All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class. Tim Shipman
Читать онлайн книгу.
Street featured similar outbursts of impulsive activity.
Ivan Rogers and Tom Scholar clashed repeatedly with Korski and Mats Persson. A Swede by birth, at six feet seven inches Persson towered over everyone else in Downing Street – height he had put to good use as a member of the 2004 Liberty Flames basketball team at Liberty University in Virginia, where he studied on an athletics scholarship: the team won the Big South Conference that year. Persson was temperamentally ice to Korski’s fire, but he believed from his time at Open Europe that Britain should push the limits of EU law to get change. ‘Mats felt we could go a lot further,’ a minister said.
‘We were too beholden to Tom Scholar and Ivan Rogers,’ one Cameron adviser said. ‘They were status quo. They were happy to take “No” for an answer, happy to believe things weren’t possible when they could be possible. I’ve lost count of the number of times Ivan threatened to resign.’ The politicos say Rogers was aggressive in dismissing their arguments, and went over their heads to Cameron: ‘He would send emails that were the stuff of legend, saying why didn’t we know anything? We were just politicos, we didn’t understand.’ Another aide said Rogers’ emails were ‘notorious’.
Rogers also clashed with the special advisers over their desire to include reforms of the European Court of Justice in the renegotiation. ‘Korski had a long-running battle with officials saying that we needed to do something, and he kept getting told that it was impossible to do something,’ a Number 10 source said. A range of proposals were put forward, ranging from new rules on the selection of judges to proposals for the ECJ to get out of lower-level decisions. Their advocates believe the plan would have allowed Britain to get a serious review of the court on the agenda. It was rejected by officials over the summer.
For his part, Rogers felt his ability to negotiate with Brussels was ‘holed below the waterline’ by Cameron and Osborne’s determination to go for a referendum in June 2016 come what may – diluting the threat that they might walk away – and the belief, widespread among the politicos, that victory was certain. Rogers told them, ‘I’ve got nothing to work with. You guys are swanning around in No. 10 saying it’s going to be 60–40 or 65–35. One, I don’t think that’s true, but two, can you shut the fuck up, because I need to go around Brussels saying it’s on an absolute knife edge and unless you deliver an absolute corking deal then it may well go pear-shaped.’ Rogers had some sympathy for Korski when proposals for business reform, which would have demanded exemptions from EU regulation for small businesses which did not sell into the single market, were also abandoned. ‘We had lots of other stuff on competitiveness, but we got browbeaten by officials into not doing anything on it,’ an aide said. ‘Mats and Dan would talk to their contacts across Europe and come back and say we have got political counterparts who are saying “There might be something here.” And then they’d be met with officials going round their backs, persuading the PM they were being naïve.’ The blame must rest, ultimately, with Cameron. ‘Ivan and Tom got their direction from the top,’ said one aide. ‘They needed to be told to operate outside the tramlines of existing EU rules. But the PM never did that.’
Despite Korski’s rage, Rogers was not actually a typical Europhile Foreign Office lifer. His civil service career began at the old Department of Health and Social Services. He had done time at the Treasury during the passage of the Maastricht Treaty, in Downing Street as Tony Blair’s principal private secretary, and in the City, where he had a spell with Barclays Capital and Citibank before Jeremy Heywood asked him to return as Cameron’s man in Brussels. ‘Ivan is not a paid-up starry-eyed enthusiast who imagines the eurozone is wonderful,’ a source close to Rogers said. ‘Within the system, he was notorious for thinking the referendum would quite probably be won by Leave, not a view shared by any of the political appointees. I don’t think the narrative of radical, ambitious reformist spads versus stick-in-the-mud, unambiguous pro-status-quo mandarins really bears examination.’
Cameron also clashed with Rogers, mocking him for adopting the pessimistic mindset of the EU ‘Ayatollahs and theologians who read the treaties every night before they go to bed’, insisting he was getting a warmer response to the proposals from his political counterparts. Rogers would hit back, pointing out that fellow leaders would never give Cameron ‘both barrels’ to his face, but would instead go behind his back to Juncker or Tusk and say, ‘We’re not having that.’ Rogers told friends that Cameron’s style, ‘allergic to any planning or strategy’, drove him ‘completely mad’. He regarded the four baskets as a ‘weird package’ lacking ‘crunch’, and regretted that much of the ‘good stuff’ in the Bloomberg speech had ‘bitten the dust’.
None of these ideas in and of themselves would have salvaged the renegotiation, but they would have helped to make it more substantial. Collectively they ensured that George Osborne’s battle to safeguard the rights of non-eurozone nations became the only significant element left on the economy, and magnified migration as the issue on which the deal would stand or fall. By the autumn one aide had concluded, ‘If the referendum campaign is fought around what is actually renegotiated, we are fucked.’
Given how limited Cameron’s demands were, some of his team believed he would have been better striking a quick and dirty deal and holding a referendum in the autumn of 2015, before Cummings had Vote Leave properly organised. ‘The assumption was always that you want people to watch you sweat and fail and get up again and fight,’ says a senior Downing Street source. ‘The irony of the whole situation was it was really, really hard, and still people said it was worthless and a stitch-up. What David saw as a great diplomatic overture came to be seen as a diplomatic begging tour around Europe, unbecoming of a great nation. We should have accepted no one was going to believe it anyway, and do it sharp and short.’
Korski also tried and failed to get Cameron to talk more positively about Europe in the eighteen months before the deal. All Conservatives were familiar with Lynton Crosby’s first rule for election success: ‘You can’t fatten a pig on market day.’ Successful politicians lay the groundwork for the arguments they will make in a campaign long before polling day. Korski argued, ‘We’ve got to speak differently about Europe if we’re ever going to speak positively about Europe.’ He devised initiatives to show that Cameron was getting his way in Brussels, taking business leaders there to cut red tape and putting the UK at the heart of plans for a ‘digital single market’. But invariably Cameron would emerge at the end of EU summits to stress his frustrations rather than his achievements to the waiting media. A Downing Street official who sympathised with Korski said, ‘We never pitch-rolled our proposition. I don’t think it was in David’s nature. He was temperamentally Eurosceptic.’
The business end of the deal-making came in four stages. On 10 November Cameron wrote a public letter to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, spelling out the broad thrust of his demands. He fleshed it out in a speech at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank, on the same day. On 17 December he talked his fellow leaders through his proposals at an EU summit in Brussels. After six further weeks of negotiations, Tusk published a full draft deal on 2 February, laying out the precise details for the first time. The final showdown came two weeks after that.
After nine months of seeing Britain’s wish list whittled down, Craig Oliver briefed the Sunday papers the weekend before the letter to Tusk that Cameron would be prepared to campaign to leave the EU if his demands were met with a ‘deaf ear’: ‘If we can’t reach such an agreement … we will have to think again about whether this European Union is right for us.’2 The rhetoric was hardened to disguise the fact that Cameron’s demands had softened. The ‘Dear Donald’ letter that followed outlined ‘four baskets’ of demands familiar to those who had followed the negotiation since June.
On ‘economic governance’, Cameron said changes in the eurozone must ‘respect the legitimate interests of non-euro members’. He asked for a recognition that ‘the EU has more than one currency’, and that ‘taxpayers in non-Euro countries should never be financially liable for operations to support the eurozone as a currency’. On ‘competitiveness’ he said ‘the United Kingdom would like to see a target to cut the total burden on business’. He told Tusk that ‘questions of sovereignty’ were ‘central’