Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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vote for Brexit was about controlling immigration. Everything else flows from there.’
May also announced, ‘Our laws will be made not in Brussels but in Westminster. The judges interpreting those laws will sit not in Luxembourg but in courts in this country. The authority of EU law in Britain will end.’ This was not, as some have suggested, a line smuggled past a confused prime minister. ‘The PM was very clear that the jurisdiction of the ECJ had to come to an end,’ a close aide said. ‘She thinks that is one of the major things that people voted for.’ Yet that decision had huge implications which were far from fully understood in the cabinet and some corners of Downing Street when May delivered her speech. The ECJ’s remit ran across dozens of agencies and thousands of regulations, from the regulation of medicines and nuclear materials to aviation safety.
While Davis was aware of much of what May was going to say, he had not seen the speech and nor had Oliver Robbins. ‘The ECJ wasn’t mentioned before the conference speech as a red line,’ a DExEU official said. ‘It was conjured up by Nick Timothy to get very Eurosceptic conference delegates and the Tory press cheering. They were terrified of people saying, “She’s a remainer.” There was no discussion or debate whatsoever. I don’t believe Olly Robbins knew what she was going to say. The speech was not shared with any of the ministers. The chancellor didn’t see it. He was livid. Even DD was furious. He agreed with most of what she said but he didn’t know exactly what she was going to say.’ Months later, after leaving government, James Chapman, Davis’s chief of staff, said, ‘The repeal bill was Nick’s idea. We thought that was the big announcement. Instead of which he basically announced hard Brexit. She hamstrung the whole negotiation from the start.’ In interviews that evening May denied that she had decided to leave the single market. ‘All options are on the table,’ she said. But according to a DExEU official, ‘The pound crashed because anyone with any sense could work out that this means hard Brexit.’
May risked accusations that her tone was divisive too. She also used the Sunday speech to train her guns on the vocal minority in her party who were demanding that MPs have a vote on Brexit. ‘Those people who argue that Article 50 can only be triggered after agreement in both Houses of Parliament are not standing up for democracy, they’re trying to subvert it. They’re not trying to get Brexit right, they’re trying to kill it by delaying it. They are insulting the intelligence of the British people.’ Later that week, in her main conference speech, she was no more conciliatory, attacking liberals who found the referendum result ‘simply bewildering’ and the Brexit voters’ ‘patriotism distasteful, their concerns about immigration parochial, their views about crime illiberal, their attachment to their job security inconvenient’. May was aligning herself clearly with the 52 per cent who backed Leave. While this was understandable politically, the prime minister missed an opportunity that week to put herself above both warring factions and stake a position as a national leader in a way that might have given her greater freedom of manoeuvre in the months ahead.
The influence of May’s team was also evident in a policy announced by Amber Rudd, the new home secretary, in her conference speech – a plan to force firms to reveal the percentage of their workers who were foreign. The proposal unleashed a storm of protest and would see Rudd reported to the police for ‘hate speech’ the following January.
Having said what she wanted to say, the prime minister made clear that the media and the public would have to get used to another information drought on Brexit: ‘There will always be pressure to give a running commentary on the state of the talks. It will not be in our best interests as a country to do that.’
When it came to speaking about herself, though, May was learning to open up. After a fashion.
The truncated leadership election meant that Theresa May was denied the chance to properly introduce herself to the nation or properly outline her political philosophy. Conference gave her the opportunity. Before her interviews with the Sunday Times and the Sun on Sunday, communications director Katie Perrior had prepped May to respond more openly than usual to more personal questions. Her voice wavering slightly, she talked about the death of her parents and her love of the Great British Bake Off and even contributed her mother’s recipe for scones.
The interviews were well received but they might not have been if the public had known the agonies that went into the preparations. May was not comfortable talking about herself, a prerequisite of modern politics. ‘Why do they want to know this stuff?’ she asked her aides. Perrior and press secretary Lizzie Loudon had also lost parents when they were young. Loudon tried to help out. She told May, ‘My dad died and it’s really sad for me that he can’t see me here because I know he would be really proud. But in some way I feel like he would know that I would be doing something like this.’ A colleague said, ‘When the PM was asked the question by the interviewer she repeated Lizzie’s words. She just pick-pocketed the explanation. It was an appropriation of her emotional response. You think: “You yourself don’t feel anything”.’ Another Downing Street aide said, ‘If you are prime minister, you have a duty to communicate what you do. You can’t resent the questioning but she does resent the questioning.’
May’s morale was boosted that week by Fiona Hill, who sent her home with a CD of the high-octane Rolling Stones song ‘Start Me Up’, which she judged to be what May needed as walk-on music for her set-piece speech. ‘She got totally into it,’ a member of the team said. ‘I love it,’ said May.
The main conference speech was a collaborative effort between Nick Timothy and Chris Wilkins, who had been friends for years after meeting in the Conservative Research Department. Wilkins was short and bald and shared Timothy’s view that the Conservatives needed to broaden their appeal to the poor. He understood May’s philosophy and the cadences of her speech. Timothy found him to be the only person he was comfortable writing with. Timothy had prepared a mini-manifesto for May which she had never used during the leadership election, and he passed on this and a couple of pages of notes laying out the substantive argument. Wilkins fashioned a first draft which the two could ‘knock about’ between them, with Fiona Hill and others making suggestions for improvements.
The keynote speech was a symphony on the riff May had played during her first speech in Downing Street, promising to make the Tories the ‘party of workers’ and go after ‘rogue’ businesses. She pledged to govern for the whole nation: ‘We will take the centre ground.’ It contained a bold declaration (for a Conservative) that she was not ideologically averse to state intervention. ‘It’s time to remember the good that government can do,’ she declared, though her definition of government appeared to be a dig at David Cameron: ‘It’s about doing something, not being someone.’ A May aide admitted, ‘It clearly was designed to define ourselves against what had come before.’
For Wilkins, the most important theme of the speech was its depiction of May as an agent of ‘change’. When he was writing the speech, Wilkins had studied the language in Tony Blair’s 2005 conference address, which used the phrase ‘We are the change-makers’ to try to depict a party in power for eight years as fresh and dynamic. May’s team hoped she could pull the same trick, using the constant refrain that ‘a change has got to come’. Wilkins recalled, ‘We even played the song “A Change Has Got to Come” over the speakers in the hall before she walked on as a little in-joke.’ This approach was to become important again months later when May called the general election.
The change message was drowned out, however, by one small phrase in the 7,500-word text, a line penned by Timothy which had barely been glanced at since the first draft. In words that cemented her reputation for plain speaking, May concluded, ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.’ The jibe was aimed at irresponsible jet-set businessmen. A source said, ‘It was basically an attack on Philip Green,’ the former boss of BHS who had sold the firm for a pound with a black hole in its pension fund. But, to Wilkins’ and Timothy’s surprise, some Remain voters and many Cameroons saw it as a totemic symbol of May’s hostile approach to internationalism, multiculturalism and immigration. One observer summed up the speech, with its statist slant and red meat for the faithful, as ‘part Ed Miliband, part Daily Mail’.
There was a second