Tim Shipman - Fall Out - A Year of Political Mayhem

The primary leaker was never identified but senior officials in Downing Street, including Katie Perrior, came to suspect that the chiefs were responsible for some of the leaks in a bid to keep journalists occupied and that they had pointed the finger of blame at Chapman to cover their tracks. In October Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, found out, half an hour before the decision was announced, that Heathrow was to be allowed to build a third runway.

Earlier, ITV’s Chris Ship had broken the news of May’s decision to approve Hinkley Point. Perrior was quizzed by security: ‘Do you ever speak to Chris Ship?’

‘Yes.’

‘How often?’

‘Several times a week.’

‘Why do you do that?’

‘Because I’m the director of communications …’

The leak inquiries were inconclusive but Hill and Timothy had not been required to submit their own phones. When most of the autumn statement appeared in the public domain in advance, Hammond told May he suspected one of her staff of trying to undermine him. This time Perrior suggested that everyone – including May, Hammond and Jeremy Heywood – hand in their phones to ensure there was no excuse for the chiefs to be excluded. She knew the chiefs had been briefing because Timothy was taking her through the plans when they were interrupted by an official informing him that a Sunday newspaper journalist was waiting for him in the next room. The officials charged with the leak inquiry discovered that the chiefs talked to journalists so often that it was impossible to tell if they were behind the specific leaks.

In early December, Jeremy Heywood issued an edict that the ‘spate of corrosive leaks’ must come to an end. In a memo to mandarins he ordered senior officials to use only government-issue phones, allowing all their communications to be monitored, and warned that anyone leaking would be fired, whether or not there was a threat to national security. Within a few days, Heywood’s memo itself had been leaked to the Mail on Sunday .

May’s government took security very seriously. Every minister in the Brexit department was given an MI5 briefing when they got the job. ‘They told us that we were going to be the most targeted department in Whitehall,’ one minister said. David Davis took this to heart, carrying around his computer and iPad in a metal briefcase containing a ‘Faraday cage’ to block all wireless, cellular, GPS and WiFi signals. At his home he stored them in a biscuit tin. He was also told by the security services to ditch his Apple watch to prevent foreign spies using it to listen to his conversations. He replaced it with a Garmin smart watch, advertised as ‘for athletes and adventurers’. Asked if it was ‘government issue’, Davis said, ‘You must be joking – that’s a thousand-quid watch.’ When embarking on foreign trips ministers were warned that they might be approached by ‘honey trap’ agents from foreign powers and jokingly told, ‘You might even want to get changed under your bedclothes.’ The warning led to a story in the Sun on Sunday that Theresa May herself had been advised to disrobe under the covers or risk being filmed naked – a leak for which Boris Johnson was blamed.

The paranoia extended to Downing Street, where Fiona Hill was highly security conscious after living with a former spy for several years. ‘Fiona banned us from talking on mobiles in case people were listening,’ said a DExEU official. ‘If you wanted Fiona you had to call her on her landline.’ Six years at the Home Office had made the prime minister, too, wary of security issues. One of her staff asked May how she kept her wardrobe refreshed: ‘I don’t know how you find the time. I go home at midnight, I sit on the John Lewis website and I get it all delivered. Do you online shop?’

May said, ‘I’m the former home secretary, of course I don’t shop online.’

By November May’s desire for secrecy around Brexit meant progress was slow. Number 10’s sensitivity was well summarised by a memo written by a Deloitte consultant in the Cabinet Office on 7 November, which leaked to The Times eight days later. It warned that Whitehall was struggling to cope with more than five hundred Brexit projects and the fact that ‘no common strategy’ had emerged among cabinet ministers. The memo said May’s predilection for ‘drawing in decisions and details to settle matters herself’ was holding up decision-making.

The prime minister was described as ‘personally affronted’ by the wording. The official response was, ‘This is not a government report and we don’t recognise the claims made in it.’ But for all too many people it had hit the nail on the head.

Within a month Deloitte had a meeting with Sir Jeremy Heywood and John Manzoni, the chief executive of the civil service, and – under threat of further punishment – agreed not to bid for any further government contracts for six months. Deloitte’s treatment excited comparisons between May’s operation and both Stalin and Colonel Gaddafi, while business voices complained that her team ‘don’t want to hear difficult messages’ and were guilty of ‘government by rage’.8 MP Anna Soubry, a Remainer, said Deloitte had been ‘bullied’. Ministers told to keep quiet, not accept lunch invitations from journalists and refused permission by Downing Street to make announcements on the government ‘grid’ felt much the same way.

The very next day, 16 November, the Institute for Government (IfG), a thinktank close to senior mandarins, warned that Brexit represented an ‘existential threat’ to the operations of some departments: ‘Whitehall does not have the capacity to deliver Brexit on top of everything else to which it is already committed.’ The IfG said May’s ‘secretive approach’ was hampering preparations, with the result that they looked ‘chaotic and dysfunctional’. It said, ‘Silence is not a strategy. Failure to reveal the government’s plan to reach a negotiating position is eroding confidence among business and investors.’9

The same day the IfG report was published, Sir Simon Fraser, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, appeared in front of the new select committee shadowing DExEU and said the government did not yet have a ‘central plan’ for Brexit.

May and her team thought they had signalled clearly where they were heading, but her cabinet was divided and Whitehall was in open revolt. To make matters worse, the European Commission was now playing hardball too, over the most contentious issue of all.

Money.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.