Remaking One Nation. Nick Timothy
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overwhelmingly in our interests – and in those of the wider world – that the EU should succeed.’11 In Washington, she pressed President Trump and won from him an unequivocal public commitment to NATO and the collective security of the West.
This was a real achievement, but behind the scenes, we were worrying. We had got off to a bad start with Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s permanent representative in Brussels. His advice in meetings was pessimistic and bordered on the destructive. We could not negotiate before triggering Article 50, he said, but neither should we trigger Article 50, because it was a trap. Every policy option was impossible, he would argue: there was no way through the mess, because Brexit itself was impossible.
Ivan also had a strange relationship with the media. Former advisers to David Cameron warned us that he had briefed against them during the renegotiation prior to the referendum. ‘He did it the whole time’, one said. ‘He is super smart, but prone to child-like tantrums and cannot pursue anything but his own personal agenda.’12 During Theresa’s premiership, newspaper reports by Brussels correspondents regularly contained quotations from ‘diplomatic sources’ that bore close resemblance to Ivan’s private criticisms of Brexit.
Ivan’s behaviour frustrated us all, including his fellow civil servants. Eventually, Jeremy Heywood suggested to Ivan that he should move on to another senior post. But very abruptly, Ivan instead resigned, writing an email to his team demanding that they continue to ‘speak truth to power’.13 Unsurprisingly, the email reached the media in no time at all. Ivan was quickly replaced by Sir Tim Barrow, a Foreign Office star, but he was to remain a prominent and trenchant critic not only of Brexit policy, but of Brexit itself.
Things were little better with some senior ministers. Meetings at Cabinet and with ministers were bad-tempered. Philip Hammond kept pushing for Brexit to be softer and softer. He wanted to make commitments about sticking with free movement rules, for example, and refused to consider alternatives to European regulations because he believed Britain would in the end have to accept EU rules anyway. Every attempt to take Brexit policy forward was an exhausting battle with one side of Cabinet pitched against the other.
In Parliament, it was clear that the House of Lords would do what it could to frustrate Brexit. In the Commons, Labour were gearing up to oppose whatever the Government did, and there were enough rebellious Tory Remainers to render the Government’s slim majority meaningless. Fiona and I talked again and again about whether we needed an early election to help get Brexit through Parliament. But when we raised the question with Theresa, she was always quick to rebuff us.
The election campaign
I had first raised the question of an early election during the leadership campaign. Theresa was adamantly opposed: she wanted to use her launch speech to rule out any election before 2020. I thought that was a promise she might come to regret, because of the way Brexit divisions would inevitably cut across the parties in Parliament. Nonetheless, she made the promise, and I chose not to raise the subject again for several months.
But as time went by, the case for an election built. There was little sign of Parliament accepting the referendum result. Every vote in the Commons felt like a dangerous challenge, and we survived only through some deft tactics and the smart whipping operation led by Gavin Williamson. In February 2017, the Conservatives won Copeland, an area represented by Labour for more than eighty years, in a byelection.14 Afterwards, several Cabinet ministers pushed for an early election. And the polls continued to look good. In April 2017, we had a poll lead over Labour of 21 percentage points.15
The coalition of support for an early election grew. Inside Number Ten, JoJo Penn and Chris Wilkins joined Fiona and me in arguing we needed to go back to the country. After Copeland, Stephen Gilbert and senior staff from CCHQ joined the chorus. In March, William Hague used his Daily Telegraph column to say an election would ‘strengthen the Government’s hand at home and abroad’.16 And the pressure was not only political. Jeremy Heywood told Theresa he thought she needed a mandate and a majority to get Brexit done.
Theresa’s attitude changed quite abruptly on 29 March. On that day, she sent her letter giving formal notification to the Council of Ministers of Britain’s intention to withdraw from the EU. When she made her statement in Parliament, the mood in the Commons was uneasy. She was interrupted repeatedly, and her statement prompted jeers and sarcastic laughter from the opposition benches. She did not decide to call an early election immediately after that statement, but I could tell her judgement changed that day. I sensed she was starting to believe an election was unavoidable.
Still, she took her time to decide. Ideally, the general election would have been held on 4 May, the same day as the local and mayoral elections, but the deadline to bring about an election that day came and went. Theresa finally announced her decision on 18 April. By that time, thanks to the timetable set out by the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act and the need to conclude parliamentary business, polling day could be no earlier than 8 June. The campaign was to last seven and a half weeks. We had sacrificed the advantage of surprise and made the first of many mistakes.
It is important to remember that at this point Theresa’s leadership was still incredibly popular in the country. The political strategy we had established – framed in her original Downing Street speech and fleshed out at the party conference – was working well. She was determined to lead Britain out of the European Union, but she was just as determined to bring about lasting change to social and economic policy. She consciously put herself at the service of working- and middle-class families, and talked much more about using the power of government to change lives for the better. This was the strategy that had created her 21-point poll lead.
Yet none of us on the Downing Street staff, nor even among the senior CCHQ staff, had ever run a national election campaign. We had to bring in external support. So Stephen Gilbert returned to the fray, and so did Lynton Crosby, who had run the Tory election campaigns of 2005 and 2015. With Crosby came his business partner, Mark Textor, and the former Obama campaign adviser, Jim Messina.
Lynton was adamant we needed a completely different approach for an election campaign. Talking about workers’ rights or public services, for example, would only increase the salience of issues that make people more likely to vote Labour. Just talking about policy was a bad thing, because policies are complicated. They prompt attacks from critics and opponents, and they muddy the message. It is much better, he said, to keep finding new devices to keep repeating the core message. And the opinion research, he said, showed swing voters did not want change. They wanted stability and continuity. Out went Theresa the changemaker, and in came the soundbite that would soon be mocked mercilessly: ‘strong and stable government’. And so our answer to everything became strong and stable, strong and stable, strong and stable.
Before the campaign began, we had envisaged a campaigning style that would reflect Theresa’s more traditional, unspun manner. We talked about holding daily press conferences, like in the elections of old, in which we would announce a new policy, or highlight a particular issue, or scrutinize our opponents. We expected to use different ministers, as well as Theresa, to front up each event. But this too was rejected. Press conferences would invite the media to cause all sorts of trouble, and we would lose control of the message. And the polling showed that while Theresa was tremendously popular, other ministers were not, and the Conservative brand itself was still badly tainted. And so we ended up with Theresa, introverted and shy, leading a campaign asking people not to vote for the Conservatives but ‘Theresa May’s team’.
We could have chosen to resist these changes. We were powerful enough to do so. But we didn’t. Ironically, after being criticized as ‘control freaks’ in Number Ten, Fiona and I handed over control of the campaign to Lynton and the consultants. We knew we had never run a national campaign, and we put our trust in the people who had. Our roles would be subordinate to the consultants. Fiona took responsibility for communications. I took on policy. JoJo took on a sort of coordinating function. Chris, having been strategy director in Number Ten, was left kicking his heels as the new campaign strategists took over.
And the problems kept coming. Theresa