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Hill was a thin and elegantly dressed brunette in her early forties whose waif-like appearance concealed a backbone of pure galvanised steel.
Nick Timothy looked both like he meant business and like an egghead – fitting for one of the best Conservative policy brains of his generation.
had all been very different on results night a year earlier. Nick Timothy was in a remote Sicilian mountain-top village with his then fiancée Nike Trost on the night of the EU referendum.
Nick Timothy grew up in a working-class family in the Tile Cross district of Birmingham.
Hill also came from a poor background, growing up in Greenock outside Glasgow. She forced her way into a job on the Scotsman newspaper, writing football reports and features, developing the news sense and sharp elbows that would take her to Sky News, where she worked on the newsdesk and met her husband, Tim Cunningham, whose name she was to take until they divorced.
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.
There was a demonstrable logic to all this but it is extraordinary that these, the foundational decisions of Britain’s withdrawal strategy, which would shape the next two years of negotiations, were taken, in essence, by two people. The cabinet certainly had no chance to debate them.
Six weeks earlier, May had shocked Westminster by putting on hold an £18 billion deal for French company EDF Energy to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, a joint venture with a Chinese state-owned firm. Now, having studied the evidence herself, May gave the green light. Hollande asked why she had thrown the deal into uncertainty. The prime minister replied, ‘It is my method.’
The paranoia extended to Downing Street, where Fiona Hill was highly security conscious after living with a former spy for several years.
is lost to history whether Martin Selmayr was an admirer of General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, the American general who was to become Donald Trump’s defence secretary, but he certainly understood one of Mattis’s favourite aphorisms about war – ‘the enemy gets a vote’.
Selmayr’s power derived in part from his hold over Juncker, whom British officials dismissed as a drunk.
Williamson was a slight figure with the demeanour of a trainee undertaker, but he was given to flashes of rage – the ‘hair dryer treatment’ they called it – if MPs were threatening to rebel.
The row came at a time when ministers were encouraging the judiciary to be more accountable and explain their decisions better to the public.
Team 2019 had formed when half a dozen former ministers and Remain-backing Tory MPs met in the office of Alistair Burt, a former Foreign Office minister and passionate pro-European, in September 2016.
As a student of political history, Osborne knew that time rather than plotting was his best hope of becoming leader. Nonetheless, as a firm Remainer still, he provided encouragement and ideas about how to steer Brexit in the right direction.
More than sixty frontbenchers jumped ship and – in a stunning rebuke to Corbyn – 172 MPs voted to remove him in a no-confidence vote. Just forty wanted him as leader but Corbyn refused to go, citing his mandate from the party membership.
That meant moving on from claims of British exceptionalism inside the European institutions of which, in Rogers’ view, Cameron’s renegotiation was the failed last hurrah.
Baker was clear that May must stick to her three red lines: no single market, no customs union, and no ECJ oversight. The chiefs took all this in but gave nothing away.
In an entire year as a key minister on the issue that would define her premiership, Bridges had just one ten-minute conversation with Theresa May on Article 50. ‘He never saw her other than that,’ a source said. This same, distant behaviour was a feature of May’s entire time in Number 10 and would cost her dearly in the general election.
Hammond did not share May and Timothy’s economic philosophy. Indeed, with the possible exception of Sajid Javid, no one in the cabinet shared it less.
Timothy confided to his friend that it would have been better if May had appointed a different chancellor: ‘Nick has said to me that one of his greatest regrets was the speed with which they appointed the original cabinet and some of the roles that they then put people into, because it did stifle the reform agenda.’
When, months later, Stewart began positioning himself as a future leadership contender, a senior government source said, ‘I’d be seriously worried if Rory Stewart went anywhere near the job. He was incapable of delivering three lines.’
Osborne’s reputation for ruthlessness was confirmed when it emerged that he had recommended the political journalist Matthew d’Ancona to Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Standard. D’Ancona was on the verge of getting the job when Osborne decided he fancied it himself.
Katie Perrior first threatened to resign in November 2016 when she was summoned to Waiting Room B in Downing Street. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill had christened it ‘the bollocking room’ when they were on the end of dressings down there in the Cameron years.
Schneider, a product of Winchester school with a jawline as firm as his conviction that Corbyn was the answer to Britain’s problems, had helped make the Momentum campaign group successful before joining LOTO – the leader of the opposition’s office – the previous October.
Corbyn united the ‘Leninists’ – hard-left activists dreaming of a Bennite revival – with the ‘John Lennonists’ – young, idealistic activists, brimming with hope and what Barack Obama called ‘the fierce urgency of now’.
Milne was the primary theorist and anchor of Team Corbyn. Zarb-Cousin said that if ‘Jez is the marksman upfront, Seumas is like the Tony Adams, the sweeper’. One of the most divisive figures in politics, the former Guardian columnist had voiced sympathy with both Soviet and Putin’s Russia, and was regarded by many MPs as an anguine figure, whose preternatural calm shrouded aggressively left-wing views.
The victory of the Bolsheviks was engineered by Karie Murphy, the flame-haired gatekeeper. A close confidante of Len McCluskey, the Unite general secretary, Murphy shot to public prominence when she sought to win selection as Labour candidate for Falkirk after Eric Joyce was kicked out of the party for boozing and brawling in a Commons bar.
At Labour HQ John McDonnell reacted with fury to Abbott’s gaffe, telling colleagues, ‘There is no way Diane is going on television ever again.’
Watching from outside, Grant Shapps, the party chairman in 2015, was exasperated that the lessons of Cameron’s victory were being ignored.
Those on the ‘never use’ list in a so-called ‘Brexit election’ included Brexiteers like Liam Fox, Andrea Leadsom and Chris Grayling, who spent the campaign doing regional tours, described by one aide as ‘trying to organise a bunch of cats in the middle of a firework display’.
One bemused minister described the enthusiasm for May as ‘the cult of no personality’.
Close to a national laughing stock, Nuttall finished a distant second just seventy-nine votes ahead of the Tory candidate, who was considered a no-hoper. Yet another chance of a Ukip breakthrough in Westminster foundered on the reef of incompetence.
Under Corbyn, McDonnell chaired most of the Monday strategy meetings in LOTO. Colleagues describe an intense and short-tempered figure who was the most quickly
The Labour leader claimed his stance on terrorism was to support peace and dialogue in conflicts around the world, but his political opponents pointed out that all too often this involved talking to the representatives of terrorist groups that opposed Britain, America and Israel, which he saw as imperialist nations.
Lansman, along with John McDonnell, understood that the way to entrench something that would outlive Corbyn was to fight to change the Labour Party, rather than to change the country. Like many schooled on the hard left in the eighties, Lansman relished obscure procedural battles to elect delegates to bodies like the Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC), which decides what issues are debated at Labour’s conference. ‘Jon
getting looked very promising, but they were misleading us.’18 More than one Tory cabinet minister later confessed that their own children voted Labour.
The location was an inauspicious one for such an important meeting: the Blythswood Room of Edinburgh’s Best Western Bruntsfield Hotel, a grey-flock-wallpaper and Formica monument to middle-management chic remembered by one participant as ‘very grotty’.
Reconstructing those final hours before the exit poll dropped has something of the quality of imagining England on the eve of war in 1914. It is to glimpse a world we no longer recognise, inhabited by a political class overconfident of their achievements, marching optimistically towards events they did not understand which would leave their careers in ruins and their country changed forever.
‘With Tory MPs you don’t need to double check, you need to triple check.
After going into the election with a policy of constructive ambiguity, the new stance was an important victory for Starmer, who had watched as Labour’s Europe policy descended into chaos throughout June and July.
McDonnell was pushing the classic ‘Lexiteer’ argument from the left that single market membership would stop a socialist government from using state aid to help key industries.
To the moderates this looked like the beginnings of a purge. One official at headquarters said, ‘Their next plan is trigger ballots. If you’ve ever said anything critical of the Dear Leader they think you should be gone. They seem to be completely blind to the fact that Jeremy Corbyn spent thirty years in Parliament opposing his own leader. They don’t see that in any way as relevant.’
The chancellor’s actions were the final straw for Nigel Lawson. The former chancellor called for Hammond to be sacked, saying, ‘What he is doing is very close to sabotage.’ He added, ‘The really important thing now is that we prepare for the no-deal outcome and it is grossly irresponsible if we don’t prepare.’
One career civil servant even ventured, ‘Bring back Gordon Brown, all is forgiven. That’s how bad it is.’
The Conservative Party won the 2017 election. They got more votes and far more seats than Labour. Yet for those involved it felt like a defeat.
Like all political leaders, her strengths and weaknesses were exposed as coterminous. May’s resolution and stoicism under fire were also stubbornness and inflexibility.
The cruel way to sum this up is to say that a stopped clock is right twice a day, but Corbyn’s team did have a philosophical approach to politics that gave them freedom to be themselves, when Labour politicians had agonised about doing so for a decade.
The other star was Corbyn who had spent decades learning which lines worked with his target audience. ‘Jeremy has spent a lot of time getting middle-class people motivated about the politics of the left,’ a Labour official said. ‘He’s very good at that.’
Corbyn was Rocky Balboa, when it mattered – after the manifesto meltdown and in the televised Q&As – Theresa May displayed all the charm and emotional intelligence of his Soviet opponent in Rocky IV, the robotic Ivan Drago played by Dolph Lundgren.
