Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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Agreement talks which had secured peace in Ulster. He said, ‘I was very involved in this and I’m very keen that the Commission is involved in the resolution of the Northern Irish border problems.’ Davis readily agreed and reported back to May, ‘He spent the whole meeting saying “no negotiation without notification” and then began negotiating.’
Other ministers had similar experiences, meeting their opposite numbers in member states, who said they could not negotiate separately and then spelled out how they wanted Brexit to work. One minister said, ‘Mostly this is to do with the rights of citizens. The Poles have got one million citizens in this country, the Romanians have got about 400,000, there’s a very big Portuguese population here too.’ The ministers sent the message: ‘We want to look after the interests of your nationals but similarly we think it’s entirely reasonable that you should undertake to protect the rights of British nationals.’
Despite the mutual interest in a deal on citizens’ rights, the issue and that of immigration remained the ones that most soured relations between the government and their European allies throughout the autumn and winter of 2016. The issue was a legacy of the period immediately after the referendum when David Cameron considered a unilateral offer to EU citizens that they could remain in Britain. According to an editorial in George Osborne’s Evening Standard in June 2017, ‘In the days immediately after the referendum, David Cameron wanted to reassure EU citizens they would be allowed to stay. All his cabinet agreed with that unilateral offer, except his home secretary, Mrs May, who insisted on blocking it.’5 May said that was ‘not my recollection’, but she had been the only leadership candidate not to support a unilateral offer to EU citizens. A former special adviser corroborated Osborne’s claim, saying Michael Gove had tried to have Number 10 issue a statement saying that EU nationals were secure, only to be told by one of Cameron’s senior aides, ‘You can’t because Theresa won’t sign it off.’
As time went by, senior Conservatives expressed concern that May had not done more to resolve the issue, which they saw as toxic to the party’s brand. One Tory adviser said, ‘It was an early example of Theresa’s tin-earedness. We could have vetoed every single piece of policy, until they gave us a guarantee over nationals. The tone was as much of a problem as the substance. It spiralled into a complete crisis for us. Three million people – the majority of whom are in London – think we’re awful.’ As he began to tour Europe, Davis realised the issue was poisoning the well for the negotiations. ‘Every meeting we went to with an ambassador, a minister or prime minister, they would say “The problem with this is what’s going on with our citizens.”’ May believed it would betray British citizens in Spain and other EU countries if they were not considered as part of a deal. ‘She was adamant that she’d said it in the leadership campaign and it had to be done,’ a DExEU official said, ‘and they said, “We’ve got to think about our people in Europe.”’
May’s attempt to resolve the issue was a disaster that raised fresh questions about her operation. When she visited Angela Merkel in Berlin on 18 November, the prime minister offered a deal to guarantee reciprocal rights for EU citizens. Merkel refused and was privately irritated, since she had told her Europe adviser, Uwe Corsepius, to make clear to Oliver Robbins in advance that she would not countenance any attempt to peel her away from the united line of the EU27. After the meeting Corsepius contacted a British official with a ‘poisonous’ complaint about Robbins: ‘I warned you in advance! Did Olly not transmit back what I said to him?’ If Robbins had warned May her advances would be rebuffed, he was ignored. Even after Merkel had rejected May’s proposal in their meetings, the prime minister had still ploughed on, robotically repeating her prepared talking points. As a source revealed, ‘Merkel’s view was: “What part of ‘no’ do you not understand?”’ The incident strengthened a growing view in Whitehall that May’s manner was ill-suited to the kind of personal interactions that grease the wheels of European negotiations and that Robbins was reluctant to give her bad news. A senior figure who saw May afterwards said she was ‘intensely stunned’ by Merkel’s reaction. ‘It went very badly.’
The German chancellor was in no mood to help, in part because her efforts to deliver a renegotiation deal for David Cameron had been in vain. ‘Merkel feels like she really did go the extra mile to get the best possible package for us in February and she was assured that we would win the referendum,’ a senior cabinet minister said. ‘She feels like we’ve let her down.’
On 28 November, eighty MPs – most of them Tories – signed a letter to Donald Tusk, the Council president, urging him to intervene to resolve the citizens issue. Coordinated by Steve Baker and Michael Tomlinson, it said people are ‘not cards to be traded “tit for tat” in a political playground’ and criticised Barnier’s refusal to allow formal talks on the matter. It was the first offensive operation by the European Research Group (ERG), a collection of Tory MPs which had been revived that month under Baker’s chairmanship. The signatories included former cabinet ministers Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and John Whittingdale. The issue was sufficiently toxic that Tusk and others assumed the letter had been organised by Downing Street. The following day a message was passed to Baker by Denzil Davidson, one of May’s Number 10 EU advisers, asking him to ‘please stop doing this’. An ERG source said, ‘We were just pissing off people at the very top of the EU and that was not what they wanted.’ Baker put out a message on the ERG WhatsApp group asking Eurosceptics to stand down. In his diary he wrote, ‘At No 10’s request suspended operations.’
While the issue of EU citizens already in Britain soured relations with Brussels, what to do about those wanting to come after Brexit was dividing the cabinet. In mid-October Amber Rudd, the home secretary, presented a paper to the Brexit committee proposing a post-Brexit visa regime that would see all European Union workers being forced to prove they had secured a skilled job before being allowed into Britain – along with a seasonal worker scheme for the agricultural and construction industries. Hammond resisted the plans, arguing that permanent low-skilled migrants might also be required.6 Rudd and Davis had a difficult balancing act to strike, respecting those voters who backed Brexit to take back control of immigration with the need to keep the NHS, the care sector and the hospitality industry, all heavily reliant on migrants, fully staffed.
On 1 December, Davis made a speech to the Welsh CBI cautioning Brexiteers not to expect sudden changes to Britain’s immigration system. ‘As we take back control of immigration by ending free movement as it has operated before, let me also say this, we won’t do so in a way that it is contrary to the national and economic interest. No one wants to see labour shortages in key sectors. That wouldn’t be in anybody’s interest.’ In this Davis had the support of Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, both of whom were liberal on immigration. The disagreement was with May, who had made her name at the Home Office talking tough and who felt she could not betray the wishes of Brexit voters. ‘The whole of her government was designed to please the Daily Mail,’ a disgruntled official claimed. ‘The Tory Party is going to meet its commitment to get immigration down to the tens of thousands without doing anything because no European will want to come. We’ll have to have immigration from India and places. I’m not sure that’s what people were voting for.’
It cannot have been easy for May, having to learn the job of prime minister in a period where every decision she made had the potential to alter the path of history. Throughout the autumn, May’s staff say, she gradually became more confident. An MP who spent a lot of time in Downing Street said, ‘At the beginning, there was an anxiety in the room which infected everyone else. She wasn’t always 100 per cent clear about what she was looking for and people weren’t sure what they should be giving her. There were awkward moments, silences, and an uneasiness. Over time, that dissipated as she clearly grew more confident, relaxed and assertive. She knew what to ask for but she also relaxed.’ A Downing Street aide agreed: ‘I think she definitely grew in the job.’
But even as she became more assured, aides say, May was also showing signs of exhaustion. ‘She was already fatigued by the time she got to Christmas – even more into the new year,’ another aide recalled. ‘Things dried up and became that little bit slower. I realised we had just sucked the soul out