Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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be too reasonable for his own good, telling his friends, ‘We weren’t built for this.’ Burt resolved to keep lines of communication open to Gavin Williamson, the chief whip, and George Hollingbery, the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary. Williamson showed a close interest in their activities. He had appointed himself personal whip to Morgan, Soubry and George Osborne, though Soubry was soon passed to Julian Smith, who developed a reputation as a ‘deeply dark force’ with some MPs. Since party conference the mood music from Number 10 had been highly confrontational. ‘If people asked questions about Brexit they were accused of thwarting the will of the people. That’s the kind of language the PM was using,’ a former minister said. ‘She continually missed how that was interpreted by those of us who didn’t embrace Brexit as she wanted.’
There was frustration that, beyond Williamson, the whips did not try to pretend they understood Team 2019’s approach. ‘It’s a very, very Brexiteer whips’ office,’ one MP said. ‘They have no sympathy or empathy with our concerns at all.’ Burt and others sought to impress on May’s envoys that principled demands about Brexit were not a plot. A former minister said, ‘Alistair told them, “You’ve got to get Nick and Fiona to understand that putting contrary views is not the first step to unseating Theresa May and removing her as party leader.”’ What they did want was for Parliament to be allowed a say over Article 50 and any final deal struck with Brussels and for May to spell out her plans, preferably to Parliament in a white paper. They had the quiet support of Remain cabinet ministers like Amber Rudd. ‘Amber said, “You’ve got to keep up the good fight, you’ve got to keep pushing,” to which the response was, “You’re in the bloody cabinet!”’
At first the Remainers had, pragmatically, conceded that Britain would leave the single market. As May remained tight-lipped about her plans their attitude hardened.
On 28 August, Britain Stronger in Europe – the Remain campaign from the referendum – was reconstituted as a new organisation, Open Britain, which was to become the umbrella under which all May’s critics could find a voice. James McGrory and Joe Carberry would run it. They launched with an op-ed article by Anna Soubry, Pat McFadden and Norman Lamb – one MP from each of the main parties – and sought to buy themselves the right to be heard by admitting that the Remain campaign and their parties had got it wrong on immigration. ‘Free movement of people cannot continue as it has done,’ they wrote.
This consensual approach did not last long. Nick Clegg, McGrory’s old boss, became the Liberal Democrat frontbench spokesman on Europe and began to demand single market membership. ‘He genuinely thinks that has been the most catastrophic decision that has been taken in his lifetime,’ a friend of Clegg said. By November, there was talk of the former Labour cabinet ministers Alan Milburn, John Hutton and Douglas Alexander, backed up by funding from insurance millionaire Sir Clive Cowdery, to push for a second referendum with the hope of overturning Brexit if public opinion cooled. Open Britain began to take a tougher line. In December another ghost of battles past resurfaced. Stephen Dorrell, the former Tory health secretary, became chairman of the European Movement with the explicit intention of blocking Brexit. ‘Brexit is a mistake and we shall seek to build support for that point of view,’ he said. ‘The government has a mandate but I don’t think the mandate it has reflects this country’s interests, so I will seek to defeat it.’
The media was most interested in the activities of Tony Blair, who decided to use Brexit to effect his re-entry into domestic politics. In September 2016, Blair announced that he was winding up his opaque network of consultancy businesses – Windrush Ventures, Firerush Ventures and Tony Blair Associates – and would set up a non-profit outfit instead. In October Blair wrote in the New European newspaper (dubbed the ‘Remoaner Gazette’ by Brexiteers) that Remain supporters should ‘mobilise and organise’ an insurgency to make the public change its mind about leaving the EU.
From that point on, there were monthly meetings in Blair’s offices on Grosvenor Square, bringing together Blair, Clegg, Dorrell, McGrory, former minister and EU commissioner Peter Mandelson and representatives of Best for Britain, a group set up by Alan Milburn and including Gina Miller, whose case was before the Supreme Court. Blair also met a range of politicians, including Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, ‘to chat about the future’. In Parliament, Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry had regular conversations to discuss parliamentary tactics with Clegg, and with Labour’s Chuka Umunna and Chris Leslie, under the banner of Open Britain. A source who talked Brexit with Blair in November said, ‘He’s not impressed with Theresa May. He thinks she’s a total lightweight. He thinks Jeremy Corbyn is a nutter and the Tories are screwing up Brexit. He thinks there’s a massive hole in British politics that he can fill.’ Another well-known figure approached by Blair said, ‘He thinks Brexit is going to fail and Theresa May’s going to fail.’
In Downing Street, the political team paid a close interest in this swirling cast of characters and the prospect that they might coalesce to form a new centre party. ‘I think enough people are talking on these lines and enough people are making fairly public overtures that we have to take their intent seriously,’ said a close May ally. ‘Their intent is to at least operate a cross-party alliance.’ In truth, there was only one figure in these conversations Downing Street was really concerned about – George Osborne.
The chiefs were alarmed to hear that, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, a close ally of the former chancellor had held discussions with Tim Farron and a couple of Labour MPs in Westminster’s Two Chairmen pub about setting up a new party called The Democrats. Osborne knew nothing of this encounter but, in private, he encouraged Team 2019 to argue for single market membership after Brexit as a way of putting pressure on May. ‘George was saying, “The Eurosceptics have been making unreasonable demands for twenty years, it’s time we did the same,”’ one of those who talked to him that autumn revealed. Osborne did not attend any of the group’s meetings but he was in touch with Nicky Morgan, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. ‘He definitely talked to all of the protagonists, without a shadow of a doubt,’ a source said. However, Osborne told friends Clegg and Blair’s quest for a second referendum was ‘hopeless’, believing they should ‘fight on the coming issues, immigration and trade, rather than the last issue’. Publicly, he called leaving the single market ‘the biggest act of protectionism in history’, because Britain was throwing away a deal with the market on its doorstep in search of deals further afield that he believed would be difficult to deliver and demand choices – like offering more visas to Indian or Chinese visitors or accepting hormone-fed American beef – which the public would find unpalatable.
Team May were intrigued to the point of obsession by Osborne’s activities and reports of his actions were sent regularly by the whips to Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. In Downing Street they saw it as an embryonic vessel for the preservation of his leadership hopes. ‘Team 2019? That’s subtle,’ one of May’s aides said when told about the group by Gavin Williamson. ‘They are obsessed and consumed by what he is up to,’ a minister commented. ‘They regard him as the real leader of the opposition.’
In fact, Osborne saw Team 2019 as half-hearted and badly organised and the people involved as ill-suited to rebellion. ‘Trying to organise a rump opposition at the moment would be a waste of my time and effort and burn me out,’ he told one ally. As a student of political history, Osborne knew that time rather than plotting was his best hope of becoming leader. Nonetheless, as a firm Remainer still, he provided encouragement and ideas about how to steer Brexit in the right direction. ‘There’s been a smile here, a text there, an occasional comment in the corridor,’ one Osborne ally said. ‘It’s unlikely that he is remonstrating with Nicky about her loyalty.’ Knowing his Machiavellian reputation, Osborne joked with Gavin Williamson, ‘You’ll know when I’m organising or rebelling, because we’ll win.’
May had not just fired the chancellor of six years, she had patronised him in private, telling him to ‘get to know your own party’, and humiliated him in public when her aides briefed details of the conversation to the media. After that the two did not exchange a single word for a year. A senior civil servant who worked with Osborne said, ‘With George, the hatred goes quite deep, it’s pretty personal. To start with he was predicting that she would not be sufficiently