Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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guidance. ‘She didn’t have the character to elicit the information she might want,’ a Home Office official said, ‘or know what’s true and what’s not true. You and I will hear a story and know if it’s right or not. I think she found that very difficult. She became reliant on others to do that screening, shielding, interpreting on her behalf.’ Others disliked the way Hill and Timothy substituted their judgement for May’s. When Alasdair Palmer, a Home Office speechwriter, did once see the home secretary alone, he wrote the speech to reflect May’s views and then submitted it to the twins. Hill asked, ‘Have you been talking to the home secretary?’ Palmer said he had. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she should say these things.’ Palmer suggested that was up to May. ‘It’s up to me,’ Hill said.6
Their determination to go to any lengths to protect May led to disaster in June 2014. Hill’s downfall came as a result of a feud between May’s team and Michael Gove, then the education secretary, over the issue of extremism in schools. Gove briefed journalists from The Times that the Home Office was to blame for the failure to tackle the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ plot to take over schools in Birmingham. He singled out for criticism Charles Farr, director of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, saying officials only took on Islamist extremists when they turned to violence, an approach Gove compared to ‘just beating back the crocodiles that come close to the boat rather than draining the swamp’. At that time Farr was in a relationship with Hill.
Furious, she retaliated by releasing onto the Home Office website a letter May had written to Gove, accusing his department of failing to act when concerns about the Birmingham schools were brought to its attention in 2010. The document was published in the small hours of the morning, after Hill and Timothy had enjoyed a night out at the Loose Box restaurant in Westminster with journalists from the Daily Mail. To make matters worse, Hill gave quotes to journalists suggesting Gove had endangered children. ‘Lord knows what more they have overlooked on the subject of the protection of kids in state schools,’ she said. ‘It scares me.’ Following an investigation by Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, David Cameron ordered that Hill be sacked, and that Gove issue a written apology to both May and Farr.
Hill found work at the Centre for Social Justice, a thinktank founded by Iain Duncan Smith, where she wrote a report calling for more effort by the authorities to tackle modern slavery, before taking up a post at lobbying firm Lexington Communications.
Timothy got his comeuppance a few months later in December 2014 when he and Stephen Parkinson – another of May’s Home Office special advisers – were kicked off the list of Conservative candidates for refusing to campaign in the Rochester by-election. The decision was taken by Grant Shapps, then the party chairman, who had decreed that all candidates and special advisers had to help out. Shapps felt they ‘thought themselves above the process’ and made an example of them. May phoned Shapps twice to ask for their reinstatement and also collared him in the margins of a cabinet meeting, but he stood firm. He reflected afterwards that, despite being a cabinet colleague for three years, it was the only time May had bothered to talk to him. It was a ripple in a pool which was to have further implications later.
In July 2015, Timothy became director of the New Schools Network. Yet he continued to exercise influence from afar, contacting his protégé Will Tanner, another special adviser, regularly about the running of May’s office. A year later the gang was back together in Number 10. An MP close to May summed up the relationship: ‘She wouldn’t be in Downing Street without their support. And she wouldn’t have got to Downing Street, if she didn’t have something about her. What Nick and Fi added to that was the ability to make the political weather. Very few people are capable of that.’
Thrown into the deep end, May’s authenticity made her popular. A cabinet colleague said, ‘There are a very small collection of politicians who are immediately attractive to the public, because they’re normal human beings, they see someone who’s true to themselves – Ken Clarke is the classic example. You will never hear Ken say something in private that he would not say in public. The PM is the same.’ During the leadership contest, Clarke had given May a helping hand, calling her a ‘bloody difficult woman’. May adopted the phrase as her calling card. Those looking for her weaknesses might have reflected that Clarke had explained her better than she had ever managed herself.
There were other clues too about what was to come. During the leadership election one of her aides said, ‘A large number of MPs said I’m backing Theresa because she came to my constituency for the dinner fifteen years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. She has met and engaged with a huge number of people, and most of those people really like her. The problem is people who’ve never engaged with her. And that’s where her appeal falls short. She can’t stand on a stage.’ An official who worked with May in the Home Office said, ‘She instils loyalty in people when you’re close. At a distance, it’s much more difficult to get that. She doesn’t reach out to people. She knows who she is and expects you to come to her.’ Knowing how difficult that was for May, Hill and Timothy devised for her a ‘submarine strategy’ whereby she kept her head down, surfacing rarely to make carefully planned set-piece interventions. At the Home Office, where most news is bad news, it was a shrewd strategy. May dodged public scrutiny but made three of the boldest speeches of the Cameron years – a 2013 party conference speech which was a leadership pitch in all but name; a 2014 warning to the Police Federation that officers should ‘face up to reality’; and a party conference speech in 2015 in which she threw raw red meat to the party faithful on immigration that earned her the appellation ‘Enoch Powell in a dress’.
In Number 10, Hill and Timothy took the same approach. On the steps of Downing Street May gave a very well received speech vowing to ‘fight against the burning injustices’ of poverty, race, class and health and make Britain ‘a country that works for everyone’. When it came time to set out May’s plans for Brexit, they knew it was the moment to write a big speech.
1
It all began with a phrase and an idea. The phrase, in a perfect encapsulation of so much that was to follow, was part Nick Timothy, part Theresa May. The two of them and Fiona Hill were in May’s parliamentary office. It was July 2016 and David Cameron had resigned. The Conservative leadership contest was under way and they were discussing how May, a leading though not prominent Remainer, could reassure the party base that she would respect the results of the EU referendum. As they tossed around phrases, Timothy said, ‘Brexit means Brexit,’ at which point May chimed in, mimicking the jingle-like cadence Timothy had used and adding the coda, ‘… and we’ll make a success of it’.
It was a phrase, as Timothy was to put it, ‘with many lives’. The immediate purpose ‘was to be very clear that she, as someone who had voted remain, respected the result and Brexit was going to happen’. In the months to come the phrase evolved. ‘It also became a message to people who didn’t like the result that they had to respect it. Brexit had to mean actually leaving and limiting the relationship, not having us effectively rejoin.’
‘Brexit means Brexit’ was a statement of intent, but there was still the question of what that meant in practice. Britain had voted to leave the European Union, but the destination had not been on the ballot paper. The Leave campaign deliberately never specified which model of future relationship should be pursued. Public debate dissolved into whether the UK would mimic Norway, Switzerland, Turkey or Canada.
Norway was a member of the European Economic Area (EEA) along with all twenty-eight EU countries, plus Liechtenstein and Iceland, giving it full membership of the single market, an area of 500 million people within which the free movement of goods, capital, services and labour – the ‘four freedoms’ – was guaranteed. While outside the European Union, Norway paid money into the EU budget and had to agree to all the standards and regulations of the market, except those on agriculture,