Читать книгу Remaking One Nation - Nick Timothy - Страница 11

All the while, one issue more than any other loomed before us. Brexit was the reason Theresa had become Prime Minister. Yet she had been a Remainer. Back on 24 June, early on the morning after the referendum, I called her to talk about the leadership election that would soon begin. I was surprised to find she was crying. The tears, I judged, were caused by frustration, not grief. But her reaction to the result was to worry that the people who had voted for Brexit – especially manufacturing workers in the regions – were the people who stood to lose most from Britain leaving the European Union.

I thought about that moment many times as, after I left Downing Street, Theresa’s negotiating strategy softened and softened. But at the time I had no cause to dwell on it. She came to terms with the result quickly. She stamped upon any suggestions that the referendum might be re-run. She rejected calls for different forms of associate EU membership. When ministers and officials proposed what she dismissed as ‘clinging to bits of the EU we used to like’, she relished reprimanding them. Taking off her reading glasses and waving them at her victims, she would explain that we needed to negotiate a close economic and security relationship, but we must be entirely outside the EU’s laws and institutions.

When she became Prime Minister, Theresa created two new government departments to help deliver Brexit. The first was the Department for International Trade, whose responsibilities would include the negotiation of free trade deals with other countries. The second was the Department for Exiting the European Union. The logic for creating this department was to create a Whitehall institution with a clear interest in delivering Brexit, and to reassure Leave supporters about her good intentions. ‘I will … create a new government department’, she promised during the leadership campaign, ‘responsible for conducting Britain’s negotiation with the EU and for supporting the rest of Whitehall in its European work. That department will be led by a senior Secretary of State – and I will make sure that the position is taken by a Member of Parliament who campaigned for Britain to leave the EU.’⁸

Strictly speaking, Theresa stuck to her promise. But the Secretary of State she appointed, David Davis, was never in charge of the negotiations. Brexit policy was discussed by the Cabinet and at regular meetings of a Cabinet sub-committee dedicated to leaving the EU. But the negotiating strategy was discussed in much smaller meetings between Theresa and her senior civil servants and political advisers. Olly Robbins, Theresa’s Brussels ‘Sherpa’, was asked to lead the negotiations, not David Davis.

David Cameron had instructed the civil service not to draw up plans for leaving the EU, fearing that preparations would play into the hands of the Leave campaign by making Brexit seem realistic and safe. So it took a little time to get things moving along. During the summer, officials and ministers conducted talks with their opposite numbers across Europe and with officials in Brussels. Theresa had wanted to start informal negotiations before giving formal notice of Britain’s intention to leave the EU. The mechanism for doing so, Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, set a two-year deadline for concluding a withdrawal agreement. But by the end of the summer, the message from the Europeans was clear, and so was the official policy advice: there would be no negotiating until Article 50 was formally triggered.

In September, Theresa decided that she would have to invoke Article 50 to get anywhere with the talks. On the opening day of the Conservative conference, she announced she would trigger by no later than the end of March 2017. And she promised to repeal the European Communities Act, which gave direct effect to EU law in Britain. ‘We will do what independent, sovereign countries do’, she said. ‘We will decide for ourselves how we control immigration. And we will be free to pass our own laws.’⁹

Later, it was claimed that this speech set unnecessary red lines that made the Brexit negotiations impossible. It was even claimed that the red lines were invented by Theresa and me alone, with no input from anybody else. Both claims are ridiculous. First, Brexit policy was discussed at Cabinet, in the Cabinet sub-committee, and in bilateral meetings between Theresa and her ministers. No Cabinet Secretary, and certainly not one as experienced and as proper as Sir Jeremy Heywood, would have allowed new policy to be decided and announced in such a manner. And second, as any student of the European Union knows, the EU was established, in its original form, as a customs union. Its single market then developed over time. If Britain did not leave the customs union and single market – and the laws and institutions that underpin both – what would we be leaving? As David Davis said to me at the time, the speech was little more than ‘a statement of the bleeding obvious’. And as Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal proved, it is possible to leave the EU in full accordance with the so-called ‘red lines’.

The speech was still a mistake, however. Theresa’s first significant public intervention on Brexit policy should not have been made before a partisan audience. The Europeans perceived a prime minister playing to the gallery, and that caused some misunderstandings about the way she was planning to go about the negotiations.

The next big Brexit intervention was a different matter altogether. Theresa’s Lancaster House speech was, if anything, tougher than what she said at the party conference. And yet it was received positively by Leavers and Remainers at home, and by Brussels and the remaining member states.

For the first time, Theresa explicitly ruled out membership of the customs union and the single market. She was robust with Brussels too. ‘No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal’, she warned. And if Britain was excluded from the single market, ‘we would be free to change the basis of Britain’s economic model.’ But the tone was still constructive. ‘We are leaving the European Union’, she explained, ‘but we are not leaving Europe.’ She said she had listened to the EU, which was why she would not seek to divide its four freedoms of goods, capital, services and people. The days of British ‘cherry picking’ were over: we would seek fair access to the single market, but not re-join it.¹⁰

Theresa’s next big speech – made in Philadelphia to an audience of Republican senators and congressmen – also went down well in Europe. Following the election of President Trump, many member states were worried that he was hostile to the EU and ambivalent about NATO. But in Philadelphia, Theresa came to Europe’s defence. ‘We are not turning our back on [Europe]’, she declared, ‘or on the interests and the values that we share. It remains overwhelmingly in our interests – and in those of the wider world – that the EU should succeed.’¹¹ In Washington, she pressed President Trump and won from him an unequivocal public commitment to NATO and the collective security of the West.

This was a real achievement, but behind the scenes, we were worrying. We had got off to a bad start with Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s permanent representative in Brussels. His advice in meetings was pessimistic and bordered on the destructive. We could not negotiate before triggering Article 50, he said, but neither should we trigger Article 50, because it was a trap. Every policy option was impossible, he would argue: there was no way through the mess, because Brexit itself was impossible.

Ivan also had a strange relationship with the media. Former advisers to David Cameron warned us that he had briefed against them during the renegotiation prior to the referendum. ‘He did it the whole time’, one said. ‘He is super smart, but prone to child-like tantrums and cannot pursue anything but his own personal agenda.’¹² During Theresa’s premiership, newspaper reports by Brussels correspondents regularly contained quotations from ‘diplomatic sources’ that bore close resemblance to Ivan’s private criticisms of Brexit.

Ivan’s behaviour frustrated us all, including his fellow civil servants. Eventually, Jeremy Heywood suggested to Ivan that he should move on to another senior post. But very abruptly, Ivan instead resigned, writing an email to his team demanding that they continue to ‘speak truth to power’.¹³ Unsurprisingly, the email reached the media in no time at all. Ivan was quickly replaced by Sir Tim Barrow, a Foreign Office star, but he was to remain a prominent and trenchant critic not only of Brexit policy, but of Brexit itself.

Things were little better with some senior ministers. Meetings at Cabinet and with ministers were bad-tempered. Philip Hammond kept pushing for Brexit to be softer and softer. He wanted to make commitments about sticking with free movement rules, for example, and refused to consider alternatives to European regulations because he believed Britain would in the end have to accept EU rules anyway. Every attempt to take Brexit policy forward was an exhausting battle with one side of Cabinet pitched against the other.

In Parliament, it was clear that the House of Lords would do what it could to frustrate Brexit. In the Commons, Labour were gearing up to oppose whatever the Government did, and there were enough rebellious Tory Remainers to render the Government’s slim majority meaningless. Fiona and I talked again and again about whether we needed an early election to help get Brexit through Parliament. But when we raised the question with Theresa, she was always quick to rebuff us.