Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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like that then it was his job to serve the PM like all of us. There’s a hierarchy and she’s at the top of it and he isn’t.’
Ahead of the December Council meeting, Rogers had a meeting with Nick Timothy, at which he said he would write to Downing Street outlining the stories he thought would emerge from the meeting so that a press handling strategy could be worked out. He agreed not to brief on Brexit itself. Then on the evening of 14 December, Rogers began getting calls warning him that the memo he had written for May in October was about to be released. The following day the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg reported his warning that Brexit could take a decade – something that provoked an immediate backlash from pro-Brexit Tories.
When his face appeared on the evening news a colleague said, ‘You’ve just been stabbed, haven’t you?’ Rogers could not prove that it was Downing Street who had knifed him, but where there might have been statements of support, instead there was a deafening silence. Senior Eurosceptics even took to the airwaves claiming that Rogers himself had leaked the contents of his memo. That night he spoke to his wife and told her he did not think he could carry on after Christmas. ‘Once you’re the story, you can’t in my view do the job.’
Despite the tensions, some around May insist Rogers was not forced out. ‘We genuinely were not saying, “This guy’s got to go,”’ one said. Fiona Hill told friends she had found out about Rogers’ resignation from Sky News. Yet there is plentiful evidence that Rogers had been told it would make sense for him to start looking for his next job. Nick Timothy did not understand why Rogers had even stayed in post once the referendum was lost and it was clear he would have to implement Brexit. ‘Nick’s view was that Ivan didn’t really believe in it and didn’t really think it could be done and he genuinely didn’t know why he stayed around,’ said one confidant. Another source close to May said her Lancaster House speech, now scheduled for early January, ‘was held up because people were waiting for Ivan to resign. There was talk of getting rid of him anyway. Had he not resigned he’d probably have been moved at some point anyway.’ The source said the chiefs ‘saw him as very close to Cameron, a person who failed at a renegotiation in the past, but also someone who would come along to those weekly meetings and just didn’t contribute in a way that was seen as helpful. He was just relentlessly negative. There was definitely a sense that we just needed some fresh blood. He had a different point of view and it was never the kind of view that was going to find favour with the PM or her team.’
The foreign secretary had also tired of Rogers. ‘Boris thought: how can we have this doom monger representing us at an EU level?’ a source close to Johnson said. ‘Boris was a bit pissed off with how he did things.’
In the week before Christmas, six days after the memo was leaked, Rogers was seen by two Foreign Office officials having breakfast with Jeremy Heywood in Villandry, an upmarket eatery in St James’s which specialises in brunch for businessmen spending their employers’ money. The exact details of the conversation are known only to its two participants, but based on their exchanges with others it is understood that they talked about Rogers’ future and the way Whitehall was handling Brexit. ‘Heywood said to him, “Think about how you handle this and get out,”’ a Foreign Office source said. ‘The view was: “He’s got to go and go before the Lancaster House speech.” Heywood was aware the writing was on the wall. The message was, “Why don’t you do it your own way?”’
Heywood and Rogers had known each other for twenty-five years and could speak frankly to one another. Whitehall sources say Rogers was concerned that his relationship with Oliver Robbins was not as open and free-flowing as it had been with Robbins’ predecessor Tom Scholar during Cameron’s renegotiation, or before with Jon Cunliffe when he was at UKREP and Rogers in London. Rogers felt he and Robbins needed to be speaking several times a day, and they were not.
Under Cameron, Cunliffe, Rogers and Scholar had all deliberately argued in front of the prime minister so he could hear each side of a case being put – but May did not like to work that way. Neither were Rogers and Heywood on the same page. Rogers thought the system Heywood had set up, with DExEU as player and referee and Robbins servicing both DExEU and Downing Street, was flawed. On occasion, departments reported their position on an issue to Rogers and UKREP, but not to David Davis and DExEU.
Rogers also complained that Whitehall departments, swamped by the future of Brexit, were failing to stay on top of evolving policy in Brussels, where damaging regulations still had to be fought because they would impact Britain outside as well as inside the EU. When he gave evidence to the European Scrutiny Committee the following February, Rogers said, ‘We were getting a diminishing quality and quantity of instructions through to UKREP. I said repeatedly at mandarin level, “That is not good enough. You have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”’3
Heywood and Robbins saw Rogers as a boat rocker, and viewed his growing demands for Downing Street to announce their plans as counterproductive. ‘Ivan thought they were pussyfooting around while he was fending off foreigners who were asking what the policy was,’ said another mandarin. ‘I think he felt that he was being left to deliver all the negative assessments.’
More importantly, Rogers believed Robbins was reluctant to tell May the truth about the difficulties ahead, a view shared by other senior civil servants. ‘Olly’s more inclined to tell people what they want to hear than how it is,’ a senior mandarin said. Another commented, ‘He sees his job mainly as giving the PM what she wants.’ In one crunch meeting that December, Rogers urged Robbins and Heywood to join him in being franker. Seeing that Rogers was on his way out, they declined. When Rogers saw Philip Hammond that week he told the chancellor that he had the support of neither Heywood nor Robbins. After their breakfast meeting the cabinet secretary suggested to other officials that if Rogers were to leave, Tim Barrow – the political director at the Foreign Office – was the right man to take over.
Once he had discussed it again with his wife over Christmas, Rogers decided to quit. Having heard that May might make her big speech in the first few days of January – and not wanting his resignation to be seen as a response to the substance of the speech – he pressed send on the email announcing his departure on 3 January from his holiday cottage in Dorset. The furore dominated the news for a week. Rogers told friends he had intended the email to be a morale-boosting call to arms for the embattled staff in Brussels, urging them to stick with Brexit and do the best they could. But his tone was interpreted as an assault on ministerial incompetence. ‘Serious multilateral negotiating experience is in short supply in Whitehall,’ he warned. One minister complained, ‘It was spiteful. His heart wasn’t in it and he had to go, but it’s a shame he went the way he did.’
On the verge of laying out her plans, May might have been badly wounded, but she faced a weak opposition leader whose equivocation on Europe left him ill-equipped to capitalise. Eurosceptic MPs quickly rallied too, seizing on passages in the present author’s first book All Out War – in which Cameron’s aides had blamed Rogers for the failure of Cameron’s renegotiation – to say, ‘Goodbye and good riddance.’ Downing Street spin doctors were quick to tell journalists about the dim view taken of his briefing gaffe in October and accuse him of pessimism towards Brexit. ‘He forgot what he was supposed to be doing and was freelancing with his own views,’ a cabinet minister said. ‘I’ve never seen a photograph of Ivan Rogers smiling,’ commented another minister.
In Downing Street, the incident was seen as a necessary clearing of the decks. ‘Jeremy Heywood played a blinder and had Tim Barrow in the job within hours,’ a Number 10 source said. ‘Jeremy himself felt quite personally betrayed by Ivan.’ May and her team had met Barrow. They did not know him well but were quickly impressed. ‘We were really clear he was the right person. Jeremy definitely thought that. DD thought that. Fox thought that and so did Boris.’
As Barrow’s name was put forward, Oliver Robbins made a power play. He argued that Rogers should not be replaced and that the new permanent representative should become a role that reported directly to him. ‘He did not want a direct replacement because he wanted more control over that operation,’ a Downing Street source said. Barrow, a Russian expert who had done the hard yards in Moscow,