Tim Shipman - Fall Out - A Year of Political Mayhem

The other issue facing Heywood was that almost no preparations had been done for Brexit, since Cameron had banned the civil service from working on contingency plans in the run-up to the referendum. The cabinet secretary had hoped to spend the summer getting the civil service ready but the earlier-than-expected end to the Tory leadership contest put paid to that. ‘We were caught flat footed,’ a senior civil servant admitted. One of May’s team said, ‘I remember thinking when I got to Number 10 that the absence of any real thinking about this massive issue the country was facing was really quite remarkable.’ Some said Heywood should have ignored Cameron. ‘It’s rather shocking that they did no preparations for Brexit,’ a Tory peer said. ‘They had a moral duty to prepare. People should have called for Jeremy’s head.’

The Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU, pronounced Dex-ee-oo) was born out of the European and Global Issues Secretariat, a group of forty officials in the Cabinet Office, and quickly cannibalised the European affairs staff of the Foreign Office as well on its way to engaging more than four hundred staff. From early in her leadership campaign, May knew who she wanted to run DExEU – David Davis. ‘DD’, as he is known in Westminster, had been a whip during the passage of the Maastricht Treaty and then John Major’s Europe minister, jobs he had done with the devil-may-care bravado of an ex-SAS territorial, which remained the most interesting line on his CV and gave him an air of menacing charm that he had put to good use over the years. Davis finished second to Cameron in the 2005 leadership contest before throwing away his frontbench career as shadow home secretary with a maverick decision to resign his seat and fight a by-election to highlight civil liberties issues. That finished him with the Cameroons and paved the way for May to become home secretary. Davis became May’s most obstreperous backbench opponent during her time at the Home Office. A vociferous critic of the snooper state, he even joined forces with Labour’s Tom Watson to take ministers to court over the government’s surveillance powers. However, these confrontations had bred mutual respect not contempt – and crucially had even impressed Hill, whose stance towards May’s political enemies more usually resembled that of a lioness protecting her cubs. She told a friend, ‘He’s an absolute pro and having been on the receiving end of his campaigning for things like counter-terrorism laws I know how good he is. When he came onto the leadership team we really hit it off.’

Having been given a chance to do a serious job in government, Davis resolved to make himself useful to May and not allow policy differences to open between DExEU and Downing Street. ‘He decided he wanted to be a political consigliere to her,’ a source said. Davis’s attempts to ingratiate himself with May went to extreme lengths. ‘She and DD had this hideous flirting thing going on,’ said one official who attended their meetings. ‘She twinkled at DD. It was awful, it was like your grandparents flirting. Everybody wanted the ground to open up and swallow them whole.’

At Hill’s instigation, and with Katie Perrior’s encouragement, James Chapman – a former political editor of the Daily Mail who had been George Osborne’s special adviser – joined as Davis’s special adviser and chief of staff. The appointment raised eyebrows since it was a leap to go from the man most determined to stop Brexit to work for the minister now charged with delivering it, but Chapman was highly intelligent, calm under pressure and brought a deep knowledge of the Eurosceptic press, who would have to be kept on side through the negotiations. It was to be a mistake for both him and Davis.

To start with, DExEU was ‘a total and utter shambles’. Four ministers were crammed into 9 Downing Street, where there had previously been just one. ‘The department didn’t function properly,’ said one official. ‘One of the floors was a courtroom which we couldn’t change because it was a listed building. The press office people were sitting in the dock in the Supreme Court of the Colonies.’ The brass plaque on the front door still read ‘Chief Whip’s Office’.

DExEU was able to coax highly regarded officials to join from across Whitehall since Brexit was a career opportunity, but the civil service had to implement an outcome in which many did not believe. In Brussels, Ivan Rogers gave his staff a pep talk: ‘You’re going to be integral to the biggest negotiation the country’s ever done and your expertise is valued. But if you can’t work for a government that’s delivering a Brexit – and that may be a hard Brexit – don’t do it. Walk out.’ Very few did. But DExEU officials were hamstrung by not knowing May’s planned destination. ‘It could be anything from staying in the EEA to hard Brexit,’ an official said. ‘They didn’t really know where to start.’

The architecture created by Heywood and the chiefs created two problems, which would hamper the government’s planning for the next year. As the lead department, DExEU was both a key participant and expected to be an honest broker with other departments. A cabinet minister said, ‘DD was both a player and the referee.’ The resentments led to briefings against Davis and his new department. ‘There was a turf war,’ said a senior DExEU official. ‘The Foreign Office was massively put out and wanted to demonstrate that DExEU didn’t know what they were doing. We had to fight against that backdrop. It was Jeremy Heywood’s fault. There should never have been a separate department.’

The second problem concerned the official who was to play the most important role in the Brexit negotiations. Oliver Robbins was appointed not only permanent secretary at DExEU, the most senior mandarin in charge of the department, but also the prime minister’s personal EU envoy – her ‘sherpa’, in Brussels parlance. Tall, mild-mannered and bespectacled, Robbins was a labrador of a man but with the brains of a fox. Just forty-one when he got the jobs, he had little EU experience. What he did have was the patronage of Jeremy Heywood – who was grooming him as a successor – the trust of Theresa May, from a spell as second permanent secretary in the Home Office, and the power of incumbency as David Cameron’s last Europe adviser. He had also served as the prime minister’s principal private secretary during the handover from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown and as the director of intelligence and security in the Cabinet Office. He combined his Rolls-Royce CV with bags of intelligence and sharp elbows clothed in a slightly old-fashioned pompous bonhomie.

Ivan Rogers told Robbins he was taking on too much. ‘You’ve got two impossible jobs,’ he said. ‘Try sticking to one impossible job. The only job that really matters is sherpa because you have to be her eyes and ears around the circuit. You need to be the person to whom people transmit messages if they want to get them to the prime minister. If you’re not that, you’re toast.’

Robbins disagreed. ‘It would be harder to do one job and not the other,’ he said. A year later it was decided this was a mistake.

Robbins had May’s trust. On foreign trips, other officials watched jealously as he talked to the prime minister alone, without Hill or Timothy listening in. ‘He was allowed to have conversations with her one on one,’ a colleague said. A senior mandarin who worked closely with Robbins described him as ‘an upwards manager’, good at ingratiating himself with his bosses, less so with his peers.

Robbins’ split role created tensions with David Davis. ‘DD and Olly didn’t see each other regularly enough and Olly was travelling an enormous amount,’ a colleague said. Robbins’ office in 70 Whitehall was a ten-minute walk from Davis’s in 9 Downing Street. ‘The consequence was they hardly ever saw each other. You want your minister and your permanent secretary – who is also the PM’s sherpa – to be talking to each other all the time and they didn’t.’ That meant May’s two key advisers on Brexit ‘weren’t properly aligning where they were headed’. The official said, ‘DD was therefore saying things in public that were contrary to what Olly thought was a sensible position.’