May’s top aide breaks silence on poll disaster
Theresa May’s former chief-of-staff tells Gordon Rayner he accepts responsibility for loss of the Tories’ majority, with a warning to the party not to duck its responsibilities – or underestimate Labour
THERESA MAY’S former right-hand man has revealed for the first time what went wrong in the general election campaign and what he believes the Conservatives must do to avoid defeat in five years’ time.
Nick Timothy, who quit as the Prime Minister’s joint chief-of-staff in June, told The Daily Telegraph that the Tories lost their majority because they abandoned Mrs May’s promise of change in favour of a “continuity” message.
He also admitted Downing Street was guilty of a breakdown in communications both with the public and with other Whitehall departments.
In his first interview since leaving No10, the man dubbed Theresa May’s “brain” said she must find new ways to reform social care and forge ahead with intervention in “unfair” energy markets if she wanted to hold off Labour.
Mr Timothy said: “If the party retreats into a comfort zone that we don’t find very challenging, I worry that we will not only fail to address the challenges the country faces but we will also increase the chances of a hard-left government in five years’ time.”
Using state intervention to fix “dysfunctional” markets – as the Tories had proposed to do with an energy tariff cap before dropping it from the Queen’s Speech – was one way in which the party could win back voters, he said.
Mr Timothy, who co-wrote the manifesto that was blamed for Mrs May’s election woes, said he was still in touch with the Prime Minister, but insisted he was no longer advising her on policy. He also claimed Mrs May had been a victim of “sexism”, as some people in Westminster refused to give her credit for coming up with her own policies, preferring instead to believe that male advisers such as him were behind them.
Mr Timothy, who begins a weekly column for the Telegraph on Thursday, also disclosed that:
♦ Reports that the Prime Minister was intending to sack Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, if she increased her majority were wide of the mark;
♦ Mrs May is still prepared to walk away from Brexit talks without a deal;
♦ Her hopes of reversing the ban on new grammar schools are over;
♦ The Tories’ strategists overruled plans for ministers to play a bigger part in the election campaign.
Mr Timothy insisted that reforming the funding of social care, dubbed the “dementia tax” by Labour, was a “strong” policy and the “right” policy. But he said that Mrs May suffered from being unable to road-test policies before unveiling them in the manifesto.
Mrs May has dropped her pledge to reform social care, but Mr Timothy urged her to “make a virtue out of necessity” by setting up a royal commission to reach agreement on the long-term solution to both the social care crisis and how to fund the NHS.
He also said that “parliamentary arithmetic” now meant that Mrs May’s plan to reverse the legal ban on grammar schools was impossible. On Brexit, Mr Timothy said: “The country can trust her to get the job done.”
‘It was a continuity campaign rather than a change campaign and I think that was wrong’
‘The country can trust her to get the job done – the fundamental things that the country voted for’
Only hours earlier, Nick Timothy had still been regarded as “the most powerful man in Britain”, but with the clock showing 3pm on June 9 he was about to make a call that would render him unemployed.
Dialling Theresa May’s personal mobile number, he told her that after eight years by her side, and having co-written the manifesto that was blamed for the Tories losing their parliamentary majority, he had no alternative but to resign.
“Nobody told me I had to go, but it became inevitable,” he says. “I’d stayed up all night watching the results come in. The exit poll was a shock and when it became clear that it was right, it was obvious that I would have to go. I said to Theresa in Conservative Central Office on the Friday morning that I thought it was probable I would have to resign, then I did so over the phone that afternoon. She understood why.”
Two months on, Timothy has had plenty of time to reflect on his and the party’s humiliation in the general election, and has decided now is the time to share his views on what went wrong and why – as well as giving his thoughts on what Mrs May must do to stop Jeremy Corbyn entering No10.
Shorn of the bushy beard he had sported for three years, (“I got sick of people telling me how old it made me look”, he says) and after a refreshing holiday in Sardinia, the 37-year-old looks, quite literally, a different person from the mysterious, careworn figure who was likened by opponents to Mrs May’s Rasputin. He and the former Sky News journalist Fiona Hill were Mrs May’s joint chiefs of staff, developing such a close relationship with her both at the Home Office and in No 10 that Cabinet ministers regarded them as the second and third most powerful people in the country.
It was Timothy and the former Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer (who lost his seat at the election) to whom Mrs May entrusted the task of writing the Tory manifesto, which scared the horses just when it seemed Mrs May was cantering to victory.
Is he, then, the man who blew the majority? “I take responsibility for the things that I was responsible for,” he says. “I do have regrets about the way the campaign was fought but everybody who was involved has to reflect and be honest with themselves about what they did, including me. And I hope I have.”
Timothy says at the outset of our interview that he will not point the finger of blame at anyone else, but his answers leave no doubt of the tensions that existed between Downing Street staff and the team of election strategists, including Sir Lynton Crosby, who were brought in by Mrs May.
“Our early instincts when we were thinking about the election was to have a more traditional campaign, daily press conferences, more policy content, certainly not make it a semi-presidential campaign,” he says. “And we didn’t do those things because the advice was about playing to strengths (meaning Mrs May) and to be perfectly honest I didn’t really challenge that. I was in a position to change this and I didn’t. With hindsight obviously we would have done it differently.”
The strategy of putting Mrs May front and centre, based on her soaring approval ratings at the start of the campaign, unravelled quickly as the Prime Minister’s uninspiring “Maybot” performances on the stump put off voters. “We knew the campaign wasn’t going as well as we’d hoped,” admits Timothy, “but actually on the basis of the research and data there was no urgent need to change the strategy because the projections still looked good.”
He trots out the statistic that the Conservatives won 42.4 per cent of the vote, the highest share by a winning party since 1997, but admits a major strategic error cost the party votes from Labour supporters who had initially been prepared to switch sides but ultimately lost faith in Mrs May.
He says: “The entire political strategy of Theresa’s leadership campaign and of the Government from July 2016 to April 2017 was based on the kind of insight that Theresa had about the country and about the referendum campaign, that yes it was a vote to leave the European Union but it was also a vote for serious change. “The message we were conveying all the time was ‘we get the anger, we get the need to change, we’re on the side of change’.”
It was why Timothy used the manifesto to reject “untrammelled free markets” and “selfish individualism”, seen at the time as being rather un-conservative language. The Tories, he says, made it clear they would be governing in the interests of “ordinary working people” and would not tolerate economic irresponsibility from rich or poor, using the power of the state “to reform dysfunctional markets and to bring industrial strategy to other parts of the country”.
It worked, and Mrs May became more popular even than Margaret Thatcher at her peak, according to polls.
“But then having done that the electoral strategy was fundamentally different. It was a reassurance and continuity campaign rather than a change campaign and on reflection I think that was wrong.
“The ‘strong and stable’ slogan wasn’t necessarily a problem but looking back we would have been much better off with a message showing we understood the need for change and we were the people capable of delivering it.”
He also admits the party “clearly” underestimated Mr Corbyn and accepts: “It probably is true that there should have been more on the economy during the campaign.”
Timothy may no longer be in Downing Street, but his views still matter, not least because he is still in contact with Mrs May (to whom he always refers as Theresa, rather than the Prime Minister). “I have spoken to Theresa a few times since the election but I haven’t seen her and I’m not advising her on policy,” he says. “They are private conversations, people catching up.” He says the same about a recent photograph of him meeting Michael Gove for a pint. Has Mrs May sought his advice on anything? “No, because when you have been on the inside you realise as soon as you’re on the outside what you don’t know, so if I did try to advise her I don’t think I would be doing her a service. “She has got a very good team of people around her, she doesn’t need my advice from afar.”
Those who know Timothy and Mrs May might find it difficult to believe they will both be able to resist the temptation to talk policy. Timothy believes the party must return to a message of change to avoid an even worse result at the next general election. “Overall the lesson of the election for the party and for the Government cannot be ‘Oh well, we tried that and we didn’t win the election we were hoping for so let’s not try it any more’.
“If the party retreats to a much more orthodox Conservative proposition then I worry that won’t be sufficient to tackle the big problems that the country has and in five years’ time we do risk the election of a dangerous Left-wing alternative.”
Timothy accepts that the controversial policy of charging more people for social care was poorly presented, giving opponents the chance to define it as a “dementia tax”, but still believes “the policy is the strong one and the right one” because the problem of Britain’s ageing population is not going to go away.
He accepts that the policy was killed off by the election result, but says the Tories must not waste the next five years by doing nothing about it, or about funding of the NHS. Why not set up a royal commission, he says, to reach a lasting cross-party solution?
He cites the Beveridge Report, published at the height of the war in 1942, which formed the basis for the post-war foundation of the welfare state. “The ideas behind the creation of the modern welfare state were done at a time when clearly the country wasn’t in a position to implement them,” he says, “but they didn’t waste that time, they used it. Something like that could take place over the next few years.
“We need more of the reformed Conservative proposition rather than less. It’s certainly the case that that kind of policy work and that kind of thinking needs to go on.”
He denies that he, Fiona Hill and the Prime Minister formed a kitchen cabinet that micro-managed policy, but concedes: “We probably didn’t communicate as well as we could have done, directly with the public and the media, and probably to a certain extent around Whitehall.”
Timothy shares many of the same traits as the Prime Minister, and it is easy to see why they developed such a strong mutual respect. Serious, intellectual and uncomfortable talking about anything bordering on the personal, his back-story also echoes Mrs May’s journey from provincial vicar’s daughter to Conservative politics via grammar school.
Timothy was born in Tile Cross, Birmingham, to working class parents who had switched their support from Labour to the Conservatives when Thatcher came to power in 1979, the year before he was born.
His father, Albert, had left school at 14 and worked his way up from the factory floor of a local steel works to become head of international sales, the sort of “striver” so beloved of the Conservative Party. His mother, Margaret, also an early school leaver, did secretarial work at a local school.
Timothy developed a boyhood passion for Aston Villa, but it was not until his second year at King Edward VI Aston School, a boys’ grammar, that he picked a political team to support.
He said: “The 1992 election was an early example as a kid growing up of how politics can change people’s lives. I had just got to the school that gave me this opportunity and if Labour had won the election that year the threat was to close it down.”
Sheffield University followed, and a first class degree in politics, before a spell of volunteering for Birmingham Conservatives led to a job in the Conservative Research Department.
He got to know Mrs May, was chosen as her special adviser in the Home Office, and when Mrs May reached Downing Street, Timothy followed her there. Aged just 36, he was generally viewed as indispensable, but resents the suggestion in Westminster that he was her “brain”.
“She has done a very good job of stabilising things since the election which disproves that theory anyway, but I do think there’s more than a hint of sexism to be honest, there’s a sort of implication that even having become Prime Minister she somehow doesn’t have a set of beliefs and a programme of her own and she obviously does. Suggesting I’m the creator of those ideas is absurd and insulting to her.”
He suggests Mrs May is misunderstood because “she doesn’t allow herself to be put into ideological boxes” and “confused” people as home secretary because she was tough on immigration and crime while also introducing the first modern slavery act and clamping down on abuses of power.
One person who allegedly finds her hard to understand is the Chancellor. There have been repeated reports of shouting matches between No 10 and No11 and a widespread belief that Mrs May intended to sack Philip Hammond if she increased her majority at the election. Not true, says Timothy. “She did not intend to get rid of him. Theresa refused to even talk about post-election reshuffles because she thought it was inappropriate, it took things for granted, she wanted to concentrate on the campaign, so that was just never on the cards.
“They go for dinner or breakfast with one another probably every fortnight, they get along fine but the two of them are businesslike politicians, that’s how they work.”
Unsurprisingly for someone so loyal to his former employer, Timothy expresses his “very, very strong view” that she is the right person to lead the country through Brexit, and insists she is not being led towards a “softer”
route out of the EU. “The country can trust her to get the job done. The fundamental things that the country voted for, that we will leave the EU, control immigration, that the Court of Justice should have no jurisdiction in this country, that we should stop paying membership fees, I’m confident that those things will end.
“For all the talk from some people that we must seek some sort of partial membership of the European Economic Area or something like that, the intention of the Government has been clear from the beginning – that if you seek a partial relationship the danger is that you will be in the worst of all worlds, where you will be a rule-taker with none of the advantages of being in, but you will also sacrifice some of the advantages of being out.”
He says it is natural that some ministers will want to emphasise particular points of the Brexit strategy, (such as Mr Hammond’s recent comments about a lengthy transition period) but insists that “if you strip out the noise” the Cabinet is adhering to the strategy set out by the Prime Minister in January, which means leaving the EU and all of its structures but with a period of transition.
He also said Mrs May is still prepared to walk away without a deal.
“It would be a bad thing if we got into a situation where there was no deal for all concerned, but there are circumstances where Britain would have to be prepared to walk away. ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ isn’t just a slogan, it means something.”
Timothy, whose personal turmoil also included the breaking-off of his engagement to his German fiancée Nike Trost before the election, now intends to take another holiday, with his new girlfriend, a former Downing Street colleague.
He laughs off suggestions that he has a reputation to rebuild, saying: “I advised anyone who would listen that they shouldn’t believe the hype then, and they shouldn’t believe the corresponding hype now.
“I think anyone who worries about their personal brand in that kind of way needs to take a cold shower.”