Читать книгу Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem - Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman - Страница 29

David Davis had thought they were going to lose from the start, but he still believed the government should fight the case. In mid-October 2016, two weeks before the High Court verdict against the government, the Brexit secretary sent the prime minister a letter outlining her options. He knew that Theresa May liked thinking over decisions, rather than having them sprung upon her. ‘I think we’re going to lose, whatever our lawyers say,’ he wrote. The plaintiffs, led by Gina Miller, wanted the court to rule that only Parliament, not the government, had the right to trigger Article 50. Davis outlined three options if the government lost: appeal the case; give MPs a vote; or appeal the decision while offering some concessions, like a debate or a white paper outlining the government’s Brexit plans.

Davis supported the third option. He believed it was desirable for the highest court in the land to rule on the constitutional principles involved to prevent further legal disputes that could disrupt Brexit later. ‘I want an authoritative outcome that cannot be challenged,’ he told colleagues. In an article for ConservativeHome, written in July before he got the job, Davis had recommended that the government publish a ‘pre-negotiation white paper’. But that was a card best kept in May’s back pocket until the Supreme Court had delivered its verdict.

Meanwhile, in preparation for the expected defeat, Davis took personal charge of drafting a bill, with just two clauses, to trigger Article 50. ‘David had a “clean bill strategy”,’ a DExEU source said. ‘He wanted it to be simple and do nothing else.’ That was the best hope of getting it on the statute book unamended. May agreed with her minister’s analysis and after the High Court verdict they engaged in two months of shadow boxing, knowing that they would have to make further concessions. Davis told MPs it would be inconceivable to deny MPs a vote on the final Brexit deal since the European Parliament would get one, but he gave no ground on who had the right to trigger Article 50. May remained equivocal even about that, refusing to commit to a vote in Parliament on the final deal when she appeared in front of the Commons liaison committee five days before Christmas.

After their defeat in the High Court, some in Downing Street could not understand why they struggled on. ‘I queried why we were continuing to fight the court case,’ one senior aide said. ‘It was clear we weren’t going to win it. Basically, politics dictated that we should and so we saw it through.’ May and her team concluded that the Eurosceptics would never forgive her if they were seen to give up.

The politics contributed to the government losing in court. Fear of the Eurosceptics prevented the attorney general, Jeremy Wright, and the government’s chief counsel, James Eadie QC, from making an argument that would have boosted their chances of success. At issue was the nature and effect of the 1972 European Communities Act, the legislation that had taken Britain into the European Economic Community and formalised how EU law took effect in Britain. The government’s argument was that the royal prerogative applied because Article 50 was an issue of ‘treaty making and unmaking’ and treaties were the sole preserve of the executive. The plaintiffs, represented by David Pannick, argued that it was the 1972 Act which gave effect to the treaty of accession and that another Act of Parliament would be required to reverse it – since the legislation conveyed rights on the British people that could not be removed at the stroke of a pen by the executive.

On 24 January, the president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, announced, ‘By a majority of eight to three, the Supreme Court rules that the government cannot trigger Article 50 without an Act of Parliament authorising it to do so.’ There were predictable fulminations from the Eurosceptics, largely calmed when Davis made a Commons statement announcing that he would publish a bill in the coming days, declaring that Britain was ‘past the point of no return’ on Brexit.

There would have been considerably more angst had they known the argument the law officers would have liked to make in court: that Article 50 was revocable. Pannick’s case was that, once triggered, Article 50 was ‘like firing a gun – the bullet will reach its target’ and Britain would leave the EU. A minister said, ‘We could have said to Pannick, “You’re talking rubbish, it’s not like firing a gun, because at any time the British government can stop this.” Legally, that would have been a great argument and I think it would have really undermined Pannick’s argument. But politically it would have been disastrous.’ If Wright and Eadie had made that case, the Supreme Court would have ruled on whether or not the Brexit negotiations could be stopped and abandoned. ‘The nightmare scenario would have been a delay while the European Court of Justice would have then had to decide,’ the minister said. The reaction of Eurosceptics to the prospect of the Luxembourg court ruling on the rights and wrongs of Brexit can be imagined. Fiona Hill told friends the case was ‘a pain in the head’.

May and Davis were now confronted with the challenge of passing a Brexit bill quickly enough to hit the prime minister’s 31 March deadline to trigger Article 50. They did not doubt that the plaintiffs had brought the case to put a spanner in the works. ‘Gina Miller really wanted to stop Brexit, it was nothing to do with giving Parliament its say,’ a DExEU minister said. The Supreme Court loss bred a team spirit at the top of government. ‘What brought the cabinet together was a sense of us having enemies everywhere,’ another minister said. ‘We were all in this together. If it went wrong, we would all go down.’

The day after the Supreme Court ruling, 25 January, Davis’s original plan began to unfold as May sought to dissuade the Team 2019 rebels from amending or opposing the bill. In response to a question from Anna Soubry at Prime Minister’s Questions, May announced that she would publish a white paper after all. The following day, continuing the choreography, Davis published the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill. It was just two clauses and fifty words long.

The following week, on 2 February, the government produced its long-awaited white paper. This did little more than turn May’s Lancaster House speech into a formal document. One of the seminal rows of the autumn was proved pointless. ‘We were always going to do it,’ a source close to May said. ‘We couldn’t give a monkey’s about the white paper.’ The prime minister was amused to receive a call from Angela Merkel, who praised her political craft. ‘Merkel congratulated Theresa for the white paper being identical to the speech,’ a senior Downing Street official revealed.

There was a last-minute panic over the bill when officials pointed out that, under the EU treaties, leaving the European Union would also entail Britain leaving Euratom, the atomic energy community which regulated nuclear security. Desperate to keep the wording of the bill to a minimum, DExEU and Downing Street felt bounced into a situation where they might have to add another clause, handing their opponents a greater chance of tabling successful amendments. Fiona Hill told friends it was one of the biggest ‘Fuck! moments’ of the whole process. ‘Euratom was the most complicated decision we’ve had to take,’ a source close to May added. ‘It resulted in a late night meeting that went on for hours where there was a collective head banging. It was like one of those brain teasers, literally contorting the innermost parts of your brain matter.’ In the end, senior figures in the nuclear industry were reassured that while Britain had to leave it would negotiate its way back into a parallel arrangement with Euratom. To avoid creating a rod for their own backs with Parliament, May’s team decided to add that plan to the notes accompanying the bill. It was an elegant way of fulfilling her instructions. A cabinet minister said, ‘One of the points that the PM makes constantly is, “Everyone is concerned about process, I am concerned about ends.” Whether or not you are in the customs union or Euratom is less important than: have you got nuclear safety or near frictionless trade?’

The Tory rebels did not wish to be labelled as Brexit deniers, so they voted with the government on 1 February, at the second reading of the bill – the crunch moment at which legislation lives or dies. The narrow drawing of the bill put the Labour Party on the spot. Europe was seen by Jeremy Corbyn’s senior aides as being ‘in the “too difficult” box’, one said. Now the leader of the opposition had to make a decision.

Ever since the High Court ruling in November, passions had run hot in the Labour Party. ‘You had passionately pro-EU MPs,’ a frontbencher said. ‘You had those who always wanted to leave, you had a group in the middle who genuinely didn’t want to leave but thought we had to accept the result and move forward. That became genuinely difficult to manage. It was a real conscience issue for people.’ MPs were divided by their seats as well as their views. ‘In one ear people were saying, “I represent a heavily Leave area, if you don’t back Article 50 fully I’m a goner.” And then lots of people saying, “I’m in a heavily Remain area and if you do back Article 50, I’m a goner.”’

Some wanted Labour to abstain, but both Corbyn and Keir Starmer thought that would make the party look ridiculous. ‘For the opposition to abstain on an issue as important as this would not be right,’ a frontbencher said. ‘The danger was we would be neither appealing to the 52 per cent nor the 48 per cent, Labour would have been the party of the 0 per cent.’

At a shadow cabinet meeting in late January, Corbyn argued that Labour had to vote for Article 50 and that he would impose a three-line whip compelling his party to do so. ‘Jeremy argued for it as did the majority of people,’ a Corbyn aide recalled. ‘There were dissenting voices. Clive Lewis, Dawn Butler.’ Those subject to the collective responsibility of the shadow cabinet were told they would have to resign if they disobeyed.

At the second reading, the bill passed by 498 votes to 114. Apart from Ken Clarke, every Conservative MP voted to trigger Article 50, but forty-seven Labour MPs defied their three-line whip. Dawn Butler, the shadow minister for diverse communities, and Rachael Maskell, the shadow environment secretary, both resigned their frontbench jobs. When the third reading of the bill was voted on, eight days later, the bill passed its Commons stages by 494 to 122. Fifty-two Labour MPs dissented, including Clive Lewis, the shadow business secretary, who also quit the shadow cabinet. Frontbenchers who were not part of the collective decision-making meeting were sent a letter of reprimand but allowed to keep their jobs.

Corbyn’s three-line whip was presented as a principled respect for the referendum result, but there was another reason for it. ‘If we didn’t support Article 50, then the Tories would have called a general election there and then,’ a source in the leader’s office said. ‘Labour would’ve been wiped out.’ A shadow cabinet minister added, ‘I think they were itching for us to vote against. That would have been the Brexit election.’ When Theresa May came to call an election, she would find it far harder to convince the electorate that it was about Brexit.

The high drama on the Conservative benches came on 7 February, with a vote on amendment 110, tabled by the Labour MP Chris Leslie, which called for ‘any new deal or treaty’ with the EU to be put to a vote before both Houses of Parliament. Gavin Williamson and May’s parliamentary aide, George Hollingbery, found themselves negotiating hard. Up to twenty Tory MPs were threatening to back the amendment. Alistair Burt, Dominic Grieve and Nicky Morgan – her Trousergate ban now rescinded – went in to Downing Street to see May and Nick Timothy. A government lawyer was also waiting for them. After a discussion, May pushed a sheet of paper across the glass-topped table in her inner sanctum for the three former ministers to read. On it was a form of words. ‘This is what David Jones will say in the House,’ May explained.

Grieve, a former attorney general, had drawn up a proposal for a deal and fed it to May via Williamson. It had been changed, but the paper sitting in front of the rebels committed the government to a vote in Parliament. It said, ‘We intend that the vote will cover not only the withdrawal arrangements but also the future relationship with the European Union. Furthermore, I can confirm that the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement, to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. We expect and intend that this will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement.’ Morgan read the paragraph and said, ‘The words are fine but they don’t go far enough, they don’t cover the no-deal scenario.’

There was a further discussion. May and her advisers argued that the word ‘agreement’ covered both scenarios, that Britain might agree not to agree with the EU. The prime minister was concerned that she should be able to use the threat of no deal as leverage in negotiations. Giving Parliament an explicit veto would remove that card from her hand. Morgan was not happy; she felt it left too much wiggle room. But Grieve and Burt were satisfied.

In the chamber, David Jones intervened on Keir Starmer to announce the decision and kept reading from his sheet each time he was probed further. In response to one question, Morgan felt he had rowed back slightly on what had been agreed. Downing Street spin doctors were also briefing that they had given no ground, when they obviously had, a modus operandi that was to come back to bite Theresa May during the general election. Morgan was seen in a heated exchange with Williamson at the back of the chamber. She tweeted, ‘Govt did make a concession but for No 10 to then brief there was no change & Minister to undermine it makes no sense.’

In the end, amendment 110 was defeated with a government majority of thirty-three. Burt and Grieve opposed it, Morgan abstained and just seven Tories – including Anna Soubry and Bob Neill – defied their party whip. It was Neill’s first ever vote against his own government. George Osborne, who the chiefs believed was fomenting rebellion by inviting colleagues into his office for private chats (claims he denied), was absent.

Davis got his bill through the Commons with no amendments, but the government still faced a rebellion in the House of Lords, where that old Europhile warrior Michael Heseltine, now eighty-three, had returned to the saddle for one last battle. In a week of drama, the Lords defeated the government on an amendment to guarantee the rights of EU citizens. Five days later, on 7 March, Heseltine led a rebellion of thirteen Conservative peers to pass a second amendment demanding a ‘meaningful’ parliamentary vote on the deal. During the debate – the best attended in the Lords since 1831 – the former deputy prime minister announced that he had been sacked ‘from the five jobs with which I have been helping the government’, including a post promoting regional growth. He insisted, ‘It’s the duty of Parliament to assert its sovereignty in determining the legacy we leave to new generations of young people.’ One senior government source claimed that Heseltine ‘cried’ when he was dismissed. More surprising, perhaps, Heseltine said that when he left the government’s employ he had never yet spoken to Theresa May.

After another week of to-ing and fro-ing, the Commons stripped out the amendments. The Lords backed down on 13 March and the bill received royal assent the following week. For Steve Baker it was a moment of great satisfaction. ‘The thing for me that was joyful about it was that the Eurosceptic movement was actually united and had done something together,’ he said. ‘And it united with the government.’ David Davis said, ‘We are now on the threshold of the most important negotiation for our country in a generation.’

Having voted for Article 50 and backed Brexit, Keir Starmer drew a line in the sand and made clear that Labour would now fight the government over the sort of Brexit they were pursuing. On 27 March, he spelt out six tests that any deal must fulfil. Some, like a ‘fair migration system’, retaining a ‘strong, collaborative relationship with the EU’ and ‘protecting national security’, were uncontroversial. Two of them – ‘delivering for all nations and regions of the UK’ and ‘protecting workers’ rights and employment protections’ – allowed Labour to make Brexit a domestic political issue, defining itself against a ‘Tory Brexit’. Starmer’s masterstroke was to demand that Britain keep ‘the exact same benefits’ she enjoyed within the single market and the customs union. Cleverly, the wording of this demand was taken from a comment made by David Davis months earlier. It was a stick with which Labour were to beat the Brexit secretary for months. ‘It was a political device to hold them to account,’ a senior Labour Party official said. ‘It set the bar so high for the Tories that we could always disagree with them. Here’s the bar, jump that high.’ Starmer, a super-smooth operator fond of jargon, told colleagues it gave Labour ‘grip’ in the process. ‘I think the phrase “grip” is ridiculous but Jeremy is and most people are more polite than I am,’ one of Corbyn’s aides said. The six tests were a success. When the general election was called, three weeks later, Starmer’s plan meant enough things to enough people that it avoided a damaging split. However, another Labour bigwig was beginning to argue that Brexit could be stopped altogether.

Tony Blair’s quest to transform himself from yesterday’s man into tomorrow’s political visionary – a role in which he had once excelled – took flight on 17 February. In a speech made under the banner of Open Europe, the former prime minister spoke with pseudo-religious intensity of his ‘mission’ to persuade Britons to ‘rise up’ and change their minds on Brexit, calling for ‘a way out from the present rush over the cliff’s edge’. Blair claimed people had voted in the referendum ‘without knowledge of the true terms of Brexit’ and argued that the consequences would be ‘painful’ and the benefits ‘largely illusory’.

Blair suggested that a second referendum was on the cards if the public changed their views. ‘If a significant part of that 52 per cent show real change of mind, however you measure it, we should have the opportunity to reconsider this decision,’ he said. ‘This issue is the single most important decision this country has taken since the Second World War and debate can’t now be shut down about it.’ Privately, he told friends opposition to Brexit would need to be running at 60 per cent for there to be any chance of stopping it.

The Brexiteers dismissed Blair as an out-of-touch elitist. Reworking Blair’s riff, Boris Johnson said, ‘I urge the British people to rise up and turn off the TV next time Blair comes on with his condescending campaign.’ Nigel Farage compared him to a ‘former heavyweight champion coming out of retirement’ who would ‘end up on the canvas’. Yet no one else trying to make the revanchist argument on Brexit succeeded in getting anything like the same coverage.

Blair’s intervention gave new energy to the monthly meetings in his office and gave rise to fresh speculation that he might be about to set up a new political party. Between February and June 2017, senior Labour moderates – both past and serving – would have conversations about how to proceed. Blair told the author that his goal was to stake out a new policy agenda for the political centre, which he felt both main parties had vacated. ‘What I’m doing is putting together a team of people who will try and articulate what a radical centre policy agenda looks like, because I think one of the problems is that both Labour and the Tories are really offering us two competing visions of the sixties.’

Behind the scenes he was a key player in conversations between moderates. A former cabinet minister said, ‘They’ve not decided whether to recapture the leadership of the Labour Party or create some new movement. Tony’s up for both. He’s very involved, talking to Labour MPs, talking to union leaders’ about turning around Labour. ‘That’s the focus of their efforts. But they accept it may not work and then they’ll have to create a new movement.’

Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s old spin doctor, suggested that moderates in the Parliamentary Labour Party, at least two-thirds of the PLP, should make a universal declaration of independence and sit as a new grouping, electing their own leader to supplant Corbyn as leader of the opposition. There was talk of Dan Jarvis, a former major in the Parachute Regiment who was MP for Barnsley Central, emerging as the front man. Blair, friends said, tried ‘frequently’ to persuade David Miliband, a former foreign secretary, to return from New York, where he was running the charity International Rescue Committee. Miliband had warned in September 2016 that Labour was ‘unelectable’ and had not been further from power since the 1930s, but he was in a good job, with his sons settled in schools, and did not want to take a gamble that could end in humiliation. ‘In the end David will want to come back to the UK,’ a close friend said. ‘But he remains very unsure as to whether or not he really wants to devote his life to this battle.’

Since the previous autumn there had been overtures from the Liberal Democrats. At the party’s conference in September 2016, the leader Tim Farron praised Blair for introducing the minimum wage and investing in public services. Referencing the Iraq War, which the Lib Dems had opposed, he quipped, ‘I see Tony Blair the way I see the Stone Roses, I preferred the early work.’ Farron commissioned polling research which showed that his party’s brand was badly damaged with voters, and allies made clear he would have been prepared to countenance a name change.

Nick Clegg, who said he agreed with ‘every word’ of Blair’s speech, went further down this path than Farron. He and Blair were in regular contact. ‘They met at Open Reason, which is Nick’s organisation in central London,’ a source said. ‘They spoke a lot more on the phone. At one point they were meeting weekly.’ Ostensibly these talks were about getting Blair to persuade Labour pro-Europeans to work with the Lib Dems. Two sources, a friend of Clegg and a senior Lib Dem, both claimed that Clegg told Blair the quickest way to set up a new centre party would be to flood the Lib Dems with membership applications by Labour moderates and take over the party. ‘There are more of you than there are of us,’ he said, according to one account. ‘There was a little bit of a worry that it was a reverse takeover of the Lib Dems,’ a source close to Farron confided.

Open Britain was a useful forum, because it also got Tory Remainers in the room as well. In an interview with the New Statesman which hit the streets on 31 March, Anna Soubry stunned her Tory colleagues by declaring that she would consider joining a new party. ‘If it could somehow be the voice of a moderate, sensible, forward-thinking, visionary middle way, with open minds – actually things which I’ve believed in all my life – better get on with it.’

The ruminating about a new party gathered urgency after May called the general election and gained a patron saint on 7 May when the centrist Emmanuel Macron, who had set up a new movement, won a remarkable victory in the French presidential election. To Blair, this was proof that it was possible in a time of populist politics to win from the centre. To Peter Mandelson, the ‘simple truth of Macron’s victory is that he won by leaving his party, not despite doing so’.1 Encouraged by Mandelson and others, leading donors who had ceased to give money to Labour since Blair’s departure indicated that they would be prepared to fund a new movement or party. A close associate of Blair said, ‘People will look at Labour’s results and say, “Is this horse a dead horse or can it still be revived?” Some people have already come to the conclusion that it can’t and therefore something else is going to have to be born out of all of this. If something did happen the money would be there. The unthinkable is being thought.’

Gina Miller put her name to a tactical voting campaign run by Best for Britain – whose chief executive Eloise Todd was a regular at Blair’s monthly gatherings – to give funds, polling and campaigning help to anti-Brexit candidates. In June she was to claim in an interview that a new party would have been launched within days of the election if Labour had done worse. One source who was in close contact with Miller said, ‘I was pretty sure they were going to go the week after the election.’ But others who worked with Miller say that is not correct. A friend of Blair said his priority was to help the moderates regain control of Labour, a view echoed by a senior Labour Party official. Friends of Blair and Mandelson said David Sainsbury, the peer who had funded the pressure group Progress, was prepared to fund ‘a Tony-and-Peter-backed pressure group that would bring together all the moderate groups. That would’ve been the vehicle to be a new party, should it be necessary. If there was a leadership election after the general election and Corbyn won, there would have to be a new party. If he lost, it would just have been a moderate momentum’ to support a new leader. Blair believed that anything he was forced to front would fail and that a new movement had to develop from the grassroots up. He told people, ‘You can’t just have a group of people with money coming together and doing something. I don’t think this is going to happen through political leaders clubbing together. I think you’re going to find it starts in the country.’ Privately, he believed that if the two main parties did not respond better to the views of the electorate and those voters who felt homeless, a new party was likely.

Others involved in the conversations saw all this talk as futile. ‘There is so much money on the pro-European side of the argument that people want to give,’ one said, ‘but they don’t want to give it to another failed shitshow. The idea that they were setting up a new party – that was never what was being discussed. What they were obsessed with was this idea of building a movement that can challenge hard Brexit as a gateway to challenging Brexit itself.’

As Theresa May prepared that March to send her letter triggering Article 50, and as the complexities became clearer, a growing number of people inside the Department for Exiting the European Union were beginning to have their doubts about how their own government was handling things.

By March, with the Article 50 bill passed, DExEU under David Davis was drawing up the Great Repeal Bill, devising ways of turning European law into British law, while the Cabinet Office under Ben Gummer worked out how to make it function with the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. ‘DD brought the laws back from Brussels and Ben made them work in the UK,’ a cabinet source said. The task was far more complex than the ministers had realised. One said, ‘I was wrung out every day with the intensity of the intellectual heavy lifting we were having to do. More than half of our statute book was intertwined with European law.’

For Gummer the work was also an emotional challenge as a die-hard Remainer, but one who passionately wanted to make Brexit work with the minimum of damage to his constituents in Ipswich, who had voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. ‘It does take a degree of emotional resilience to be going in every day to make what is clearly a disaster less disastrous,’ a close confidant said.

New problems kept flaring up. With Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, increasingly threatening a second independence referendum and concerns about the prospect of a ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the cabinet held a meeting on 21 February at which Gummer was charged with finding ways of ensuring Brexit did not threaten the Union. Ministers were warned that any return to border posts in Ulster would lead to a campaign of violence by dissident Republican terrorists, while a trade arrangement with different tariffs either side of the border would lead to smuggling and complicated rules of origin on imports – and that was before ministers considered how EU migrants could enter the rest of the UK via Belfast. ‘You can’t wish these problems away,’ a senior civil servant said. The Irish situation also removed a key argument Tory ministers might have used to dissuade the Scots from voting for independence. ‘You can’t say that we’re not going to have a border with Ireland but we are going to have a hard border with Scotland,’ an official said. This did not make for a quiet life. ‘The default position with the devolved administrations is complaint,’ a Cabinet Office source said. ‘Whatever you do, however much you consult them, however much you pay attention to them, it’s never enough.’

The amount of legislation being drawn up was mounting. By mid-March it was clear that, in order to keep the Repeal Bill to a manageable size, there would need to be at least another seven bills to prepare for life outside the EU, covering immigration, tax, agriculture, trade and customs regimes, fisheries, data protection and sanctions – any one of which could be challenged and amended by MPs and peers.2

Theresa May charged Sajid Javid, the communities secretary, with designing a new system for replacing EU structural funds, worth £8.5 billion over a seven-year period for the poorer parts of the country. During the referendum campaign, Boris Johnson had told voters in Cornwall, the only area of England defined by the EU as a ‘less-developed region’, that they would get the same amount of money after Brexit. But was this still viable? ‘Cornwall gets three or four times the rest of England,’ a source said.

David Davis approached the deal like a game of chess. In late spring he began thinking about war-gaming the final talks, and conducting a ‘backwards analysis of the endgame’, working out the steps necessary to get in a good position. He believed the deal would ultimately be influenced by special interests in each country and sought to work out which of them might help Britain. ‘DD was looking at the Flems, who were desperate to do a deal, and wondering how much of a problem the Wallonians would be. What do the Bavarian car makers really want, or the French farmers? He wanted to know what final squeeze plays they might use. What might Spain want on Gibraltar?’ Davis told colleagues, ‘We’ll have to bully, cajole, coerce and bribe our way through. That’s the nature of this. It makes the Congress of Vienna look like a walk in the park.’

Davis and his minister in the Lords, George Bridges, clashed over preparations for a new customs regime. Davis told officials they were ‘making it all far too complicated’. He said, ‘We already have non-EU customs processes, we just increase the capacity.’ Much of it, he argued, could be pre-notified so customs officers had only to use a barcode reader to know what was in each container, allowing most consignments to be nodded through. Nonetheless, Bridges was concerned that a lot needed to change at ports and airports if even a minimal level of inspections were needed for EU goods. A DExEU source said, ‘We didn’t have space for checking French cheeses or French livestock. There were potentially technical issues with the IT. Sometimes when David was confronted with these issues, his reaction was, “Don’t tell me this.” Sometimes he didn’t want to hear tricky news.’

There were also divisions over the role of the European Court of Justice, which the prime minister had made a red line the previous year. Bridges and Davis’s chief of staff, James Chapman, were concerned that the implications of ruling out ECJ involvement in any deal had not been thought through and would make it difficult to arbitrate a trade deal or continue as members of justice and home affairs initiatives. ‘It’s difficult to do that if you insist that the letters “ECJ” don’t appear anywhere in the new treaty,’ a source said. Davis and David Jones, his minister of state, were adamant that there would have to be a new arrangement, in which oversight of future deals would involve a hybrid panel including judges from Britain and the EU with an independent member.

As the legal complications were examined, DExEU officials grew frustrated that the prime minister was taking independent legal advice from lawyers she had brought into Downing Street from the Home Office. One official said, ‘They’re not the experts on the EU. You don’t use your family lawyer to conduct a trade deal.’

The Brexit department itself was not settled. ‘DExEU staff were tearing their hair out. There was a lot of discontent. They didn’t think they had clear instructions. They didn’t see DD as a good leader,’ one official said. They also had, in Oliver Robbins, a permanent secretary who was rarely in the building. ‘Olly was always on the road,’ a minister recalled. ‘Every other department I’ve worked in you had ministerial “prayers” where everyone goes around the table saying what they’re doing and what they’re concerned about. We just didn’t have that. Olly wasn’t there. It’s very difficult to see how you can be running a machine that big and that important while also on the road.’ In March, Davis hired Philip Rycroft to become Robbins’ deputy and take day-to-day charge of the civil service team.

Far more serious was the impact of Robbins’ dual role as permanent secretary at DExEU and May’s EU ‘sherpa’. It led to the prime minister and Robbins commissioning work from officials in the department which was sent to Downing Street, leaving Davis and the other ministers oblivious that it had even been commissioned and unable to read the resulting reports. A DExEU source said, ‘There would be papers going into Number 10 whose existence DD was not aware of.’ It put civil servants in a difficult position when they were banned from showing their work to their own ministers. Robbins was not secretive about it, but he told Davis, ‘I have two responsibilities: to you, as your permanent secretary, but also to her, as her sherpa, and there will be times that I want to put information to her and she’ll want to discuss it with me and I won’t want to show you.’

One minister said Robbins often did not pass on to Davis intelligence from his trips around the EU. ‘There wasn’t really a great sense of what Olly was picking up on the grapevine,’ he said. ‘There were meetings going on quite often with the prime minister, Olly and the chiefs of staff, about policy positions that we were never part of. We never had had meetings on a formal systematic basis with the EU policy unit in Number 10.’ That group, which included Denzil Davidson and Peter Storr, was also ‘frozen out’ by Robbins and the chiefs. Davidson and George Bridges ‘formed an alliance’ to keep each other informed.

It became clear to Davis’s team that Robbins, as a career civil servant, put his sherpa duties first. DExEU ministers were constantly frustrated that they did not know the prime minister’s intentions and had never seen an overarching plan for Brexit written down. They did not know if that was because none existed or because May was pathologically secretive. ‘We were shut out of the loop because either she doesn’t trust people, or she doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ one minister said. There was also suspicion that Robbins did not always share bad news with May. ‘Olly saw the way that Ivan [Rogers] went and acted accordingly,’ said a source.

Similarly, officials in DExEU put their loyalty to Robbins above their loyalty to the secretary of state. On one occasion James Chapman asked officials where their work on automatic number-plate recognition systems had got to. The systems were expected to be employed at customs and would be used to monitor the Irish border. ‘We asked for this three months ago,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’ After a year at the Treasury, Chapman was used to officials working fast to tight deadlines. This time he was told, ‘We’ve done a bit of work on customs for Olly. It’s gone to Nick [Timothy] in Number 10 because they commissioned it.’ When Davis heard this he ‘erupted’ and threatened, ‘If this carries on, I’m going to resign.’

After months of being kept in the dark, Davis confronted Robbins and May. A fellow minister said, ‘David Davis had a very forthright discussion with [Robbins] and he also spoke to the prime minister about it.’ Davis was placated by Fiona Hill, who told him at these moments, ‘Listen DD, you’re the most important member of the cabinet, you’re our favourite.’