Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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Street. I’m afraid the team here have fucked up.’
The following morning Hill was in work by seven, dressed in a designer leopard-print skirt with Gucci heels, when the journalists arrived. Perrior looked in briefly on the interview but, feeling surplus to requirements for the pictures, retreated to her office. A couple of hours later a pale-faced Sanderson sought her out. ‘How did it go?’ Perrior asked.
‘Theresa looked really good.’ Sanderson paused. ‘But there might be an issue. She was in £2,000 worth of clothes. We will need a line to take.’ The clothes Hill had helped May to select included a pair of brown leather trousers costing £995, a jumper worth £495 and a pair of spotless Burberry trainers which retailed at £295. For a politician who claimed to be working for people who were ‘just about managing’ it was a public relations disaster in the making. Perrior inspected the pictures and thought that May did not even look natural. Her languid pose was that of an ageing starlet rather than a no-nonsense national leader. Another of the Number 10 heads of department said, ‘I remember looking at that photograph thinking, “It is not the leather trousers that are odd, it is that the plimsolls she was wearing had never been out of the house.” They were virgin white. It all looked completely artificial.’
When the magazine dropped, on 27 November, journalists from other publications began phoning up, firing off awkward questions. ‘Are they her clothes? Did she borrow them? Did she keep them? Did she pay for them? Does she have a stylist? Is Fiona her stylist?’ There were no good answers. All Perrior and her colleagues in the press office could think about was: why did the prime minister allow herself to be kitted out in two grand’s worth of clobber? That night even Perrior’s mother told her May had gone down in her estimation. At the end of the week she went home to watch Have I Got News For You. All they could talk about was May’s leather trousers. Then she watched Gogglebox and was confronted with the same images.
There was more to come, though. The following week Nicky Morgan told The Times that May’s extravagant trousers had been ‘noticed and discussed’ in local Tory circles. ‘My barometer is always, “How am I going to explain this in Loughborough market?” I don’t have leather trousers,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much on anything apart from my wedding dress.’
Team 2019 had been due to go into Downing Street for a third time, this time to see the prime minister. Morgan was taken aside by George Hollingbery, May’s parliamentary bag carrier, and told, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come to that meeting.’ Morgan said, ‘I know exactly where this has come from. If they want to play it that way, okay.’
Three days earlier Alistair Burt had received a text from Fiona Hill saying, ‘Don’t bring that woman to Downing Street again.’ Incensed, Morgan texted the chief of staff, ‘If you don’t like something I have said or done, please tell me directly. No man brings me to any meeting. Your team invites me. If you don’t want my views in future meetings you need to tell them.’ Hill, apparently responding to the part of the message about Burt, replied, ‘Well, he just did. So there!’3
Morgan was furious. She felt Downing Street should have laughed off her comments. Instead they were intent on signalling that anyone who ever voiced criticism would be shot down. The week that Gavin Williamson fixed the amendment, turning the tables on Team 2019, someone briefed the Guardian that Morgan had been banned from Downing Street. She thought to herself, ‘I’m not having this,’ and passed the texts to the Mail on Sunday, which splashed the story on 11 December. Hill told colleagues, ‘I will never speak to Nicky Morgan again. There’s no point. It’s nothing to do with the trousers. I fundamentally think it’s wrong to share private text messages.’
The story included a quote from Adam Stares, deputy chairman of Morgan’s Loughborough constituency association, who said, ‘There’s a lot of people who think she is taking sideswipes at the government and at Theresa May.’ Morgan knew that Stares was friends with the whip Julian Smith from their days in Yorkshire politics. She confronted Gavin Williamson, accusing Smith of getting her own association to denounce her. Smith did not admit that he had encouraged Stares, but he admitted speaking to him. Morgan confided in a friend, ‘You know it’s really lonely at the moment. I’m standing up for what I believe in but I’m getting killed right now.’
Fiona Hill’s behaviour during that fortnight became a talking point around Downing Street. Many would have sympathised with her more if they had known that a month earlier she had separated from her partner Charles Farr, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was a stark reminder of the pressures real life and political life sometimes place on each other. But Hill did not seek sympathy by revealing the break-up.
The Commons motion meant the time was fast approaching when the prime minister needed to spell out her Brexit plan. Having seen off the two most awkward female backbenchers, Morgan and Soubry, she now had to deal with the two men who, in their very different ways, had become the biggest headaches in her government: Boris Johnson and Ivan Rogers.
5
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Boris?
Open with a joke, they say. Theresa May’s gag certainly got a big laugh when she began her party conference speech. It was the perfect way to break the ice with the party faithful. In retrospect it might have been better not to choose as her joke the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. Clearly revelling in her big moment, May strode to the mark and said, ‘When we came to Birmingham this week, some big questions were hanging in the air. Do we have a plan for Brexit? We do. Are we ready for the effort it will take to see it through? We are.’ May paused, taking her audience by the hand towards the punchline: ‘Can Boris Johnson stay on message for a full four days?’
The audience laughed. Near the front of the stalls, Johnson waved. ‘Just about,’ said May, rotating her palm as if the verdict hung in the balance. The foreign secretary staked his claim to loyalty. ‘Slavishly … religiously,’ he shouted out.
Behind the smiles, though, Johnson’s ability to carry himself in one of the great offices of state was already in question. His appointment – shortly after his career appeared to have imploded – was a surprise, not least to him. As one of the front men for Brexit he was not popular in the European capitals. But in the Whitehall reorganisation that followed, the Foreign Office was not in the box seats when it came to Brexit. His allies celebrated the fact that Britain’s most mercurial politician finally had the chance to prove himself a serious contender for even higher office.
Yet throughout the autumn, controversy and gaffes appeared to follow Johnson as if he were the Pied Piper of political problems. First came the cabinet wars over Chevening, the grand country pile in Kent which is traditionally the grace and favour home of the foreign secretary or the deputy prime minister. In a sign that May had a warped sense of humour, she decreed that ‘The Three Brexiteers’ – Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox – should share the mansion, a move that prompted newspaper articles about which of them should be ‘the keyholder’. ‘Boris cared enormously about Chevening. DD couldn’t give a fuck,’ one senior government figure recalled. ‘Boris was insisting that “They can use it but they have to get my permission.”’ Davis, never one to miss an opportunity for devilment, engaged heartily in debates with Johnson about which of them was the senior minister before announcing to officials, ‘Just tell them I’m not going to use it. Boris can do whatever he wants.’
May had given Johnson the job because she wanted him to shake things up, but also because she felt he was the wronged party after Michael Gove’s betrayal in the 2016 leadership election. ‘We wanted a big brain in there to reassess whether our policies in those regions are stale or need rethinking,’ said one of May’s aides. ‘She wanted to give him a good job.’ But by October there was widespread irritation that Johnson was learning on the job so publicly. ‘Theresa was clear with him that he had to show his serious side,’ a Downing Street source said. ‘He took