Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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populist campaign, coming hot on the heels of Brexit, and what it meant for British politics. A source observed, ‘We collectively said to each other, “This is why you cannot underestimate Corbyn. If he campaigns on the basis of emotion, he can win. The government does facts, but we don’t live in facts any more. We have to explain facts through emotional stories. You have to tell stories.”’ It was an analysis they would have done well to remember when May called her own election.
Trump’s victory sent shockwaves through Whitehall and prompted hasty assessments of the damage he might do. Concern focused on his declaration that NATO was ‘obsolete’. Trump’s aide Steve Bannon, the alt-right theorist who ran Breitbart News before revitalising Trump’s campaign, was a vociferous opponent of the EU and had professed the hope that it would break up. EU foreign ministers called an immediate ‘panic meeting’ as if a war had broken out rather than democratic elections in a close ally. It was boycotted by Boris Johnson, who told his counterparts, ‘I think it’s time we snapped out of the collective whinge-o-rama,’ turning an attempt to curry favour with the new administration into an insult to Britain’s negotiating partners.
In what seemed to be a snub to the UK – but was probably an early sign of chaos over protocol in the Trump White House – May was only the tenth foreign leader to be called by Trump. The Australian premier Malcolm Turnbull jumped the queue by getting the new president’s mobile number from Greg Norman, the golfer. In recompense, Boris Johnson was the first foreign politician on vice president Mike Pence’s call list. The media wondered if Britain’s lowly place in the queue was anything to do with a tweet by Fiona Hill saying ‘Trump is a chump’, and one by Nick Timothy in May, which read, ‘As a Tory I don’t want any “reaching out” to Trump.’ Yet May’s team now began a systematic wooing operation to get the prime minister to the front of the queue for a White House visit.
On Saturday 12 November, Darroch was just digesting the fact that his election night memo had been leaked to the Sunday Times when things got worse. On Twitter there appeared pictures of Farage posing with Trump in front of the golden doors of his apartment at the top of Trump Tower in New York. The president was in the middle of picking his senior staff but still had time to sit down for nearly an hour with Farage, the businessman Arron Banks, who had funded the Leave cause to the tune of £6 million, and Gerry Gunster, the US political consultant who had brought some order to their anarchic campaign. They were accompanied by Banks’ sidekick and spokesman Andy Wigmore, a part-time diplomat, and Raheem Kassam, Farage’s former spokesman, who worked for the British end of Bannon’s Breitbart operation.
Farage had attended a rally to support Trump in the final weeks of the campaign and was on Fox News most nights predicting that he would win. Now the favour was returned. Trump believed he would not have won without the example of Brexit and saw Farage as the sine qua non of the Leave campaign. The president-elect’s opening question was, ‘Nigel, do you think Brexit was bigger or was my election bigger?’ Farage deferred to Trump, calling Trump’s win ‘Brexit plus, plus plus’. Banks explained, ‘What Trump clearly recognises is that it’s all part of the same anti-establishment movement that’s been spreading like wildfire. In his own mind, he sees the connection between the two. He sees Nigel as the architect of Brexit.’ The president made warm noises about a free trade deal with Britain, and Farage also got Trump to agree to the return to the Oval Office of the bust of Winston Churchill which had been removed by Barack Obama.
The meeting was embarrassing for the government, more so when Farage began offering himself as an informal envoy to the White House, an idea closed down fast. A Downing Street aide said, ‘I think the UK brings enough to the special relationship for it to be special without Nigel Farage.’ By the time Farage met Trump, the government had already dangled the prospect of a state visit to Britain, using the queen as their ‘secret weapon’ to woo the president. Trump gushed to Farage and Banks, ‘My late mother, Mary, loved the Queen. I’m going to meet her, too. I can’t wait to come over to England. My mum would be chuffed to bits when I meet the Queen.’
That did not stop Trump making mischief. On 21 November, he tweeted, ‘Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job!’ Downing Street said there was ‘no vacancy’, but for Darroch it was another setback. It was ten more days before May received a second call from Trump to help cement their relationship.
Boris Johnson also had some ground to make up. In 2015, after Trump had suggested there were ‘no go areas’ of London where the British police feared to tread, Johnson publicly accused him of ‘betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of president of the United States’. In early October the foreign secretary had told a friend, ‘This is an election that is going to expose America’s primal psyche as never before. If it is Trump, it will be a victory of really base daytime TV Redneck America.’
Now the foreign secretary and his advisers had emerged as key contacts for Mike Pence and the ideological end of team Trump – Stephen Miller and chief strategist Steve Bannon – while Hill and Timothy dealt with Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, and Katie Perrior talked to Sean Spicer, her opposite number in the White House. Johnson’s advisers were keen to go to the US to meet the people they had been speaking to on the phone, but it was decreed they could not travel before Hill and Timothy. The decision would lead to mounting frustration.
The chiefs finally flew to Washington in secret in mid-December to meet Priebus and around ten other key Trump World contacts at a series of hastily arranged meetings in hotels, restaurants and coffee shops. To the rage of one colleague, the chiefs – who were accompanied by Johnny Hall, a private secretary, and Richard ‘Tricky’ Jackson, May’s head of operations – flew business class. ‘That’s one of those things nobody does,’ the source said. ‘It is taxpayers’ money. They should have just phoned ahead and got an upgrade.’ The chiefs did not apologise for their comments on Twitter, which were not raised by the Americans either. Hill and Timothy met business associates of Trump and reported back to May, ‘He’s not a politician and he doesn’t behave like a politician and if you want to understand the administration and influence it then the best thing you can do is a build a relationship with him on those terms.’ The reward came on 8 January when Trump announced – via Twitter, of course – ‘I look very much forward to meeting Prime Minister Theresa May in Washington in the Spring. Britain, a longtime U.S. ally, is very special!’
The same day Trump announced May’s visit, the prime minister was due to do her first broadcast interview of the year, the launch show for Sky News’s new Sunday political presenter Sophy Ridge. With Trump at the top of the news, Katie Perrior expected the young host would put her boss on the spot about a tape that had emerged during the presidential election campaign in which Trump boasted about groping women, saying he could ‘grab them by the pussy’ because of his celebrity status.
On the way to the studio in her armoured Jaguar, Perrior embarked on one of the most awkward conversations that can ever have been had with a British prime minister. To the snorts of the police protection officer, Perrior told May she would probably be asked what she thought of Trump’s ‘pussy’ comments, and warned her the cameras would zoom in tight on her face, expecting her jaw to fall into the grimace that seized her at moments of unease. ‘I don’t do that,’ May said, denying the evidence of a thousand press photographs. ‘You do,’ said Perrior. ‘Keep completely and utterly still – poker face.’2
When Ridge asked May how the comments made her feel as a woman, the prime minister kept her composure and replied, ‘I think that’s unacceptable.’
The chiefs’ trip had released Boris Johnson to make his own connections with team Trump. That night, 8 January, the foreign secretary was in New York for the first face-to-face meetings at Trump Tower. ‘The Number 10 view was, “Boris, you speak to Bannon”,’ a Foreign Office source said. ‘They’re both agitators and disruptors. Bannon was blowing up the realm. Boris is the same.’ In the boardroom on the twentieth floor of Trump’s empire, Johnson and his team met Bannon and Jared Kushner, husband of the president-elect’s daughter Ivanka and a key power broker.