Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman

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.