Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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the words of one of May’s aides, was a reputation for ‘giving good independent analysis and advice in the manner we’d expect senior diplomats to behave’. The contrast with their view of Rogers was obvious. In the Foreign Office, the admiration was distilled into one phrase: ‘There is a saying, “Don’t fuck with Tim Barrow,”’ one official said. Barrow refused to see his new role downgraded into a Robbins satrapy and the power play was rebuffed. ‘If you have done the dark arts in Russia you know how to play the game,’ said an admirer.
Boris Johnson phoned Steve Baker, the Eurosceptics’ shop steward, and briefed him on Barrow, asking for a public endorsement. The Eurosceptic MPs quickly offered their support.
David Davis received a text from Rogers after he had jumped overboard, which revealed how bruised he had been by being depicted as a bulwark of the Brussels and Whitehall establishment. ‘I’m not a member of the establishment, I’m a grammar school boy from middle England, the son of a grammar school teacher and a school secretary.’ A minister said, ‘He saw himself on one level as very ordinary, on the other not very ordinary at all.’
Rogers was prepared to stay in the civil service, but over the next forty-eight hours a succession of ministers told Downing Street they could not trust him and would not work with him. Realising the game was up, he quit the civil service altogether on 5 January. May’s aides were relieved by his departure. ‘The number of stories emanating from Brussels correspondents from “senior diplomatic sources” reduced,’ one said.
Yet gone too was a vast stock of European knowledge, institutional memory and the most capacious address book in Brussels. Looking back, it is possible to judge that David Cameron’s negotiation with Brussels was hamstrung by listening too much to Rogers and his calls for caution over what could be achieved. Yet, as it became clear that the government might have been better to delay the triggering of Article 50, would have to pay a sizeable bill, would need a transition deal, and would be confronted by Eurosceptics pushing for a no-deal departure for which Whitehall was not prepared, it was possible to conclude that Theresa May’s negotiation with Brussels was damaged by not listening to Ivan Rogers nearly enough.
Nonetheless, with the most difficult official out of the way, the prime minister now had to square her cabinet so she could make the big speech spelling out how she was planning to conduct the Brexit negotiations.
7
On 17 January, more than one hundred days after Theresa May gave her speech on Brexit at the Conservative Party conference, the prime minister got to her feet in Lancaster House and finally confirmed in public that she wanted a ‘clean break’ from the European Union by leaving the single market and abandoning full membership of the customs union. She announced that Britain would seek a ‘new partnership’, not ‘partial membership, associate membership or anything that leaves us half-in, half-out’ of the EU. Seeking to learn from David Cameron, she threatened to walk if the terms were not good enough, declaring, ‘No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain.’
Those with a perverse sense of history might have recalled that Lancaster House, one of London’s great neoclassical Georgian buildings, was the venue where Margaret Thatcher in 1988 had declared her ambition to take Britain into the single market. Here now was Britain’s second woman prime minister declaring an intention to leave. It was a measure of the importance that she attached to the occasion that May took to the stage in the green and blue tartan Vivienne Westwood suit she had worn to her leadership campaign launch six months earlier. Before a canvas of King George III, the monarch who lost the American colonies, May delivered her case for British independence. The ambassadors of the twenty-seven other member states applauded, grateful at least for some clarity.
The Lancaster House speech had taken shape over the Christmas break, when Nick Timothy sat down with May to agree the main points. ‘This is what I want the speech to be,’ she said, explaining her priorities. Timothy worked her thoughts into twelve statements of intent, or ‘pillars’, some of them momentous, others peripheral. ‘How does this structure work for you?’ he asked. ‘I like it,’ May replied. It says much about May that she did not boil the points down to a media-friendly list of ten. When he had the skeleton of a text, Timothy brought in Chris Wilkins to help with the second draft. As the speech was refined, May ‘commented on the arguments and the substance more than the language and soundbites’. Since so much of the substance had been months in the planning, Timothy told colleagues, he found it ‘one of the easiest speeches I’ve ever written’.
Before the Christmas break, the chiefs had taken soundings from a range of Conservatives who would have liked to think they would be consulted about the substance of such a momentous speech. However, as at conference, the decision-making circle was extremely small. Accompanied by Michael Tomlinson, another Eurosceptic MP, Steve Baker, the chairman of the European Research Group, went into Downing Street on 19 December to see Timothy and Hill. ‘We were on transmit, they were on receive,’ Baker told a friend. Baker was clear that May must stick to her three red lines: no single market, no customs union, and no ECJ oversight. The chiefs took all this in but gave nothing away. ‘They were very cool operators,’ Baker reported back to the other Eurosceptics.
May herself had played host to a group of a dozen Remain MPs, led by the former minister Alistair Burt, in her House of Commons office just before Christmas, at the meeting from which Nicky Morgan had been banned. They pressed the case they had been making publicly that the government’s plans should be converted into a white paper, so they had legislative weight and could be properly scrutinised, and that Parliament should be granted a vote on the final deal.
The chiefs also talked to ‘DD, Hammond and Boris’, as well as Damian Green and Amber Rudd. ‘The consultation was not wide,’ a Downing Street official said. Unlike Cameron, who had toured the capitals of Europe before revealing his negotiating demands the previous February, the prime minister did not consult foreign diplomats, let alone foreign leaders, about her intentions.
The key development that helped May to achieve a cabinet consensus ahead of the speech was the emergence of an alliance between David Davis and Philip Hammond. Despite initial ‘mutual suspicion’, the Brexit secretary and the chancellor had come to see each other as the ‘grown-ups’ around the table. Davis’s chief of staff, James Chapman, and Hammond’s special adviser, Poppy Trowbridge, plotted to bring the two big beasts together like zookeepers encouraging reluctant pandas to mate. ‘James constantly impressed on DD the importance of Hammond because Hammond needed a friend,’ a source said. ‘They influenced each other.’ The two men agreed to meet once a week. ‘They went for drinks in Hammond’s flat, quite often.’
Hammond was beginning to understand that his defence of membership of the customs union was a lost cause. Davis, now better read in the detail, had begun to appreciate the complexities which concerned the Treasury. Cabinet sources say that he resorted less often to the old Brexiteer argument that ‘German car makers and French knicker manufacturers’ would ride to Britain’s rescue and insist on a good trade deal with Britain. A government source who sympathised with the Treasury said, ‘Davis made a lot of progress. It was painful at times. But DD did want to work with Big Phil. He did recognise it was vastly more difficult than he first thought.’ Davis himself told MPs, ‘This is likely to be the most complicated negotiation of modern times, and maybe the most complicated negotiation of all time.’
The rapprochement between Davis and Hammond was evident to cabinet ministers in meetings of the Brexit subcommittee. ‘They would snigger together,’ a minister said, at some of the contributions from Boris Johnson and Liam Fox. This created suspicion among some Leave-voting ministers, who wondered if DD was backing away from his belief that the UK could not stay in the customs union. ‘There was a period when we all thought DD was wobbling,’ said a leading minister.
They were more suspicious on 1 December, when the Brexit secretary told the Commons, in response to a question, that the government would ‘consider’ paying to