Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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or not? All hell could have broken loose.’ A Downing Street aide said, ‘We had to be absolutely clear with the party that Brexit really did mean Brexit – and with some parts of the country. Any confusion would have led to real disruption and calls for another referendum.’ May’s view was, ‘We live in a democracy, democracy has spoken. Now we have to enact it.’
Tory leaders usually give their big conference speech before lunch on the Wednesday. May was keen to lay out her vision for Britain, but if that was not to be drowned out by Brexit she would need to deliver it separately – and first. Timothy said, ‘It’s unsustainable to wait until Wednesday to hear from Theresa when it’s her first conference as leader.’ Hill agreed: ‘We need two speeches and a plan for Europe. Then we can have a big conference speech about our domestic agenda.’ May was ‘already there’ and agreed immediately. She would give a short speech on the Sunday on Brexit.
Used to governing by speech, May’s aides say she used the writing process to define policy, rather than have the speech reflect a pre-ordained line. Timothy discussed with May what she wanted and then wrote a text. The finer points were clarified in ‘an iterative process’ involving May, Timothy, Hill, Jojo Penn, the deputy chief of staff, and Chris Wilkins, the head of strategy who had penned May’s ‘nasty party’ speech fourteen years earlier. ‘The first draft is a hypothesis that either she agrees with or not,’ one of those involved said. ‘Nick being Nick would write the most “out there” option and it would get reined in. The process of drafting and editing gets Theresa to the point of, “Yes, that’s what I want to say.”’
Timothy and May were clear on three things: leaving the European Union meant leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, and leaving with it the single market and customs union over which its judges held sway. Anything else, Timothy believed, would leave May open to the charge that she was trying to undermine the referendum vote, and put the other EU countries in a position to claim that Britain wanted the benefits of EU membership – free access to markets – without the downsides – the cost and the need to accept rules made elsewhere. By opting out of all these areas, May could then try to negotiate some of the benefits without being tied to the institutions. ‘Nick’s view,’ a Downing Street aide said, ‘was that you’re always going to be accused of cherry picking and they’re going to say you can’t cherry pick. Therefore, we should try and forge our own way forward with a new relationship. Nick largely wrote the speech and took pleasure in doing so.’
In the speech, May was to say, ‘There is no such thing as a choice between “soft Brexit” and “hard Brexit”. This line of argument – in which “soft Brexit” amounts to some form of continued EU membership and “hard Brexit” is a conscious decision to reject trade with Europe – is simply a false dichotomy.’ May explained her new deal ‘is not going to be a “Norway model”. It’s not going to be a “Switzerland model”. It is going to be an agreement between an independent, sovereign United Kingdom and the European Union.’ Timothy said later, ‘If you seek a partial relationship the danger is that you will be in the worst of all worlds, where you will be a rule-taker with none of the advantages of being in, but you will also sacrifice some of the advantages of being out.’
There was a demonstrable logic to all this but it is extraordinary that these, the foundational decisions of Britain’s withdrawal strategy, which would shape the next two years of negotiations, were taken, in essence, by two people. The cabinet certainly had no chance to debate them.
Timothy knew where the decisions would take the country but recognised the plan was too controversial to announce so bluntly while emotions were still raw about the referendum result. It would be three months before May admitted publicly, in another speech at Lancaster House, that she wanted to leave the single market and the customs union. ‘You need to conduct the negotiation in a way that takes all of the people with you,’ a source close to May said. ‘I think if we’d said we no longer want to be in the single market at party conference, it would have looked on the EU side like an aggressive statement.’
To distract attention from these major decisions – and to settle key issues of concern – May used interviews with the Sunday Times and the Sun on Sunday to launch the first of two major announcements from her speech. The government would convert the acquis – the existing body of EU law – into British law so that nothing would change on day one of Brexit. Individual laws could then be changed by Parliament in the usual way. The way this was to be accomplished was by a ‘Great Repeal Bill’ which would also do away with the European Communities Act 1972, the legislation that gave direct effect to all EU law in Britain. The paper was briefed with some suitably Churchillian rhetoric from the speech: ‘Today marks the first stage in the UK becoming a sovereign and independent country.’
The rhetoric of repeal was clever since it disguised the fact that the plan was to take every hated Brussels directive for four decades and write them into British law. In private, Davis referred to it as ‘the Great Continuity Bill’. Government lawyers had said it was impossible to do anything else, but in an environment where ministers like Andrea Leadsom were proposing to start tearing up regulations and the Daily Mail was running a ‘scrap EU red tape’ campaign, the move took some guts.
May delivered the second announcement during an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on the Sunday morning, pledging to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – the mechanism for kickstarting two years of Brexit negotiations – by the end of March 2017. May had bought time during the leadership election by saying she would not trigger Article 50 before the end of the year. Senior civil servants in DExEU and Ivan Rogers in Brussels had warned her that announcing a timetable was a bad idea because the moment Britain fired the starting gun, ‘you lose pretty much all the leverage you have’, putting Britain on a countdown clock where the other twenty-seven countries set the rules of the negotiation.
On 29 June, five days after the referendum result, the other twenty-seven member states had agreed a policy of ‘no negotiations without notification’ and – to the surprise of some British officials – they had stuck to it ever since. Rogers told May the best way of forcing the EU to compromise would be to say, ‘We intend to invoke in March, but I give you no cast-iron commitment. The moment I’ve seen your draft guidelines document we’ll invoke.’ So confident was Rogers that the prime minister had listened that he told friends in Brussels just days before the conference that May would not invoke Article 50 until the end of 2017. It was proof that even the most experienced civil servants don’t always read the politics of a situation accurately. As one of May’s senior aides recalled, ‘We couldn’t get through conference without putting a line in the sand. We had to say something about timing.’ David Davis was involved in the discussions over the timing, suggesting that the vague ‘before the end of the first quarter’ be changed to ‘by the end of March’, which he believed to be ‘specific sounding’ and ‘hard to demur from later’.
Figures like George Osborne were arguing that no progress would be made in the negotiations until after the German elections in September 2017, so May should delay triggering until then. In retrospect it is possible to conclude that Britain would have been in a stronger position in the talks if the prime minister had set a firm date of October 2017 to trigger Article 50 and announced that Whitehall would spend the next year preparing for the UK to leave without a deal in order to maximise leverage in the negotiations. A minister said, ‘She might just have got away with that.’ But May was a new prime minister who did not wish to antagonise the Eurosceptics. Choosing 31 March as T-Day, Timothy said, ‘I don’t think it is sustainable to take longer.’
Later that day, May opened her speech by dismissing those who ‘say that the referendum isn’t valid, that we need to have a second vote’ or were planning to ‘challenge any attempt to leave the European Union through the courts’. She said, ‘Come on! The referendum result was clear. It was legitimate. It was the biggest vote for change this country has ever known. Brexit means Brexit – and we’re going to make a success of it.’ In addition to the two main factual announcements, the most important passage of the speech came when the prime minister made clear that controlling immigration was her top priority, above even economic prosperity. ‘We