Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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easing, provided the necessary emergency medicine after the financial crash, we have to acknowledge there have been some bad side effects.’ Her words appeared to be a breach of the convention, established when the Bank of England was granted independence in 1997, that politicians refrain from commenting on monetary policy, and it caused a temporary fall in the pound. A former cabinet minister said, ‘They got a real shock. They had no idea that markets paid attention to these things. It was just amateurishness. I know Mark Carney was staggered by it. He thought it was unbelievably incompetent. She said “we’re the fifth largest economy in the world” and I think by the end of it we were the sixth.’
Business leaders disliked much of May’s rhetoric about rogue bosses. Chris Brannigan, the debonair head of government relations whose job it was to act as the link man with business leaders, was unable to placate them in advance since he had not been told what was going to be in the speech. Carolyn Fairbairn, the new boss of the CBI, Britain’s biggest business group, walked past him ‘with a face like thunder’ as May finished.
On the EU front, May’s speech was welcomed in Westminster as much-needed clarity and by the Brexiteers as proof of May’s commitment to their cause. But the citizens of the world and those running the other EU countries joined the City in reacting with horror.
In interviews during conference week, May had made clear that she was keen to start ‘preparatory work’ with Brussels before she invoked Article 50. Both she and David Davis pledged that Britain would respect the existing rights of the three million EU citizens in Britain, as long as the 1.5 million Britons elsewhere in the EU were protected. Ministers saw that as an easy, early win. It was one the rest of the EU did not want to give them. Jean-Claude Juncker and officials from France, Germany, Poland and Slovakia all reasserted the position that there would be ‘no negotiation before notification’. While some welcomed the clarity over timing and the acceptance that May was not trying to hold on to all the benefits of membership, Joseph Muscat – the Maltese prime minister who would hold the EU presidency in 2017 – spoke for many when he said, ‘Any deal has to be a fair deal, but an inferior deal.’
While attention at home was focused on the timetable for triggering Article 50 and the Great Repeal Bill, the Europeans were transfixed by May’s blanket rejection of ECJ oversight. ‘My sense of that was that they hadn’t fully realised what they’d said on jurisdiction and how radical it was,’ commented a diplomat. In Brussels, Rogers and his colleagues began to hear from their EU counterparts, ‘Clearly you’re leaving the single market and the customs union. Why then can’t we just get on with it?’
Nick Timothy had defined British policy on Brexit. Now Theresa May had to guide her cabinet to the same place without admitting the policy was already set in stone.
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Two moments in early September summed up Theresa May’s approach to Brexit negotiations during the autumn of 2016. In the first Prime Minister’s Questions after the summer break, May said she would not give a ‘running commentary’ on the talks. She then took a call from the French president, François Hollande. Six weeks earlier, May had shocked Westminster by putting on hold an £18 billion deal for French company EDF Energy to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, a joint venture with a Chinese state-owned firm. Now, having studied the evidence herself, May gave the green light. Hollande asked why she had thrown the deal into uncertainty. The prime minister replied, ‘It is my method.’
Alasdair Palmer, who worked for May at the Home Office, said, ‘She likes to consider the evidence carefully before coming to a conclusion. That takes her time. That is why she likes to set up inquiries and consultations – processes that delay decision taking and help reassure her that the decision that eventually emerges will be the right one.’ She would not be bounced into decisions. ‘I’ve seen people trying to grab her in the margins of a meeting and say, “Can we do this?” and she’ll ask them to produce a piece of paper, and not take the decision now,’ a senior cabinet minister said. ‘She has always been like that.’
May embarked upon a laborious series of cabinet discussions about Brexit, in which her desire to keep her destination hidden from the public seemed at times to fly in the face of the clear signals that she had sent in her party conference speeches. It was a process in which the prime minister herself seemed to want reassurance that the roadmap she and Nick Timothy had agreed was the right one.
The prime minister had made a big thing of returning to cabinet government after the Cameron years but Brexit was not discussed by the full cabinet. Instead, May appointed a dozen-strong cabinet subcommittee (the European Union Exit and Trade Committee). In keeping with her penchant for secrecy the membership was not published until it leaked in mid-October. Every cabinet minister who had campaigned to leave the EU – David Davis, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel and Andrea Leadsom – was included, half the committee, when they represented just a quarter of the full cabinet. The other five members, all Remain backers, were Philip Hammond, Amber Rudd, Damian Green, Greg Clark and party chairman Patrick McLoughlin.
May let everyone have their say and ministers initially praised the way conclusions had not been preordained on her sofa before the meeting as they had been in the Cameron days. One cabinet minister said, ‘There’s proper consideration of the issues.’ Soon, though, some realised these discussions seldom led to decisions at all. ‘They were deliberations not decision making,’ one cabinet minister said. ‘The decisions were still made in Downing Street.’ Another present for the meetings described them as ‘fairly odd’. ‘Cameron meetings were always chaotic and vociferous. Hers were calm, more measured, but you don’t really get a real debate with her. You lodge some points and some observations and she absorbs. But it’s terribly difficult to gauge whether you are getting anywhere.’ To those paying attention, it seemed obvious that May had decided to leave the single market and the customs union, but the prime minister denied it publicly and in private let her warring ministers fight it out, occasionally showing her displeasure. A senior cabinet minister said, ‘She has a very healthy impatience, a slightly Thatcherian quality. She gives that heavy sigh and there’s a rolling of the eyebrows.’
In the early meetings, each of which lasted around two hours, Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond emerged as the key antagonists at the head of the blocs of Remain- and Leave-supporting ministers. ‘Boris would make rousing speeches about how it was all going to be brilliant and how we should all be saying positive things about Brexit,’ a cabinet colleague recalled. ‘Phil used to get pretty annoyed about that and say, “It’s not that simple.” Phil was pretty punchy about staying in the single market and even more so on the customs union.’ A source close to May said, ‘Hammond and Boris wound each other up, pulling faces when the other one was saying stuff.’ Another witness said, ‘Boris would chunter through Phil’s interventions.’
The two men could not have been more different. Johnson, the Dulux dog lookalike with papers spilling from the distended pockets of his suit, was a man of feral political instincts whose yearning for positive publicity belied an essential shyness. By contrast, Hammond was buttoned up in both tailoring and manner. His accountant’s eye for the bottom line had garnered him one nickname ‘Spreadsheet Phil’, his allergic reaction to the media and soporific delivery another ironic appellation: ‘Box Office’. Hammond had a sense of humour drier than a Jacob’s cream cracker in the Sahara but his lugubrious politics and appearance, that of a purse-lipped Jar Jar Binks, almost invited the question, ‘Why the long face?’
Since no work had been done by the civil service to prepare for Brexit, these early meetings were information-gathering exercises rather than policy-making forums. Civil servants despaired at the level of knowledge around the table. ‘It is not possible to underestimate the level of knowledge in the cabinet at that point,’ one official said. ‘When those things were said at conference I would be quite careful about assuming that the implications were really clear. A big part of the job for officials was educating politicians about the implications of the