Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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happened twice now.’ But Perrior thought she was putting on a brave face. Hill looked like someone thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’
Johnson went for a long walk. There was briefly concern that he might resign. A close friend said, ‘He was in a really bad way that week. It really really affected him. It made him think, “What the fuck am I doing in this fucking job.”’ Perrior visited him in Carlton Gardens. Over a glass of wine she told him to calm down. ‘It’s not you, the prime minister doesn’t hate you.’ She recalled later, ‘Every cabinet minister thought at one point it was just them, that the guns were on them from Nick and Fi and no one liked them or rated them. I had to tell them, “It’s not just you who gets treated like that. I do as well, the foreign secretary does, the chancellor does.”’ In Downing Street she made the case that it was better to hug Johnson close than slap him down. ‘When Boris is upset and angry, he says things, it causes World War Three. He just does his own thing, he does media interviews, he goes on the road. We don’t need that.’
At the Prime Minister’s Questions that followed, Peter Dowd, an enterprising Labour MP, got to his feet and asked May, ‘In the light of the foreign secretary’s display of chronic foot-in-mouth disease, when deciding on cabinet positions, does the prime minister now regret that pencilling “FO” against his name should have been an instruction not a job offer?’ May replied with the grin of one who has prepared her own gag. ‘I have to say that the foreign secretary is doing an absolutely excellent job,’ she began. But there was a sting in the tail. She added, ‘He is, in short, an FFS – a fine foreign secretary.’ No one could be in any doubt that May was miffed. In text speak ‘FFS’ also meant ‘for fuck’s sake’.
Having seen the wisdom of offering an olive branch, Hill agreed to go for an early evening drink with Johnson at a central London hotel to restore friendly relations. The meeting was brokered by Ben Wallace, the security minister who had run Johnson’s leadership campaign and was an old friend of Hill’s. Jojo Penn, the deputy chief of staff, also attended. Johnson and Hill discussed how they did not properly communicate when there was a crisis. ‘I wish you would take my calls,’ the foreign secretary said. Hill hit back, ‘I wish you’d bloody ring me up.’
It was not to be the last time Downing Street would have to deal with a Johnsonian eruption. The biggest beast in Theresa May’s cabinet did not resign, in part because she did not want him to. Her ambassador to Brussels was about to quit, in part because she did.
6
A civil service mandarin who worked with Ivan Rogers for two decades said of the UK’s permanent representative in Brussels, ‘Ivan’s problem was that while he was knowledgeable, he’d never say in a word what he could say in one hundred. He was bloody irritating, but he did speak truth unto power.’ It was with an email of close to 1,400 words, sent on 3 January 2017, that Rogers signalled that he had tired of offering his counsel to politicians who did not like what he had to say and he would be resigning.
The news detonated in Westminster like a battlefield nuclear weapon – a deadly blast with unpredictable fallout that consumed its author as much as its targets. As head of UKREP, Britain’s diplomatic post in Brussels, Rogers had not operated quietly, and the email – which leaked within hours, as he must have known it would – took few prisoners. After four months of cabinet deliberations, it claimed, Theresa May had not yet even set the ‘negotiating objectives for the UK’s relationship with the EU after exit’; Rogers urged his colleagues to ‘continue to challenge’ the ‘ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking’ of ministers. ‘I hope that you will support each other in those difficult moments where you have to deliver messages that are disagreeable to those who need to hear them,’ he wrote. ‘Senior ministers, who will decide on our positions, issue by issue, also need from you detailed, unvarnished – even where this is uncomfortable – and nuanced understanding of the views, interests and incentives of the other 27.’
Rogers’ style was more than familiar to the aides of David Cameron who had been on the receiving end of his missives during their renegotiation with Brussels ahead of the EU referendum. Daniel Korski, whose inbox contained several threats of resignation and expletive-laden missives from Rogers, remarked to a friend that day, ‘It seemed quite mild compared with the emails we used to get.’
The explosion had been long in the coming, pitching as it did the irresistible force of one of the most headstrong officials in the British government against the immovable objects of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.
In the early days of the May government, the prime minister and Rogers had been on good terms. ‘They actually got on really well when she was home secretary,’ a Number 10 official said. When May travelled to Brussels to negotiate the justice and home affairs opt-outs, it was Rogers who had sat next to her. They shared an occasional gin and tonic at his residence. As a grammar-school boy, Rogers also had a strong fellow feeling with May socially, telling friends the Cameron regime had ‘treated her pretty shittily’.
It was not long before Rogers began to rub May and her team up the wrong way. Glasses perched on the end of his nose like a disapproving schoolmaster, he spoke bluntly and fast. Words were not minced, meanings not finessed. He told May – as he had Cameron, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – that he owed her his ‘best assessment of where we’re at’. With Rogers, that meant warts and all. He did not see the point of operating any other way. An ally said, ‘Whatever else he is – and obviously he’s driven people mad under numerous regimes – he does know a lot about how the budget works and how the single market works and how the customs union works.’ Rogers’ personal creed was that he would tell his political masters where the game was going and what he thought they should do about it. But, as he explained to colleagues, ‘If they then say, “Interesting point of view but fuck off,” then that’s okay. The best civil servants get on and implement the wishes of the boss.’ The problem was that May’s team began to think he was doing too much of the advising and not enough of the implementing.
May first asked Rogers to see her in her Commons office the weekend before she became prime minister, at the start of what she assumed would be an eight-week leadership battle. ‘Tell me how this really works and what you really think,’ she said. Rogers briefed her on the technicalities of the Article 50 process and the dynamics in Brussels. When she entered Downing Street, he told Hill and Timothy, ‘I’m totally committed to making Brexit work.’ Having seen David Cameron’s difficulties up close, his advice was that May needed to learn from her predecessor’s mistakes, to ‘start at the outset from where you want to end’ and work her way backwards. ‘Set an objective. Where do you want the country to be by 2025, what’s our route to getting there?’
Contrary to the widespread view after he resigned, Rogers was not doing the work of the vanquished Remainers by steering May towards a soft Brexit. He believed from the start that a soft Brexit was never viable and that Britain was destined to go ‘further out’ than many initially assumed. In an appearance before the Brexit select committee in February 2017 – after his resignation – Rogers revealed that he had told May, ‘If control of your own borders and no jurisdiction by the ECJ are your desiderata, the answer to that is to leave the customs union, leave the single market and strike as comprehensive an FTA with the EU as you can get.’1 He told the prime minister she would get a better hearing in Brussels if fellow leaders did not think she was simply trying to emulate Boris Johnson’s doctrine of having cake while simultaneously eating it. That meant moving on from claims of British exceptionalism inside the European institutions of which, in Rogers’ view, Cameron’s renegotiation was the failed last hurrah. It meant accepting that the single market came with the four freedoms and that the UK did want to hold on to ‘the best bits’ while ditching free movement of people. Rogers’ concern was that May’s team should adopt a pragmatic enough approach to Brussels that all this could be accomplished without ‘massive disorder’. Tensions arose because, in explaining where the obstacles