Читать книгу Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 19

Anna Soubry was firm, that was her style. If Ken Clarke was the best-known Europhile on the Conservative benches, Soubry was the most outspoken. The MP for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire had not won her marginal seat by apologising for who she was. During her days as a minister she had given an off-the-record quote to a journalist featuring the word ‘chuffing’. When the hack had suggested that might identify her, Soubry had laughed and said, ‘If I’d used “fucking” it would have identified me.’ It had made her a favourite of lobby journalists, a divisive figure with her colleagues and a nuisance to the whips. It was December 2016 and Soubry was talking to the chief whip, Gavin Williamson, the man who had ensured enough votes for Theresa May in the leadership contest and was now charged with keeping her in power with a working majority of seventeen. The Labour Party had tabled a motion on an opposition day debate calling ‘on the Prime Minister to commit to publishing the Government’s plan for leaving the EU before Article 50 is invoked’.

On the face of it the motion was innocuous. May would surely have to spell out her plan at some point. It stopped short of demanding the government publish a white paper or hold a vote that would guarantee that Britain stayed in the single market, or even a second referendum. A vote on any one of those would be more problematic for the government if it was lost. But as soon as he read the motion Williamson knew it was a threat. It acknowledged that ‘there should be no disclosure of material that could be reasonably judged to damage the UK in any negotiations’. The motion was entirely reasonable. Labour had designed it to garner the maximum parliamentary backing. Soubry confirmed that he had a problem on his hands. She said, ‘I’ve read it and I have to say I can’t see anything in it I don’t approve of and could not support.’

Williamson was a slight figure with the demeanour of a trainee undertaker, but he was given to flashes of rage – the ‘hair dryer treatment’ they called it – if MPs were threatening to rebel. He played the role of chief whip with gothic glee, keeping on his desk a jar containing a tarantula called Cronos. Some said he saw himself as a real-life Francis Urquhart, the chief whip in House of Cards. Shouting was not going to work with Soubry – and she was just the tip of the iceberg. On this, he knew, she had twenty Conservative MPs behind her. For the first time, the government was in danger of losing a vote on Brexit in the House of Commons. It could not afford to do so. It had already been defeated in the courts.

When Theresa May announced, on 2 October, that she would trigger Article 50 by the end of March, the government was already facing legal action to prevent her from doing so. By 19 July, less than a month after the referendum, seven different plaintiffs had brought an action in the High Court arguing that only Parliament, and not the prime minister, had the authority to invoke Article 50. On that day, judges including Sir Brian Leveson decided that the lead claimant would be Gina Miller, a fifty-one-year-old Guyanese-born City fund manager who had voted Remain. Miller, a photogenic former model and mother of three, soon showed herself adept at garnering publicity for her cause. With the assistance of Lisa Tremble, a gifted PR who had once been David Miliband’s special adviser, Miller had the backing of lawyers Mishcon de Reya and the heavyweight clout of QC Lord Pannick. Their claim was that, since the referendum had been advisory rather than legally binding, acting on it would require parliamentary approval. The government’s case was that May could use the royal prerogative to trigger Article 50 since David Cameron had repeatedly made clear that he would respect the results of the referendum. The stage was set for a highly charged showdown over constitutional law.

Tensions were quickly inflamed. At the hearing on 19 July, Pannick complained that Mishcon de Reya had been subjected to ‘racist and anti-Semitic abuse’ by pro-Brexit protesters. Miller was soon the victim of online abuse. By January 2017 the police would be probing twenty-two cases of intimidation, including threats of beheading and rape and one offer of a £5,000 bounty to anyone who ran her over.

Tempers boiled over on 3 November, when a panel of three judges – the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton and Lord Justice Sales – ruled, ‘The Government does not have power under the Crown’s prerogative to give notice pursuant to Article 50 for the UK to withdraw from the European Union.’ David Davis had barely an hour’s notice of the verdict and announced that, if it was upheld by the Supreme Court, an Act of Parliament would be required for Brexit to proceed – a process that allowed MPs or peers to table amendments that would enable them to dictate the terms of Brexit or even halt the process altogether.

The reaction of Eurosceptics was swift and brutal. Iain Duncan Smith accused the judges of sparking ‘a constitutional crisis – literally pitting Parliament against the will of the people’. The Daily Mail delivered the most memorable rebuke, a front page with pictures of the three judges under the headline, ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’, giving details of their links to Brussels and, in one case, their sexuality. If the verdict was not a constitutional crisis, the accusation that it was improper for the judiciary to involve themselves in Brexit now created one. For three days, debate raged over whether those who wanted to subvert the referendum result or those who wanted to silence an independent judiciary were the ones undermining democracy and the rule of law. On the evening of the verdict, Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, went on the BBC’s Question Time programme and accused the judges of ‘an attempt to frustrate the will of the British people’.

Caught in the middle was Elizabeth Truss, the justice secretary. The next morning, Truss wrote to her fellow ministers stressing that the judges were independent and urging them to desist from further attacks. However, Truss herself came under attack from the Law Society and one of her predecessors as Lord Chancellor, Labour’s Charlie Falconer, who said that since the judges ‘can’t defend themselves’ it was Truss’s ‘constitutional duty’ to do so.

Truss spoke to Downing Street and to her aides, one of whom warned her, ‘You’ve got two choices here and they are both really shit.’ Condemning the Mail and supporting the judges and their ruling would be ‘career ending’ as long as May, Timothy and Hill occupied Downing Street. Failure to speak up would rupture relations with the judiciary. Truss’s special adviser, Kirsty Buchanan, a former political editor of the Sunday Express, reinforced Truss’s instincts that it was not her job to start telling newspapers what they could and couldn’t write. Together they studied the Constitutional Reform Act, which showed she had a constitutional duty to uphold the independence of the judiciary. ‘What it doesn’t say is that you have to defend the judiciary by putting out a press statement within forty-five minutes of any critical headlines in newspapers,’ a Ministry of Justice source said. At midday, an aide spoke to Downing Street about whether Truss should issue a statement and got a clear ‘No way, Jose’ response. A second call later in the day confirmed Number 10’s position.

By the Saturday #whereisliztruss was trending on Twitter. Truss had lost her nerve and spoke to the chiefs of staff. They told her not to issue a statement. Truss sent them a bland quote defending the integrity of the Lord Chief Justice but going no further. ‘Can’t I even say this?’ she asked. She phoned Lord Thomas himself and told him that she was going to make a statement supporting him. Again, the chiefs refused her permission to release it. Truss said she had told Thomas a statement was coming. They finally relented, changing a word or two and banning her from making any further comment. ‘The lord chief justice is a man of great integrity and impartiality. Like all judges, he has sworn an oath to administer the law without fear or favour, affection or ill will,’ the statement read. ‘It was supposed to be enough, but without being too much,’ an ally explained. It was too little too late for the lawyers and at least one minister, who said, ‘I felt strongly that it was a matter for the Lord Chancellor to deal with – not a Lord Chancellor operating under Number 10. She should have got on with it.’

The row came at a time when ministers were encouraging the judiciary to be more accountable and explain their decisions better to the public. The High Court case was an example of where they might have done better, spelling out why the case mattered and making it harder to depict them as enemies of Brexit. But the incident not only proved the power of the chiefs of staff over cabinet ministers; it illustrated and unleashed the full range of venomous passions that the referendum campaign had both uncovered and kindled. Having embraced Brexit and the Brexiteers, Theresa May now felt under siege.

It was in that context that a cross-party group of MPs began to talk about how they might build on the High Court ruling to exert the power of Parliament and press the prime minister to reveal her hand. They included members of a Labour Party reeling from a second leadership contest and a group of Conservatives who called themselves Team 2019.

Team 2019 had formed when half a dozen former ministers and Remain-backing Tory MPs met in the office of Alistair Burt, a former Foreign Office minister and passionate pro-European, in September 2016. They wanted to give the impression that they were looking forwards to the date of Brexit, not harking back to the result of the referendum. But the title created greater suspicion in the whips’ office. The driving forces, in addition to the short, balding and pathologically polite Burt, were Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry, close friends and former ministers who were increasingly unwilling to bite their tongues. Dominic Grieve, the courtly former attorney general; Neil Carmichael, the MP for Stroud; former transport minister Claire Perry; and Ben Howlett, the MP for Bath. Sir Nicholas Soames, who put grand in the word grandee, was soon attending their Monday meetings as well.

Gradually, numbers swelled to include Bob Neill, Jeremy Lefroy, Flick Drummond, Alberto Costa and Stephen Hammond. ‘There was a group of twelve to fifteen that would meet regularly,’ one MP said. Others, like Alex Chalk, supported from afar but did not attend the meetings. The group acquired their own researcher, Garvan Walshe, a former Tory adviser now running his own consultancy, Brexit Analytics, which helped businesses understand the risks of Brexit. His salary was paid by Sir Tim Sainsbury, a former Conservative minister. Walshe penned an article for ConservativeHome accusing May of making the same mistakes on Brexit as George W. Bush during the invasion of Iraq, comparing the government’s aggression towards its critics to the shooting of ‘peaceful demonstrators’ in Iraq. He accused the Brexiteers of ‘wielding the “will of the people” with the enthusiasm of French revolutionaries’.1 Team 2019 now had to decide whether to behave like peaceful demonstrators or Robespierre.

Nicky Morgan put her head above the parapet on the Sunday of the Conservative Party conference, giving an interview to the Observer in which she warned that pursuing a ‘hard Brexit’ would ‘promote intolerance and bigotry’. A tall and bustling figure with the air of a school lacrosse captain, Morgan had been fired as education secretary in July as part of May’s cull of the Cameroons. To go to a centre-left newspaper on the very day May was setting out her plans to trigger Article 50 in March, was interpreted as an act of war by Downing Street and the whips’ office. When Morgan spoke at an education event on the fringe, voicing her opposition to May’s decision to allow new grammar schools, there were two whips – Julian Smith and David Evennett – in attendance to keep an eye on her.

The ‘harshness’ of May’s party conference speech and Amber Rudd’s announcement that companies should publish details of the number of foreign workers they employed persuaded the trainee rebels that they needed to become more proactive. Morgan and Soubry both took to the airwaves to denounce the Home Office plan. That week, Nick Herbert, who had led the Conservative Party’s Remain campaign, also surfaced, telling the Guardian that Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox were ‘the three blind mice’ of Brexit, peddling ‘Brexit fundamentalism’.2

Crucially, though, both Morgan and Herbert said Tory pro-Europeans should accept the result of the referendum. From that point on, the rows that consumed the Conservative Party were over the nature of Brexit, not its very existence. The moral core of the group, Alistair Burt, was not a natural rebel. A mild and modest man, he accepted that he had failed over forty years to persuade the British public of the benefits of Brussels. He did not want to spend his remaining years as a parliamentarian trying to reverse the referendum result. Instead, he told the group, they needed to make sure the new ‘script is written as much by those who valued the EU, rather than by those who hated it’.

The first test of strength came in late October with the elections to fill the seats on a new select committee to shadow DExEU. Unusually it was comprised of twenty-one MPs, nearly double the usual number, something that appeared designed to neuter it at birth. One Conservative MP said, ‘It’s ridiculously large. It won’t be able to agree anything.’ The former shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn was elected leader, beating off Brexiteer Kate Hoey. The election for the membership was a dogfight. By their own admission Team 2019 were late to get themselves organised and run a slate of candidates. Leavers ran a successful operation to secure spots for prominent Brexiteers like Michael Gove, John Whittingdale, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Peter Bone. ‘We woke up to that quite late,’ a Team 2019 member said. ‘Everything was done at the last minute.’ Belatedly, Nicky Morgan began to act as a whip, corralling supportive MPs, including George Osborne, to vote for the Team 2019 slate. They succeeded in getting Alistair Burt and Jeremy Lefroy elected, denying the Brexiteers a majority, but Anna Soubry failed by ‘a handful of votes’.

Following the High Court ruling, Team 2019 was divided over strategy. Soubry was sick of watching Eurosceptics cause trouble and determined to give the whips something to think about. Burt did not want to vote against his own government and argued that the group should work privately on Downing Street. ‘If we became the saboteurs who people like the Mail claim,’ he told his colleagues, ‘I think we’ll lose influence.’ Burt knew that he – and most of his colleagues – were not temperamentally the kind who could wage trench warfare against their own. He recognised that he might be too reasonable for his own good, telling his friends, ‘We weren’t built for this.’ Burt resolved to keep lines of communication open to Gavin Williamson, the chief whip, and George Hollingbery, the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary. Williamson showed a close interest in their activities. He had appointed himself personal whip to Morgan, Soubry and George Osborne, though Soubry was soon passed to Julian Smith, who developed a reputation as a ‘deeply dark force’ with some MPs. Since party conference the mood music from Number 10 had been highly confrontational. ‘If people asked questions about Brexit they were accused of thwarting the will of the people. That’s the kind of language the PM was using,’ a former minister said. ‘She continually missed how that was interpreted by those of us who didn’t embrace Brexit as she wanted.’

There was frustration that, beyond Williamson, the whips did not try to pretend they understood Team 2019’s approach. ‘It’s a very, very Brexiteer whips’ office,’ one MP said. ‘They have no sympathy or empathy with our concerns at all.’ Burt and others sought to impress on May’s envoys that principled demands about Brexit were not a plot. A former minister said, ‘Alistair told them, “You’ve got to get Nick and Fiona to understand that putting contrary views is not the first step to unseating Theresa May and removing her as party leader.”’ What they did want was for Parliament to be allowed a say over Article 50 and any final deal struck with Brussels and for May to spell out her plans, preferably to Parliament in a white paper. They had the quiet support of Remain cabinet ministers like Amber Rudd. ‘Amber said, “You’ve got to keep up the good fight, you’ve got to keep pushing,” to which the response was, “You’re in the bloody cabinet!”’

At first the Remainers had, pragmatically, conceded that Britain would leave the single market. As May remained tight-lipped about her plans their attitude hardened.

On 28 August, Britain Stronger in Europe – the Remain campaign from the referendum – was reconstituted as a new organisation, Open Britain, which was to become the umbrella under which all May’s critics could find a voice. James McGrory and Joe Carberry would run it. They launched with an op-ed article by Anna Soubry, Pat McFadden and Norman Lamb – one MP from each of the main parties – and sought to buy themselves the right to be heard by admitting that the Remain campaign and their parties had got it wrong on immigration. ‘Free movement of people cannot continue as it has done,’ they wrote.

This consensual approach did not last long. 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. In September 2016, Blair announced that he was winding up his opaque network of consultancy businesses – Windrush Ventures, Firerush Ventures and Tony Blair Associates – and would set up a non-profit outfit instead. In October Blair wrote in the New European newspaper (dubbed the ‘Remoaner Gazette’ by Brexiteers) that Remain supporters should ‘mobilise and organise’ an insurgency to make the public change its mind about leaving the EU.

From that point on, there were monthly meetings in Blair’s offices on Grosvenor Square, bringing together Blair, Clegg, Dorrell, McGrory, former minister and EU commissioner Peter Mandelson and representatives of Best for Britain, a group set up by Alan Milburn and including Gina Miller, whose case was before the Supreme Court. Blair also met a range of politicians, including Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, ‘to chat about the future’. In Parliament, Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry had regular conversations to discuss parliamentary tactics with Clegg, and with Labour’s Chuka Umunna and Chris Leslie, under the banner of Open Britain. A source who talked Brexit with Blair in November said, ‘He’s not impressed with Theresa May. He thinks she’s a total lightweight. He thinks Jeremy Corbyn is a nutter and the Tories are screwing up Brexit. He thinks there’s a massive hole in British politics that he can fill.’ Another well-known figure approached by Blair said, ‘He thinks Brexit is going to fail and Theresa May’s going to fail.’

In Downing Street, the political team paid a close interest in this swirling cast of characters and the prospect that they might coalesce to form a new centre party. ‘I think enough people are talking on these lines and enough people are making fairly public overtures that we have to take their intent seriously,’ said a close May ally. ‘Their intent is to at least operate a cross-party alliance.’ In truth, there was only one figure in these conversations Downing Street was really concerned about – George Osborne.

The chiefs were alarmed to hear that, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, a close ally of the former chancellor had held discussions with Tim Farron and a couple of Labour MPs in Westminster’s Two Chairmen pub about setting up a new party called The Democrats. Osborne knew nothing of this encounter but, in private, he encouraged Team 2019 to argue for single market membership after Brexit as a way of putting pressure on May. ‘George was saying, “The Eurosceptics have been making unreasonable demands for twenty years, it’s time we did the same,”’ one of those who talked to him that autumn revealed. Osborne did not attend any of the group’s meetings but he was in touch with Nicky Morgan, Nick Clegg, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. ‘He definitely talked to all of the protagonists, without a shadow of a doubt,’ a source said. However, Osborne told friends Clegg and Blair’s quest for a second referendum was ‘hopeless’, believing they should ‘fight on the coming issues, immigration and trade, rather than the last issue’. Publicly, he called leaving the single market ‘the biggest act of protectionism in history’, because Britain was throwing away a deal with the market on its doorstep in search of deals further afield that he believed would be difficult to deliver and demand choices – like offering more visas to Indian or Chinese visitors or accepting hormone-fed American beef – which the public would find unpalatable.

Team May were intrigued to the point of obsession by Osborne’s activities and reports of his actions were sent regularly by the whips to Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. In Downing Street they saw it as an embryonic vessel for the preservation of his leadership hopes. ‘Team 2019? That’s subtle,’ one of May’s aides said when told about the group by Gavin Williamson. ‘They are obsessed and consumed by what he is up to,’ a minister commented. ‘They regard him as the real leader of the opposition.’

In fact, Osborne saw Team 2019 as half-hearted and badly organised and the people involved as ill-suited to rebellion. ‘Trying to organise a rump opposition at the moment would be a waste of my time and effort and burn me out,’ he told one ally. As a student of political history, Osborne knew that time rather than plotting was his best hope of becoming leader. Nonetheless, as a firm Remainer still, he provided encouragement and ideas about how to steer Brexit in the right direction. ‘There’s been a smile here, a text there, an occasional comment in the corridor,’ one Osborne ally said. ‘It’s unlikely that he is remonstrating with Nicky about her loyalty.’ Knowing his Machiavellian reputation, Osborne joked with Gavin Williamson, ‘You’ll know when I’m organising or rebelling, because we’ll win.’

May had not just fired the chancellor of six years, she had patronised him in private, telling him to ‘get to know your own party’, and humiliated him in public when her aides briefed details of the conversation to the media. After that the two did not exchange a single word for a year. A senior civil servant who worked with Osborne said, ‘With George, the hatred goes quite deep, it’s pretty personal. To start with he was predicting that she would not be sufficiently revolutionary for the Eurosceptics and that she’d be eaten by the revolutionaries. Then, presumably, the world would turn to George as the answer.’

To the chiefs, Osborne was both a threat to May and guilty of talking down Britain. To the consternation of some of his MP colleagues, Osborne had landed six highly paid jobs after leaving the cabinet. One was as a research fellow with the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Arizona. When Osborne spoke at a fundraising dinner for the Institute in London, one of those present texted Nick Timothy an account of his speech: ‘Doom and gloom. Danger is coming. We need EU to provide peace and prosperity. He said he was going to research the origins of populism and how to restore proper politicians to government, like him.’ The guest next to the spy described Osborne’s view as ‘a crock of shit’. A source close to May said, ‘Some might say is unpatriotic.’

On 1 December, the assorted battalions of non-Tory Remainers secured a landmark victory, when Liberal Democrat Sarah Olney beat Zac Goldsmith to win the Richmond Park by-election. Goldsmith had stood down as Conservative MP to honour a promise to force a by-election if the government approved a third runway at Heathrow airport. He ran as an independent but fell nearly two thousand votes short. The Greens withdrew their candidate to improve Olney’s chances following a hustings run by More United, a campaign set up that summer in memory of Jo Cox, the Labour MP slain by a far-right fanatic during the referendum campaign. Lance Price – a former spokesman for Tony Blair – was the group’s mouthpiece and it became another forum where Remainers could compare notes. Downing Street insisted the vote would ‘change nothing’ of May’s approach to Brexit, but said it had solidified her intention not to call a general election.

Labour lost their deposit in Richmond Park, but the party was ready – after four months of infighting triggered by the referendum – to play a leading role in the Brexit drama.

Jeremy Corbyn’s problems had begun the day after the EU referendum, when he said in an interview that Article 50 should be triggered immediately. This enraged Labour MPs backing Remain and prompted an attempt to oust him. Corbyn’s supporters believed he was misunderstood. One of his closest allies said, ‘Jeremy came out and said Article 50 will have to be triggered. That’s a statement of fact. That’s what the referendum was about. He wasn’t saying it needed to be triggered right now. It was a wilful misinterpretation. There was a period of mass hysteria after the referendum result.’

Corbyn was already under fire from Labour officials, who accused him of lacklustre effort for the Remain cause during the referendum and his closest aides of active sabotage. Corbyn, his chief adviser Seumas Milne and shadow chancellor John McDonnell were all longstanding critics of the single market, which they regarded as a capitalists’ club that penalised workers. Another aide said, ‘There are aspects of the EU we didn’t like and we don’t like, for example state aid and forced privatisation. That’s why we campaign to “remain but reform”. That’s where we thought the public were.’ But a senior official at Labour headquarters said, ‘Had Jeremy campaigned during the referendum like he was to do during the general election, I don’t think we’d be leaving the EU. I genuinely think he’s to blame for this. It was absolutely shameful.’

The coup was triggered by the sacking of Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, the weekend after the referendum just as he was about to resign. More than sixty frontbenchers jumped ship and – in a stunning rebuke to Corbyn – 172 MPs voted to remove him in a no-confidence vote. Just forty wanted him as leader but Corbyn refused to go, citing his mandate from the party membership.

In the subsequent leadership election, however, Corbyn’s upbeat campaigning persuaded more than one hundred thousand new members to join the party and propelled him to another victory, this time over Owen Smith. Europe became a feature of the leadership election, with Smith arguing that Labour should fight for a second referendum and seek to overturn Brexit. Had he won, Labour would have been in the simple position of battling for the 48 per cent and telling voters they were wrong. It might have finished the party but it would have had the benefit of simplicity. Instead, Corbyn immediately ruled out a second referendum. On the morning of the result he went for coffee with his closest aide, Seumas Milne, and two of his press spokesmen, Kevin Slocombe and Matt Zarb-Cousin. ‘We straight away said you’ve got to respect the result of the referendum,’ one explained.

Even once he had cemented his position, Corbyn’s approach to Brexit was confused, but his equivocation perhaps reflected the ambiguities many voters felt towards the EU. His challenge was to show that he could mount a competent opposition to the government and reconcile the pro-Remain views of voters and party members in their metropolitan seats with the working-class supporters who backed Brexit in the Northern towns. After the party conference, Corbyn’s team set up a Brexit subcommittee, chaired by the leader, which included John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Emily Thornberry and Jon Trickett, plus the new shadow Brexit secretary, former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer. His appointment brought a forensic legal mind to the task and neutralised someone Corbyn’s team saw as a threat. ‘People were of the view that it was necessary to have Keir in the tent, that he was a potential future leadership candidate,’ a source said. ‘If you have him in the tent, locked into a difficult area, there’s a lot to be said for that.’

For the next six months Labour pursued a twin approach. Corbyn and his closest aides sought to focus Brexit policy, not on the institutional arrangements which were obsessing the government, but on what choices made by the Tories would mean for ordinary workers. That allowed them to turn Brexit into just one more domestic political issue. A Corbyn aide said, ‘For the leadership, it’s not about the process, it’s about different visions for the future. The government has the low-wage, low-growth economy, we’ve got the high-wage, high-growth, high-investment, high-skill economy with an interventionist state.’ Labour warned that a chaotic – or sometimes ‘shambolic’ – Brexit would hurt the working poor. They demanded a ‘Brexit that works for Britain and puts jobs, living standards and the economy first’.

Even as the leadership coup was still raging, John McDonnell gave a speech on 1 July laying out five Labour principles for Brexit. He called for existing workers’ rights to be protected; for UK businesses to have the freedom to trade with the EU and EU businesses with the UK; for protection of residency rights for EU citizens living in the UK, and for UK citizens elsewhere in Europe; for the UK to stay part of the European Investment Bank; and for UK financial services to keep their access to the EU.

In parallel with this approach, Starmer and Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, lawyers both, sought to find ways of tripping up the government and harassing them on the institutional details. On 11 October, Starmer and Thornberry issued 170 questions for the Tories on their Brexit plans. The effort was not focused but it was the right idea. In the weeks ahead, they began demanding a white paper and the right for Parliament to approve the Brexit plans. ‘The first thing to do was to try to get government to move on from this position of “No running commentary”,’ a Corbyn aide said. That was how Labour came to devise its opposition day motion calling for the government to spell out its plan. Starmer said, ‘Parliament and the public need to know the basic terms the Government is seeking to achieve from Brexit. This issue is too important to be left mired in uncertainty any longer.’

When the motion went down, the Tory Remainers were wary of being seen to form a cross-party alliance with the opposition, but the motion offered them a chance to show Downing Street that they were a force to be reckoned with. Briefings began to appear that up to forty Conservative MPs might back the motion.

Around the same time, Fiona Hill had reached out to Morgan and Burt and invited them in to Downing Street for two face-to-face meetings. She told them, ‘I voted Remain as well, but believe me when I tell you it’s all going to be okay because I’m in the middle of it. Britain will be better than ever.’ The Remainers explained that they wanted a white paper. They believed, wrongly as it was to transpire, that there would come a time when May would need them and their votes to help face down the Eurosceptics. ‘At that point we all expected that the prime minister would have to make compromises which would upset the Brexiteers,’ a former minister said. ‘We talked about, “How do we help her to make those compromises and be there to support her when she does?”’

Nicky Morgan, Anna Soubry, Alistair Burt, Dominic Grieve, Ben Howlett and Neil Carmichael all went to see chief whip Gavin Williamson and told him they were prepared to support the motion. ‘We’d like to back this, there’s nothing wrong with this amendment,’ Morgan said. Williamson knew he needed a plan – and fast. Fortunately, Team 2019 weren’t the only pressure group on the Conservative backbenches.

Steve Baker was looking at Twitter on his phone when he heard a cheer and looked up. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘You’ve just been made chairman of the ERG,’ came the answer. The ERG was the European Research Group, once a group of Conservative MPs who had got together to fund a researcher, now the shock troops of the Eurosceptic right. During the referendum campaign Baker, a former RAF engineer and amateur military strategist, had masterminded a guerrilla campaign against his own government to boost the chances of the Brexiteers, most notably changing the wording of the referendum question in a way that experts said had boosted Leave’s chances by four percentage points. In September 2016, Baker disbanded Conservatives for Britain, his old pressure group, and after May’s conference speech, over breakfast in dining room A of the House of Commons, he had been elected by acclamation to repeat the trick with the ERG. This time, his goal was to keep his government on the track it had set, rather than knock it off course. By then two external Brexit groups had been set up. The businessmen Richard Tice and John Longworth led Leave Means Leave. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson lent their support to Change Britain, run by Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP they had worked with on the Vote Leave campaign.

Baker brought in a new MP, Michael Tomlinson, as his deputy while Suella Fernandes and Anne-Marie Trevelyan became vice chairmen. Every Monday Baker met with the ‘steering group’ of Paleosceptic veterans – Bill Cash, Bernard Jenkin, John Redwood, Peter Lilley and Iain Duncan Smith among them – who had led them into the battles over the Maastricht Treaty twenty-five years earlier. ‘Without them nothing moves,’ an ERG source said. ‘With them everything starts shaking and quaking.’ Soon, Baker had a WhatsApp group with eighty Tory MPs signed up and awaiting instructions.

On 20 November, Suella Fernandes fired the first shot, fronting a letter signed by sixty Tory MPs, including seven former cabinet ministers, which demanded that May pull Britain out of the single market and the customs union. Baker controlled which MPs did broadcast interviews for all the main Eurosceptic groups and fed in practical ideas to Stephen Parkinson, one of May’s Downing Street political aides. Baker was also in close touch with Gavin Williamson, who told MPs, ‘Steve’s here to support the government now.’ Williamson had a different name for the group of Eurosceptics, regarding them as less house-trained – The Taliban. They got special trips to Downing Street. Some MPs referred to Baker as ‘the real deputy chief whip’. At the same time, Baker kept up the pressure for a hard Brexit. ‘There was a real tension between rolling the pitch in a way which we knew was helpful and unhelpfully driving them forwards,’ an MP recalled. ‘It was loyal activism.’

When the day of the opposition debate arrived, Gavin Williamson feared amendments would be added to the Labour motion to impose greater obligations on the government. He did not want an embarrassing defeat. He contacted Team 2019 and informed them that he would be tabling an amendment of his own to the Labour motion accepting that the government would spell out its Brexit plans. Team 2019 were duty bound to vote for a government amendment that gave them what they wanted. Keir Starmer had been outmanoeuvred. The rebels had won – or so they thought.

Steve Baker was sitting in Williamson’s office when the text of the government amendment was sent to the table office. It called on ‘the Prime Minister to commit to publishing the Government’s plan for leaving the EU before Article 50 is invoked’, but there was a kicker. Williamson had added, ‘this House should respect the wishes of the United Kingdom as expressed in the referendum on 23 June; and further calls on the Government to invoke Article 50 by 31 March 2017’. The chief whip had given ground where he needed to and was now bouncing the Remainers into supporting May’s timetable for triggering Article 50. Williamson handed Baker the text of the amendment. Baker photographed it, tweeted the picture and texted a link to the entire parliamentary press lobby. A wry smile crossed Williamson’s lips. With Cronos the tarantula looking on, he said, ‘Steve, you’re really quite organised, aren’t you?’ Baker replied, ‘Yes chief, I am.’ They both fell about laughing.

The motion was passed by 461 votes to 89. It was a non-binding vote, but through his manoeuvrings Williamson had ensured that, more than a month before the Supreme Court ruled definitively on whether Parliament should have to approve the triggering of Article 50, MPs had voted to support doing exactly that. ‘His amendment completely spoiled their rebellion, and turned everything on its head,’ a leading Eurosceptic MP said. ‘It was a brilliant, brilliant piece of work by the government chief whip.’

It was also to contribute to one of the most spectacular rows of May’s first year in power. Team 2019, particularly Anna Soubry, felt they had been misled. ‘Anna was absolutely furious she was being asked to vote for something which accepted the triggering of Article 50,’ a colleague recalled. ‘She felt very betrayed. At that point the disillusionment started to set in. We realised that Downing Street were not interested in us, they were only into appeasing the Brexiteers.’

The incident which weaponised the relationship between Team 2019 and Downing Street became known as ‘Trousergate’. It began in mid-November when Liz Sanderson, the Downing Street head of features, agreed that Theresa May would sit down with the Sunday Times Magazine for an interview and a glossy shoot with a portrait photographer. Sanderson was a former feature writer with the Mail on Sunday who had joined the Home Office as a special adviser after Hill was forced to resign. She put together a briefing note to May and the day before the interview, she and Katie Perrior, the director of communications, were called to see the prime minister. Knowing May would be expected to open up about herself for a long-form interview, they took her through a few obvious lines of questioning. When they had finished, Perrior asked the prime minister, ‘Do you need a stylist?’

‘No,’ said May.

‘Are you sure? I mean they’re offering it, so if you want it go for it.’

‘I don’t want a stylist.’

‘What about hair and make-up?’

Again May said ‘No’, but there was hesitation in her voice. She changed her mind: ‘I wouldn’t mind.’

Perrior then asked if Sanderson could inspect the Mays’ private flat above 11 Downing Street. ‘I know it’s your home but we might want to rearrange some things because we want the photos to look fab,’ she explained. May readily agreed. Sanderson did a recce and was happy that everything looked smart.

At 7 p.m. that evening, the day before the shoot, Fiona Hill marched to the press office and began shouting at Sanderson. Minutes earlier she had demanded a list of British designers. ‘I need that list now! How the fuck did this happen?’

Perrior emerged from her office to find out what was going on. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

In front of the entire press office, Hill said, ‘No, it fucking isn’t all right. You have taken your eye off the ball again.’ Perrior asked what the problem was. ‘Where are the clothes?’ Hill asked. Perrior explained that the prime minister had been fully briefed by Sanderson and ‘the prime minister said she doesn’t want a stylist and she wants to choose her own clothes’.

Hill was furious: ‘First. Fucking. Mistake. Why on earth did you listen to that?’

‘Because she’s the prime minister. Anyway, her clothes are fantastic. She always looks good.’

‘Big mistake. You need to realise that the PM does not know her own mind on this stuff and needs me to be the one making these decisions for her. First of all, it shows you’re not in control of this, at all. Secondly, where are the fucking hydrangeas?’ Perrior was lost for words, recalling a line from the film The Devil Wears Prada about a bullying boss in the fashion industry and her obsession with flowers. Hill continued, ‘Flowers? Hydrangeas? You know, brighten up the flat a bit. Second big fail.’

Perrior suggested getting the Sunday Times people to bring some in the morning. ‘I want hydrangeas now!’ said Hill. Perrior dispatched her PA, armed with Perrior’s credit card, to locate hydrangeas at seven o’clock in the evening. While that was happening, Hill had picked up the phone to May’s favourite fashion designer, Amanda Wakeley: ‘I’m really sorry to do this, but could we have a van full of clothes for Theresa’s size tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. at Downing Street. I’m afraid the team here have fucked up.’

The following morning Hill was in work by seven, dressed in a designer leopard-print skirt with Gucci heels, when the journalists arrived. Perrior looked in briefly on the interview but, feeling surplus to requirements for the pictures, retreated to her office. A couple of hours later a pale-faced Sanderson sought her out. ‘How did it go?’ Perrior asked.

‘Theresa looked really good.’ Sanderson paused. ‘But there might be an issue. She was in £2,000 worth of clothes. We will need a line to take.’ The clothes Hill had helped May to select included a pair of brown leather trousers costing £995, a jumper worth £495 and a pair of spotless Burberry trainers which retailed at £295. For a politician who claimed to be working for people who were ‘just about managing’ it was a public relations disaster in the making. Perrior inspected the pictures and thought that May did not even look natural. Her languid pose was that of an ageing starlet rather than a no-nonsense national leader. Another of the Number 10 heads of department said, ‘I remember looking at that photograph thinking, “It is not the leather trousers that are odd, it is that the plimsolls she was wearing had never been out of the house.” They were virgin white. It all looked completely artificial.’

When the magazine dropped, on 27 November, journalists from other publications began phoning up, firing off awkward questions. ‘Are they her clothes? Did she borrow them? Did she keep them? Did she pay for them? Does she have a stylist? Is Fiona her stylist?’ There were no good answers. All Perrior and her colleagues in the press office could think about was: why did the prime minister allow herself to be kitted out in two grand’s worth of clobber? That night even Perrior’s mother told her May had gone down in her estimation. At the end of the week she went home to watch Have I Got News For You. All they could talk about was May’s leather trousers. Then she watched Gogglebox and was confronted with the same images.

There was more to come, though. The following week Nicky Morgan told The Times that May’s extravagant trousers had been ‘noticed and discussed’ in local Tory circles. ‘My barometer is always, “How am I going to explain this in Loughborough market?” I don’t have leather trousers,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much on anything apart from my wedding dress.’

Team 2019 had been due to go into Downing Street for a third time, this time to see the prime minister. Morgan was taken aside by George Hollingbery, May’s parliamentary bag carrier, and told, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come to that meeting.’ Morgan said, ‘I know exactly where this has come from. If they want to play it that way, okay.’

Three days earlier Alistair Burt had received a text from Fiona Hill saying, ‘Don’t bring that woman to Downing Street again.’ Incensed, Morgan texted the chief of staff, ‘If you don’t like something I have said or done, please tell me directly. No man brings me to any meeting. Your team invites me. If you don’t want my views in future meetings you need to tell them.’ Hill, apparently responding to the part of the message about Burt, replied, ‘Well, he just did. So there!’3

Morgan was furious. She felt Downing Street should have laughed off her comments. Instead they were intent on signalling that anyone who ever voiced criticism would be shot down. The week that Gavin Williamson fixed the amendment, turning the tables on Team 2019, someone briefed the Guardian that Morgan had been banned from Downing Street. She thought to herself, ‘I’m not having this,’ and passed the texts to the Mail on Sunday, which splashed the story on 11 December. Hill told colleagues, ‘I will never speak to Nicky Morgan again. There’s no point. It’s nothing to do with the trousers. I fundamentally think it’s wrong to share private text messages.’

The story included a quote from Adam Stares, deputy chairman of Morgan’s Loughborough constituency association, who said, ‘There’s a lot of people who think she is taking sideswipes at the government and at Theresa May.’ Morgan knew that Stares was friends with the whip Julian Smith from their days in Yorkshire politics. She confronted Gavin Williamson, accusing Smith of getting her own association to denounce her. Smith did not admit that he had encouraged Stares, but he admitted speaking to him. Morgan confided in a friend, ‘You know it’s really lonely at the moment. I’m standing up for what I believe in but I’m getting killed right now.’

Fiona Hill’s behaviour during that fortnight became a talking point around Downing Street. Many would have sympathised with her more if they had known that a month earlier she had separated from her partner Charles Farr, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was a stark reminder of the pressures real life and political life sometimes place on each other. But Hill did not seek sympathy by revealing the break-up.

The Commons motion meant the time was fast approaching when the prime minister needed to spell out her Brexit plan. Having seen off the two most awkward female backbenchers, Morgan and Soubry, she now had to deal with the two men who, in their very different ways, had become the biggest headaches in her government: Boris Johnson and Ivan Rogers.