Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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in the middle was Elizabeth Truss, the justice secretary. The next morning, Truss wrote to her fellow ministers stressing that the judges were independent and urging them to desist from further attacks. However, Truss herself came under attack from the Law Society and one of her predecessors as Lord Chancellor, Labour’s Charlie Falconer, who said that since the judges ‘can’t defend themselves’ it was Truss’s ‘constitutional duty’ to do so.
Truss spoke to Downing Street and to her aides, one of whom warned her, ‘You’ve got two choices here and they are both really shit.’ Condemning the Mail and supporting the judges and their ruling would be ‘career ending’ as long as May, Timothy and Hill occupied Downing Street. Failure to speak up would rupture relations with the judiciary. Truss’s special adviser, Kirsty Buchanan, a former political editor of the Sunday Express, reinforced Truss’s instincts that it was not her job to start telling newspapers what they could and couldn’t write. Together they studied the Constitutional Reform Act, which showed she had a constitutional duty to uphold the independence of the judiciary. ‘What it doesn’t say is that you have to defend the judiciary by putting out a press statement within forty-five minutes of any critical headlines in newspapers,’ a Ministry of Justice source said. At midday, an aide spoke to Downing Street about whether Truss should issue a statement and got a clear ‘No way, Jose’ response. A second call later in the day confirmed Number 10’s position.
By the Saturday #whereisliztruss was trending on Twitter. Truss had lost her nerve and spoke to the chiefs of staff. They told her not to issue a statement. Truss sent them a bland quote defending the integrity of the Lord Chief Justice but going no further. ‘Can’t I even say this?’ she asked. She phoned Lord Thomas himself and told him that she was going to make a statement supporting him. Again, the chiefs refused her permission to release it. Truss said she had told Thomas a statement was coming. They finally relented, changing a word or two and banning her from making any further comment. ‘The lord chief justice is a man of great integrity and impartiality. Like all judges, he has sworn an oath to administer the law without fear or favour, affection or ill will,’ the statement read. ‘It was supposed to be enough, but without being too much,’ an ally explained. It was too little too late for the lawyers and at least one minister, who said, ‘I felt strongly that it was a matter for the Lord Chancellor to deal with – not a Lord Chancellor operating under Number 10. She should have got on with it.’
The row came at a time when ministers were encouraging the judiciary to be more accountable and explain their decisions better to the public. The High Court case was an example of where they might have done better, spelling out why the case mattered and making it harder to depict them as enemies of Brexit. But the incident not only proved the power of the chiefs of staff over cabinet ministers; it illustrated and unleashed the full range of venomous passions that the referendum campaign had both uncovered and kindled. Having embraced Brexit and the Brexiteers, Theresa May now felt under siege.
It was in that context that a cross-party group of MPs began to talk about how they might build on the High Court ruling to exert the power of Parliament and press the prime minister to reveal her hand. They included members of a Labour Party reeling from a second leadership contest and a group of Conservatives who called themselves Team 2019.
Team 2019 had formed when half a dozen former ministers and Remain-backing Tory MPs met in the office of Alistair Burt, a former Foreign Office minister and passionate pro-European, in September 2016. They wanted to give the impression that they were looking forwards to the date of Brexit, not harking back to the result of the referendum. But the title created greater suspicion in the whips’ office. The driving forces, in addition to the short, balding and pathologically polite Burt, were Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry, close friends and former ministers who were increasingly unwilling to bite their tongues. Dominic Grieve, the courtly former attorney general; Neil Carmichael, the MP for Stroud; former transport minister Claire Perry; and Ben Howlett, the MP for Bath. Sir Nicholas Soames, who put grand in the word grandee, was soon attending their Monday meetings as well.
Gradually, numbers swelled to include Bob Neill, Jeremy Lefroy, Flick Drummond, Alberto Costa and Stephen Hammond. ‘There was a group of twelve to fifteen that would meet regularly,’ one MP said. Others, like Alex Chalk, supported from afar but did not attend the meetings. The group acquired their own researcher, Garvan Walshe, a former Tory adviser now running his own consultancy, Brexit Analytics, which helped businesses understand the risks of Brexit. His salary was paid by Sir Tim Sainsbury, a former Conservative minister. Walshe penned an article for ConservativeHome accusing May of making the same mistakes on Brexit as George W. Bush during the invasion of Iraq, comparing the government’s aggression towards its critics to the shooting of ‘peaceful demonstrators’ in Iraq. He accused the Brexiteers of ‘wielding the “will of the people” with the enthusiasm of French revolutionaries’.1 Team 2019 now had to decide whether to behave like peaceful demonstrators or Robespierre.
Nicky Morgan put her head above the parapet on the Sunday of the Conservative Party conference, giving an interview to the Observer in which she warned that pursuing a ‘hard Brexit’ would ‘promote intolerance and bigotry’. A tall and bustling figure with the air of a school lacrosse captain, Morgan had been fired as education secretary in July as part of May’s cull of the Cameroons. To go to a centre-left newspaper on the very day May was setting out her plans to trigger Article 50 in March, was interpreted as an act of war by Downing Street and the whips’ office. When Morgan spoke at an education event on the fringe, voicing her opposition to May’s decision to allow new grammar schools, there were two whips – Julian Smith and David Evennett – in attendance to keep an eye on her.
The ‘harshness’ of May’s party conference speech and Amber Rudd’s announcement that companies should publish details of the number of foreign workers they employed persuaded the trainee rebels that they needed to become more proactive. Morgan and Soubry both took to the airwaves to denounce the Home Office plan. That week, Nick Herbert, who had led the Conservative Party’s Remain campaign, also surfaced, telling the Guardian that Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox were ‘the three blind mice’ of Brexit, peddling ‘Brexit fundamentalism’.2
Crucially, though, both Morgan and Herbert said Tory pro-Europeans should accept the result of the referendum. From that point on, the rows that consumed the Conservative Party were over the nature of Brexit, not its very existence. The moral core of the group, Alistair Burt, was not a natural rebel. A mild and modest man, he accepted that he had failed over forty years to persuade the British public of the benefits of Brussels. He did not want to spend his remaining years as a parliamentarian trying to reverse the referendum result. Instead, he told the group, they needed to make sure the new ‘script is written as much by those who valued the EU, rather than by those who hated it’.
The first test of strength came in late October with the elections to fill the seats on a new select committee to shadow DExEU. Unusually it was comprised of twenty-one MPs, nearly double the usual number, something that appeared designed to neuter it at birth. One Conservative MP said, ‘It’s ridiculously large. It won’t be able to agree anything.’ The former shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn was elected leader, beating off Brexiteer Kate Hoey. The election for the membership was a dogfight. By their own admission Team 2019 were late to get themselves organised and run a slate of candidates. Leavers ran a successful operation to secure spots for prominent Brexiteers like Michael Gove, John Whittingdale, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Peter Bone. ‘We woke up to that quite late,’ a Team 2019 member said. ‘Everything was done at the last minute.’ Belatedly, Nicky Morgan began to act as a whip, corralling supportive MPs, including George Osborne, to vote for the Team 2019 slate. They succeeded in getting Alistair Burt and Jeremy Lefroy elected, denying the Brexiteers a majority, but Anna Soubry failed by ‘a handful of votes’.
Following the High Court ruling, Team 2019 was divided over strategy. Soubry was sick of watching Eurosceptics cause trouble and determined to give the whips something to think about. Burt did not want to vote against his own government and argued that the group should work privately on Downing Street. ‘If we became the saboteurs who people like the Mail