Читать книгу Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 23

A civil service mandarin who worked with Ivan Rogers for two decades said of the UK’s permanent representative in Brussels, ‘Ivan’s problem was that while he was knowledgeable, he’d never say in a word what he could say in one hundred. He was bloody irritating, but he did speak truth unto power.’ It was with an email of close to 1,400 words, sent on 3 January 2017, that Rogers signalled that he had tired of offering his counsel to politicians who did not like what he had to say and he would be resigning.

The news detonated in Westminster like a battlefield nuclear weapon – a deadly blast with unpredictable fallout that consumed its author as much as its targets. As head of UKREP, Britain’s diplomatic post in Brussels, Rogers had not operated quietly, and the email – which leaked within hours, as he must have known it would – took few prisoners. After four months of cabinet deliberations, it claimed, Theresa May had not yet even set the ‘negotiating objectives for the UK’s relationship with the EU after exit’; Rogers urged his colleagues to ‘continue to challenge’ the ‘ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking’ of ministers. ‘I hope that you will support each other in those difficult moments where you have to deliver messages that are disagreeable to those who need to hear them,’ he wrote. ‘Senior ministers, who will decide on our positions, issue by issue, also need from you detailed, unvarnished – even where this is uncomfortable – and nuanced understanding of the views, interests and incentives of the other 27.’

Rogers’ style was more than familiar to the aides of David Cameron who had been on the receiving end of his missives during their renegotiation with Brussels ahead of the EU referendum. Daniel Korski, whose inbox contained several threats of resignation and expletive-laden missives from Rogers, remarked to a friend that day, ‘It seemed quite mild compared with the emails we used to get.’

The explosion had been long in the coming, pitching as it did the irresistible force of one of the most headstrong officials in the British government against the immovable objects of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.

In the early days of the May government, the prime minister and Rogers had been on good terms. ‘They actually got on really well when she was home secretary,’ a Number 10 official said. When May travelled to Brussels to negotiate the justice and home affairs opt-outs, it was Rogers who had sat next to her. They shared an occasional gin and tonic at his residence. As a grammar-school boy, Rogers also had a strong fellow feeling with May socially, telling friends the Cameron regime had ‘treated her pretty shittily’.

It was not long before Rogers began to rub May and her team up the wrong way. Glasses perched on the end of his nose like a disapproving schoolmaster, he spoke bluntly and fast. Words were not minced, meanings not finessed. He told May – as he had Cameron, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – that he owed her his ‘best assessment of where we’re at’. With Rogers, that meant warts and all. He did not see the point of operating any other way. An ally said, ‘Whatever else he is – and obviously he’s driven people mad under numerous regimes – he does know a lot about how the budget works and how the single market works and how the customs union works.’ Rogers’ personal creed was that he would tell his political masters where the game was going and what he thought they should do about it. But, as he explained to colleagues, ‘If they then say, “Interesting point of view but fuck off,” then that’s okay. The best civil servants get on and implement the wishes of the boss.’ The problem was that May’s team began to think he was doing too much of the advising and not enough of the implementing.

May first asked Rogers to see her in her Commons office the weekend before she became prime minister, at the start of what she assumed would be an eight-week leadership battle. ‘Tell me how this really works and what you really think,’ she said. Rogers briefed her on the technicalities of the Article 50 process and the dynamics in Brussels. When she entered Downing Street, he told Hill and Timothy, ‘I’m totally committed to making Brexit work.’ Having seen David Cameron’s difficulties up close, his advice was that May needed to learn from her predecessor’s mistakes, to ‘start at the outset from where you want to end’ and work her way backwards. ‘Set an objective. Where do you want the country to be by 2025, what’s our route to getting there?’

Contrary to the widespread view after he resigned, Rogers was not doing the work of the vanquished Remainers by steering May towards a soft Brexit. He believed from the start that a soft Brexit was never viable and that Britain was destined to go ‘further out’ than many initially assumed. In an appearance before the Brexit select committee in February 2017 – after his resignation – Rogers revealed that he had told May, ‘If control of your own borders and no jurisdiction by the ECJ are your desiderata, the answer to that is to leave the customs union, leave the single market and strike as comprehensive an FTA with the EU as you can get.’1 He told the prime minister she would get a better hearing in Brussels if fellow leaders did not think she was simply trying to emulate Boris Johnson’s doctrine of having cake while simultaneously eating it. That meant moving on from claims of British exceptionalism inside the European institutions of which, in Rogers’ view, Cameron’s renegotiation was the failed last hurrah. It meant accepting that the single market came with the four freedoms and that the UK did want to hold on to ‘the best bits’ while ditching free movement of people. Rogers’ concern was that May’s team should adopt a pragmatic enough approach to Brussels that all this could be accomplished without ‘massive disorder’. Tensions arose because, in explaining where the obstacles in Brussels lay, Rogers all too often seemed like the voice of Brussels in Whitehall, rather than the voice of Downing Street in Brussels.

Rogers’ friends, including journalists in Brussels who dealt with him regularly, felt it was unfair to characterise him as a Europhile. ‘I’m a deeply unenthusiastic European,’ he told them. ‘I experience co-decision making, I experience the European Parliament, I think the project has taken various turns for the worse.’ Rogers had thought Cameron’s referendum risky precisely because he was frustrated that the EU would not reform and believed that the referendum would be lost before it dawned on most of Cameron’s political staff. He told Downing Street that political leaders on the continent would ‘make absolutely heroic efforts which seem to us to be ludicrous’ to preserve the integrity of the EU because ‘the consequences of it falling over are too dark to contemplate’. That meant putting the political integrity of the EU before mutual economic benefit when negotiating Brexit. His position put him at odds with the Brexiteers and made him a Cassandra-like figure to Team May.

Rogers told colleagues – including Jeremy Heywood and Oliver Robbins – that May was embarking on ‘the negotiation from hell’ and none of them would be doing her a favour by not telling her where the opposition was coming from in Brussels. A Rogers ally said, ‘Ivan’s view was that she was going to find that out after she invoked Article 50 and then she’ll come along and say, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that?” His job was to deliver bluntness from Brussels. He thought there was too much punch pulling which evaded telling her uncomfortable things. His style is to tell people uncomfortable stuff.’

The way he did so, however, left May’s team with the impression he considered himself a professional in a team of amateurs. Rogers had been present at fifty or more European Council meetings, more than any other Briton alive. He saw May as ‘the new girl’ who had to learn at warp speed who to trust.

On 14 October, Rogers sent May a long ‘scene setter’ for her first European Council meeting, summarising what he had been hearing from the Commission officials and fellow ambassadors. Two months later it was to leak, with disastrous consequences for Rogers. He told May everyone he spoke to believed now that Britain would leave the single market and the customs union and that the negotiation would be about a deep and comprehensive free trade agreement. He told her, ‘Most of them think that will take three or four years to negotiate, a couple of years to ratify, therefore nothing will be in place before the mid-2020s.’ Rogers did not in fact say – as was later claimed – that he thought it would take ten years; he was communicating the views of his contacts. But it was hardly what May wanted to hear. He also warned Hill and Timothy that if they wanted a good trade agreement they would have to fight the hardline Eurosceptics, who he believed did not want Britain to sign any arrangement that would keep the UK in close regulatory alignment with the rest of the EU.

Before May’s first Council meeting, Rogers briefed the reporters that the prime minister would tell her fellow leaders over dinner that the UK wanted to keep good relations with Europe and was not a ‘wrecker’ trying to bring down their project. He insisted later that he had ‘stuck absolutely rigidly to the script’ agreed by Number 10. He should perhaps have been more cautious in handling a new prime minister and a team of spin doctors who were under pressure not to give the media too much. When discussions between the leaders on the Syrian civil war overran, May never delivered the lines he had briefed, but the prime minister awoke to find them in the morning newspapers. ‘It was not cool,’ one source close to May said. Rogers was quizzed by Katie Perrior about whether he was responsible for the briefing because the line was not the one they wanted in the papers. Rogers pointed out it was in the pre-conference script. She asked him to clear what he would say to the Brussels press pack in future so they could agree on the best line to brief. ‘If you’re about to go into a negotiation it’s tight lips and observation,’ a Downing Street aide said. ‘It’s not like the old days when you can just freewheel.’

In July, Rogers had told May he was happy to move jobs if she wanted him to. Now he did so again. May demurred. But the briefing row dented his morale, coming as it did shortly after – against Rogers’ advice – she set the March deadline for triggering Article 50 at party conference. May’s team were also beginning to tire of him explaining why their approach was wrong before deploying his favourite line: ‘I speak truth to power.’ As one of them explained later, ‘He says that all the time. Yes, you should tell truth to power, that’s what all advisers do, but you also have a job to do, which is setting up our pillars for the negotiation. He wasn’t moving at the pace that our thinking was moving at. Which is why he didn’t see our thinking when we set our timetable at conference.’

To the civil servants it seemed as if Number 10 was not interested in their, and Rogers’, knowledge of the workings of Brussels. ‘One of the things they were starting to feel in the autumn was: are we really wanted? Are we contaminated by expertise?’ one official said. ‘People felt compromised by knowing their stuff.’

In meetings, Rogers’ approach would ‘visibly irritate Nick and Fi’, according to another official present. ‘They were pretty sharp exchanges.’ When Rogers put across the views of his contacts in Brussels, he would receive a primer in practical politics from the chiefs. Rogers stressed the need for a long period of transition after Brexit and for the need to accept the sequencing for the talks agreed by the other twenty-seven member states. ‘If we do that we’ll be eaten alive by the Tory Party,’ one of the chiefs replied. Another Downing Street source said, ‘They would be openly rude to him in front of Theresa in those meetings. They didn’t actually sack people. They made it so they know that they don’t want you and they’re not giving you what you need to do your job.’

May would also show her displeasure. ‘The PM just cuts across him: “Well, this is my position and I’m afraid you need to think about it a bit more,”’ the official recalled. Rogers was heard in Brussels bemoaning the ‘control freak Home Office approach’ of May’s team, and had branded Hill and Timothy ‘children’ – a phrase that found its way back to the chiefs. Another Downing Street aide who watched the three of them together compared it to being stuck next to a couple about to divorce: ‘No one wanted to be in a room with them.’

Some in government called Hill and Timothy ‘the terrible twins’. It did not take long for ‘Ivan the Terrible’ to be coined by one minister in return. Frustrated that his advice was not being taken, political sources say, Rogers became difficult to work with. ‘He is very rude about everybody. He just didn’t seem happy with anything,’ a Number 10 source said. ‘It wasn’t that Theresa wasn’t happy with him, he just wasn’t happy and it made it difficult to work with him.’

By autumn, Rogers was also frustrated that May was taking an age to firm up the decision to leave the single market and the customs union that had been implicit in her conference speech. A senior cabinet minister said, ‘Ivan wanted clarity and he felt the machine wasn’t deciding. He would keep coming to me and saying, “You must get to Number 10 to make their minds up about this.” He felt he didn’t know what message to give. Nobody knew what we were doing.’

Rogers’ greatest fear, though, was that the government was not doing enough work to analyse the risks or prepare for the possibility of crashing out of the EU without a new deal, falling back on World Trade Organisation tariff rules. He told colleagues the prospect needed to be treated like ‘a national emergency’. Privately he warned of ‘mutually assured destruction’. Rogers had been arguing since 2012 that an exit contingency cell should have been set up in the Cabinet Office, but Cameron and Heywood had vetoed the suggestion. Without that work, May could not credibly threaten to walk away from negotiations, a card she needed to hold in her hand. ‘My advice inside the Government is that you have to work through every area of British economic life, and work through what the default to WTO option really means and really entails, and where it really takes you,’ he told MPs later.2

Friends of David Cameron say Rogers shared some of these concerns with the former prime minister when they had breakfast together that autumn. Cameron wanted to talk about the memoir he was writing, for which HarperCollins were reputed to have paid £1 million.

Allies of May say Rogers resented that it was May, not him, making the important calls. ‘These are the biggest decisions that any government will take, probably in our lifetime, and they were always going to be taken by a PM, not an official,’ said one senior figure in Downing Street. ‘I think Ivan struggled with that. I don’t know how it worked under the last regime but if Ivan didn’t like that then it was his job to serve the PM like all of us. There’s a hierarchy and she’s at the top of it and he isn’t.’

Ahead of the December Council meeting, Rogers had a meeting with Nick Timothy, at which he said he would write to Downing Street outlining the stories he thought would emerge from the meeting so that a press handling strategy could be worked out. He agreed not to brief on Brexit itself. Then on the evening of 14 December, Rogers began getting calls warning him that the memo he had written for May in October was about to be released. The following day the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg reported his warning that Brexit could take a decade – something that provoked an immediate backlash from pro-Brexit Tories.

When his face appeared on the evening news a colleague said, ‘You’ve just been stabbed, haven’t you?’ Rogers could not prove that it was Downing Street who had knifed him, but where there might have been statements of support, instead there was a deafening silence. Senior Eurosceptics even took to the airwaves claiming that Rogers himself had leaked the contents of his memo. That night he spoke to his wife and told her he did not think he could carry on after Christmas. ‘Once you’re the story, you can’t in my view do the job.’

Despite the tensions, some around May insist Rogers was not forced out. ‘We genuinely were not saying, “This guy’s got to go,”’ one said. Fiona Hill told friends she had found out about Rogers’ resignation from Sky News. Yet there is plentiful evidence that Rogers had been told it would make sense for him to start looking for his next job. Nick Timothy did not understand why Rogers had even stayed in post once the referendum was lost and it was clear he would have to implement Brexit. ‘Nick’s view was that Ivan didn’t really believe in it and didn’t really think it could be done and he genuinely didn’t know why he stayed around,’ said one confidant. Another source close to May said her Lancaster House speech, now scheduled for early January, ‘was held up because people were waiting for Ivan to resign. There was talk of getting rid of him anyway. Had he not resigned he’d probably have been moved at some point anyway.’ The source said the chiefs ‘saw him as very close to Cameron, a person who failed at a renegotiation in the past, but also someone who would come along to those weekly meetings and just didn’t contribute in a way that was seen as helpful. He was just relentlessly negative. There was definitely a sense that we just needed some fresh blood. He had a different point of view and it was never the kind of view that was going to find favour with the PM or her team.’

The foreign secretary had also tired of Rogers. ‘Boris thought: how can we have this doom monger representing us at an EU level?’ a source close to Johnson said. ‘Boris was a bit pissed off with how he did things.’

In the week before Christmas, six days after the memo was leaked, Rogers was seen by two Foreign Office officials having breakfast with Jeremy Heywood in Villandry, an upmarket eatery in St James’s which specialises in brunch for businessmen spending their employers’ money. The exact details of the conversation are known only to its two participants, but based on their exchanges with others it is understood that they talked about Rogers’ future and the way Whitehall was handling Brexit. ‘Heywood said to him, “Think about how you handle this and get out,”’ a Foreign Office source said. ‘The view was: “He’s got to go and go before the Lancaster House speech.” Heywood was aware the writing was on the wall. The message was, “Why don’t you do it your own way?”’

Heywood and Rogers had known each other for twenty-five years and could speak frankly to one another. Whitehall sources say Rogers was concerned that his relationship with Oliver Robbins was not as open and free-flowing as it had been with Robbins’ predecessor Tom Scholar during Cameron’s renegotiation, or before with Jon Cunliffe when he was at UKREP and Rogers in London. Rogers felt he and Robbins needed to be speaking several times a day, and they were not.

Under Cameron, Cunliffe, Rogers and Scholar had all deliberately argued in front of the prime minister so he could hear each side of a case being put – but May did not like to work that way. Neither were Rogers and Heywood on the same page. Rogers thought the system Heywood had set up, with DExEU as player and referee and Robbins servicing both DExEU and Downing Street, was flawed. On occasion, departments reported their position on an issue to Rogers and UKREP, but not to David Davis and DExEU.

Rogers also complained that Whitehall departments, swamped by the future of Brexit, were failing to stay on top of evolving policy in Brussels, where damaging regulations still had to be fought because they would impact Britain outside as well as inside the EU. When he gave evidence to the European Scrutiny Committee the following February, Rogers said, ‘We were getting a diminishing quality and quantity of instructions through to UKREP. I said repeatedly at mandarin level, “That is not good enough. You have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”’3

Heywood and Robbins saw Rogers as a boat rocker, and viewed his growing demands for Downing Street to announce their plans as counterproductive. ‘Ivan thought they were pussyfooting around while he was fending off foreigners who were asking what the policy was,’ said another mandarin. ‘I think he felt that he was being left to deliver all the negative assessments.’

More importantly, Rogers believed Robbins was reluctant to tell May the truth about the difficulties ahead, a view shared by other senior civil servants. ‘Olly’s more inclined to tell people what they want to hear than how it is,’ a senior mandarin said. Another commented, ‘He sees his job mainly as giving the PM what she wants.’ In one crunch meeting that December, Rogers urged Robbins and Heywood to join him in being franker. Seeing that Rogers was on his way out, they declined. When Rogers saw Philip Hammond that week he told the chancellor that he had the support of neither Heywood nor Robbins. After their breakfast meeting the cabinet secretary suggested to other officials that if Rogers were to leave, Tim Barrow – the political director at the Foreign Office – was the right man to take over.

Once he had discussed it again with his wife over Christmas, Rogers decided to quit. Having heard that May might make her big speech in the first few days of January – and not wanting his resignation to be seen as a response to the substance of the speech – he pressed send on the email announcing his departure on 3 January from his holiday cottage in Dorset. The furore dominated the news for a week. Rogers told friends he had intended the email to be a morale-boosting call to arms for the embattled staff in Brussels, urging them to stick with Brexit and do the best they could. But his tone was interpreted as an assault on ministerial incompetence. ‘Serious multilateral negotiating experience is in short supply in Whitehall,’ he warned. One minister complained, ‘It was spiteful. His heart wasn’t in it and he had to go, but it’s a shame he went the way he did.’

On the verge of laying out her plans, May might have been badly wounded, but she faced a weak opposition leader whose equivocation on Europe left him ill-equipped to capitalise. Eurosceptic MPs quickly rallied too, seizing on passages in the present author’s first book All Out War – in which Cameron’s aides had blamed Rogers for the failure of Cameron’s renegotiation – to say, ‘Goodbye and good riddance.’ Downing Street spin doctors were quick to tell journalists about the dim view taken of his briefing gaffe in October and accuse him of pessimism towards Brexit. ‘He forgot what he was supposed to be doing and was freelancing with his own views,’ a cabinet minister said. ‘I’ve never seen a photograph of Ivan Rogers smiling,’ commented another minister.

In Downing Street, the incident was seen as a necessary clearing of the decks. ‘Jeremy Heywood played a blinder and had Tim Barrow in the job within hours,’ a Number 10 source said. ‘Jeremy himself felt quite personally betrayed by Ivan.’ May and her team had met Barrow. They did not know him well but were quickly impressed. ‘We were really clear he was the right person. Jeremy definitely thought that. DD thought that. Fox thought that and so did Boris.’

As Barrow’s name was put forward, Oliver Robbins made a power play. He argued that Rogers should not be replaced and that the new permanent representative should become a role that reported directly to him. ‘He did not want a direct replacement because he wanted more control over that operation,’ a Downing Street source said. Barrow, a Russian expert who had done the hard yards in Moscow, had vastly more foreign policy experience than Rogers but lacked his predecessor’s budget, trade, financial services and single market expertise. What he did have, in the words of one of May’s aides, was a reputation for ‘giving good independent analysis and advice in the manner we’d expect senior diplomats to behave’. The contrast with their view of Rogers was obvious. In the Foreign Office, the admiration was distilled into one phrase: ‘There is a saying, “Don’t fuck with Tim Barrow,”’ one official said. Barrow refused to see his new role downgraded into a Robbins satrapy and the power play was rebuffed. ‘If you have done the dark arts in Russia you know how to play the game,’ said an admirer.

Boris Johnson phoned Steve Baker, the Eurosceptics’ shop steward, and briefed him on Barrow, asking for a public endorsement. The Eurosceptic MPs quickly offered their support.

David Davis received a text from Rogers after he had jumped overboard, which revealed how bruised he had been by being depicted as a bulwark of the Brussels and Whitehall establishment. ‘I’m not a member of the establishment, I’m a grammar school boy from middle England, the son of a grammar school teacher and a school secretary.’ A minister said, ‘He saw himself on one level as very ordinary, on the other not very ordinary at all.’

Rogers was prepared to stay in the civil service, but over the next forty-eight hours a succession of ministers told Downing Street they could not trust him and would not work with him. Realising the game was up, he quit the civil service altogether on 5 January. May’s aides were relieved by his departure. ‘The number of stories emanating from Brussels correspondents from “senior diplomatic sources” reduced,’ one said.

Yet gone too was a vast stock of European knowledge, institutional memory and the most capacious address book in Brussels. Looking back, it is possible to judge that David Cameron’s negotiation with Brussels was hamstrung by listening too much to Rogers and his calls for caution over what could be achieved. Yet, as it became clear that the government might have been better to delay the triggering of Article 50, would have to pay a sizeable bill, would need a transition deal, and would be confronted by Eurosceptics pushing for a no-deal departure for which Whitehall was not prepared, it was possible to conclude that Theresa May’s negotiation with Brussels was damaged by not listening to Ivan Rogers nearly enough.

Nonetheless, with the most difficult official out of the way, the prime minister now had to square her cabinet so she could make the big speech spelling out how she was planning to conduct the Brexit negotiations.