Caroline Lucas - MP, Brighton Pavilion May 2010 – Co-Leader, Green Party September 2016 – May 2018

UKICE: Was part of your thinking that a referendum was inevitable, so you were putting yourself on the right side of history? Because of the state of the Conservative Party and the debate about Europe, did you think we were going to have to have a referendum at some point anyway regardless of its desirability? CL: No, I don’t think I thought that was inevitable. [...] I remember him talking about the number of billboards that were everywhere from the Leave campaign and asking, ‘Could we not have more of a campaign on the ground?’ It was just dismissed, that it had to be the air war, we didn’t need a ground campaign in the same way. [...] Did you have concerns about the way that the People’s Vote campaign was run in terms of the personnel, for example, or the techniques it was using? CL: I think they fell into some of exactly the same traps as the Stronger In campaign had, and clearly there were major disagreements and personal animosities that broke out in the most appalling way just at the most important time. [...] There was a small group of us who tried to bring that thinking into the steering group for the People’s Vote campaign and to try to say, ‘We as a People’s Vote campaign should be making it much more explicit that a People’s Vote was the beginning not the end of something.’ It was the beginning of doing everything that we could in our respective parties to level up, as you might now say, using the. [...] UKICE: Were you surprised by the resonance of the Conservative ‘Get Brexit Done’ message at that and how they managed to use that to fashion such a positive outcome for them in it? Did it make you have second thoughts about whether actually if you’d got a referendum, you would win it given the relative success of that? CL: I guess the strength of the win on the back of that did surprise me.