Читать книгу Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 21

Open with a joke, they say. Theresa May’s gag certainly got a big laugh when she began her party conference speech. It was the perfect way to break the ice with the party faithful. In retrospect it might have been better not to choose as her joke the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. Clearly revelling in her big moment, May strode to the mark and said, ‘When we came to Birmingham this week, some big questions were hanging in the air. Do we have a plan for Brexit? We do. Are we ready for the effort it will take to see it through? We are.’ May paused, taking her audience by the hand towards the punchline: ‘Can Boris Johnson stay on message for a full four days?’

The audience laughed. Near the front of the stalls, Johnson waved. ‘Just about,’ said May, rotating her palm as if the verdict hung in the balance. The foreign secretary staked his claim to loyalty. ‘Slavishly … religiously,’ he shouted out.

Behind the smiles, though, Johnson’s ability to carry himself in one of the great offices of state was already in question. His appointment – shortly after his career appeared to have imploded – was a surprise, not least to him. As one of the front men for Brexit he was not popular in the European capitals. But in the Whitehall reorganisation that followed, the Foreign Office was not in the box seats when it came to Brexit. His allies celebrated the fact that Britain’s most mercurial politician finally had the chance to prove himself a serious contender for even higher office.

Yet throughout the autumn, controversy and gaffes appeared to follow Johnson as if he were the Pied Piper of political problems. First came the cabinet wars over Chevening, the grand country pile in Kent which is traditionally the grace and favour home of the foreign secretary or the deputy prime minister. In a sign that May had a warped sense of humour, she decreed that ‘The Three Brexiteers’ – Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox – should share the mansion, a move that prompted newspaper articles about which of them should be ‘the keyholder’. ‘Boris cared enormously about Chevening. DD couldn’t give a fuck,’ one senior government figure recalled. ‘Boris was insisting that “They can use it but they have to get my permission.”’ Davis, never one to miss an opportunity for devilment, engaged heartily in debates with Johnson about which of them was the senior minister before announcing to officials, ‘Just tell them I’m not going to use it. Boris can do whatever he wants.’

May had given Johnson the job because she wanted him to shake things up, but also because she felt he was the wronged party after Michael Gove’s betrayal in the 2016 leadership election. ‘We wanted a big brain in there to reassess whether our policies in those regions are stale or need rethinking,’ said one of May’s aides. ‘She wanted to give him a good job.’ But by October there was widespread irritation that Johnson was learning on the job so publicly. ‘Theresa was clear with him that he had to show his serious side,’ a Downing Street source said. ‘He took his time to settle.’

Others in Number 10 say May’s team set Johnson up to fail. ‘They thought Boris was a threat,’ a Downing Street official said. ‘Part of the plan of appointing him to that position was to let him discredit himself. He has done it a bit. You tame him that way.’

If that was indeed May’s plan, it worked a treat. As he began to travel, the foreign secretary discovered that his colourful way of expressing himself was a world away from the nuanced niceties of the diplomatic world. Searching for a purpose, he seemed at times like a child in a sweet shop, latching on to each passing international crisis with his customary brand of dangerously quotable insight. He enthusiastically backed a ‘no bombing zone’ in Syria that had no prospect of support from the White House and consequently no hope of success. Disgusted by Russian backing for the Assad regime, he called on 11 October for ‘demonstrations outside the Russian embassy’, a move that was widely ridiculed. Two days later, at a select committee hearing, he admitted he did not know what the Commonwealth flag looked like. When an official drew it for him, he said, ‘That’s a lovely flag.’

With the cabinet on the verge of backing the expansion of Heathrow airport, which he had bitterly opposed, Johnson had to find a way around his ancient pledge, made while Mayor of London, to lie down in front of the bulldozers. ‘I’m going to construct a sarcophagus that will allow me to be suspended under the bulldozers,’ he said. ‘Once they roll over me I will emerge like Houdini in order to fulfil my pledge.’

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’.

Johnson was weakened in mid-October by the departure of Walden to the private sector. Johnson had wanted him to be made chief of staff but he fell foul of a crackdown on the number of special advisers and their remuneration. Walden offered to take a pay cut and forget the grander title but then received a message from Sue Gray, in the Cabinet Office, saying Downing Street would not approve his appointment. His name, it seemed, was on a ‘banned list’ drawn up by Team May, which included special advisers who had worked for former ministers they did not like, such as Michael Gove, some civil servants, and people close to David Cameron. It was further evidence that May’s allies did not want Johnson to build a strong team that could become a rival power centre. The foreign secretary recruited Liam Parker, Mark Carney’s spin doctor at the Bank of England, to handle his media but he was still learning the ropes when the briefing wars began.

Two weeks after the party conference Johnson was embarrassed by the publication, in the Sunday Times, of an article he had written arguing for a Remain vote, just two days before he declared for Leave. The article had been dashed off to demonstrate the weakness of the Remain cause but its publication fuelled the views of some voters and MPs that Johnson had backed Leave to further his own ambitions. The vociferousness with which he pursued the Brexit cause can only have been fuelled by the need to prove that he had made the right decision. Some cabinet colleagues still felt he was too ready to approach Brexit as if he was part of the Leave campaign, rather than as a minister in a government that had to get to grips with the potential problems. ‘We all call him Borisgloss, like he’s Panglossian,’ one cabinet minister said. ‘All of us want this to work, even those who were passionate Remainers. That means that you have to engage in the difficulties.’ Allies of Johnson said he was acutely aware that, having led the Leave campaign, he would be personally blamed for any problems with Brexit. Protests outside his front door in Islington by irate Remainers had already driven Johnson to move his family to the more protected surroundings of the foreign secretary’s official residence in Carlton Gardens. A special adviser said, ‘Bojo knows he’s going to be drummed out of the country if this is a disaster. He already hardly shows his face in London, the city he used to run.’

Ivan Rogers, believing Johnson had an overly optimistic view of how easy it would be to reach a deal, invited him to Brussels for dinner with David McAllister, the German MEP with a Scottish father who was tipped by some as a successor to Angela Merkel, and some other Anglophile MEPs. Both sides were shocked by what they heard. McAllister gave Johnson an ‘unvarnished’ view of how Britain was seen for leaving the EU and warned that the final deal ‘will take much longer than you think’. He said Britain would need a transitional agreement and would get no special privileges beyond what other third-party countries enjoyed. Johnson was aggressive in return, telling his fellow guests, ‘This is why we’ve got to exit and this is why this venture isn’t going anywhere.’ McAllister ‘went white’ according to one account and declared later, ‘I can’t believe that is the British foreign secretary.’

Rogers also put Johnson in front of Anthony Gardner, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the European Union, who gave him a similarly blunt view of how the EU was seeing things. As he had with Hammond, Rogers stressed to Johnson that a transitional period would be necessary: ‘I don’t think we’ll do an FTA [free trade agreement] in the space of two years.’ But, he pointed out, ‘We have to leave the customs union if we want to do our own trade policy – so that’s a battle you’re bound to win.’ He compared the prospect of leaving via ‘a cliff edge’ a year before a general election to an outbreak of ‘foot and mouth disease cubed’ because there would be huge delays at the border. ‘What kills governments is the public sense of chaos,’ Rogers warned. ‘Don’t take this from me, go and talk to customs people.’

May’s desire to put Johnson in his place was again evident at the start of November when both accepted awards at the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year dinner, Johnson for best comeback. In his speech, Johnson compared himself to Michael Heseltine’s dog, Kim, who the former cabinet minister had admitted to strangling to calm it down. (Heseltine denied killing the dog.) ‘Like Kim the Alsatian I am absolutely thrilled to have had this reprieve,’ Johnson joked. But when May took to the stage she delivered a joke with menace: ‘Boris, the dog was put down … when its master decided it wasn’t needed any more.’

Johnson’s allies pushed back hard at Downing Street, making clear that if he was slapped down again in public he would respond in kind. In Number 10 Johnson had an ally in Katie Perrior, who had helped run his first mayoral campaign in 2008. He also got a call from Fiona Hill, who said May ‘didn’t mean it’. May called Johnson and said, ‘Oh Boris, I hope you didn’t take too much offence last night. It was a joke.’ He replied, ‘I don’t. I’ve made a living out of jokes but the papers seem to think there is something there and it doesn’t help.’ He made the point that May knew what she was dealing with when she appointed him and it was agreed that the jokes would stop. An edict even went to ministers that they should start referring to Johnson as the foreign secretary, rather than ‘Boris’. A source close to May said, ‘I think he had created the idea that it was okay to have a joke about Boris because he joked about everything and everyone. But that was the last time we made a joke about him, because I think she knew herself the caravan had moved on. He was a bit upset about it.’

As the most prominent face of a hard Brexit, Johnson was also the focus of lingering anger among EU politicians. ‘Around the world, they all regard the guy as a British Trump,’ reported a former minister who travelled a lot. On 16 November, Johnson was accused of ‘insulting’ Italian economic development minister Carlo Calenda when Boris said Italy should back a good trade deal for Britain or they would lose ‘prosecco exports’ to the UK. With his trademark verbal gymnastics, Johnson had suggested controlling immigration while maintaining trade was ‘pro-secco but by no means anti-pasto’. But his desire for Britain to have its cake and eat it rubbed his counterparts up the wrong way. Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem – the president of the eurozone’s Eurogroup – accused him of ‘saying things that are intellectually impossible, politically unavailable’.

There was resentment at Johnson’s statements during the referendum campaign, which many saw as misleading. When the foreign secretary travelled to Turkey later that month and told President Erdogan that he supported Turkish EU entry, just months after the Leave campaign had played on fears of Turkey to drum up votes, Manfred Weber – the president of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) grouping in the European Parliament – accused him of an ‘unbelievable provocation’. Johnson’s suggestion in January 2017 that EU leaders should not be tempted to give the UK ‘punishment beatings’ for Brexit ‘in the manner of some World War Two movie’ would only confirm to many continentals that he was more intent on being interesting than being diplomatic.

European officials mounted their own briefing operation against Johnson. On the evening of 30 November, the Guardian and Sky News began to report that the foreign secretary had privately told a group of EU ambassadors that he was personally in favour of the free movement of people. Four of them had spoken to Sky. One said, ‘He did say he was personally in favour of free movement, but he said it wasn’t government policy.’ Johnson had always been liberal on immigration, but the claim was toxic since it flew in the face of his stance at Vote Leave and Theresa May’s decision to put control of immigration at the top of her list of priorities.

When Steve Baker heard the news, he detected ‘a political operation designed to discomfort Eurosceptics’. The ambassadors had been introduced to the journalists by British Influence, a group run by Peter Wilding, an arch-Europhile who had first coined the term ‘Brexit’. Baker texted Johnson to ask what the ‘line to take was’. The foreign secretary replied that he was ‘in favour of migration under control’. Determined to close down the story, Baker messaged all 170 MPs and peers on an old mailing list he had used to stage EU rebellions against David Cameron and said, ‘This is an attack on Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson’s view hasn’t changed, he’s in favour of migration under democratic control. Nothing has changed.’ He sent the same message to the European Research Group WhatsApp group and then tweeted his support for Johnson, urging others to do the same. ‘The result was that within fifteen minutes we’d destroyed that operation against Boris,’ a leading Eurosceptic said. ‘What they were hoping for was Eurosceptics turning on Boris Johnson and tearing him limb from limb.’ Baker had turned his Eurosceptic shock troops from a guerrilla unit fighting his own government into a praetorian guard for hard Brexit.

Even so, Johnson’s cabinet colleagues continued to undermine him. In his autumn statement speech to the Commons, Philip Hammond could not resist a dig at Boris’s failed leadership bid and his reference a year earlier that he would seek the leadership ‘if the ball came loose at the back of the scrum’. Incisors gleaming, the chancellor told MPs, ‘I suspect that I will prove no more adept at pulling rabbits from hats than my successor as foreign secretary has been in retrieving balls from the back of scrums.’ Johnson smiled ruefully. A special adviser said, ‘Number 10 advised Hammond not to put that joke in his speech and he didn’t listen to them.’

Some of Johnson’s problems were the result of the uncontrollable circus that has always surrounded him. In late November, he was in Serbia and was invited to speak about press freedom at the oldest bookshop in Belgrade. But when the owner produced copies of his biography of Winston Churchill to sign, Johnson found himself in hot water, accused of profiting from a diplomatic trip.

Others appeared to be the result of hostile briefing from his cabinet colleagues. Priti Patel was fingered for briefing the Sun about the Foreign Office wasting aid money. ‘She felt very uncomfortable that he was making headlines on Brexit and she was stuck in DfID,’ a ministerial aide adduced. Other colleagues ridiculed his contributions to discussion. One stated, ‘Boris has not said anything of consequence in cabinet. It is very high level tendentious piffle.’ Cabinet ministers recounted how May’s patience with Johnson wore thin, on one occasion holding up her hand with her eyes closed and sighing as if she was trying to mute him. ‘There was a flash of anger,’ a cabinet minister said. ‘That was unusual for her.’ One minister even made the extraordinary claim that Johnson ‘got the number of Punic wars wrong’ during one of his classical disquisitions in cabinet. Johnson saw the hand of May’s acolytes too. He told friends, ‘I think there were at least a couple of shots from our friends in Number 10.’

The most damaging story was traced to the Treasury. On 20 November, at the height of the rows over the customs union, the Mail on Sunday claimed Johnson had turned up at the Brexit committee with the wrong papers.1 In the meeting, he had annoyed Hammond by making a point unconnected with the chancellor’s presentation. Another cabinet minister said, ‘It wasn’t that he turned up with the wrong papers. He started talking about something that we had discussed at the last meeting. He had just forgotten that whole discussion.’ The chancellor told friends Johnson was unprepared and the anecdote was passed to the press.

Cabinet colleagues continued to be frustrated by Johnson’s controversialism – and his seeming ability to get away with things they could not. On a cabinet away day in early 2017, Johnson was walking with Andrea Leadsom and Ben Gummer while press photographers stalked them. Gummer referred to the controversy over the size of the crowds at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Johnson, who had misheard said, ‘The Krauts? What do you mean the Krauts?’

‘No, no, no. Crowds, Boris.’

‘What about the Krauts?’

‘I said the crowds, the people there.’

Johnson bellowed, ‘I thought you said Krauts! It wasn’t Krauts at all! I thought you were talking about Krauts.’

Gummer said, ‘For God’s sake don’t say that in front of the cameras because they’ll be able to lip read what you’re saying.’

One minister who heard the story said, ‘It shows the layers of his mind, what comes first, what you hear.’

The moment that led to a full-blown crisis at the top of the government came in early December, shortly after the prime minister had made a trade trip to the Gulf. In the Bahraini capital, Manama, May had become the first woman ever to address the Gulf Cooperation Council, the regional political organisation for the energy-rich Gulf monarchies: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In a speech and over dinner with the ageing potentates, May sealed a strategic security partnership and agreement to unblock barriers to free trade, saying that in challenging times Britain wanted to be ‘partner of choice’ with its ‘oldest and most dependable friends’. The warmth of the welcome impressed May and Fiona Hill, who was travelling with her. ‘They just fell in love with her,’ Hill told colleagues.

May and Hill were both livid when it emerged that, at a conference in Rome the following week, Johnson had criticised her new Saudi friends. ‘There are politicians who are twisting and abusing religion and different strains of the same religion in order to further their own political objectives,’ Johnson claimed. Referring to the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, he added, ‘You’ve got the Saudis, Iran, everybody, moving in and puppeteering and playing proxy wars.’ The comments were a flagrant breach of the diplomatic omertà on criticising allies in public.

In Downing Street, Helen Bower – May’s official spokeswoman – needed a line to give to the morning briefing with lobby journalists. Hill issued her with an incendiary quote: ‘Those are the foreign secretary’s views, they are not the government’s position on Saudi Arabia and its role in the region.’ Instead of calming the situation, the quote was guaranteed to be seen as another slap-down for Johnson from Team May. Suggesting the foreign secretary did not speak for the government was hugely damaging. According to several sources, Bower queried the line and Hill ordered her to use it. Hill says only that she cleared it.

The resulting row was the worst to date. Katie Perrior was returning from a meeting outside Downing Street when the news dropped. The Downing Street slap-down to their best-known minister was leading every news bulletin. She received a call from Johnson, who was ‘very cross’ and hurt. ‘I cannot believe you’ve issued that line,’ he said. ‘Why would you do that to me?’ When Perrior returned to Downing Street, her phone still buzzing with calls from journalists, she saw Bower, who said, ‘I told her that would happen.’ Perrior went to see Hill. The chief of staff said, ‘It serves him right, it’s happened twice now.’ But Perrior thought she was putting on a brave face. Hill looked like someone thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’

Johnson went for a long walk. There was briefly concern that he might resign. A close friend said, ‘He was in a really bad way that week. It really really affected him. It made him think, “What the fuck am I doing in this fucking job.”’ Perrior visited him in Carlton Gardens. Over a glass of wine she told him to calm down. ‘It’s not you, the prime minister doesn’t hate you.’ She recalled later, ‘Every cabinet minister thought at one point it was just them, that the guns were on them from Nick and Fi and no one liked them or rated them. I had to tell them, “It’s not just you who gets treated like that. I do as well, the foreign secretary does, the chancellor does.”’ In Downing Street she made the case that it was better to hug Johnson close than slap him down. ‘When Boris is upset and angry, he says things, it causes World War Three. He just does his own thing, he does media interviews, he goes on the road. We don’t need that.’

At the Prime Minister’s Questions that followed, Peter Dowd, an enterprising Labour MP, got to his feet and asked May, ‘In the light of the foreign secretary’s display of chronic foot-in-mouth disease, when deciding on cabinet positions, does the prime minister now regret that pencilling “FO” against his name should have been an instruction not a job offer?’ May replied with the grin of one who has prepared her own gag. ‘I have to say that the foreign secretary is doing an absolutely excellent job,’ she began. But there was a sting in the tail. She added, ‘He is, in short, an FFS – a fine foreign secretary.’ No one could be in any doubt that May was miffed. In text speak ‘FFS’ also meant ‘for fuck’s sake’.

Having seen the wisdom of offering an olive branch, Hill agreed to go for an early evening drink with Johnson at a central London hotel to restore friendly relations. The meeting was brokered by Ben Wallace, the security minister who had run Johnson’s leadership campaign and was an old friend of Hill’s. Jojo Penn, the deputy chief of staff, also attended. Johnson and Hill discussed how they did not properly communicate when there was a crisis. ‘I wish you would take my calls,’ the foreign secretary said. Hill hit back, ‘I wish you’d bloody ring me up.’

It was not to be the last time Downing Street would have to deal with a Johnsonian eruption. The biggest beast in Theresa May’s cabinet did not resign, in part because she did not want him to. Her ambassador to Brussels was about to quit, in part because she did.