Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
Читать онлайн книгу.
calm under pressure and brought a deep knowledge of the Eurosceptic press, who would have to be kept on side through the negotiations. It was to be a mistake for both him and Davis.
To start with, DExEU was ‘a total and utter shambles’. Four ministers were crammed into 9 Downing Street, where there had previously been just one. ‘The department didn’t function properly,’ said one official. ‘One of the floors was a courtroom which we couldn’t change because it was a listed building. The press office people were sitting in the dock in the Supreme Court of the Colonies.’ The brass plaque on the front door still read ‘Chief Whip’s Office’.
DExEU was able to coax highly regarded officials to join from across Whitehall since Brexit was a career opportunity, but the civil service had to implement an outcome in which many did not believe. In Brussels, Ivan Rogers gave his staff a pep talk: ‘You’re going to be integral to the biggest negotiation the country’s ever done and your expertise is valued. But if you can’t work for a government that’s delivering a Brexit – and that may be a hard Brexit – don’t do it. Walk out.’ Very few did. But DExEU officials were hamstrung by not knowing May’s planned destination. ‘It could be anything from staying in the EEA to hard Brexit,’ an official said. ‘They didn’t really know where to start.’
The architecture created by Heywood and the chiefs created two problems, which would hamper the government’s planning for the next year. As the lead department, DExEU was both a key participant and expected to be an honest broker with other departments. A cabinet minister said, ‘DD was both a player and the referee.’ The resentments led to briefings against Davis and his new department. ‘There was a turf war,’ said a senior DExEU official. ‘The Foreign Office was massively put out and wanted to demonstrate that DExEU didn’t know what they were doing. We had to fight against that backdrop. It was Jeremy Heywood’s fault. There should never have been a separate department.’
The second problem concerned the official who was to play the most important role in the Brexit negotiations. Oliver Robbins was appointed not only permanent secretary at DExEU, the most senior mandarin in charge of the department, but also the prime minister’s personal EU envoy – her ‘sherpa’, in Brussels parlance. Tall, mild-mannered and bespectacled, Robbins was a labrador of a man but with the brains of a fox. Just forty-one when he got the jobs, he had little EU experience. What he did have was the patronage of Jeremy Heywood – who was grooming him as a successor – the trust of Theresa May, from a spell as second permanent secretary in the Home Office, and the power of incumbency as David Cameron’s last Europe adviser. He had also served as the prime minister’s principal private secretary during the handover from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown and as the director of intelligence and security in the Cabinet Office. He combined his Rolls-Royce CV with bags of intelligence and sharp elbows clothed in a slightly old-fashioned pompous bonhomie.
Ivan Rogers told Robbins he was taking on too much. ‘You’ve got two impossible jobs,’ he said. ‘Try sticking to one impossible job. The only job that really matters is sherpa because you have to be her eyes and ears around the circuit. You need to be the person to whom people transmit messages if they want to get them to the prime minister. If you’re not that, you’re toast.’
Robbins disagreed. ‘It would be harder to do one job and not the other,’ he said. A year later it was decided this was a mistake.
Robbins had May’s trust. On foreign trips, other officials watched jealously as he talked to the prime minister alone, without Hill or Timothy listening in. ‘He was allowed to have conversations with her one on one,’ a colleague said. A senior mandarin who worked closely with Robbins described him as ‘an upwards manager’, good at ingratiating himself with his bosses, less so with his peers.
Robbins’ split role created tensions with David Davis. ‘DD and Olly didn’t see each other regularly enough and Olly was travelling an enormous amount,’ a colleague said. Robbins’ office in 70 Whitehall was a ten-minute walk from Davis’s in 9 Downing Street. ‘The consequence was they hardly ever saw each other. You want your minister and your permanent secretary – who is also the PM’s sherpa – to be talking to each other all the time and they didn’t.’ That meant May’s two key advisers on Brexit ‘weren’t properly aligning where they were headed’. The official said, ‘DD was therefore saying things in public that were contrary to what Olly thought was a sensible position.’
It was clear to Davis that Robbins put more time and effort into the Downing Street half of his job. ‘His primary concern was the relationship with Nick [Timothy] because he knew nothing was decided by anyone else,’ a DExEU source said. Robbins was not alone in this attitude. Those who had served in the Cabinet Office’s EU secretariat could not see the point of DExEU. ‘There was resentment among the officials that they had ministers at all,’ said a source close to Davis. ‘They just thought they should report to Number 10.’ Davis war-gamed various scenarios for the Brexit negotiations but could never get Robbins to discuss ‘the plan’ – the strategy for the negotiation, which cards Britain held and when they should be played. More than one official concluded, ‘It was all in Olly’s head. It wasn’t really a properly functioning relationship.’
DExEU was not the only new department established that summer. May also ordered the creation of a Department for International Trade (DIT) to drum up deals with countries outside the EU. She handed the keys to Liam Fox, a former defence secretary and Brexiteer whose cabinet career had ended in controversy under Cameron but who was an enthusiast for free trade and travel and had cleverly cultivated May for years. ‘Liam would take her out for lunch, which no one else could bear to do,’ a special adviser recalled. DIT was slower to get off the ground but cannibalised UK trade policy and UK Export Finance, took the Defence Export Services Organisation from the Ministry of Defence and grabbed UK Trade and Investment, the part of the Foreign Office which was supposed to promote business out of Britain’s embassies overseas. It would take until January, six months after the department was set up, to get a permanent secretary: Antonia Romeo, another Heywood protégée. It was not until June 2017 that Britain acquired a lead trade negotiator. Crawford Falconer, an experienced New Zealander, took the job after the first choice, Canadian Jonathan Fried, walked away at the final stage because Heywood refused to raise the £260,000 salary.
When tackling Brexit, May had learned three crucial lessons from David Cameron’s renegotiation with Brussels before the referendum. The first was to ask for what Britain wanted, rather than making an opening offer calibrated to what the rest of the EU might accept. The second was to at least look like you were prepared to walk away from the talks to maximise leverage. The third was not to broadcast her negotiating position in advance to the media or MPs. A sound tactic this might have been, but by September 2016 May’s reticence in spelling out what Brexit really meant had led to claims she was ‘dithering’. The only announcement had been a reassurance to farmers and universities, on 13 August, that until 2020 they would keep the same level of subsidy outside the EU as they enjoyed inside it.
MPs on both sides of the EU divide were twitchy. Ken Clarke, the former cabinet minister and arch-Europhile, accused May of running a ‘government with no policies’. As the party conference approached – it was to be held, appropriately, in Timothy’s home city of Birmingham – May knew she had to add flesh to ‘Brexit means Brexit’.
The prime minister’s challenge was to reassure Brexiteers that she would honour the result of the referendum, despite her decision to vote Remain and despite insisting to those who voted to stay that she would get the best deal possible. The first part of the equation was made easier by May’s less than enthusiastic support for Cameron. ‘She was a reluctant Remainer,’ said one adviser, ‘but she’s never been any fan of the EU. She was absolutely comfortable in her own skin about why we were leaving.’ Timothy was a longstanding Brexiteer and Fiona Hill, while also a Remain voter, was quickly reconciled to the result and an enthusiast for the opportunities Brexit offered. May saw her first priority as confirming the triumph of the 52 per cent, both to prevent civil disorder and protect her own position within the Conservative Party. She told her closest aides, ‘We need to keep this country stable because this could get quite messy.’ The senior Eurosceptics, including veterans like Bill Cash, Bernard Jenkin