Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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gamble that could end in humiliation. ‘In the end David will want to come back to the UK,’ a close friend said. ‘But he remains very unsure as to whether or not he really wants to devote his life to this battle.’
Since the previous autumn there had been overtures from the Liberal Democrats. At the party’s conference in September 2016, the leader Tim Farron praised Blair for introducing the minimum wage and investing in public services. Referencing the Iraq War, which the Lib Dems had opposed, he quipped, ‘I see Tony Blair the way I see the Stone Roses, I preferred the early work.’ Farron commissioned polling research which showed that his party’s brand was badly damaged with voters, and allies made clear he would have been prepared to countenance a name change.
Nick Clegg, who said he agreed with ‘every word’ of Blair’s speech, went further down this path than Farron. He and Blair were in regular contact. ‘They met at Open Reason, which is Nick’s organisation in central London,’ a source said. ‘They spoke a lot more on the phone. At one point they were meeting weekly.’ Ostensibly these talks were about getting Blair to persuade Labour pro-Europeans to work with the Lib Dems. Two sources, a friend of Clegg and a senior Lib Dem, both claimed that Clegg told Blair the quickest way to set up a new centre party would be to flood the Lib Dems with membership applications by Labour moderates and take over the party. ‘There are more of you than there are of us,’ he said, according to one account. ‘There was a little bit of a worry that it was a reverse takeover of the Lib Dems,’ a source close to Farron confided.
Open Britain was a useful forum, because it also got Tory Remainers in the room as well. In an interview with the New Statesman which hit the streets on 31 March, Anna Soubry stunned her Tory colleagues by declaring that she would consider joining a new party. ‘If it could somehow be the voice of a moderate, sensible, forward-thinking, visionary middle way, with open minds – actually things which I’ve believed in all my life – better get on with it.’
The ruminating about a new party gathered urgency after May called the general election and gained a patron saint on 7 May when the centrist Emmanuel Macron, who had set up a new movement, won a remarkable victory in the French presidential election. To Blair, this was proof that it was possible in a time of populist politics to win from the centre. To Peter Mandelson, the ‘simple truth of Macron’s victory is that he won by leaving his party, not despite doing so’.1 Encouraged by Mandelson and others, leading donors who had ceased to give money to Labour since Blair’s departure indicated that they would be prepared to fund a new movement or party. A close associate of Blair said, ‘People will look at Labour’s results and say, “Is this horse a dead horse or can it still be revived?” Some people have already come to the conclusion that it can’t and therefore something else is going to have to be born out of all of this. If something did happen the money would be there. The unthinkable is being thought.’
Gina Miller put her name to a tactical voting campaign run by Best for Britain – whose chief executive Eloise Todd was a regular at Blair’s monthly gatherings – to give funds, polling and campaigning help to anti-Brexit candidates. In June she was to claim in an interview that a new party would have been launched within days of the election if Labour had done worse. One source who was in close contact with Miller said, ‘I was pretty sure they were going to go the week after the election.’ But others who worked with Miller say that is not correct. A friend of Blair said his priority was to help the moderates regain control of Labour, a view echoed by a senior Labour Party official. Friends of Blair and Mandelson said David Sainsbury, the peer who had funded the pressure group Progress, was prepared to fund ‘a Tony-and-Peter-backed pressure group that would bring together all the moderate groups. That would’ve been the vehicle to be a new party, should it be necessary. If there was a leadership election after the general election and Corbyn won, there would have to be a new party. If he lost, it would just have been a moderate momentum’ to support a new leader. Blair believed that anything he was forced to front would fail and that a new movement had to develop from the grassroots up. He told people, ‘You can’t just have a group of people with money coming together and doing something. I don’t think this is going to happen through political leaders clubbing together. I think you’re going to find it starts in the country.’ Privately, he believed that if the two main parties did not respond better to the views of the electorate and those voters who felt homeless, a new party was likely.
Others involved in the conversations saw all this talk as futile. ‘There is so much money on the pro-European side of the argument that people want to give,’ one said, ‘but they don’t want to give it to another failed shitshow. The idea that they were setting up a new party – that was never what was being discussed. What they were obsessed with was this idea of building a movement that can challenge hard Brexit as a gateway to challenging Brexit itself.’
As Theresa May prepared that March to send her letter triggering Article 50, and as the complexities became clearer, a growing number of people inside the Department for Exiting the European Union were beginning to have their doubts about how their own government was handling things.
By March, with the Article 50 bill passed, DExEU under David Davis was drawing up the Great Repeal Bill, devising ways of turning European law into British law, while the Cabinet Office under Ben Gummer worked out how to make it function with the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. ‘DD brought the laws back from Brussels and Ben made them work in the UK,’ a cabinet source said. The task was far more complex than the ministers had realised. One said, ‘I was wrung out every day with the intensity of the intellectual heavy lifting we were having to do. More than half of our statute book was intertwined with European law.’
For Gummer the work was also an emotional challenge as a die-hard Remainer, but one who passionately wanted to make Brexit work with the minimum of damage to his constituents in Ipswich, who had voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. ‘It does take a degree of emotional resilience to be going in every day to make what is clearly a disaster less disastrous,’ a close confidant said.
New problems kept flaring up. With Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, increasingly threatening a second independence referendum and concerns about the prospect of a ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the cabinet held a meeting on 21 February at which Gummer was charged with finding ways of ensuring Brexit did not threaten the Union. Ministers were warned that any return to border posts in Ulster would lead to a campaign of violence by dissident Republican terrorists, while a trade arrangement with different tariffs either side of the border would lead to smuggling and complicated rules of origin on imports – and that was before ministers considered how EU migrants could enter the rest of the UK via Belfast. ‘You can’t wish these problems away,’ a senior civil servant said. The Irish situation also removed a key argument Tory ministers might have used to dissuade the Scots from voting for independence. ‘You can’t say that we’re not going to have a border with Ireland but we are going to have a hard border with Scotland,’ an official said. This did not make for a quiet life. ‘The default position with the devolved administrations is complaint,’ a Cabinet Office source said. ‘Whatever you do, however much you consult them, however much you pay attention to them, it’s never enough.’
The amount of legislation being drawn up was mounting. By mid-March it was clear that, in order to keep the Repeal Bill to a manageable size, there would need to be at least another seven bills to prepare for life outside the EU, covering immigration, tax, agriculture, trade and customs regimes, fisheries, data protection and sanctions – any one of which could be challenged and amended by MPs and peers.2
Theresa May charged Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, with designing a new system for replacing EU structural funds, worth £8.5 billion over a seven-year period for the poorer parts of the country. During the referendum campaign, Boris Johnson had told voters in Cornwall, the only area of England defined by the EU as a ‘less-developed region’, that they would get the same amount of money after Brexit. But was this still viable? ‘Cornwall gets three or four times the rest of England,’ a source said.
David Davis approached the deal like a game of chess.