The Battle of the Thames: was it Geldof vs the fishermen wot won it for Leave?

Ten years ago today, on a bright and faintly ridiculous June morning, I stood on Butler’s Wharf and watched the English class war reignite in miniature on the Pool of London. There was a bar. There is always a bar.

It had begun, as the best disasters do, with a telephone call. In early April, the line crackling, on the other end was Alan Hastings, a slight, wiry, tufted ginger, a fifth-generation Ayrshire fisherman with the boundless energy of a man who has never once been becalmed. Alan ran Fishing for Leave, a campaign by fishermen for fishermen, and Alan had a notion.

‘I’ve got a great idea, Gawain’, he said, in that doughty, bright-spark way of his. ‘Let’s have a flotilla on the Thames.’ It turned, in short order, into possibly the maddest day’s campaigning I have ever been involved in organising – and having worked for UKIP, Leave.EU, the Brexit Party, and Reform UK, I have organised some madness in my time.

The division of labour was simple. Rob Burberry and Bob Spink looked after the fishermen, and young John Gill and I took the media. The rest we left, with what now looks like criminal optimism, in the lap of the gods. The Edwardian was hired, a great paddle steamer with a churning wheel.

The press came in their hundreds. They packed onto the boat until the timbers groaned: television crews squabbling with the print hacks (who were mostly sketch-writers, and therefore the most dangerous men in London), and snappers wedged into every gap. On the quayside, we left dozens of forlorn members of the international press corps. There was simply no more room.

On board, the cast: Nigel Farage, George Eustice (the UK fisheries minister himself, lending the thing a sheen of legitimacy it did not deserve), Labour’s Kate Hoey, a clutch of UKIP grandees – the self-styled Bad Boys of Brexit – 50-odd journalists, and the aforementioned bar.

Across the river, off Butler’s Wharf, lay a handsome London barge dressed fore and aft in Remain posters. And up from the direction of the Medway, on the flooding tide, came the flotilla proper: inshore boats out of Suffolk, Kent and Essex, low and workmanlike, and looming above them two great Scottish trawlers, the Atlantic Challenge and the Christina S, ocean-going beasts that had no earthly business in the Pool of London and were all the more magnificent for it.

The City Corporation, predictably, took fright. Tower Bridge would have to be raised, officials bleated. It would cost hundreds of thousands in lost productivity. That the bridge rises and falls regularly throughout the year, to the inconvenience of no one’s balance sheet, was held to be entirely beside the point. There is no bureaucracy on Earth that cannot find a reason to be appalled by joy.

Nevertheless, the Edwardian’s great wheel began to churn, and we were off. And then came Bob Geldof.

Geldof arrived on a luxury party boat, its speakers blaring ‘The “In” Crowd’ at a volume that, friends in the City later told me, made it impossible to work. The choice of anthem was so perfect a piece of self-satire that no satirist would have dared write it. Trinity House and the Port of London Authority (PLA) pleaded with him to turn it down – the river pilots, you understand, rather needed to be able to talk to one another, this being a small technical matter of not drowning anybody.

He refused. I was told afterwards that he had telephoned No10 to have David Cameron overrule the PLA. The man who once shamed a nation into feeding the world, ringing the prime minister to protect his right to deafen the river. Go figure.

And then the madness in full. Geldof broadcasting at two hundred decibels, little fishing boats skating across the Pool of London like water boatmen, every bridge thick with protesters of both persuasions – flags waving, the odd stone dropping. Farage and Hoey out on the bowsprit like a suburban Titanic, faces to the wind. Comedian Adam Hills weaving through the throng on his own craft, a great boom microphone flapping hopefully in our direction. It was bedlam, and it was glorious.

Then the fateful moment. Geldof, the millionaire popstar, leaned out and began bawling at Farage that he did not care about fishermen, and started, for the cameras, to flick the Vs. Two fingers, from a man with a flotilla of his own, aimed squarely at Farage, but in the general direction of boatloads of people who actually fish for their living. I turned to the assembled hacks at my elbow. ‘Typical, isn’t it’, I said, helpfully. ‘That contempt for hard-working fishermen. It’s the whole Brexit debate in a single gesture.’ Sometimes the job writes itself.

By now, Rachel Johnson, aboard Geldof’s boat, and others of that party were growing restive. We, meanwhile, had warned our own hacks that it would last three hours, and we had the bar. At which point, two of the small boats threw their ropes up and went marauding aboard Geldof’s vessel: an actual boarding party, fishermen swarming the luvvies. The whole scene was one of complete and joyous chaos, hulls passing inches from catastrophe, the establishment versus the hard-bottomed fisherfolk, played out at full volume in the heart of the capital.

I believe, and I will go to my grave believing, that it gained us at least three points in the referendum a week later, because it encapsulated everything. It showed the working classes being told to get back in their box by the establishment elite, who had arrived by river to explain how they ought to think. We had been braced that morning for nothing more than a snap on page 16 of the Mail. Instead, the thing went round the world.

And there, 10 years on, I would happily leave it: as comedy, as farce, as the day the river rose against the great and the good. But I cannot, and you will know why.

One of the Remain barges across the water was Jo Cox’s. In one of the small boats, a man and two small children waving their Remain flags, dangerous as anything out there and loving every second of it, were Brendan and the children. The next day, Jo was murdered. And all of it – the joy, the farce, the noise, the hard-won political capital of a glorious afternoon – turned grey in the mouth overnight, and has stayed grey ever since.

Ten years. We won the vote. I would not, even now, give back the day. But I have never since been able to think of the Pool of London at full churning chaos, without also thinking of two small children on a boat, waving, and not yet knowing.

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK.