Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
Читать онлайн книгу.
You had to put evidence in front of him and use facts.’
May also faced a steep learning curve. Her experience as home secretary was valuable. But having done the same job for six years she lacked expertise outside her brief, particularly in economic affairs. A senior civil servant said, ‘I didn’t have a sense that outside the world of justice and home affairs she knew what she thought very much.’
A senior cabinet minister summed up the Brexit committee discussions as ‘an educational process’. He said, ‘There hadn’t been a stroke of work done under Cameron, so this was all from scratch. The initial meetings covered what the questions were, then by late autumn we were beginning to get options. In the new year we started answering those questions.’
To their colleagues some Brexiteer ministers seemed more interested in justifying the way they voted in the referendum than preparing for Brexit. Andrea Leadsom, the environment secretary, stood out to colleagues as one who read her thoughts from the departmental brief in front of her. ‘Andrea turns up and says what officials have told her to say,’ a source close to May said. Another aide characterised the contributions of Leadsom and Priti Patel, the international development secretary, as ‘pretty vacuous’, their comments a combination of ‘departmental briefs’ and ‘occasional prejudices’.
DExEU officials told Leadsom she would need to hire five hundred more staff but she initially recruited only thirty. ‘They’ve got to redesign forty years of agriculture policy and the entire system of subsidy,’ a DExEU source said. ‘Meetings with her were embarrassing.’ A cabinet colleague said, ‘She was completely out of her depth at the beginning. She is a genuine and decent person, but massively underpowered for what was needed at secretary of state level. She’s very stubborn and basically not really bright enough.’ Several ministers recalled that Leadsom’s most memorable contribution in cabinet that year was nothing to do with Brexit. Leadsom had been subjected to ridicule from MPs when she used leadership hustings in June 2016 to discuss the neonatal charity she had set up, which advocated massaging babies’ brains. During a health discussion that autumn, she raised the subject again, to the bemusement of her cabinet colleagues. One said, ‘She only ever talks about exports of British produce and babies’ brains.’
Philip Hammond’s time as foreign secretary during Cameron’s renegotiation gave him an advantage over most of his colleagues. Combined with the institutional clout of the Treasury, he quickly began to assert himself. The chancellor was ‘very gloomy’ about Brexit for three reasons. A former minister with whom he discussed his concerns that autumn said, ‘One was the economic cost of it. The second was they could see the impact on financial services. Companies were making decisions about whether to leave. Third, they were feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the problems – like creating a customs system at the border.’
A cabinet committee paper discussed in mid-October warned that the Treasury could lose up to £66 billion a year in tax revenues if there was a hard Brexit. It also predicted a worst-case scenario that GDP could fall by as much as 9.5 per cent after fifteen years if Britain left the single market and traded on World Trade Organisation terms. ‘In headline terms trade would be around a fifth lower than it otherwise would have been,’ it said. The paper drew on the work Treasury officials had done for George Osborne during the referendum campaign. Jeremy Heywood ordered a rewrite of key sections for ‘more balance’, but even the revised draft drew complaints from Brexiteers that Hammond was ‘trying to make leaving the single market look bad’.1 Publication of the leak drove the pound to a thirty-one-year low against the dollar.
Hammond’s vociferous stance and the institutional activism of the Treasury enraged the senior Brexiteers. ‘The Treasury for months after the vote was absolutely determined to frustrate the outcome as much as it possibly could,’ a senior cabinet minister said. ‘They believed that membership of the single market would be seen by everybody as an unalloyed good. But to leave the EU you have to leave the legislative rule-making system, which is the single market.’
Realising after the first cabinet committee meeting on Brexit that they needed to stick together, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis met in a waiting room in 10 Downing Street to confirm to each other that they accepted the logic that Brexit meant leaving both the single market and the customs union. ‘If you’re going to do it, do it right,’ Johnson said. ‘It’s like Theresa says, you’ve got to stop thinking about what we hold on to, you have to imagine Britain free and think of what you want.’ Fox’s ability to secure free trade deals depended on Britain leaving both arrangements: ‘To be in the single market would mean unrestricted freedom of movement which is politically not possible,’ he said. ‘To remain fully in the customs union we’re not allowed to have separate free trade agreements with the rest of the world outside of the EU.’ Fox regarded these arguments as ‘unanswerable’.
Davis was sceptical of the ‘clever people with a uniform set of views’ in the Treasury and the ‘gravity model’ they used on trade, which decreed that the closer you are to a country the more you trade. He believed it was ineffective because services were ‘weightless’ and traditional constraints on long-distance trade, like transport costs, were a small fraction of what they had been decades earlier. ‘David felt they massively overestimated the negative impact of a no-deal WTO scenario and then underestimated the advantages of deals with the rest of the world because they’re all a long way away from us,’ a source said. When Hammond told him there might be a 25 per cent fall in trade, Davis replied, ‘That’s bollocks!’
Despite her conference speech, May did not wish to be boxed in or hurried into stating her views publicly. ‘The system was moving too rapidly to tell her what the right answer would be without giving any evidence,’ one mandarin admitted. Some officials found it difficult to adapt from the free-wheeling briefings of the Cameron days to a female prime minister who wanted things done more formally. Both Mark Lyall-Grant, the national security adviser, and Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, attracted May’s ire for interrupting her, talking over her and ‘mansplaining’ in condescending tones.2 Ivan Rogers had a similar effect. Some saw the same trait in Hammond, who did not trouble to disguise his disdain for those with lesser intellects or job titles. A cabinet minister said, ‘He was patronising. Boris, in particular, had a rough time at some of these meetings.’ Another cabinet colleague explained, ‘He thinks Boris is a plonker.’ May’s team saw Hammond’s spats with Johnson as evidence that he, too, was seeking to justify his vote on 23 June: ‘It does feel a little bit like an exchange of blows over things that are long gone. Phil made such a song and dance about his Euroscepticism over the years – then he campaigned to stay in. Having then lost he feels he can’t re-rat.’
When May made Hammond her chancellor, the conventional wisdom was that they were old university friends and that she wanted someone she could trust next door. While they were Oxford contemporaries, Hammond had a very different approach to economics from May and Nick Timothy and felt himself to be no less able than May. Hammond told a former cabinet minister, ‘If Theresa May can be the prime minister, so can I.’ The source said, ‘They’re not friends. He doesn’t like her.’
Hammond’s personality also irritated May’s team. A cabinet colleague said, ‘There is something mildly Aspergic about him. Philip is not very user friendly.’ The chancellor clung to the security blanket of single market membership long after others had given it up as impossible. A senior mandarin said, ‘Phil was beating a dead horse. That’s the charm and the irritation of the man. He usually picks the wrong battle.’
For his part, the chancellor became highly frustrated that he was blocked by the chiefs from seeing May alone, without their presence. A Downing Street official said, ‘Philip used to get very frustrated that he could not see the PM. He thought he had the right to see her any time he liked.’ A senior civil servant said Hammond would hover outside May’s office but would be intercepted by Timothy or Hill: ‘He would want to see her on her own but they would say, “You’re not going in there without us.”’ Another Downing Street source said, ‘He was made to feel unwelcome. They never spoke to DD like that.’
In