Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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him to that position was to let him discredit himself. He has done it a bit. You tame him that way.’
If that was indeed May’s plan, it worked a treat. As he began to travel, the foreign secretary discovered that his colourful way of expressing himself was a world away from the nuanced niceties of the diplomatic world. Searching for a purpose, he seemed at times like a child in a sweet shop, latching on to each passing international crisis with his customary brand of dangerously quotable insight. He enthusiastically backed a ‘no bombing zone’ in Syria that had no prospect of support from the White House and consequently no hope of success. Disgusted by Russian backing for the Assad regime, he called on 11 October for ‘demonstrations outside the Russian embassy’, a move that was widely ridiculed. Two days later, at a select committee hearing, he admitted he did not know what the Commonwealth flag looked like. When an official drew it for him, he said, ‘That’s a lovely flag.’
With the cabinet on the verge of backing the expansion of Heathrow airport, which he had bitterly opposed, Johnson had to find a way around his ancient pledge, made while Mayor of London, to lie down in front of the bulldozers. ‘I’m going to construct a sarcophagus that will allow me to be suspended under the bulldozers,’ he said. ‘Once they roll over me I will emerge like Houdini in order to fulfil my pledge.’
The ridicule might have been greater had Johnson not been stopped by his senior aide Will Walden from announcing his latest wheeze to boost Brexit Britain – a new Channel Tunnel for cars. In private conversations at the Tory Party conference he said, ‘If you wanted to show your commitment to Europe, is it not time for us to have further and better economic integration with a road tunnel? That’s what we need.’ Johnson argued that such a plan had been ruled out in the 1980s ‘on the basis that you could not clean the fumes out of the tunnel’. But he said, ‘That’s all changed. They now have the technology. You could come out of the EU but join Europe in the most fundamental way.’ The plan was even more grandiose than the ‘Boris Island’ Thames Estuary airport he had advocated as London mayor and appealed to Johnson’s sense of history. ‘You undo the damage done at the end of the ice age,’ he explained. ‘The Channel is really a river whose tributaries used to be the Seine and the Thames. It became bigger and bigger and bigger as the ice melted until it separated Britain from France.’ Reversing it would be ‘a great symbol of European commitment’.
Johnson was weakened in mid-October by the departure of Walden to the private sector. Johnson had wanted him to be made chief of staff but he fell foul of a crackdown on the number of special advisers and their remuneration. Walden offered to take a pay cut and forget the grander title but then received a message from Sue Gray, in the Cabinet Office, saying Downing Street would not approve his appointment. His name, it seemed, was on a ‘banned list’ drawn up by Team May, which included special advisers who had worked for former ministers they did not like, such as Michael Gove, some civil servants, and people close to David Cameron. It was further evidence that May’s allies did not want Johnson to build a strong team that could become a rival power centre. The foreign secretary recruited Liam Parker, Mark Carney’s spin doctor at the Bank of England, to handle his media but he was still learning the ropes when the briefing wars began.
Two weeks after the party conference Johnson was embarrassed by the publication, in the Sunday Times, of an article he had written arguing for a Remain vote, just two days before he declared for Leave. The article had been dashed off to demonstrate the weakness of the Remain cause but its publication fuelled the views of some voters and MPs that Johnson had backed Leave to further his own ambitions. The vociferousness with which he pursued the Brexit cause can only have been fuelled by the need to prove that he had made the right decision. Some cabinet colleagues still felt he was too ready to approach Brexit as if he was part of the Leave campaign, rather than as a minister in a government that had to get to grips with the potential problems. ‘We all call him Borisgloss, like he’s Panglossian,’ one cabinet minister said. ‘All of us want this to work, even those who were passionate Remainers. That means that you have to engage in the difficulties.’ Allies of Johnson said he was acutely aware that, having led the Leave campaign, he would be personally blamed for any problems with Brexit. Protests outside his front door in Islington by irate Remainers had already driven Johnson to move his family to the more protected surroundings of the foreign secretary’s official residence in Carlton Gardens. A special adviser said, ‘Bojo knows he’s going to be drummed out of the country if this is a disaster. He already hardly shows his face in London, the city he used to run.’
Ivan Rogers, believing Johnson had an overly optimistic view of how easy it would be to reach a deal, invited him to Brussels for dinner with David McAllister, the German MEP with a Scottish father who was tipped by some as a successor to Angela Merkel, and some other Anglophile MEPs. Both sides were shocked by what they heard. McAllister gave Johnson an ‘unvarnished’ view of how Britain was seen for leaving the EU and warned that the final deal ‘will take much longer than you think’. He said Britain would need a transitional agreement and would get no special privileges beyond what other third-party countries enjoyed. Johnson was aggressive in return, telling his fellow guests, ‘This is why we’ve got to exit and this is why this venture isn’t going anywhere.’ McAllister ‘went white’ according to one account and declared later, ‘I can’t believe that is the British foreign secretary.’
Rogers also put Johnson in front of Anthony Gardner, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the European Union, who gave him a similarly blunt view of how the EU was seeing things. As he had with Hammond, Rogers stressed to Johnson that a transitional period would be necessary: ‘I don’t think we’ll do an FTA [free trade agreement] in the space of two years.’ But, he pointed out, ‘We have to leave the customs union if we want to do our own trade policy – so that’s a battle you’re bound to win.’ He compared the prospect of leaving via ‘a cliff edge’ a year before a general election to an outbreak of ‘foot and mouth disease cubed’ because there would be huge delays at the border. ‘What kills governments is the public sense of chaos,’ Rogers warned. ‘Don’t take this from me, go and talk to customs people.’
May’s desire to put Johnson in his place was again evident at the start of November when both accepted awards at the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year dinner, Johnson for best comeback. In his speech, Johnson compared himself to Michael Heseltine’s dog, Kim, who the former cabinet minister had admitted to strangling to calm it down. (Heseltine denied killing the dog.) ‘Like Kim the Alsatian I am absolutely thrilled to have had this reprieve,’ Johnson joked. But when May took to the stage she delivered a joke with menace: ‘Boris, the dog was put down … when its master decided it wasn’t needed any more.’
Johnson’s allies pushed back hard at Downing Street, making clear that if he was slapped down again in public he would respond in kind. In Number 10 Johnson had an ally in Katie Perrior, who had helped run his first mayoral campaign in 2008. He also got a call from Fiona Hill, who said May ‘didn’t mean it’. May called Johnson and said, ‘Oh Boris, I hope you didn’t take too much offence last night. It was a joke.’ He replied, ‘I don’t. I’ve made a living out of jokes but the papers seem to think there is something there and it doesn’t help.’ He made the point that May knew what she was dealing with when she appointed him and it was agreed that the jokes would stop. An edict even went to ministers that they should start referring to Johnson as the foreign secretary, rather than ‘Boris’. A source close to May said, ‘I think he had created the idea that it was okay to have a joke about Boris because he joked about everything and everyone. But that was the last time we made a joke about him, because I think she knew herself the caravan had moved on. He was a bit upset about it.’
As the most prominent face of a hard Brexit, Johnson was also the focus of lingering anger among EU politicians. ‘Around the world, they all regard the guy as a British Trump,’ reported a former minister who travelled a lot. On 16 November, Johnson was accused of ‘insulting’ Italian economic development minister Carlo Calenda when Boris said Italy should back a good trade deal for Britain or they would lose ‘prosecco exports’ to the UK. With his trademark verbal gymnastics, Johnson had suggested controlling immigration while maintaining trade was ‘pro-secco but by no means anti-pasto’. But his desire for Britain to have its cake