The Three Brexiteers

Brilliant start. But the real crunch will come when May clashes swords with ...

IT WAS just before noon on Wednesday when I set eyes on Theresa May for the last time. I was standing in the corridor behind the back of the Speaker’s Chair, waiting to see David Cameron enter for his final PMQs. She was with Michael Ellis, her resolutely perpendicular PPS, but no one else. No entourage. She looked happy, maybe even a touch excited. There was a bit of joking with a colleague about whether she was going to have to fight them for a seat on the front bench, and then she walked into the Chamber. I never saw her again.

Six hours later I was standing at the top of Downing Street to observe the arrival of our new Prime Minister. The steel gates opened, a BMW glided up, and someone got out. She looked a lot like Theresa May, but it wasn’t her. The woman in front of me was taller. The eyes were keener. The tread more purposeful. Evidence power brings a physical, as well as political, transformation.

Over the past seven days events have moved at an almost incomprehensively rapid – and consequentially dangerous – pace. Against a backdrop of national crisis, a threemonth transition of office has been frenetically compressed into 48 hours. But it’s a transition that has already revealed something significant about what May insiders have been keen to stress is not a conventional reshuffle but ‘ an entirely new Government’.

Speak to anyone who has ever been involved in the nuts and bolts of establishing a new administration, and they will tell you the same thing: the first decisions are the most important. ‘The mistakes you make in the first 48 hours take you years to unravel,’ said a Coalition veteran.

TO DATE Theresa May and her team have already taken three important decisions, and they have all been good ones. The first was to place The Three Brexiteers – Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox – in charge of the paving the way for implementation of Article 50. Within two hours of walking through the famous black doorway, May had put the potentially destabilising ‘does Brexit really mean Brexit?’ argument to bed. While ‘we are all pro-Brexit now’ is Team May’s motto, she is only too aware that out in the Tory shires, some Brexiteers appear more Brexity than others.

As a result, Thursday’s headlines were dominated by talk of the ‘Brexit Cabinet’, even though three of the four major offices of state are now held by Remain supporters, and of the five Cabinet Ministers who backed Leave at the start of the referendum campaign, only one – Chris Grayling – survives.

The second major decision involved anchoring her new administration firmly in the political centre ground. Those hoping May would pull the handbrake on David Cameron’s modernisation project have been disappointed. Indeed, with her rallying cry ‘The Government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few but by yours’, she plans to accelerate it.

Despite liberal media talk of a ‘lurch to the Right’, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, David Davis, Amber Rudd, Liz Truss, Justine Greening and Damian Green are all passionate advocates of social liberalisation and mobility. Hence the heavy emphasis on the fact that she had appointed more state-educated Ministers than any other Conservative Prime Minister – a clear attempt to hose away the ‘rich, posh boy’ graffiti that has clung to the wall of Downing Street for the past six years. Johnson – the last surviving member of the Bullingdon Set – is being given the benefit of the doubt. ‘He’s not really one of the Bullingdon Boys,’ one senior May aide told me, tongue slightly in cheek. ‘He’s not slick enough.’

The last key decision was to make a clean break with the past. The cull of the Cameronites was brutal, but necessary. Both John Major and Gordon Brown were hamstrung and ultimately destroyed by their failure to move out of their predecessors’ shadows.

May intends to cast her own. This proved especially harsh for George Osborne, the man who warned David Cameron against holding a referendum, then dutifully sacrificed his career in defence of it.

But politics is a cruel business. The result is May will enjoy her first weekend as Prime Minister knowing she has succeeded in her first task: that of bringing a measure of reassurance to her country and her party. ‘In the aftermath of the referendum there was a sense of, “Oh my God, what have we done,”’ says a May ally. ‘That was even coming from the Brexit supporters. Now there’s a feeling of relief, and actually some excitement.’ There certainly is. ‘She’s like Elizabeth Gloriana,’ one Tory MP cooed. ‘She’s turned her collar up and said, “Right boys, I’m in charge now.”’

But May’s team know this early wave of optimism cannot alter the fundamentals. And the fundamentals dictate she faces the greatest challenge of any incoming Prime Minister since Churchill.

A popular Westminster narrative is currently forming that she has skilfully dumped the momentous decision to leave the EU into the lap of its architects. ‘You Brexit, you own it,’ was one Minister’s description.

It’s a nice line, but an inaccurate one. May knows responsibility for management of EU withdrawal cannot be outsourced. She is primus inter pares, and her ability to bring the political, economic and diplomatic cycles into alignment will define her premiership. From here on in, she will own her Government’s successes – and its failures.

SHE will also have to demonstrate a Lincoln-like capacity to construct a team of rivals. While May has a reputation as a strong departmental manager, that is not the same as the asymmetrical team-building that will now be required.

Just take the Three Brexiteers. David Davis is a born adventurer. On the wall of his office is the ice axe that saved his life – ‘I had to punch it in, breaking up the knuckles a bit.’

Liam Fox is driven by a belief (not entirely unjustified) that he has done much of the heavy lifting for the Eurosceptic cause, without receiving the recognition of some of his more high-profile colleagues – one of whom happens to be Boris Johnson, the man who can cause a diplomatic incident simply by being Boris Johnson. ‘This is a challenge for him,’ one May ally acknowledged soon after Johnson’s appointment was announced. All of this would be daunting enough for any new PM. But May is taking office without any mandate from the country, her party or even the technical endorsement of her own MPs.

On Monday, I stood outside the Boothroyd Room in the House of Commons while the parliamentary party gathered for her coronation. As May finished addressing them, they cheered and stamped their feet with such vigour the room shook. Moments later they poured into the corridor through two doors.

May’s supporters funnelled through the one on the right, the one closest to the side of the room from which she had spoken. They were laughing and patting one another on the back.

But from the door to the left came many of the 80-strong supporters of Andrea Leadsom. Many of their expressions were more neutral.

One MP who had been in despair since the referendum result said to me: ‘For the first time I’m feeling quite upbeat.’ Another grabbed me and said: ‘We all love grammar school girls!’

Our new Prime Minister has got her first important decisions right. So they do. For now.

She faces greatest challenge of any PM since Churchill