Did Brexit rebel Hammond sack aide for wearing brown shoes?

REVEALED: The Tory Party dossier on our ex- Chancellor which he says is nothing but a political smear

PHILIP HAMMOND has reacted with fury after The Mail on Sunday obtained a secret party file detailing a series of allegations about his conduct in office when he was Theresa May’s Chancellor.

The claims – most of which Mr Hammond says are ‘categorically untrue’ – have emerged after Mr Hammond joined 20 other Tory MPs in backing a bill to block a No Deal Brexit, leading to them being thrown out of the Conservative Party.

The dossier lists more than a dozen claims about Mr Hammond’s tenure at the Treasury, including the bizarre allegation that he sacked an adviser because he sported brown shoes – ‘which should only be worn in the country’, according to the file.

The file also claimed that members of the Treasury’s Enterprise And Growth Unit had been formally warned that Mr Hammond was ‘disappointed’ by their ‘sloppy dress’.

Last night, a spokesman for the former Chancellor denied that he had sacked the official for breaking the ‘no brown in town’ rule, but added: ‘Philip is well known for his firm views on work attire – and is always suited and booted himself. Call him old fashioned but he thinks people shouldn’t wear jeans and trainers to meetings in Downing Street. We need some standards.’

Boris Johnson’s T-shirt-wearing No 10 enforcer Dominic Cummings – the likely intended target of the spokesman’s barbed remarks – blames Mr Hammond for failing to prepare sufficiently for a No Deal during his time as Chancellor, thereby handing Brussels an advantage in the Brexit negotiations. Since quitting the Cabinet when Mr Johnson entered No 10, Mr Hammond has spearheaded a drive by backbench Tory MPs to thwart a hard Brexit. The dossier also includes the claims that:

• He was such an ‘absentee Chancellor’ that his Treasury office overlooking St James’s Park was turned into a meeting room;

• He refused to fly on an RAF plane afforded to Ministers because it wasn’t ‘nice enough’;

• He was ‘reprimanded’ by Treasury mandarins for forcing private office staff to support his wife Susan – despite her having no official role;

• He ordered his private secretary to scour the first-class lounge at Heathrow ‘to demand that someone swap seats with him on the plane’;

• Civil servants were tasked with minding Susan on official trips to keep ‘her presence secret’;

• On his way to a trade mission to China, he kept his plane waiting on the tarmac while he signed Christmas cards at No 11.

The file also claims that he racked up a €1,000 bill drinking red wine late into the night with his German counterpart in Berlin last year and on a visit to a brewery in London, he forced his special advisers to confiscate all phones so pictures of him could be deleted. The dossier also claims he instituted a rule that he had to visit the US at least three times a year.

Mr Hammond’s spokesman said that the allegations about the red wine bill, the brewery visit, the RAF plane and the reprimand by mandarins were all ‘categorically untrue’, and claimed that it was an attempt to smear him because of his opposition to the Prime Minister.

The spokesman said: ‘It will be pretty obvious to everyone where this has come from. If No 10 spent their time negotiating a Brexit deal rather than trying to smear Philip, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’

He added that the other allegations had been misrepresented. Mr Hammond had sought a change of seats ‘so that he could sit next to a senior official to conduct a meeting on the flight’.

On the trips to the US, he said that ‘every Chancellor makes two trips to Washington each year for the IMF conferences, so that leaves one trip for purely UK-US relations’. He added that it was also proper for Mr Hammond’s wife to accompany him on official trips, and that ‘when the Chancellor travels on official business where a spouse is invited by the host, a civil servant is tasked with looking after the spouse – but this is never “secret”, it is all declared and public’.

He also said that, while it was true that his office overlooking St James’s Park had been turned into a meeting room, it was because Mr Hammond had preferred to use ‘the much smaller office in No 11’.

Although some of the 21 rebels sacked from the party have said they plan to leave Parliament at the next Election, about ten – including Mr Hammond – are still planning to stand.

‘He refused to fly on an RAF plane because it wasn’t nice enough’