Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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makers really want, or the French farmers? He wanted to know what final squeeze plays they might use. What might Spain want on Gibraltar?’ Davis told colleagues, ‘We’ll have to bully, cajole, coerce and bribe our way through. That’s the nature of this. It makes the Congress of Vienna look like a walk in the park.’
Davis and his minister in the Lords, George Bridges, clashed over preparations for a new customs regime. Davis told officials they were ‘making it all far too complicated’. He said, ‘We already have non-EU customs processes, we just increase the capacity.’ Much of it, he argued, could be pre-notified so customs officers had only to use a barcode reader to know what was in each container, allowing most consignments to be nodded through. Nonetheless, Bridges was concerned that a lot needed to change at ports and airports if even a minimal level of inspections were needed for EU goods. A DExEU source said, ‘We didn’t have space for checking French cheeses or French livestock. There were potentially technical issues with the IT. Sometimes when David was confronted with these issues, his reaction was, “Don’t tell me this.” Sometimes he didn’t want to hear tricky news.’
There were also divisions over the role of the European Court of Justice, which the prime minister had made a red line the previous year. Bridges and Davis’s chief of staff, James Chapman, were concerned that the implications of ruling out ECJ involvement in any deal had not been thought through and would make it difficult to arbitrate a trade deal or continue as members of justice and home affairs initiatives. ‘It’s difficult to do that if you insist that the letters “ECJ” don’t appear anywhere in the new treaty,’ a source said. Davis and David Jones, his minister of state, were adamant that there would have to be a new arrangement, in which oversight of future deals would involve a hybrid panel including judges from Britain and the EU with an independent member.
As the legal complications were examined, DExEU officials grew frustrated that the prime minister was taking independent legal advice from lawyers she had brought into Downing Street from the Home Office. One official said, ‘They’re not the experts on the EU. You don’t use your family lawyer to conduct a trade deal.’
The Brexit department itself was not settled. ‘DExEU staff were tearing their hair out. There was a lot of discontent. They didn’t think they had clear instructions. They didn’t see DD as a good leader,’ one official said. They also had, in Oliver Robbins, a permanent secretary who was rarely in the building. ‘Olly was always on the road,’ a minister recalled. ‘Every other department I’ve worked in you had ministerial “prayers” where everyone goes around the table saying what they’re doing and what they’re concerned about. We just didn’t have that. Olly wasn’t there. It’s very difficult to see how you can be running a machine that big and that important while also on the road.’ In March, Davis hired Philip Rycroft to become Robbins’ deputy and take day-to-day charge of the civil service team.
Far more serious was the impact of Robbins’ dual role as permanent secretary at DExEU and May’s EU ‘sherpa’. It led to the prime minister and Robbins commissioning work from officials in the department which was sent to Downing Street, leaving Davis and the other ministers oblivious that it had even been commissioned and unable to read the resulting reports. A DExEU source said, ‘There would be papers going into Number 10 whose existence DD was not aware of.’ It put civil servants in a difficult position when they were banned from showing their work to their own ministers. Robbins was not secretive about it, but he told Davis, ‘I have two responsibilities: to you, as your permanent secretary, but also to her, as her sherpa, and there will be times that I want to put information to her and she’ll want to discuss it with me and I won’t want to show you.’
One minister said Robbins often did not pass on to Davis intelligence from his trips around the EU. ‘There wasn’t really a great sense of what Olly was picking up on the grapevine,’ he said. ‘There were meetings going on quite often with the prime minister, Olly and the chiefs of staff, about policy positions that we were never part of. We never had had meetings on a formal systematic basis with the EU policy unit in Number 10.’ That group, which included Denzil Davidson and Peter Storr, was also ‘frozen out’ by Robbins and the chiefs. Davidson and George Bridges ‘formed an alliance’ to keep each other informed.
It became clear to Davis’s team that Robbins, as a career civil servant, put his sherpa duties first. DExEU ministers were constantly frustrated that they did not know the prime minister’s intentions and had never seen an overarching plan for Brexit written down. They did not know if that was because none existed or because May was pathologically secretive. ‘We were shut out of the loop because either she doesn’t trust people, or she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ one minister said. There was also suspicion that Robbins did not always share bad news with May. ‘Olly saw the way that Ivan [Rogers] went and acted accordingly,’ said a source.
Similarly, officials in DExEU put their loyalty to Robbins above their loyalty to the secretary of state. On one occasion James Chapman asked officials where their work on automatic number-plate recognition systems had got to. The systems were expected to be employed at customs and would be used to monitor the Irish border. ‘We asked for this three months ago,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’ After a year at the Treasury, Chapman was used to officials working fast to tight deadlines. This time he was told, ‘We’ve done a bit of work on customs for Olly. It’s gone to Nick [Timothy] in Number 10 because they commissioned it.’ When Davis heard this he ‘erupted’ and threatened, ‘If this carries on, I’m going to resign.’
After months of being kept in the dark, Davis confronted Robbins and May. A fellow minister said, ‘David Davis had a very forthright discussion with [Robbins] and he also spoke to the prime minister about it.’ Davis was placated by Fiona Hill, who told him at these moments, ‘Listen DD, you’re the most important member of the cabinet, you’re our favourite.’
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