Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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bad cough and cold that just lingered for ages and did wear her down’. One meeting in December 2016 was abandoned when she was gripped by a coughing fit. ‘For all that Fiona or Jojo went on about caring about her, it was Simon [Case] who sorted out getting a glass of water and said, “We don’t need to do this meeting now,”’ one of those present recalled. ‘She was really tired and not feeling very well.’
The prime minister was a Type 1 diabetic, meaning she had to monitor her blood sugar levels and inject herself in the stomach with insulin before every meal. Officials in Downing Street were secretly instructed in how to do the injections in case May became incapacitated on a foreign trip. But friends and foes alike in Number 10 say that has never happened. ‘I think she manages it really well,’ one civil servant said. ‘She is very calm about it.’
When May flew to Bahrain for the Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in December 2016 it was suggested the prime minister get some rest rather than talk to journalists on the way out. Fiona Hill, hypersensitive to any suggestion that May was fragile, insisted that she do it. ‘Are you mad?!’ Hill said. ‘As soon as you tell the press that she’s unwell it will be a big story.’
One of May’s aides, recognising that she was worn out, took to riding in the car with her to encourage the prime minister to take a nap. ‘Occasionally I’d say, “Do you want to sleep?” If she wouldn’t say “yes”, I’d say, “I’m really tired today. Do you mind if I just close my eyes for five minutes, collect my thoughts?” She took it as her cue to do it herself.’ Even this aide insists May never cried off work. ‘I don’t want anyone to read into that like she’s not up for the job or well enough. I think she looks physically tired at times. She looks puffy. But I’ve never seen her when she doesn’t want to do the work or says, “I’m too tired for that.” She is relentless.’
As November became December the prime minister realised she needed to impose greater order on the Brexit process, which had been saddled with the uncertainty of her first weeks in the job. The cabinet debates of the autumn had allowed ministers to educate themselves about the challenges of Brexit but the time was arriving when the direction of travel laid out in the conference speech had to become firm policy. Those three months had bought Britain time, taking some of the sting out of the EU’s anger and allowing the issues to be studied methodically as May preferred. A cabinet minister said, ‘We had to make sure we’d exhausted all the options. Theresa wanted to show we’d tested everything. You can’t govern based on assumptions.’
Yet the cabinet had decided no firm policy and May had not formalised the hints she had dropped at the party conference. She now faced a rainbow coalition of forces in the courts, Parliament and the wider political world determined to force her hand.
4
Anna Soubry was firm, that was her style. If Ken Clarke was the best-known Europhile on the Conservative benches, Soubry was the most outspoken. The MP for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire had not won her marginal seat by apologising for who she was. During her days as a minister she had given an off-the-record quote to a journalist featuring the word ‘chuffing’. When the hack had suggested that might identify her, Soubry had laughed and said, ‘If I’d used “fucking” it would have identified me.’ It had made her a favourite of lobby journalists, a divisive figure with her colleagues and a nuisance to the whips. It was December 2016 and Soubry was talking to the chief whip, Gavin Williamson, the man who had ensured enough votes for Theresa May in the leadership contest and was now charged with keeping her in power with a working majority of seventeen. The Labour Party had tabled a motion on an opposition day debate calling ‘on the Prime Minister to commit to publishing the Government’s plan for leaving the EU before Article 50 is invoked’.
On the face of it the motion was innocuous. May would surely have to spell out her plan at some point. It stopped short of demanding the government publish a white paper or hold a vote that would guarantee that Britain stayed in the single market, or even a second referendum. A vote on any one of those would be more problematic for the government if it was lost. But as soon as he read the motion Williamson knew it was a threat. It acknowledged that ‘there should be no disclosure of material that could be reasonably judged to damage the UK in any negotiations’. The motion was entirely reasonable. Labour had designed it to garner the maximum parliamentary backing. Soubry confirmed that he had a problem on his hands. She said, ‘I’ve read it and I have to say I can’t see anything in it I don’t approve of and could not support.’
Williamson was a slight figure with the demeanour of a trainee undertaker, but he was given to flashes of rage – the ‘hair dryer treatment’ they called it – if MPs were threatening to rebel. He played the role of chief whip with gothic glee, keeping on his desk a jar containing a tarantula called Cronos. Some said he saw himself as a real-life Francis Urquhart, the chief whip in House of Cards. Shouting was not going to work with Soubry – and she was just the tip of the iceberg. On this, he knew, she had twenty Conservative MPs behind her. For the first time, the government was in danger of losing a vote on Brexit in the House of Commons. It could not afford to do so. It had already been defeated in the courts.
When Theresa May announced, on 2 October, that she would trigger Article 50 by the end of March, the government was already facing legal action to prevent her from doing so. By 19 July, less than a month after the referendum, seven different plaintiffs had brought an action in the High Court arguing that only Parliament, and not the prime minister, had the authority to invoke Article 50. On that day, judges including Sir Brian Leveson decided that the lead claimant would be Gina Miller, a fifty-one-year-old Guyanese-born City fund manager who had voted Remain. Miller, a photogenic former model and mother of three, soon showed herself adept at garnering publicity for her cause. With the assistance of Lisa Tremble, a gifted PR who had once been David Miliband’s special adviser, Miller had the backing of lawyers Mishcon de Reya and the heavyweight clout of QC Lord Pannick. Their claim was that, since the referendum had been advisory rather than legally binding, acting on it would require parliamentary approval. The government’s case was that May could use the royal prerogative to trigger Article 50 since David Cameron had repeatedly made clear that he would respect the results of the referendum. The stage was set for a highly charged showdown over constitutional law.
Tensions were quickly inflamed. At the hearing on 19 July, Pannick complained that Mishcon de Reya had been subjected to ‘racist and anti-Semitic abuse’ by pro-Brexit protesters. Miller was soon the victim of online abuse. By January 2017 the police would be probing twenty-two cases of intimidation, including threats of beheading and rape and one offer of a £5,000 bounty to anyone who ran her over.
Tempers boiled over on 3 November, when a panel of three judges – the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton and Lord Justice Sales – ruled, ‘The Government does not have power under the Crown’s prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 for the UK to withdraw from the European Union.’ David Davis had barely an hour’s notice of the verdict and announced that, if it was upheld by the Supreme Court, an Act of Parliament would be required for Brexit to proceed – a process that allowed MPs or peers to table amendments that would enable them to dictate the terms of Brexit or even halt the process altogether.
The reaction of Eurosceptics was swift and brutal. Iain Duncan Smith accused the judges of sparking ‘a constitutional crisis – literally pitting Parliament against the will of the people’. The Daily Mail delivered the most memorable rebuke, a front page with pictures of the three judges under the headline, ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’, giving details of their links to Brussels and, in one case, their sexuality. If the verdict was not a constitutional crisis, the accusation that it was improper for the judiciary to involve themselves in Brexit now created one. For three days, debate raged over whether those who wanted to subvert the referendum result or those who wanted to silence an independent judiciary were the ones undermining democracy and the rule of law. On the evening of the verdict, Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, went on the BBC’s