Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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in Brussels who dealt with him regularly, felt it was unfair to characterise him as a Europhile. ‘I’m a deeply unenthusiastic European,’ he told them. ‘I experience co-decision making, I experience the European Parliament, I think the project has taken various turns for the worse.’ Rogers had thought Cameron’s referendum risky precisely because he was frustrated that the EU would not reform and believed that the referendum would be lost before it dawned on most of Cameron’s political staff. He told Downing Street that political leaders on the continent would ‘make absolutely heroic efforts which seem to us to be ludicrous’ to preserve the integrity of the EU because ‘the consequences of it falling over are too dark to contemplate’. That meant putting the political integrity of the EU before mutual economic benefit when negotiating Brexit. His position put him at odds with the Brexiteers and made him a Cassandra-like figure to Team May.
Rogers told colleagues – including Jeremy Heywood and Oliver Robbins – that May was embarking on ‘the negotiation from hell’ and none of them would be doing her a favour by not telling her where the opposition was coming from in Brussels. A Rogers ally said, ‘Ivan’s view was that she was going to find that out after she invoked Article 50 and then she’ll come along and say, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that?” His job was to deliver bluntness from Brussels. He thought there was too much punch pulling which evaded telling her uncomfortable things. His style is to tell people uncomfortable stuff.’
The way he did so, however, left May’s team with the impression he considered himself a professional in a team of amateurs. Rogers had been present at fifty or more European Council meetings, more than any other Briton alive. He saw May as ‘the new girl’ who had to learn at warp speed who to trust.
On 14 October, Rogers sent May a long ‘scene setter’ for her first European Council meeting, summarising what he had been hearing from the Commission officials and fellow ambassadors. Two months later it was to leak, with disastrous consequences for Rogers. He told May everyone he spoke to believed now that Britain would leave the single market and the customs union and that the negotiation would be about a deep and comprehensive free trade agreement. He told her, ‘Most of them think that will take three or four years to negotiate, a couple of years to ratify, therefore nothing will be in place before the mid-2020s.’ Rogers did not in fact say – as was later claimed – that he thought it would take ten years; he was communicating the views of his contacts. But it was hardly what May wanted to hear. He also warned Hill and Timothy that if they wanted a good trade agreement they would have to fight the hardline Eurosceptics, who he believed did not want Britain to sign any arrangement that would keep the UK in close regulatory alignment with the rest of the EU.
Before May’s first Council meeting, Rogers briefed the reporters that the prime minister would tell her fellow leaders over dinner that the UK wanted to keep good relations with Europe and was not a ‘wrecker’ trying to bring down their project. He insisted later that he had ‘stuck absolutely rigidly to the script’ agreed by Number 10. He should perhaps have been more cautious in handling a new prime minister and a team of spin doctors who were under pressure not to give the media too much. When discussions between the leaders on the Syrian civil war overran, May never delivered the lines he had briefed, but the prime minister awoke to find them in the morning newspapers. ‘It was not cool,’ one source close to May said. Rogers was quizzed by Katie Perrior about whether he was responsible for the briefing because the line was not the one they wanted in the papers. Rogers pointed out it was in the pre-conference script. She asked him to clear what he would say to the Brussels press pack in future so they could agree on the best line to brief. ‘If you’re about to go into a negotiation it’s tight lips and observation,’ a Downing Street aide said. ‘It’s not like the old days when you can just freewheel.’
In July, Rogers had told May he was happy to move jobs if she wanted him to. Now he did so again. May demurred. But the briefing row dented his morale, coming as it did shortly after – against Rogers’ advice – she set the March deadline for triggering Article 50 at party conference. May’s team were also beginning to tire of him explaining why their approach was wrong before deploying his favourite line: ‘I speak truth to power.’ As one of them explained later, ‘He says that all the time. Yes, you should tell truth to power, that’s what all advisers do, but you also have a job to do, which is setting up our pillars for the negotiation. He wasn’t moving at the pace that our thinking was moving at. Which is why he didn’t see our thinking when we set our timetable at conference.’
To the civil servants it seemed as if Number 10 was not interested in their, and Rogers’, knowledge of the workings of Brussels. ‘One of the things they were starting to feel in the autumn was: are we really wanted? Are we contaminated by expertise?’ one official said. ‘People felt compromised by knowing their stuff.’
In meetings, Rogers’ approach would ‘visibly irritate Nick and Fi’, according to another official present. ‘They were pretty sharp exchanges.’ When Rogers put across the views of his contacts in Brussels, he would receive a primer in practical politics from the chiefs. Rogers stressed the need for a long period of transition after Brexit and for the need to accept the sequencing for the talks agreed by the other twenty-seven member states. ‘If we do that we’ll be eaten alive by the Tory Party,’ one of the chiefs replied. Another Downing Street source said, ‘They would be openly rude to him in front of Theresa in those meetings. They didn’t actually sack people. They made it so they know that they don’t want you and they’re not giving you what you need to do your job.’
May would also show her displeasure. ‘The PM just cuts across him: “Well, this is my position and I’m afraid you need to think about it a bit more,”’ the official recalled. Rogers was heard in Brussels bemoaning the ‘control freak Home Office approach’ of May’s team, and had branded Hill and Timothy ‘children’ – a phrase that found its way back to the chiefs. Another Downing Street aide who watched the three of them together compared it to being stuck next to a couple about to divorce: ‘No one wanted to be in a room with them.’
Some in government called Hill and Timothy ‘the terrible twins’. It did not take long for ‘Ivan the Terrible’ to be coined by one minister in return. Frustrated that his advice was not being taken, political sources say, Rogers became difficult to work with. ‘He is very rude about everybody. He just didn’t seem happy with anything,’ a Number 10 source said. ‘It wasn’t that Theresa wasn’t happy with him, he just wasn’t happy and it made it difficult to work with him.’
By autumn, Rogers was also frustrated that May was taking an age to firm up the decision to leave the single market and the customs union that had been implicit in her conference speech. A senior cabinet minister said, ‘Ivan wanted clarity and he felt the machine wasn’t deciding. He would keep coming to me and saying, “You must get to Number 10 to make their minds up about this.” He felt he didn’t know what message to give. Nobody knew what we were doing.’
Rogers’ greatest fear, though, was that the government was not doing enough work to analyse the risks or prepare for the possibility of crashing out of the EU without a new deal, falling back on World Trade Organisation tariff rules. He told colleagues the prospect needed to be treated like ‘a national emergency’. Privately he warned of ‘mutually assured destruction’. Rogers had been arguing since 2012 that an exit contingency cell should have been set up in the Cabinet Office, but Cameron and Heywood had vetoed the suggestion. Without that work, May could not credibly threaten to walk away from negotiations, a card she needed to hold in her hand. ‘My advice inside the Government is that you have to work through every area of British economic life, and work through what the default to WTO option really means and really entails, and where it really takes you,’ he told MPs later.2
Friends of David Cameron say Rogers shared some of these concerns with the former prime minister when they had breakfast together that autumn. Cameron wanted to talk about the memoir he was writing, for which HarperCollins were reputed to have paid £1 million.
Allies of May say Rogers resented that it was May, not him, making the important calls. ‘These are the biggest decisions that any government will take, probably in our lifetime, and they