Remaking One Nation. Nick Timothy
Читать онлайн книгу.
And what makes a minister successful running a government department – even a department as important as the Home Office – will not necessarily translate to Number Ten. In the Home Office, Fiona and I were able, on Theresa’s behalf, to maintain a tight grip on departmental business. We were equals in everything we did, and worked fluidly across policy, political work, strategy and communications. In Number Ten, we tried and failed to work in the same way. Our status as joint chiefs of staff sometimes caused confusion in the command chain. With notable exceptions like JoJo Penn, James Slack, Will Tanner and Chris Wilkins, we did not build a strong enough senior team to delegate with confidence. We neglected our managerial duties because our other responsibilities overwhelmed us.
Compared to life in a department, the job in Downing Street is much more about setting a strategy and allowing ministers to deliver it, coordinating efforts across departments, solving problems and ensuring delivery, and constant, human communication. The complaint that Theresa – and we, her senior advisers – brought too much of the Home Office into Number Ten was justified. The role of the prime minister is not to play every instrument in the orchestra, but to write the score and conduct the musicians. Too often, Theresa was trying to play the strings, woodwind, brass and percussion all at the same time.
Yet she often backed down when confronted by opposition. She promised to ‘repair the dysfunctional housing market’, but was too nervy about agreeing the policies that would get more houses built.6 She wanted ‘an energy policy ... [with] lower costs for users’, but ended up supporting unilateral climate change policies that will increase bills for households and industry.7 When Hammond and others objected to her policies, she watered them down or gave up on them altogether. On each occasion I tried to convince her to change fiscal policy, she refused to do so. Only once the election had been lost did she accept the need to call time on the age of austerity.
Brexit
All the while, one issue more than any other loomed before us. Brexit was the reason Theresa had become Prime Minister. Yet she had been a Remainer. Back on 24 June, early on the morning after the referendum, I called her to talk about the leadership election that would soon begin. I was surprised to find she was crying. The tears, I judged, were caused by frustration, not grief. But her reaction to the result was to worry that the people who had voted for Brexit – especially manufacturing workers in the regions – were the people who stood to lose most from Britain leaving the European Union.
I thought about that moment many times as, after I left Downing Street, Theresa’s negotiating strategy softened and softened. But at the time I had no cause to dwell on it. She came to terms with the result quickly. She stamped upon any suggestions that the referendum might be re-run. She rejected calls for different forms of associate EU membership. When ministers and officials proposed what she dismissed as ‘clinging to bits of the EU we used to like’, she relished reprimanding them. Taking off her reading glasses and waving them at her victims, she would explain that we needed to negotiate a close economic and security relationship, but we must be entirely outside the EU’s laws and institutions.
When she became Prime Minister, Theresa created two new government departments to help deliver Brexit. The first was the Department for International Trade, whose responsibilities would include the negotiation of free trade deals with other countries. The second was the Department for Exiting the European Union. The logic for creating this department was to create a Whitehall institution with a clear interest in delivering Brexit, and to reassure Leave supporters about her good intentions. ‘I will … create a new government department’, she promised during the leadership campaign, ‘responsible for conducting Britain’s negotiation with the EU and for supporting the rest of Whitehall in its European work. That department will be led by a senior Secretary of State – and I will make sure that the position is taken by a Member of Parliament who campaigned for Britain to leave the EU.’8
Strictly speaking, Theresa stuck to her promise. But the Secretary of State she appointed, David Davis, was never in charge of the negotiations. Brexit policy was discussed by the Cabinet and at regular meetings of a Cabinet sub-committee dedicated to leaving the EU. But the negotiating strategy was discussed in much smaller meetings between Theresa and her senior civil servants and political advisers. Olly Robbins, Theresa’s Brussels ‘Sherpa’, was asked to lead the negotiations, not David Davis.
David Cameron had instructed the civil service not to draw up plans for leaving the EU, fearing that preparations would play into the hands of the Leave campaign by making Brexit seem realistic and safe. So it took a little time to get things moving along. During the summer, officials and ministers conducted talks with their opposite numbers across Europe and with officials in Brussels. Theresa had wanted to start informal negotiations before giving formal notice of Britain’s intention to leave the EU. The mechanism for doing so, Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, set a two-year deadline for concluding a withdrawal agreement. But by the end of the summer, the message from the Europeans was clear, and so was the official policy advice: there would be no negotiating until Article 50 was formally triggered.
In September, Theresa decided that she would have to invoke Article 50 to get anywhere with the talks. On the opening day of the Conservative conference, she announced she would trigger by no later than the end of March 2017. And she promised to repeal the European Communities Act, which gave direct effect to EU law in Britain. ‘We will do what independent, sovereign countries do’, she said. ‘We will decide for ourselves how we control immigration. And we will be free to pass our own laws.’9
Later, it was claimed that this speech set unnecessary red lines that made the Brexit negotiations impossible. It was even claimed that the red lines were invented by Theresa and me alone, with no input from anybody else. Both claims are ridiculous. First, Brexit policy was discussed at Cabinet, in the Cabinet sub-committee, and in bilateral meetings between Theresa and her ministers. No Cabinet Secretary, and certainly not one as experienced and as proper as Sir Jeremy Heywood, would have allowed new policy to be decided and announced in such a manner. And second, as any student of the European Union knows, the EU was established, in its original form, as a customs union. Its single market then developed over time. If Britain did not leave the customs union and single market – and the laws and institutions that underpin both – what would we be leaving? As David Davis said to me at the time, the speech was little more than ‘a statement of the bleeding obvious’. And as Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal proved, it is possible to leave the EU in full accordance with the so-called ‘red lines’.
The speech was still a mistake, however. Theresa’s first significant public intervention on Brexit policy should not have been made before a partisan audience. The Europeans perceived a prime minister playing to the gallery, and that caused some misunderstandings about the way she was planning to go about the negotiations.
The next big Brexit intervention was a different matter altogether. Theresa’s Lancaster House speech was, if anything, tougher than what she said at the party conference. And yet it was received positively by Leavers and Remainers at home, and by Brussels and the remaining member states.
For the first time, Theresa explicitly ruled out membership of the customs union and the single market. She was robust with Brussels too. ‘No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal’, she warned. And if Britain was excluded from the single market, ‘we would be free to change the basis of Britain’s economic model.’ But the tone was still constructive. ‘We are leaving the European Union’, she explained, ‘but we are not leaving Europe.’ She said she had listened to the EU, which was why she would not seek to divide its four freedoms of goods, capital, services and people. The days of British ‘cherry picking’ were over: we would seek fair access to the single market, but not re-join it.10
Theresa’s next big speech – made in Philadelphia to an audience of Republican senators and congressmen – also went down well in Europe. Following the election of President Trump, many member states were worried that he was hostile to the EU and ambivalent about NATO. But in Philadelphia, Theresa came to Europe’s defence. ‘We are not turning our back on [Europe]’,