Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman

May’s appointment as home secretary by David Cameron in 2010, when the coalition government was formed, added further layers of complexity to her politics. Cameron joked that he and May were the only two ministers who supported the Tory commitment to reduce net immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’. Yet May also led a crackdown on police ‘stop and search’ powers, which she felt were directed unfairly at young black men, and a crusade to stamp out modern slavery. May was hard to categorise politically.

Willie Whitelaw, who lost the 1975 leadership contest to Margaret Thatcher and then became her home secretary, is said to have remarked that no home secretary should ever become prime minister because they spend their time trying to stop things from happening rather than leading from the front.

Where Cameron was open, May was secretive. One civil service official said May and her Home Office permanent secretary Helen Ghosh ‘would go for weeks without speaking’.

While the Cameroons shared dinner parties as well as political views, May dined in the Commons with her husband. In her leadership launch speech, she explained, ‘I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in Parliament’s bars.’ A senior party official said, ‘She is the least clubbable politician I know.’ Alasdair Palmer had a typical lunch experience: ‘She lacks the personal charm of most politicians. Conversation was not easy. Somewhat to my alarm, May had no small talk whatsoever. She was perfectly comfortable with silence, which I found extremely disorienting.’3

May’s social awkwardness and secrecy meant even close colleagues knew little about her. Some who worked closely with her were perplexed by the efforts of journalists and MPs to discover the ‘real’ Theresa May. One Tory who worked for her said, ‘I’m not sure there’s much there. She’s very sensible. There’s no interest in ideas. Philip is a very sweet man but it takes a certain type of character to marry someone who is so bland. Their conversation is completely banal.’

The fact that Theresa May seemed the only possible option for prime minister by 13 July 2016 was the work of her two closest aides, who were rewarded with the top staff jobs in Downing Street – for ever more known as ‘the chiefs’. Nick Timothy grew up in a working-class family in the Tile Cross district of Birmingham. His father left school at fourteen and worked his way up from the factory floor to become head of international sales at a local steel works. His mother did secretarial work at a school. Margaret Thatcher converted his parents to the Tory Party and Timothy was politicised by the 1992 general election because the Labour Party was threatening to close the grammar school – Edward VI Aston School – which had given him a chance in life. He went on to get a first-class degree in politics from Sheffield University and then landed a job in the Conservative research department, where his path first crossed with May’s.

In 2006, Timothy met Fiona Hill outside The Speaker pub in Westminster and the cerebral staff officer acquired an artillery commander. ‘I just immediately knew we were politically in the exact same place,’ she told friends. Hill had a blunter approach, once declaring, ‘We fucking hate socialism and we want to crush it in a generation.’ 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.

The relationship between Timothy and Hill was compared by colleagues to that between brother and sister or even lovers, which they had never been – often fractious but with a united front presented to the world. ‘They never let a cigarette paper come between them in public,’ a colleague said. Another observed, ‘They’re like siblings, they fight a lot. They don’t care what they say about each other. But there’s a loyalty there. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done, it doesn’t matter how bad the other person’s behaved, they’ll always cover the other’s arse.’

It all began with a phrase and an idea. The phrase, in a perfect encapsulation of so much that was to follow, was part Nick Timothy, part Theresa May. The two of them and Fiona Hill were in May’s parliamentary office. It was July 2016 and David Cameron had resigned. The Conservative leadership contest was under way and they were discussing how May, a leading though not prominent Remainer, could reassure the party base that she would respect the results of the EU referendum. As they tossed around phrases, Timothy said, ‘Brexit means Brexit,’ at which point May chimed in, mimicking the jingle-like cadence Timothy had used and adding the coda, ‘… and we’ll make a success of it’.

‘Brexit means Brexit’ was a statement of intent, but there was still the question of what that meant in practice.

At this point the phrase ‘soft Brexit’ was taken to mean membership of the single market and the customs union, while ‘hard Brexit’ meant an alternative arrangement, though these terms were to evolve.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

To distract attention from these major decisions – and to settle key issues of concern – May used interviews with the Sunday Times and the Sun on Sunday to launch the first of two major announcements from her speech. The government would convert the acquis – the existing body of EU law – into British law so that nothing would change on day one of Brexit. Individual laws could then be changed by Parliament in the usual way.

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.”

The change message was drowned out, however, by one small phrase in the 7,500-word text, a line penned by Timothy which had barely been glanced at since the first draft. In words that cemented her reputation for plain speaking, May concluded, ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.’

May had said, ‘While monetary policy, with super-low interest rates and quantitative easing, provided the necessary emergency medicine after the financial crash, we have to acknowledge there have been some bad side effects.’ Her words appeared to be a breach of the convention, established when the Bank of England was granted independence in 1997, that politicians refrain from commenting on monetary policy, and it caused a temporary fall in the pound.

The prime minister had made a big thing of returning to cabinet government after the Cameron years but Brexit was not discussed by the full cabinet. Instead, May appointed a dozen-strong cabinet subcommittee (the European Union Exit and Trade Committee). In keeping with her penchant for secrecy the membership was not published until it leaked in mid-October. Every cabinet minister who had campaigned to leave the EU – David Davis, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel and Andrea Leadsom – was included, half the committee, when they represented just a quarter of the full cabinet. The other five members, all Remain backers, were Philip Hammond, Amber Rudd, Damian Green, Greg Clark and party chairman Patrick McLoughlin.

Since no work had been done by the civil service to prepare for Brexit, these early meetings were information-gathering exercises rather than policy-making forums. Civil servants despaired at the level of knowledge around the table. ‘It is not possible to underestimate the level of knowledge in the cabinet at that point,’ one official said.

A big part of the job for officials was educating politicians about the implications of the political narrative that they had established.’ This even included Davis. A civil servant said, ‘He thought he knew a lot but most of what he’d written was wrong in some way: legally, diplomatically or just plain not correct. You had to put evidence in front of him and use facts.’

DExEU officials told Leadsom she would need to hire five hundred more staff but she initially recruited only thirty. ‘They’ve got to redesign forty years of agriculture policy and the entire system of subsidy,’ a DExEU source said. ‘Meetings with her were embarrassing.’ A cabinet colleague said, ‘She was completely out of her depth at the beginning. She is a genuine and decent person, but massively underpowered for what was needed at secretary of state level. She’s very stubborn and basically not really bright enough.’

A cabinet committee paper discussed in mid-October warned that the Treasury could lose up to £66 billion a year in tax revenues if there was a hard Brexit. It also predicted a worst-case scenario that GDP could fall by as much as 9.5 per cent after fifteen years if Britain left the single market and traded on World Trade Organisation terms.

2017, ‘In the days immediately after the referendum, David Cameron wanted to reassure EU citizens they would be allowed to stay. All his cabinet agreed with that unilateral offer, except his home secretary, Mrs May, who insisted on blocking it.’5 May said that was ‘not my recollection’, but she had been the only leadership candidate not to support a unilateral offer to EU citizens.

Tempers boiled over on 3 November, when a panel of three judges – the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton and Lord Justice Sales – ruled, ‘The Government does not have power under the Crown’s prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 for the UK to withdraw from the European Union.’

Caught in the middle was Elizabeth Truss, the justice secretary. The next morning, Truss wrote to her fellow ministers stressing that the judges were independent and urging them to desist from further attacks. However, Truss herself came under attack from the Law Society and one of her predecessors as Lord Chancellor, Labour’s Charlie Falconer, who said that since the judges ‘can’t defend themselves’ it was Truss’s ‘constitutional duty’ to do so.

Jeremy Corbyn’s problems had begun the day after the EU referendum, when he said in an interview that Article 50 should be triggered immediately. This enraged Labour MPs backing Remain and prompted an attempt to oust him. Corbyn’s supporters believed he was misunderstood. One of his closest allies said, ‘Jeremy came out and said Article 50 will have to be triggered. That’s a statement of fact. That’s what the referendum was about. He wasn’t saying it needed to be triggered right now. It was a wilful misinterpretation. There was a period of mass hysteria after the referendum result.’

Baker brought in a new MP, Michael Tomlinson, as his deputy while Suella Fernandes and Anne-Marie Trevelyan became vice chairmen. Every Monday Baker met with the ‘steering group’ of Paleosceptic veterans – Bill Cash, Bernard Jenkin, John Redwood, Peter Lilley and Iain Duncan Smith among them – who had led them into the battles over the Maastricht Treaty twenty-five years earlier. ‘Without them nothing moves,’ an ERG source said. ‘With them everything starts shaking and quaking.’ Soon, Baker had a WhatsApp group with eighty Tory MPs signed up and awaiting instructions.

David McAllister, the German MEP with a Scottish father who was tipped by some as a successor to Angela Merkel, and some other Anglophile MEPs. Both sides were shocked by what they heard. McAllister gave Johnson an ‘unvarnished’ view of how Britain was seen for leaving the EU and warned that the final deal ‘will take much longer than you think’. He said Britain would need a transitional agreement and would get no special privileges beyond what other third-party countries enjoyed. Johnson was aggressive in return, telling his fellow guests, ‘This is why we’ve got to exit and this is why this venture isn’t going anywhere.’ McAllister ‘went white’ according to one account and declared later, ‘I can’t believe that is the British foreign secretary.’

A civil service mandarin who worked with Ivan Rogers for two decades said of the UK’s permanent representative in Brussels, ‘Ivan’s problem was that while he was knowledgeable, he’d never say in a word what he could say in one hundred. He was bloody irritating, but he did speak truth unto power.’ It was with an email of close to 1,400 words, sent on 3 January 2017, that Rogers signalled that he had tired of offering his counsel to politicians who did not like what he had to say and he would be resigning.

Rogers’ greatest fear, though, was that the government was not doing enough work to analyse the risks or prepare for the possibility of crashing out of the EU without a new deal, falling back on World Trade Organisation tariff rules. He told colleagues the prospect needed to be treated like ‘a national emergency’. Privately he warned of ‘mutually assured destruction’.

On 17 January, more than one hundred days after Theresa May gave her speech on Brexit at the Conservative Party conference, the prime minister got to her feet in Lancaster House and finally confirmed in public that she wanted a ‘clean break’ from the European Union by leaving the single market and abandoning full membership of the customs union.

The Article 50 letter was written in Downing Street by Nick Timothy and only shown to David Davis the day before it was delivered to Brussels. ‘DD couldn’t tolerate that he didn’t know exactly what was in it or when it was going to be,’ a Downing Street official recalled. A DExEU source said, ‘Nobody saw the Article 50 letter until twenty-four hours before it was sent. DD kept asking. Bridges kept asking. We knew Hammond wouldn’t be shown it. He kept asking as well.’

May was now facing a crisis. That morning Michael Howard suggested she might be prepared to go to war over Gibraltar as Margaret Thatcher had over the Falklands in 1982: ‘Thirty-five years ago this week, another woman prime minister sent a task force halfway across the world to defend the freedom of another small group of British people against another Spanish-speaking country, and I’m absolutely certain that our current prime minister will show the same resolve in standing by the people of Gibraltar.’ Few in Downing Street doubted that Picardo had briefed the papers or that he intended to start his own war of words with the government as chief whipping boy live on air.

When Hammond was not in the room, political aides and civil servants both say Hill and Timothy were vituperative about him in front of officials, knowing their views would be reported back. ‘They called him “The Cunt”,’ one said. ‘That was around the office in front of people like Will Macfarlane, our point man with the Treasury, who used to work in the Treasury,’ another said. ‘He knew it would get back to Hammond.’ Hill denies using that term of abuse. When she had first joined the Conservative Party, she had worked for Hammond but became disappointed the chancellor was ‘not a team player’.

May’s Plan for Britain was overshadowed by other news. With delicious timing, a few hours before she stood up to speak at the spring conference, it was announced that George Osborne was to become editor of the London Evening Standard. The appointment stunned Westminster. For an MP representing Tatton in Cheshire to take charge of the capital’s leading newspaper was audacious. To do so while holding down six jobs in addition to Osborne’s parliamentary duties was too much for some of his colleagues. Osborne had already trousered – in Westminster parlance – more than £700,000 from public speaking; secured a £650,000 stipend for four days’ work a month from BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment firm; been granted a £120,000 fellowship at the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Arizona; and would now take home more than £220,000 for a four-day week at the Standard – on top of his £75,000 salary as an MP. A senior civil servant said, ‘He likes money. He’s got Blair and Mandelson disease.’

Hill’s abrupt changes of mind and mood did not just affect the communications department. An official working in another corner of Number 10 said, ‘Nick could be grumpy but it was Fi balling people out that would upset most because she’s very volatile. She’ll turn on a sixpence and she’ll shout at you for doing something and then shout at you twenty minutes later for the exact opposite. People who hadn’t worked with her before found that very difficult.’ Hill’s allies say this was evidence she was ‘nimble’ when events changed the game. But an MP who was fond of Hill said, ‘I love Fi, but my advice to people was, “Don’t put your head in the tiger’s mouth,” because you never knew when it would snap shut.’ This was not just uncomfortable, it hindered good policy-making. ‘Most of us in the next rank down didn’t float an idea because you were shouted down, so we just kept our heads down,’ a middle-ranking Number 10 aide said.

In Downing Street, May seldom visited the rest of the house to drop in on staff, to thank them for their efforts or boost morale. ‘She is lacking emotional intelligence,’ one aide said. At Christmas, Perrior suggested that May visit the press team for mince pies and prosecco. Her request was declined. The prime minister was too busy, the chiefs said. Eventually Perrior was offered a date in May.

Several sources interviewed for this book described May as a ‘captive’ or ‘prisoner’ of the chiefs. Early in 2017, Boris Johnson returned to the Foreign Office after a meeting with May in which the chiefs had been particularly assertive and made a reference to Hill’s signature policy: ‘That’s modern slavery, right there.’6 Others compared them to a dysfunctional family. One senior figure in Number 10 said, ‘I feel disloyal saying this, but she was made to feel she couldn’t do without them. She genuinely loves them. I think they’re the children she didn’t have.

When the Tories won the Copeland by-election on 23 February, seizing the Cumbrian seat which Labour had held uninterrupted since 1935, the stars seemed to be aligning. It was the first by-election gain by a governing party since 1982, and the largest increase in vote share since 1966.

By then, May was also being lobbied hard to call an election by two of her most senior ministers, Philip Hammond and David Davis. ‘It was a pincer move,’ a ministerial aide recalled. The chancellor urged May to take the plunge as early as January, complaining that the ‘fiscal straitjacket’ left behind by the Cameron government, which banned him from raising income tax, National Insurance and VAT, had left him too little room for manoeuvre if Brexit led to a downturn – a view reinforced by the chaos of the budget. Hammond told her, ‘You can’t get tax changes through, you’ve got no flexibility, until we’ve got a bigger majority. You’ve killed Ukip, so why don’t you do it?’ A source close to May said, ‘Her approach was, “No, I don’t think so, I said there should be certainty.” At that point she didn’t see on balance why she should do it.’

Of her vision for post-Brexit Britain or her wish to transform society for the benefit of those left behind there was not one word in either the speech or the briefing document. ‘Strong leadership in the national interest’, which implied some purpose to the strength, had become ‘strong and stable leadership’. The proposition for change had become a slogan about continuity. A source said, ‘When Lynton and Tex got involved in that draft statement it was all about Brexit, which all of our research showed us people didn’t want us to talk about.’

Under the terms of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, two-thirds of MPs would need to vote for an election to make it happen. The day after May’s announcement, MPs voted by 522 votes to thirteen to approve the election. Nine Labour MPs defied Jeremy Corbyn’s edict to back the motion, while the SNP abstained. A secret Tory contingency plan – to pass a one-line Bill by simple majority mandating an election on 8 June – was not required. When May was interviewed by the Today programme that morning she admitted, ‘Every election has a risk.’ But none of her senior staff seriously believed it. Perrior said, ‘They thought they were home and dry.’15

Corbyn’s team watched May’s speech with concern as she framed the election around Brexit, an issue which could only expose the divisions in Labour between their metropolitan Remain supporters and the working-class voters who had backed Leave the year before. The party held twenty of the top twenty-five most Remain seats, and the same number of seats where Leave won biggest. As May finished, Corbyn turned to his aides and said, ‘She’s done that pretty well.’ One recalled, ‘It very effectively set out what they wanted the campaign to be.’

Corbyn was no ordinary leader. After a career of principled obscurity lasting three decades, in which he had voted against his own front bench more than five hundred times, he had only run for the leadership in the first place because John McDonnell did not want to, and the younger Labour MPs on the hard left insisted they must have a candidate. Corbyn had only made it onto the ballot because grandees like Margaret Beckett and Sadiq Khan loaned him their votes to ‘widen the debate’. Yet he had swept to victory on a wave of revulsion at the compromises of the Blair and Brown years and the lacklustre performance of his rivals – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall – who offered only incremental change when party members wanted revolutionary transformation of the political and economic status quo. 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’. Matt Zarb-Cousin, who worked for Corbyn, was typical: ‘I didn’t really have much of a home in the party, but then Jeremy stood for the leadership and I felt a sense of purpose in my politics that I had been searching for.’

Corbyn had come to realise that he could do something with this talent. ‘He was a reluctant leader,’ a member of his core team said. ‘He lives in a simple house. He’d be a monk if he wasn’t a politician. He sees himself as the representative of the dispossessed. What changed in Jeremy was when he started doing the visits as a leader of the Labour Party. He saw that he could make a difference.’

A belief in the durability of your leader and the sanctity of your cause is not enough to win an election, though. What drove the Corbynistas as the campaign began was not data, strategy or tactics, but a political analysis. It had four strands: a belief that an interventionist state and socialist economics are morally and self-evidently right; the proposition that the 2008 economic crisis had provided an opportunity for their brand of radical-left politics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies; an understanding that British broadcasting rules meant equal air time for the leader of the opposition during an election campaign, allowing them to avoid the refracting distortions of a partisan press; and a belief that Corbyn could entice people who do not usually vote into the polling booth.

Once Corbyn had won his second election as leader, most moderates decided he could not be removed and vowed to make Corbyn ‘own’ what they expected to be an electoral catastrophe. Blairites like Jamie Reed and Tristram Hunt walked away. Things were not so easy for the Southsiders, whose reputations were also on the line in an election.

The document finally unveiled Labour’s election strapline: ‘For the many, not the few’, which veterans delighted in recalling had been appropriated from Tony Blair. It said the ‘core theme’ could be summarised as: ‘Instead of a country run for the rich, Labour wants a Britain where all of us can lead richer lives.’ As a summary of the Corbynistas’ world view it was effective, but some at the NEC meeting regarded the performance and the document as ‘cringeingly embarrassing’ because it bore little resemblance to the detailed offerings that NEC members like Margaret Beckett were used to. ‘It was unbelievably flimsy,’ one of those present said. ‘They just made it up overnight.’