Tim Shipman - Fall Out - A Year of Political Mayhem

There was a demonstrable logic to all this but it is extraordinary that these, the foundational decisions of Britain’s withdrawal strategy, which would shape the next two years of negotiations, were taken, in essence, by two people. The cabinet certainly had no chance to debate them.

Timothy knew where the decisions would take the country but recognised the plan was too controversial to announce so bluntly while emotions were still raw about the referendum result. It would be three months before May admitted publicly, in another speech at Lancaster House, that she wanted to leave the single market and the customs union. ‘You need to conduct the negotiation in a way that takes all of the people with you,’ a source close to May said. ‘I think if we’d said we no longer want to be in the single market at party conference, it would have looked on the EU side like an aggressive statement.’

To distract attention from these major decisions – and to settle key issues of concern – May used interviews with the Sunday Times and the Sun on Sunday to launch the first of two major announcements from her speech. The government would convert the acquis – the existing body of EU law – into British law so that nothing would change on day one of Brexit. Individual laws could then be changed by Parliament in the usual way. The way this was to be accomplished was by a ‘Great Repeal Bill’ which would also do away with the European Communities Act 1972, the legislation that gave direct effect to all EU law in Britain. The paper was briefed with some suitably Churchillian rhetoric from the speech: ‘Today marks the first stage in the UK becoming a sovereign and independent country.’

The rhetoric of repeal was clever since it disguised the fact that the plan was to take every hated Brussels directive for four decades and write them into British law. In private, Davis referred to it as ‘the Great Continuity Bill’. Government lawyers had said it was impossible to do anything else, but in an environment where ministers like Andrea Leadsom were proposing to start tearing up regulations and the Daily Mail was running a ‘scrap EU red tape’ campaign, the move took some guts.

May delivered the second announcement during an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on the Sunday morning, pledging to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – the mechanism for kickstarting two years of Brexit negotiations – by the end of March 2017. May had bought time during the leadership election by saying she would not trigger Article 50 before the end of the year. Senior civil servants in DExEU and Ivan Rogers in Brussels had warned her that announcing a timetable was a bad idea because the moment Britain fired the starting gun, ‘you lose pretty much all the leverage you have’, putting Britain on a countdown clock where the other twenty-seven countries set the rules of the negotiation.

On 29 June, five days after the referendum result, the other twenty-seven member states had agreed a policy of ‘no negotiations without notification’ and – to the surprise of some British officials – they had stuck to it ever since. Rogers told May the best way of forcing the EU to compromise would be to say, ‘We intend to invoke in March, but I give you no cast-iron commitment. The moment I’ve seen your draft guidelines document we’ll invoke.’ So confident was Rogers that the prime minister had listened that he told friends in Brussels just days before the conference that May would not invoke Article 50 until the end of 2017. It was proof that even the most experienced civil servants don’t always read the politics of a situation accurately. As one of May’s senior aides recalled, ‘We couldn’t get through conference without putting a line in the sand. We had to say something about timing.’ David Davis was involved in the discussions over the timing, suggesting that the vague ‘before the end of the first quarter’ be changed to ‘by the end of March’, which he believed to be ‘specific sounding’ and ‘hard to demur from later’.

Figures like George Osborne were arguing that no progress would be made in the negotiations until after the German elections in September 2017, so May should delay triggering until then. In retrospect it is possible to conclude that Britain would have been in a stronger position in the talks if the prime minister had set a firm date of October 2017 to trigger Article 50 and announced that Whitehall would spend the next year preparing for the UK to leave without a deal in order to maximise leverage in the negotiations. A minister said, ‘She might just have got away with that.’ But May was a new prime minister who did not wish to antagonise the Eurosceptics. Choosing 31 March as T-Day, Timothy said, ‘I don’t think it is sustainable to take longer.’

Later that day, May opened her speech by dismissing those who ‘say that the referendum isn’t valid, that we need to have a second vote’ or were planning to ‘challenge any attempt to leave the European Union through the courts’. She said, ‘Come on! The referendum result was clear. It was legitimate. It was the biggest vote for change this country has ever known. Brexit means Brexit – and we’re going to make a success of it.’ In addition to the two main factual announcements, the most important passage of the speech came when the prime minister made clear that controlling immigration was her top priority, above even economic prosperity. ‘We are not leaving the EU only to give up control of immigration again,’ she said. A May adviser observed, ‘It’s logical we’d leave the single market because we don’t want free movement. By conference we knew that. The vote for Brexit was about controlling immigration. Everything else flows from there.’

May also announced, ‘Our laws will be made not in Brussels but in Westminster. The judges interpreting those laws will sit not in Luxembourg but in courts in this country. The authority of EU law in Britain will end.’ This was not, as some have suggested, a line smuggled past a confused prime minister. ‘The PM was very clear that the jurisdiction of the ECJ had to come to an end,’ a close aide said. ‘She thinks that is one of the major things that people voted for.’ Yet that decision had huge implications which were far from fully understood in the cabinet and some corners of Downing Street when May delivered her speech. The ECJ’s remit ran across dozens of agencies and thousands of regulations, from the regulation of medicines and nuclear materials to aviation safety.

While Davis was aware of much of what May was going to say, he had not seen the speech and nor had Oliver Robbins. ‘The ECJ wasn’t mentioned before the conference speech as a red line,’ a DExEU official said. ‘It was conjured up by Nick Timothy to get very Eurosceptic conference delegates and the Tory press cheering. They were terrified of people saying, “She’s a remainer.” There was no discussion or debate whatsoever. I don’t believe Olly Robbins knew what she was going to say. The speech was not shared with any of the ministers. The chancellor didn’t see it. He was livid. Even DD was furious. He agreed with most of what she said but he didn’t know exactly what she was going to say.’ Months later, after leaving government, James Chapman, Davis’s chief of staff, said, ‘The repeal bill was Nick’s idea. We thought that was the big announcement. Instead of which he basically announced hard Brexit. She hamstrung the whole negotiation from the start.’ In interviews that evening May denied that she had decided to leave the single market. ‘All options are on the table,’ she said. But according to a DExEU official, ‘The pound crashed because anyone with any sense could work out that this means hard Brexit.’