Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman

Hill had a blunter approach, once declaring, ‘We fucking hate socialism and we want to crush it in a generation.’

While Davis was aware of much of what May was going to say, he had not seen the speech and nor had Oliver Robbins. ‘The ECJ wasn’t mentioned before the conference speech as a red line,’ a DExEU official said. ‘It was conjured up by Nick Timothy to get very Eurosceptic conference delegates and the Tory press cheering. They were terrified of people saying, “She’s a remainer.”

‘Those people who argue that Article 50 can only be triggered after agreement in both Houses of Parliament are not standing up for democracy, they’re trying to subvert it. They’re not trying to get Brexit right, they’re trying to kill it by delaying it. They are insulting the intelligence of the British people.’

Perrior and press secretary Lizzie Loudon had also lost parents when they were young. Loudon tried to help out. She told May, ‘My dad died and it’s really sad for me that he can’t see me here because I know he would be really proud. But in some way I feel like he would know that I would be doing something like this.’ A colleague said, ‘When the PM was asked the question by the interviewer she repeated Lizzie’s words. She just pick-pocketed the explanation. It was an appropriation of her emotional response. You think: “You yourself don’t feel anything”.’

‘Cameron meetings were always chaotic and vociferous. Hers were calm, more measured, but you don’t really get a real debate with her. You lodge some points and some observations and she absorbs. But it’s terribly difficult to gauge whether you are getting anywhere.’

‘I didn’t have a sense that outside the world of justice and home affairs she knew what she thought very much.’

‘If you’re going to do it, do it right,’ Johnson said. ‘It’s like Theresa says, you’ve got to stop thinking about what we hold on to, you have to imagine Britain free and think of what you want.’

While they were Oxford contemporaries, Hammond had a very different approach to economics from May and Nick Timothy and felt himself to be no less able than May. Hammond told a former cabinet minister, ‘If Theresa May can be the prime minister, so can I.’

Johnson said, ‘DD’s position was, “God, it’s all so difficult” because he had a vested interest in intensifying the magnitude of the task in order to intensify his triumph when it comes. Boris was worried that the whole tone of the government was becoming defeatist.’

‘Merkel feels like she really did go the extra mile to get the best possible package for us in February and she was assured that we would win the referendum,’ a senior cabinet minister said. ‘She feels like we’ve let her down.’

On 1 December, Davis made a speech to the Welsh CBI cautioning Brexiteers not to expect sudden changes to Britain’s immigration system. ‘As we take back control of immigration by ending free movement as it has operated before, let me also say this, we won’t do so in a way that it is contrary to the national and economic interest. No one wants to see labour shortages in key sectors. That wouldn’t be in anybody’s interest.’ In this Davis had the support of Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, both of whom were liberal on immigration. The disagreement was with May, who had made her name at the Home Office talking tough and who felt she could not betray the wishes of Brexit voters.

Under Cameron, Cunliffe, Rogers and Scholar had all deliberately argued in front of the prime minister so he could hear each side of a case being put

Once again, the most important decisions on Brexit in May’s first year in power had been taken by a group of people who could have fitted into a telephone box. The fear of leaks was such that most cabinet ministers were only shown the text of the speech minutes before May delivered it.

Lancaster House was her finest hour.’

With Trump he’ll start with, “Theresa I love you, I’ve missed you.” She can’t speak to that. It’s not the way you are supposed to speak to each other in these telephone calls. Her deliverable gets totally shot out of the water and she just can’t grapple with it.’ The aide said May’s calls with Trump were ‘the only example I saw of her in work not delivering when she set out to deliver … It shows you something about his power. He’s a crazy person but there is a charisma and an effectiveness there. In speaking like that he prevents all sorts of conversations. He’s completely in control. It’s deeply worrying.’

‘Every other department I’ve worked in you had ministerial “prayers” where everyone goes around the table saying what they’re doing and what they’re concerned about.

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.

the chancellor would say, ‘I can see what you’re trying to achieve, but the means by which you’re trying to do it aren’t going to work, and might have perverse results that you’ve not thought about.’ This was just the kind of Eeyoreish approach the chiefs could not stand.

Hammond was grateful for the support of the Number 10 press team and called May to thank her. The prime minister called Perrior on her mobile and said, ‘I wanted to let you know the chancellor personally wanted to thank you and your team for all the hard work.’ It was the first time Perrior could ever remember being thanked for anything in Downing Street.

Corbyn was also a happy warrior. When his team gathered in the large corner meeting room in Norman Shaw South, which Ed Miliband had used as his office, the leader was upbeat: ‘We’re going to have a positive campaign. We’re going to do this and win. It’s going to be a victory for the people we need to support.’ If not all of his aides believed it, they were ready to die in a ditch for him, and they applauded anyway.

‘My whole life I’ve been saying the Labour Party should be a socialist left-wing party,’ he said. ‘And then the opportunity comes along. How could I ever walk away?’

if you put forward policies which challenge the way everything’s been for the last forty years and are massively popular – and polling suggests that they are – and we get fair broadcast time and we ignore the print lobby, then we’d rise significantly in the polls.’

by the sheer ordinariness of their leader. ‘With Blair and Brown you’d know when the leader of the Labour Party was in,’ one said. ‘You’d sort of sense their presence and their charisma and look up in awe. Jeremy just wanders around and makes people cups of tea and is just a normal person.’

Tory high command fell out over a lot of things during the 2017 campaign, but on one thing they were agreed: Theresa May should not be sent into a face-to-face debate with Corbyn.

The only question for Labour now was whether Theresa May would perform another U-turn. ‘We honestly thought they would turn up,’ a source in Corbyn’s office said. Many Tories later wished that she had done so. It would have delighted the media for May to appear at the very last moment, walk on stage even as Rudd was being mic’ed up and say, ‘I’ll take it from here.’ However, the prospect of a grand gesture was never seriously discussed that day in Tory Central Office. None of the campaign commanders believed the prime minister would have made a good fist of it, still less have consented to try.

‘When Cameron was in the shit with his back to the wall, you knew he could pull it out of the bag,’ said one former Downing Street aide who had worked closely with May during the coalition years. ‘He had another gear. Theresa had no second gear.’

When May appeared in CCHQ towards the end of the campaign, she struggled even to rally her own troops. To weary incredulity from campaign staff, who were tired of fighting for someone they did not rate, she simply repeated her standard stump speech while staff gazed at their phones.

Labour also ran a clever advertising campaign in marginal seats. Voters who raised concerns about the NHS on the doorstep would find their details fed into the party’s central voter database. The party’s digital team then used software called Promote, developed in-house, which linked voters in the database to their Facebook profiles. Within twenty-four hours they got Facebook adverts about the state of the health service.

In 2015, Edmonds Elder ran 350 different Facebook adverts targeted at four basic voter types. This time there were more than 4,000 adverts tailored to dozens of different voter blocs depending on their stance on Brexit, which part of the country and the type of seat they lived in, and who they had voted for before.

‘If you drill down into raw numbers from all polling that you can get your hands on from the last two weeks of the campaign,’ a Corbyn aide said, ‘it broadly shows the same thing: Labour one to three points ahead. Then they apply what you think is going to happen. We had a heavy scepticism of politically accepted wisdom. That’s different from saying “The polls don’t know anything.” It’s the way in which they’re interpreted which is wrong.’

More than one Tory cabinet minister later confessed that their own children voted Labour.

‘Labour’s data is extremely good at telling you how someone who hasn’t moved in the last twenty years, and also frequently opens their door on a Saturday morning, is going to vote,’ a Corbyn aide said.

When the exit poll dropped the leader gave a slight nod of recognition. ‘Jeremy doesn’t do fist-pumping,’ one staffer said. He had believed what he had believed for forty years.

Corbyn had privately predicted that he would win 37 per cent of the vote. It looked now as if he might do rather better than that. He went back to sipping his cup of tea.

The chemical composition of the government has to change. The party will not swallow Nick and Fi any more. Serious people are saying, in numbers, that they have to go. The problem is that she is nothing without them.’

Heywood and the other mandarins regarded it as their duty to ensure the continuity of government. The parliamentary arithmetic meant that only a deal between the Tories and the DUP could deliver a majority in the Commons. From their point of view propping up May was their only viable course of action, even if she was incapable of thinking clearly for herself.

‘What the fuck was that speech on the doorstep? No contrition, no humility, nothing. Why didn’t she challenge that? Why didn’t she say, “This is crap”? If I turned in something like that my boss would have gone fucking bonkers. This is why the “Maybot” is so wounding. She just reads out what she’s given to read.

The ‘tipping point’ age at which someone was more likely to vote Tory was forty-seven.

May apologised for the election result but her loss of authority was palpable as every single minister spoke, a trend that would be repeated in the weeks ahead.

With Corbyn’s allies predicting an election by Christmas, Tory MPs had effectively concluded that a bad prime minister was better than no prime minister.

‘Grenfell was a critical moment,’ a ministerial aide added. ‘She had got rid of Nick and Fiona, which was a good thing, but could she make decisions on her own? It showed she couldn’t.

Significantly, the deal was time-limited until 2019, the date not only of Brexit but the assumed date of May’s own departure – ‘Mayxit’.

Others claimed that Johnson was deliberately trying to get sacked because – after years of earning more than £400,000 for his day job, a column and book deals – he was struggling to manage his extensive family responsibilities on a cabinet minister’s salary of £141,505.

It is far too early to know what the 2017 general election will mean for British politics or what Brexit would mean for the UK. May’s first year made clear how she would deal with both – with methodical but secretive precision and pathological caution leavened with moments of great boldness.

‘All the stories build up to a very weak character who was primed over a very long period to be the front woman, but totally unsuited to being it,’ a former aide said. ‘She still takes instruction. It’s just there are different puppet masters. She’s brilliant at learning a script but she’s less good when she has to improvise.’

‘I work for a woman who works her balls off and absolutely loves her country and will do anything and everything possible to make sure she gets the right thing for the country,’ one of her closest advisers said. ‘Theresa has got six years of experience being at the heart of Europe negotiating. She knows what she’s doing and how she’ll do it. Sometimes she doesn’t tell us what’s in her head. But she has this kind of confident, relaxed, knowing look in her face, which I take great comfort from.’