Though most people assume Steve Bannon-style populism arrived with Brexit in 2016, the planning, the people, and the project first came together three years earlier
Churchill College, Cambridge, 2013. A December weekend out of term time, and a hundred or so right-wing libertarians are gathered in a lecture hall to hear an American talk with two rising stars of the Young Britons Foundation (YBF) on its 10th anniversary.
Self-described as a ‘Conservative Madrasa’, the YBF was a youth insurgency movement within the Conservative Party and the right in general. The foundation’s dolphin symbol was a play on this badge of ideological purity: the founder, Donal Blaney, would reward young activists, journalists and would-be politicians with a ‘Golden Dolphin’ award for being ‘ultrasound’.
This wasn’t, however, a home-grown movement.
Low tax and deregulation were old Thatcherite themes, but the group’s emphasis on untrammelled ‘liberty’, relaxing gun control, privatising the NHS (a 60-year “mistake”, according to YBF president Daniel Hannan on Fox News) and an odd strand of right-wing evangelical intolerance, betrayed its US origins.
The YBF was an offshoot of the Young Americas Foundation (YAF), based at the Reagan Ranch in California, which relied heavily on funding from US hedge fund billionaire, Robert Mercer.
And 2013 was a particular moment in this particular transatlantic bridge. The sister YAF was flying delegates over to Cambridge for a 2013 Special Relationship Scholarship programme. The relationship between Mercer, Bannon, the Trump campaign and the young ideologues from Britain would very special indeed.
Given the influence of the US republican right, YBF members were sceptical of Prime Minister David Cameron’s modernisation project, which was more closely aligned to President Barack Obama who had just been re-elected for a second term.
The YBF and its affiliates like Conservative Way Forward longed for a more ‘ultrasound’ leader. For years, the YBF president Daniel Hannan – by then a prominent Eurosceptic Member of the European Parliament – had been their favourite. But, since his victory in the mayoral campaign in London in the previous year, Boris Johnson was now openly discussed as the preferred choice.
Much has been made of the personal antipathy between personalities in the official Vote Leave and unofficial Leave.EU campaigns, but they began a joint project three years before the EU Referendum, just as they are converging three years later.
How could they win? The Obama campaign had shown the power of online activism and digital propaganda, but matching that was a constant question in the YBF since his victory in 2008. According to one attendee, Harsimrat Kaur, the rallying cry at the 10th anniversary was: “If you are able to go to war, then you can affect policy. We are the party of ‘yes we can’!”
But, how could the right tap into the same energy and enthusiasm among the young?
One man had an answer.
Digital Warfare
Steve Bannon, destined to be Donald Trump’s campaign manager, had spent the last decade or so as a film producer and then mining World of Warcraft gold. He had developed an understanding of both the cultural dimension of the battle ahead, and the need to take that battle online.
Two years earlier, he had started discussions with Nigel Farage (reportedly introduced to him by the YBF’s executive director Matthew Richardson) about starting a British-style populist ‘Tea Party’ movement to respond to the crisis after the credit crunch. In 2012, Bannon had entered into an alliance with YAF funder Robert Mercer to become executive director of the ‘Alt Right’ Breitbart publications.
At the panel session with the YBF in Cambridge the following year, Bannon shared a stage with Raheem Kassam, a conservative activist and campaigns manager for the Henry Jackson Society. Seated on the other side of him was Harry Cole, news editor for the Guido Fawkes blog. They were there to discuss digital activism. No record remains of what was said.
But, just around the corner, Chris Wylie and Alexander Nix, of SCL Elections, an electioneering and digital operations company contracted by the UK Ministry of Defence, were hurriedly setting up an office in Cambridge, staffed by new recruits, to impress Bannon.
Bannon and his backer Mercer wanted to use the military grade SCL ‘target audience acquisition’ technology on the US population.
He was impressed by both British culture and academia and wanted to give the new company the same kind of kudos. So Cambridge Analytica was born.
Three years later, Cambridge Analytica would shoot to fame for – in Nix’s own words at the time – winning the surprise Leave vote in the EU Referendum, and then powering the shock election of Donald Trump. It was closed down in 2018 when a history of election manipulation worldwide and extensive hacking of millions of Facebook users was revealed.
The YBF was just as scandal-prone. It was closed down in 2015 when a young activist, Elliott Johnson, committed suicide claiming he had been bullied by the YBF’s director of outreach Mark Clarke, a former Conservative parliamentary candidate. He organised the Roadtrip Battlebus for young volunteers, which itself came under investigation for multiple examples of overspending during the 2015 General Election. Mr Clarke has denied the allegations.
In retrospect, the Cambridge Analytica form of online electoral manipulation would have much wider repercussions.
Why 2013 was so Pivotal
The dark arts of digital ‘information operations’ and data mining, which would play such an important role in both the Trump campaign and Brexit referendum three years later, all began to converge in that winter of 2013.
In December, Prime Minister David Cameron, facing a rebellion from hardcore Eurosceptics in Parliament, agreed to a referendum on membership of the EU within a year of winning the next election. But, a wider conflict would make the stakes even higher.
That November 2013, another crisis was brewing to the east.
Vladimir Putin had initiated his long-term plan to bring Ukraine back under Russian domination through his puppet Yanukovitch, only to be met by a surprise resistance from students in Kyiv who occupied the Maidan to oppose his ‘Eurasian Union’ replacement for the EU.
YBF members were sceptical of Prime Minister David Cameron’s modernisation project, which was more closely aligned to President Barack Obama.
Putin’s close associate Yevgeny Prigozhin had set up the Internet Research Ag