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.
