Читать книгу Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 17

It is lost to history whether Martin Selmayr was an admirer of General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, the American general who was to become Donald Trump’s defence secretary, but he certainly understood one of Mattis’s favourite aphorisms about war – ‘the enemy gets a vote’. While the debate in cabinet and the British media was almost entirely consumed with what Britain wanted from a new deal with Brussels, senior Eurocrats had their own ideas and were beginning to flex their muscles. They didn’t come any more senior, or more aggressive, than Selmayr, the chief of staff to European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

A German lawyer in his mid-forties, Selmayr was regarded – with good reason – as the most powerful man in Brussels. To some he was the most gifted protector of the European dream. To a generation of British diplomats he was a menace who regarded the UK as an obstruction to his schemes and had fully earned his nicknames, ‘the Rasputin of Brussels’ and ‘Monster of the Berlaymont’, the Commission’s headquarters. Said hardly ever to sleep, Selmayr harboured a peculiar animosity towards the British and their media, who had, in his words, a ‘foot on the brake of history’ – though Selmayr once claimed, ‘I only read the British press once a year, when I go to holiday in Spain, when one’s blood pressure is low.’ A ‘true believer’ in the European project, he was on record as saying, ‘Brexit cannot be a success,’ fearing that anything but a catastrophic Brexit could damage the European project. In early November he set out to make it so.

On 4 November, the Financial Times – Selmayr’s preferred British outlet – ran a story saying that the European Union was to demand an exit bill of €60 billion from Britain. Ivan Rogers, Britain’s ambassador to the EU, warned London that Selmayr was trying to ‘explode the whole thing’ by making an impossible demand. A British diplomat said, ‘Selmayr enjoys lobbing grenades into the UK debate. Unlike other EU figures, he is skilled in dealing with the media.’

The exact genesis of the Commission’s calculations was a mystery even to many in Brussels. Other member states told British officials that they had never seen the figure before and suggested it had been ‘plucked from the sky’ by Selmayr. Nonetheless there would be money to pay. Britain’s departure was hugely inconvenient for the other twenty-seven member states because it removed a net contributor to the EU budget that paid around 12 per cent of the bills, in 2016 a sum of around £9.5 billion. In 2013, the UK had signed up for the so-called Multi-annual Financial Framework (MFF) which dictated budget contributions through to 2020, a year after Brexit. Confronted by his opposite numbers about Britain ceasing to pay its dues, Rogers said, ‘They are not our dues because we will have left, so we do not have any financial liabilities at that point.’ EU officials told him, ‘You have exploded a bomb under the Multi-annual Financial Framework.’1 Countries in Eastern Europe which received EU structural funds would only get €88 for every €100 they had budgeted. The issue united countries that were net contributors and recipients. ‘One thing they can all agree on is that we are the rogues who have ceased to pay our dues,’ Rogers said.

The second part of the bill was the UK’s share of the so-called reste à liquider: the gap, in European Union accounting jargon, between commitments made by member states and the actual payments handed over, a figure that had ballooned over the years and would be more than €200 billion by 2018. Britain was also expected to pay its share of the pensions for EU officials accrued during its membership and fees for initiatives like the Erasmus university scheme and the Horizon 2020 scientific research budget if it wished to remain part of those initiatives. On the other side of the ledger, Britain could argue that it owned a share of EU assets like its buildings and had around £9 billion invested in the European Investment Bank.

If the money was a burden, it was also Theresa May’s best leverage in negotiating a new trade deal. Rogers told MPs, ‘The mere fact of our exiting during the period of the framework causes them immense financial difficulty.’2 His advice to May was, ‘Money will unlock a lot.’ But that stance – continuing to pay into the budget even after Brexit – was anathema to most Eurosceptics. It also put UKREP – the UK team in Brussels – at odds with officials in Whitehall, who took legal advice over whether Britain could be forced to pay anything. A House of Lords committee later concluded Britain could not be made to pay. To Rogers it was a matter of politics, not law.

Selmayr had first clashed with May when she was home secretary and he could see that her tactics for Brexit were an echo of her negotiation when Britain opted out of all EU justice and home affairs directives and then back into some of them. EU officials believed the Brexit process was far more complicated and described May’s approach as ‘deluded’. Selmayr’s other beef with May was that he had personally spent hours thrashing out the details of concessions she had demanded as home secretary during David Cameron’s ill-fated renegotiation before the EU referendum. Having sweated to satisfy May, he was furious when she virtually sat out the campaign. A British diplomat said, ‘May was pushing to get extra things into the package but she never then made much of it in the referendum campaign, which Martin hasn’t forgotten.’

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.’

Dinner with Jean-Claude Juncker would have to wait but efforts to get May to bond with EU power brokers were made, to the bewilderment of some of them. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council – the body of member state governments – was ushered in for a series of private chats and faced the same fate as many an MP and journalist. ‘There were Pinteresque pauses in all their bilaterals,’ an official said. Tusk complained, ‘She doesn’t say anything!’ and was told, ‘That’s not her style. Don’t take it personally.’ Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, was invited to Downing Street in late September 2016. After his meeting with May, he texted a senior British diplomat to complain, ‘She didn’t say anything at all. Why have we come all the way to Downing St for that?’

These meetings raised questions about whether May would be able to do the human end of the negotiations, the ‘walk in the woods’ with fellow leaders that helped get a deal over the line. A Downing Street aide said May’s silences were partly a function of insecurity. ‘When you give her a brief to learn, she’s brilliant, but she doesn’t want to reveal what she doesn’t know so she won’t say anything.’ A senior European government official described May as ‘almost reciting from her notes’.3 At the European Council meeting in Brussels that December, May appeared isolated as television footage showed other leaders greeting each other warmly while she stood awkwardly to the side. She was quickly branded ‘Billy no mates’ on social media.

The Commission was regarded in Britain as a rather ridiculous organisation. It took Rogers to point out, ‘They are really pretty good at negotiating against people. Lots of people who have been doing it for thirty years. They have vastly more information at their disposal about where the twenty-seven are coming from than we do, because they are talking to all these people all the time.’4 He urged Jeremy Heywood to appoint a slate of a dozen negotiators under Oliver Robbins to lead on individual issues because he could not get across all the detail himself. The plan was rejected. Robbins would be up against Michel Barnier’s deputy Sabine Weyand, a ‘very smart’ German with three decades of trade negotiations behind her, and Didier Seeuws, a former chef de cabinet to Herman van Rompuy, the former Council president. Robbins would need to know everything from customs procedures to the life cycle of pelagic fish.

David Davis regarded the Commission as a smaller version of the Treasury – a group of people with a belief in the European project who were caught up in a ‘cauldron of emotions’ by Britain’s vote to leave. He believed that they would be ‘brought back to reality’ by the governments of the individual member states. Throughout the summer and autumn Davis travelled Europe meeting fellow ministers and special interest groups, trying to work out who might have interests that would align with Britain’s. The first thing he and David Jones, another of his Brexit ministers, found in their travels was that the rest of Europe was still traumatised by Britain’s decision to leave. Many could not comprehend that Brexit would even happen, so used were they to EU governments holding repeat referendums until they got the result they wanted. Another cabinet minister said, ‘Their initial reaction was one of extreme disappointment, charged with irritation that they were now going to go through a traumatic process which is of our making.’ Another minister estimated, ‘It took about three or four months before EU ministers came to terms with the fact that we were actually leaving.’ At a general affairs council meeting in Bratislava, David Jones was introduced to the Commission’s vice president, Frans Timmermans, whose first words betrayed his angst: ‘Well, how long do you intend to remain shackled to this corpse?’

In a bid to curry favour, ministers found themselves procuring tickets for a Liverpool football game for one senior EU politician. Davis also considered roping in Aston Martin ‘in the national interest’ to give Guy Verhofstadt a spin in one of their cars. The Belgian MEP, who was the European Parliament’s point man on Brexit, raced vintage sports cars. Davis needed all the tricks of the trade ahead of his first meeting with Verhofstadt on 22 November. When asked about the Belgian in Parliament two months earlier, the Brexit secretary had quoted the biblical line, ‘Get thee behind me Satan’. Davis meant he would not be tempted to comment, but the media wrote that he had called Verhofstadt the Devil. When they met, Verhofstadt entered into the spirit of things, greeting Davis with the words, ‘Welcome to hell.’ The talks were not quite that bad, but at their conclusion Verhofstadt’s MEP colleague Manfred Weber said, ‘I have not heard much as to how the British government wants to tackle Brexit and what Brexit really means.’ Verhofstadt was regarded in Downing Street as a voluble nuisance, but his role was important since the European Parliament would have to rubber-stamp a future trade deal. Davis had identified him as one of thirty key interlocutors – one in each of the twenty-seven countries, plus the Commission, the Council and the Parliament. He believed he needed to meet each of them three times in order to develop a relationship of trust.

In order to facilitate all this travel, Davis demanded the use of the prime minister’s official aircraft, dubbed TheresaJet by Westminster journalists, and the Queen’s Flight of the Royal Air Force, which is also used by ministers. ‘DD felt he was the “real” foreign secretary and so therefore thought he should be allowed to use the prime minister’s plane and to catch a royal flight,’ a DExEU official recalled. The request led to ‘an enormous battle’. Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, gave the green light but Simon Case – May’s principal private secretary at Number 10 – and Oliver Robbins, who regularly flew EasyJet, both resisted. ‘Olly totally disapproved and kept blocking the plane,’ the official said. ‘He didn’t really see why DD should be whisked by private jet across Europe.’ Davis won the day when he told Fiona Hill he would not do the trips unless he got his way.

The most important relationship for Davis to develop was that with Michel Barnier, the French former commissioner for financial services who had been appointed as the lead negotiator for the Commission. Barnier was, in Davis’s words, ‘very French’, a smooth and debonair character – in contrast with Davis, who sported the twisted nose of a boxer with more bravery than ability. The two had known each other since the days when they were both Europe ministers in the 1990s. Now they were friendly adversaries. Officials hoped Barnier would take a more pragmatic approach than Martin Selmayr. ‘Barnier is a vain, hopeless and tedious individual but he’s not as vicious as he’s made out to be,’ one undiplomatic diplomat said. ‘He actually wants to do a deal.’ Davis was similarly encouraged by a belief that Barnier wished to become European Union president when Juncker stood down in 2019 – perfect timing for Barnier if he could land a deal with Britain that spring.

Barnier’s hands were tied by the negotiating mandate he had been given by the member states. In their first substantive conversation, Barnier repeated the mantra, ‘no negotiation without notification’, and told Davis Britain’s demand that the divorce arrangements be negotiated alongside the new trade deal was a non-starter. The EU wanted the exit bill settled first, along with a solution to the Irish border and the thorny issue of citizens’ rights. Yet when the conversation turned to Northern Ireland, Barnier said, ‘You must not attempt to do the Northern Irish and Irish resolution bilaterally.’ Barnier had been involved on the EU side in the Good Friday Agreement talks which had secured peace in Ulster. He said, ‘I was very involved in this and I’m very keen that the Commission is involved in the resolution of the Northern Irish border problems.’ Davis readily agreed and reported back to May, ‘He spent the whole meeting saying “no negotiation without notification” and then began negotiating.’

Other ministers had similar experiences, meeting their opposite numbers in member states, who said they could not negotiate separately and then spelled out how they wanted Brexit to work. One minister said, ‘Mostly this is to do with the rights of citizens. The Poles have got one million citizens in this country, the Romanians have got about 400,000, there’s a very big Portuguese population here too.’ The ministers sent the message: ‘We want to look after the interests of your nationals but similarly we think it’s entirely reasonable that you should undertake to protect the rights of British nationals.’

Despite the mutual interest in a deal on citizens’ rights, the issue and that of immigration remained the ones that most soured relations between the government and their European allies throughout the autumn and winter of 2016. The issue was a legacy of the period immediately after the referendum when David Cameron considered a unilateral offer to EU citizens that they could remain in Britain. According to an editorial in George Osborne’s Evening Standard in June 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. A former special adviser corroborated Osborne’s claim, saying Michael Gove had tried to have Number 10 issue a statement saying that EU nationals were secure, only to be told by one of Cameron’s senior aides, ‘You can’t because Theresa won’t sign it off.’

As time went by, senior Conservatives expressed concern that May had not done more to resolve the issue, which they saw as toxic to the party’s brand. One Tory adviser said, ‘It was an early example of Theresa’s tin-earedness. We could have vetoed every single piece of policy, until they gave us a guarantee over nationals. The tone was as much of a problem as the substance. It spiralled into a complete crisis for us. Three million people – the majority of whom are in London – think we’re awful.’ As he began to tour Europe, Davis realised the issue was poisoning the well for the negotiations. ‘Every meeting we went to with an ambassador, a minister or prime minister, they would say “The problem with this is what’s going on with our citizens.”’ May believed it would betray British citizens in Spain and other EU countries if they were not considered as part of a deal. ‘She was adamant that she’d said it in the leadership campaign and it had to be done,’ a DExEU official said, ‘and they said, “We’ve got to think about our people in Europe.”’

May’s attempt to resolve the issue was a disaster that raised fresh questions about her operation. When she visited Angela Merkel in Berlin on 18 November, the prime minister offered a deal to guarantee reciprocal rights for EU citizens. Merkel refused and was privately irritated, since she had told her Europe adviser, Uwe Corsepius, to make clear to Oliver Robbins in advance that she would not countenance any attempt to peel her away from the united line of the EU27. After the meeting Corsepius contacted a British official with a ‘poisonous’ complaint about Robbins: ‘I warned you in advance! Did Olly not transmit back what I said to him?’ If Robbins had warned May her advances would be rebuffed, he was ignored. Even after Merkel had rejected May’s proposal in their meetings, the prime minister had still ploughed on, robotically repeating her prepared talking points. As a source revealed, ‘Merkel’s view was: “What part of ‘no’ do you not understand?”’ The incident strengthened a growing view in Whitehall that May’s manner was ill-suited to the kind of personal interactions that grease the wheels of European negotiations and that Robbins was reluctant to give her bad news. A senior figure who saw May afterwards said she was ‘intensely stunned’ by Merkel’s reaction. ‘It went very badly.’

The German chancellor was in no mood to help, in part because her efforts to deliver a renegotiation deal for David Cameron had been in vain. ‘Merkel feels like she really did go the extra mile to get the best possible package for us in February and she was assured that we would win the referendum,’ a senior cabinet minister said. ‘She feels like we’ve let her down.’

On 28 November, eighty MPs – most of them Tories – signed a letter to Donald Tusk, the Council president, urging him to intervene to resolve the citizens issue. Coordinated by Steve Baker and Michael Tomlinson, it said people are ‘not cards to be traded “tit for tat” in a political playground’ and criticised Barnier’s refusal to allow formal talks on the matter. It was the first offensive operation by the European Research Group (ERG), a collection of Tory MPs which had been revived that month under Baker’s chairmanship. The signatories included former cabinet ministers Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and John Whittingdale. The issue was sufficiently toxic that Tusk and others assumed the letter had been organised by Downing Street. The following day a message was passed to Baker by Denzil Davidson, one of May’s Number 10 EU advisers, asking him to ‘please stop doing this’. An ERG source said, ‘We were just pissing off people at the very top of the EU and that was not what they wanted.’ Baker put out a message on the ERG WhatsApp group asking Eurosceptics to stand down. In his diary he wrote, ‘At No 10’s request suspended operations.’

While the issue of EU citizens already in Britain soured relations with Brussels, what to do about those wanting to come after Brexit was dividing the cabinet. In mid-October Amber Rudd, the home secretary, presented a paper to the Brexit committee proposing a post-Brexit visa regime that would see all European Union workers being forced to prove they had secured a skilled job before being allowed into Britain – along with a seasonal worker scheme for the agricultural and construction industries. Hammond resisted the plans, arguing that permanent low-skilled migrants might also be required.6 Rudd and Davis had a difficult balancing act to strike, respecting those voters who backed Brexit to take back control of immigration with the need to keep the NHS, the care sector and the hospitality industry, all heavily reliant on migrants, fully staffed.

On 1 December, Davis made a speech to the Welsh CBI cautioning Brexiteers not to expect sudden changes to Britain’s immigration system. ‘As we take back control of immigration by ending free movement as it has operated before, let me also say this, we won’t do so in a way that it is contrary to the national and economic interest. No one wants to see labour shortages in key sectors. That wouldn’t be in anybody’s interest.’ In this Davis had the support of Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, both of whom were liberal on immigration. The disagreement was with May, who had made her name at the Home Office talking tough and who felt she could not betray the wishes of Brexit voters. ‘The whole of her government was designed to please the Daily Mail,’ a disgruntled official claimed. ‘The Tory Party is going to meet its commitment to get immigration down to the tens of thousands without doing anything because no European will want to come. We’ll have to have immigration from India and places. I’m not sure that’s what people were voting for.’

It cannot have been easy for May, having to learn the job of prime minister in a period where every decision she made had the potential to alter the path of history. Throughout the autumn, May’s staff say, she gradually became more confident. An MP who spent a lot of time in Downing Street said, ‘At the beginning, there was an anxiety in the room which infected everyone else. She wasn’t always 100 per cent clear about what she was looking for and people weren’t sure what they should be giving her. There were awkward moments, silences, and an uneasiness. Over time, that dissipated as she clearly grew more confident, relaxed and assertive. She knew what to ask for but she also relaxed.’ A Downing Street aide agreed: ‘I think she definitely grew in the job.’

But even as she became more assured, aides say, May was also showing signs of exhaustion. ‘She was already fatigued by the time she got to Christmas – even more into the new year,’ another aide recalled. ‘Things dried up and became that little bit slower. I realised we had just sucked the soul out of her. The chiefs didn’t look after her. They used her to get what they wanted – it was relentless.’

May got a ‘really bad cough and cold that just lingered for ages and did wear her down’. One meeting in December 2016 was abandoned when she was gripped by a coughing fit. ‘For all that Fiona or Jojo went on about caring about her, it was Simon [Case] who sorted out getting a glass of water and said, “We don’t need to do this meeting now,”’ one of those present recalled. ‘She was really tired and not feeling very well.’

The prime minister was a Type 1 diabetic, meaning she had to monitor her blood sugar levels and inject herself in the stomach with insulin before every meal. Officials in Downing Street were secretly instructed in how to do the injections in case May became incapacitated on a foreign trip. But friends and foes alike in Number 10 say that has never happened. ‘I think she manages it really well,’ one civil servant said. ‘She is very calm about it.’

When May flew to Bahrain for the Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in December 2016 it was suggested the prime minister get some rest rather than talk to journalists on the way out. Fiona Hill, hypersensitive to any suggestion that May was fragile, insisted that she do it. ‘Are you mad?!’ Hill said. ‘As soon as you tell the press that she’s unwell it will be a big story.’

One of May’s aides, recognising that she was worn out, took to riding in the car with her to encourage the prime minister to take a nap. ‘Occasionally I’d say, “Do you want to sleep?” If she wouldn’t say “yes”, I’d say, “I’m really tired today. Do you mind if I just close my eyes for five minutes, collect my thoughts?” She took it as her cue to do it herself.’ Even this aide insists May never cried off work. ‘I don’t want anyone to read into that like she’s not up for the job or well enough. I think she looks physically tired at times. She looks puffy. But I’ve never seen her when she doesn’t want to do the work or says, “I’m too tired for that.” She is relentless.’

As November became December the prime minister realised she needed to impose greater order on the Brexit process, which had been saddled with the uncertainty of her first weeks in the job. The cabinet debates of the autumn had allowed ministers to educate themselves about the challenges of Brexit but the time was arriving when the direction of travel laid out in the conference speech had to become firm policy. Those three months had bought Britain time, taking some of the sting out of the EU’s anger and allowing the issues to be studied methodically as May preferred. A cabinet minister said, ‘We had to make sure we’d exhausted all the options. Theresa wanted to show we’d tested everything. You can’t govern based on assumptions.’

Yet the cabinet had decided no firm policy and May had not formalised the hints she had dropped at the party conference. She now faced a rainbow coalition of forces in the courts, Parliament and the wider political world determined to force her hand.