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.’ 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. When she joined the Conservative

Selmayr’s power derived in part from his hold over Juncker, whom British officials dismissed as a drunk. David Cameron had tried to stop Juncker getting the presidency of the European Commission and his aides had spread stories – apparently accurate – about the former Luxembourg prime minister drinking brandy for breakfast. ‘I’ve been to four or five things when he has been shitfaced,’ one official said. ‘Off his trolley, hugging and kissing people.’ Rogers’ advice to May was that she would have to find a way to ‘go around Selmayr’ to do business with Juncker directly. ‘Before he became a total pisshead he was a very sinuous, agile, clever, schmoozing politician,’ a senior official said. ‘Even now there are flashes through the alcoholic haze where you think, “This guy’s got a very considerable brain.”’ The problem was that Juncker’s knowledge of Britain was twenty years out of date. Recognising that he was ‘a total address book politician’, one diplomat asked Juncker, ‘Who do you know in British politics?’ Juncker replied, ‘There’s John Major, who I got along well with in the past, Ken Clarke, Peter Bottomley.’ As a roster of out-of-touch Europhiles with no skin in the new game it was hard to top. Hearing this, Rogers had sought to impress on London that someone should tell Juncker the home truths about political reality in Britain. ‘You need people who can be private channels,’ Rogers said. ‘That’s how the game works and every other European power does it.’

Nick Clegg, McGrory’s old boss, became the Liberal Democrat frontbench spokesman on Europe and began to demand single market membership. ‘He genuinely thinks that has been the most catastrophic decision that has been taken in his lifetime,’ a friend of Clegg said. By November, there was talk of the former Labour cabinet ministers Alan Milburn, John Hutton and Douglas Alexander, backed up by funding from insurance millionaire Sir Clive Cowdery, to push for a second referendum with the hope of overturning Brexit if public opinion cooled. Open Britain began to take a tougher line. In December another ghost of battles past resurfaced. Stephen Dorrell, the former Tory health secretary, became chairman of the European Movement with the explicit intention of blocking Brexit. ‘Brexit is a mistake and we shall seek to build support for that point of view,’ he said. ‘The government has a mandate but I don’t think the mandate it has reflects this country’s interests, so I will seek to defeat it.’ The media was most interested in the activities of Tony Blair, who decided to use Brexit to effect his re-entry into domestic politics.

The ridicule might have been greater had Johnson not been stopped by his senior aide Will Walden from announcing his latest wheeze to boost Brexit Britain – a new Channel Tunnel for cars. In private conversations at the Tory Party conference he said, ‘If you wanted to show your commitment to Europe, is it not time for us to have further and better economic integration with a road tunnel? That’s what we need.’ Johnson argued that such a plan had been ruled out in the 1980s ‘on the basis that you could not clean the fumes out of the tunnel’. But he said, ‘That’s all changed. They now have the technology. You could come out of the EU but join Europe in the most fundamental way.’ The plan was even more grandiose than the ‘Boris Island’ Thames Estuary airport he had advocated as London mayor and appealed to Johnson’s sense of history. ‘You undo the damage done at the end of the ice age,’ he explained. ‘The Channel is really a river whose tributaries used to be the Seine and the Thames. It became bigger and bigger and bigger as the ice melted until it separated Britain from France.’ Reversing it would be ‘a great symbol of European commitment’.

on 7 March, Heseltine led a rebellion of thirteen Conservative peers to pass a second amendment demanding a ‘meaningful’ parliamentary vote on the deal. During the debate – the best attended in the Lords since 1831 – the former deputy prime minister announced that he had been sacked ‘from the five jobs with which I have been helping the government’, including a post promoting regional growth. He insisted, ‘It’s the duty of Parliament to assert its sovereignty in determining the legacy we leave to new generations of young people.’ One senior government source claimed that Heseltine ‘cried’ when he was dismissed. More surprising, perhaps, Heseltine said that when he left the government’s employ he had never yet spoken to Theresa May. After another week

letter was finally released on 29 March, a day that could have been calculated to annoy pro-Europeans – it was John Major’s birthday and Tony Blair’s wedding anniversary. The signing and delivery of the letter descended into low farce. At 4.40 p.m. May had still not physically signed it. The early evening news and the newspaper deadlines were fast approaching. Katie Perrior wanted a picture to mark the historic moment. ‘There aren’t many photos in politics where you need no words,’ she said. The picture was the story. A Downing Street official recalled, ‘Katie was pacing the room. There was an argument over whether the PM should do it in a black pen or a blue pen.’

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’. The stories spread, in part, because the chiefs seemed keen for others to know about their treatment of the chancellor. ‘Nick used to relate them with delight,’ said a Downing Street official. ‘Nick would say, “We’ve told you what the policy is, fuck off and follow it.”’ Those were not the words Timothy used to Hammond’s face but a version of events he apparently wanted circulated. A source said, ‘Nick would quite like the idea that he was abusing the chancellor. He relished those fights.’ After one bruising episode Hammond quizzed one of May’s aides about the intelligence which had filtered back to Number 11.

The fuss about sex also deterred the Lib Dems from announcing another controversial policy. Three days before the publication of their manifesto they ditched plans to announce that they wanted to legalise and regulate prostitution so they could tax the proceeds – a policy which they hoped would raise £10 billion a year. The plan was ditched after a stress-test exercise in which Paul Butters played Sam Coates of The Times, regarded as one of the most awkward lobby correspondents. ‘What’s the tax on a blow job?’ asked Butters, warming to his theme. ‘How much for a hand job?’ There were objections from MPs too. Sarah Olney, on the back foot in Richmond Park, said she would find it ‘morally indefensible on the doorstep’.

‘Miliband was offering a similar thing on student fees and yet it had a completely different effect,’ a Tory cabinet minister reflected. ‘The increase in the interest rate, no one had really clocked that in Westminster, and it really electrified the issue in young people’s minds.’

Some Conservative associations, even in seats classified as winnable, had as few as three members. ‘One dose of botulism in the prawn sandwiches and we could be three associations down by dinner,’ a special adviser joked. The one hundred paid organisers employed in 2015 had all left. In Brighton Kemptown, where the Tories trailed by just 690 votes before polling day, ministers visiting the seat were surprised to discover that the local association consisted of little more than the candidate and his family.

Labour had always had a strong ground game. Their supremacy in the social media war – after being comprehensively outmanoeuvred in 2015 – was more surprising, and arguably more significant. Tom Edmonds, the Conservative head of digital, pumped out professionally-made content, but was limited to paid-for advertising on Facebook, by far the most important platform, since six out of ten people in Britain used the site. During the campaign the Tories spent around £2 million on paid-for advertising, up from £1.3 million in 2015. That compared with £1.2 million for Labour. Three-quarters of the spend went on Facebook adverts. Labour’s great advantage was that their army of young supporters, inspired by Corbyn, were far more willing to share campaign materials with their friends via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. One of the most remarkable statistics of the entire campaign is that one in three Facebook users saw Momentum content during the campaign, yet Momentum spent just £2,000 on Facebook adverts, because they could rely on their supporters to distribute campaign materials for free. ‘The content was so accessible,’ said Klug. ‘It resonated, it was creative and it was clever.’ Among the successful videos was a satirical take on austerity, with a young daughter asking her father why she got no free school meal, her class sizes were larger and she couldn’t afford to go to university. He replies, ‘Because I voted for Theresa May.’ The daughter asks, ‘Do you hate me, Dad?’ ‘Obvio...

In 2015 the SNP army of fifty-six MPs had vowed to shake up Westminster. ‘They stopped English people shopping on a Sunday and they stopped a change to fox-hunting – in England,’ said an amused Tory. ‘Well whoopdee-fucking-doo. What did you do for Scotland? Fuck-all.’

Michael Dugher, who stood down in Barnsley East, went further, condemning the triumphalism of the Corbynistas. ‘They were like the generals of Dunkirk, presenting a self-evident military catastrophe as a PR victory. The last time Labour won an election in 2005, Jeremy Corbyn claimed it was a damning indictment of Tony Blair and his illegal foreign war. Blair got ninety-six seats more than the greatest victory for socialism since the war.’ The Tories had their own frustrations with the white working class.

Martin Selmayr, the Rasputin of Brussels, reacted to the departure of the Rasputin of Downing Street by tweeting a single word, ‘Bauernopfer’, a German chess term for a pawn sacrifice. A former cabinet minister predicted that defenestrating the chiefs would not save May: ‘King Charles I’s adviser Strafford was his most effective lieutenant but he had to be sacrificed and that left him defenceless. Theresa will be less effective without them.’

Javid wagged his finger while May sat, downcast, contemplating the table, her arms crossed in front of her as if she was hugging herself. ‘When you should have broadened contributions, you narrowed things because of them.’ Javid then rounded on Nick Timothy’s economic agenda. ‘One of the abiding lessons of this election result, is that we didn’t talk about our fundamental strength, which is the economy. Now is an opportunity to dump all those anti-business policies that we had in our manifesto.’ Two months earlier, Javid’s intervention would have been tantamount to political suicide, but now his colleagues saw it as brave. ‘There was this intake of breath with people thinking, “How the fuck is he going to get away with all that?”’ a witness recalled. ‘But then it is about throwing the first stone. Once they see that it has landed the rest of them all got involved.’ Afterwards Javid was inundated with texts praising him for speaking out.

In the months after the referendum, friends said he was sanguine about the situation. ‘The thing about David is, he’s a self-confident, secure person, and he doesn’t hold grudges, or sit awake at night,’ one friend said. ‘He’s more interested in what animal he’s going to shoot, or what claret he’s going to have for lunch, or where he’s going to shag Sam next! He’s not a political obsessive, which is one of his great strengths.’ When the former Israeli

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the plan, every single Tory campaign chief with access to the internal data says that the public reaction was immediate and catastrophic, with support dropping ‘off a cliff’ in a way that veterans had never seen before. The

A senior official in the London Labour Party said, ‘It was a policy that smashed their core vote in the balls and a U-turn that tore their slogan to pieces.’