliament. They are met by a flotilla carrying remain campaigners led by Bob Geldof.

Kate Hoey, Labour MP, campaigned for leave: All these little boats had been organised to come down and sail up the Thames, and it was a wonderful spectacle. It was absolutely crowded with media on the [main] boat, more media than us from the leave campaign. When we got up to parliament I felt quite moved, because here we were with all these genuine, hard-working people who felt they were being affected.

Then we discovered that Bob Geldof had come along with a group of his supporters, including Boris Johnson’s sister Rachel, screaming what I can only say was abusive stuff at us.

But we then realised this was going to play into the leave voters’ hands because this was establishment people screwing ordinary fishermen who were simply coming to protest and to show they supported leave. I think we all went home feeling this had been a really worthwhile exercise.

Rachel Johnson, journalist and sister of Boris, campaigned for remain: It had good intentions [but] the optics were so bad. As someone said, it looked like a bunch of Tory Annabels or sharp suited metropolitan execs on a fun day out, flicking V-signs at the working man. It was a really bad look.

Farage spun it brilliantly, he said it was outrageous that I was consorting with these disgraceful characters like Bob Geldof and insulting the good, honest fisherfolk.

I wasn’t deeply aware of it at the time, but Brendan Cox [the husband of the MP Jo Cox, who was murdered the next day] and his kids were in a tender alongside which, when I think back on it, just makes me feel so sad.

The flotilla I think really helped deliver Brexit, in a way that I thought would be stopped by the murder of Jo Cox. Within 24 hours you had the flotilla and her murder, and I thought nobody would think about the flotilla and everybody would think of Jo Cox. [I assumed] people would think: “We don’t want to be a country where an MP who’s campaigning for remain can be shot in broad daylight outside her constituency office by a guy shouting Britain first.” But actually I think the Thames was the clincher.

I said to [Boris] later: “You should have given me a damehood for services to Brexit.” Because everybody thought: “Well, if it’s going to be Bob Geldof and Rachel Johnson and [PR executive] Matthew Freud and all those wankers on that boat, I’m with the fishermen.”

Gawain Towler, head of press and communications at Farage’s Ukip: We set off from next to Tower Bridge and invited British media and broadcasters; there were queues for foreign media desperately trying to get on from the docks. It was a crazy event.

Nigel and Kate Hoey were at the front of our boat like a late-middle-aged version of Titanic, the press were pissed, and that moron from the Last Leg was trying to interview Nigel from another boat. Some people boarded the Bob Geldof boat like pirates and Rachel Johnson looked really annoyed. At one point the harbour master asked Geldof to turn the sound down and he refused.

Geldof was shouting “You’re no fisherman’s friend” at Farage and started flicking the V at him. I pointed to him and said: “This is a sanctimonious millionaire pop star who has contempt for the fishermen” – and that image was the story around the world on the front pages.

It is one of the most magnificent days of campaigning I can remember because it was totally out of our control. So thank you, Bob.

16 June 2016

Nigel Farage (not part of the official leave campaign) releases a poster showing a crowd of Syrian refugees near the Croatia-Slovenia border, with the slogan “Breaking point: the EU has failed us all.” It attracts an immediate backlash.

Later that day, Jo Cox, a Labour MP who had been a prominent campaigner for remain, is murdered in her constituency, after holding a surgery, by a white supremacist in an act of terrorism.

Craig Oliver: The most difficult day of my professional life was a week before the vote. It started with a claim by the leave campaign that was leading BBC News that Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, was falsifying information in order to try and persuade people to stay in the EU. I remember calling up the BBC and saying: “This is utterly ridiculous, there’s no evidence for this at all,” and they said: “Well, the leave campaign’s saying it, so we’re duty bound to say it.”

I found that really depressing, but not as depressing as a few hours later when Nigel Farage released his Breaking Point poster. It was deeply shocking, seeing how that got covered. It exploded everywhere and was given a kind of seriousness that I didn’t think it deserved.

A few hours after that, I got a call telling me that Jo Cox had been murdered, and it was soon confirmed that she was shot and kicked and stabbed to death and spat on by a man shouting “Britain first”.

Those three events really made me realise something has deeply gone wrong in our country. There is something we hadn’t really been aware of that is coming to a head just one week before the referendum.

This was the first time that we realised we were canaries in the coalmine of populism. Just because the establishment thought something and campaigned for something, and people were told this isn’t going to be good for you, [they] weren’t necessarily going to believe it. And the rest is history. It was an extraordinary moment of realisation.

Gawain Towler: The awful murder of Jo Cox changed everything in that last week. We had a series of seven posters and we only did two. We cut back our campaign because that was the right thing to do.

[The poster] had been in the papers and, OK, it was not brilliant. I could understand why people didn’t like it; it was not my favourite one. The news about Jo being killed came about two hours later. That poster became conflated with her murder and became a massive deal afterwards.

Before that happened, the strategic thinking had been: if we are talking about immigration in the last week we will win, and if we are talking about the economy we will lose. The fact the whole press talked about Breaking Point for the next four days did it. I would have chosen a different poster myself, but the strategic thinking of getting them talking about migration in the last week worked.

Jess Phillips: I was at Jo Cox’s house 48 hours before she was killed. She’d held a party to celebrate those of us in the 2015 intake. I distinctly remember as I was leaving, because I was going off with some girlfriends to Spain for the weekend, she said to me: “What do you think is going to happen?” And I said: “I don’t know.” She told me she was scared and I told her that it would be all right and I gave her a cuddle. I feel grateful that I told her that I loved her. The last thing I ever said to her was: “Look, it’ll be OK, and I’ll see you on the flip side of this.” And obviously I didn’t ever see her again.

I found out that she had died from a news flash that came up on my phone while I was in Spain. I then saw that I had what seems now, in my memory, like hundreds of missed calls. I didn’t believe it. I thought the news was a mistake.

In some stupid, crazy moment in my head, I rang her, like she was going to answer, and obviously she didn’t answer. So I sent her some messages that just said: “You’re going to be OK, just call me when you’re feeling better. Let me know how you’re doing and I love you.” I just couldn’t believe it could be that bad.

Everybody stopped campaigning. There was a real sense, definitely among her friends in Westminster, that we all wanted to be together. I came home from Spain and I remember going to be with [Labour MPs] Wes Streeting, Anna Turley and others because they were the people who would understand. As much as my friends were being kind to me, people didn’t understand the way it made us feel. It made us feel like we were hunted, that our jobs put us at risk.

People were kinder for a period, but that washed away pretty quickly. Nigel Farage, on the day that the referendum was won by his side, said: “We did all this without a single shot being fired.” I felt very, very deep resentment for that.

It actually got worse after that, the way that members of parliament got treated. The thing I resent the most is the idea that Jo Cox’s murder became just one of those things, like, people get murdered. And that is not how it felt to me. It’s not how it felt to my colleagues.

Tom Watson: I remember crying in the arms of the speaker’s chaplain, Rose Hudson-Wilkin. She was very caring to the Labour MPs, who were obviously devastated.

I remember talking to David Cameron and others [who were] concerned that during the last weekend we wouldn’t be campaigning, but nobody in the Labour party was ready to do anything after Jo’s death. They needed a time to grieve. I don’t think that would have affected the outcome. But we were not ready for that.

20 June 2016

Representatives from the leave and remain campaigns face one another in a BBC head to head at Wembley arena in front of 6,500 people. The “great debate”, chaired by David Dimbleby, is billed as the largest debate in British history.

Boris Johnson, Gisela Stuart(a German-born Labour MP) and the Tory MP Andrea Leadsom debate for leave, while Ruth Davidson (the Conservative party leader in Scotland), Sadiq Khan (the new mayor of London after Johnson’s departure a month earlier) and the TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady argue for remain.

Mishal Husain, the BBC journalist who chaired a secondary panel of leave and remain public figures at the event: We prepared really thoroughly. I also voiced the graphics that preceded each section that we were debating [sovereignty, the economy and immigration]. They had to be absolutely rigorous and the phrasing had to be absolutely right. We did have some pretty intense discussions on wording.

It was different from political panels I’d been accustomed to because clearly we were going across party lines, and it also included business people and other voices. Then there was the sheer challenge of the amount of time and the number of panellists. I think it was probably, journalistically, one of the harder things I’ve done. It did feel like the stakes were very high.

The moment of that whole night that stood out for me very clearly was when Boris Johnson, from the main stage, said [the vote could be] the UK’s independence day. The eruption in the hall from those who were planning to vote for leave was just immense. I think it was that intensity, not just the fact that people were cheering for one side or the other, but it just felt that there was a fervour that seemed absent on the other side. Perhaps that’s the difference between the status quo and change.

Paul Stephenson: The TV debates took up a huge amount of capacity and time. There was an insane amount of focus among politicians wanting to be on the stage at Wembley, as Robbie Gibb [then the BBC’s editor of live political events, later Theresa May’s director of communications at No 10 and a BBC board member] had built it up to be such as big thing. Boris talked about “independence day”, which I think was the rallying call and got a bunch of the headlines. I think having Gisela Stuart on stage showing it was OK to be not born in Britain and still back leaving – having a reasonable, German, Labour female politician there saying, “Look, there’s a risk of staying in and it’s better to leave for democratic reasons” – it broadened it out from Boris and Michael [Gove] having an argument with David Cameron.

23-24 June 2016

Polling day, results come in.

Paul Stephenson: Lots of us had been telling each other we thought [leave] were going to win; later it turned out not everyone had really believed that. But the data had been positive for us, the postal ballots seemed to be positive and on the day itself we had this WhatsApp group of people on the ground saying leave areas were turning out in great force.

We had this feeling in the afternoon that something was happening. The way I would describe the last few weeks is that it was a bit like a cup final, where you’re ahead and it’s very tight and anything could happen to make it into a draw or a loss. It was one minute to go and we thought we could get it over the line, but we hardly to dared to believe it.

Will Walden: The 24 hours leading up to the referendum result being declared were extraordinary. Not least because for most of the day of voting, we were stuck in Scotland with Boris and his family at his daughter’s graduation, and we had a plane problem on the way back to City airport that left us scrambling to reach the polling station. I remember running down the road in Islington to get him there to vote, because I knew the one thing that would look really bad was if the leader of the Vote Leave campaign didn’t manage to actually register a vote.

I was so focused on this that I had not clocked that on the DLR back from City airport into London, he’d managed to tell a member of the public that Vote Leave were going to lose, and it turned out that guy was a pro-remain Labour activist. So the first thing that we saw on the TV was Boris Johnson predicting after 10 o’clock that Vote Leave had lost – and I think, for all his efforts, he thought they probably had.

Boris had a study at the back of his house where he worked, it had a big screen TV and everyone was assembled there. The moment where he leapt off the sofa and said: “God, I think we’re going to win”, was when the result in Sunderland came in. He then became, for the next two hours, comedically focused on the betting markets, and he grew increasingly confident.

Then, of course, when it was declared, I think the reality of it hit him really, really suddenly. He was both euphoric and sort of crestfallen. It was like: “My God, what happens next?”

I remember trying to send him to bed because he needed to rest, and he suddenly appeared in the living room 35 minutes later, dressed bizarrely in surfing shorts and a Brazilian football shirt to report that he couldn’t get to sleep and he needed to focus on the speech he was going to give the next morning.

Tom Watson: I spent the evening of the referendum in Westminster doing an interview round. I had my 11-year-old son with me, Malachy, and we had pizza in the Yes campaign offices. Then we went to my office after midnight and built a den with the TV on to watch the results.

I fell asleep, but I remember waking up early to see Malachy absolutely perplexed, just not being able to comprehend what the country had done. It’s then that I realised we’ve taken his generation’s future away.

Robert Peston, ITV political editor: Night after night on ITV’s News at 10, I said that if we voted to leave the EU we would be poorer. The economics were decisively against Brexit, and on the night itself the speculation and rumours were that the British people had voted to remain.

I thought, OK, the British people have done what they normally do, voted in an economically rational way. The pound rose. Even Nigel Farage made statements that implied that he thought that he had lost.

I found myself at the remain party reporting, and we saw the results coming in. The one that stays in my memory is Sunderland, where the Nissan factory was. There was an assumption that Nissan workers would vote to stay in the EU because Nissan itself had benefited so greatly from British membership of the single market. Sunderland voted to leave.

In fact, the local MP said to me that the workers at Nissan actually cheered when they learned that, and at this party in the Festival Hall, it was as if a massive freezer door had been opened. The temperature in the room absolutely plummeted.

Then I went on to the leave party, and there was a growing sense of euphoria. It was a night where I had to reassess my view of how people vote, because in the end economics had not been decisive.

Caroline Lucas: I thought when I went to bed that we probably had done it because I’d spent most of the day in London where more people were in favour of remaining.

But I do remember [very early in the morning] putting the radio on and literally the first thing I heard was David Dimbleby saying: “And now the result is in – and we’re out.” It just felt like a dagger in my heart.

It was a lovely sunny day, and I remember walking over the [River Thames] with some staff from my office feeling that we were all in mourning. There was a tribute to Jo Cox, a boat with lots of flowers on it in the Thames – and there was just such a stark contrast between the utter grief and the sense that we’d failed and obviously the massive price that Jo had had paid – and the beautiful day. It was a morning of utter contradictions.

24 June 2016

David Cameron resigns.

Craig Oliver: David Cameron’s closest team gathered on the afternoon of the vote, and there was a debate about whether or not he should resign if he lost the referendum. A number of people in the room were of the view that he owed it to the country to stay on for stability to continue.

My view – very, very strongly – was that if you lose this referendum, you should go, and there were two reasons for that. One, he just spent the last few months trying to persuade everybody that the right thing to do was to remain in the EU, and they’d gone against that, and the second thing was that I wanted him to do it for his own personal dignity. You’ve made your case and people are going against it, so go with dignity and don’t be in a situation where you look like you’re clinging on and they get rid of you anyway.

At four in the morning, after the result had come through, I walked to the prime minister’s office. He said to me: “Craig, do you think I do have to resign?” And I said: “Sadly, I think you do.” I remember patting him on the back as he walked upstairs to his flat.

David Cameron tries to deal with things with humour when they’re the most difficult, and [the next morning] he walked into the office where we’d been drafting a resignation statement for him, and he said: “Well, that didn’t go well, did it?”

He walked outside, and Sam [Cameron’s wife] was standing beside him, and I think people at that moment knew that he was going to resign. It was very emotional inside his private office.

He walked back in, he said to us: “Look, you’ve all been a great team. I don’t blame you at all, I think you’re amazing, and I’m just sorry that we couldn’t push it over the line.” There were a lot of people crying. He went into his office with Sam and they had a private moment together.

After that, we went and met some of the remain campaign, had a drink with them, and people were feeling pretty beaten up. Then seeing Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – I remember that very, very clearly. They both looked totally shocked, as if they’d never really intended this to happen and didn’t really know what to do next.

Will Walden: I think Boris hadn’t appreciated the idea that Cameron would go, and when he did go, I think Boris felt really genuinely heartfelt concern for Dave and Sam. I remember him saying: “God, poor Sam, look at her, she looks terrible.”

Where the significance of it really dawned on him was when we left the house to go to Vote Leave [campaign HQ]. He lived in a very pro-remain area in Islington, in north London, and we had to have probably 20 police officers to get us in the cars.

People were furious, they felt that Boris had given away their stake in the future. I remember sitting in the car, and we zoomed off down the road. The light changed to red, and the [driver] slammed on the brakes, and we were basically caught by hundreds of cyclists, trapped, banging on the car door, banging on the window, telling [Johnson] what they thought of him.

I don’t think he was fearful for his safety, because the police were there pretty quickly, but I think at that point Boris realised the magnitude of the decision that had been made, and how that was going to change the course of politics and change the course of this country.