‘MONSIEUR NON’: THE EU CAN’T BOSS US
In first interview as Brexit chief, David Davis gives stark warning on migrant ‘surge’ He’ll live up to ‘Charming B ***** d’ reputation in Brussels and says: ‘We are changing history’
DAVID DAVIS is not just the kind of man who would cross the road to pick a fight: he would probably get involved in a road rage incident on his way across. He loves to brag about how he brought a series of Labour Home Secretaries to their knees when he was the Tory Home Affairs spokesman. And his repeated clashes with another Home Secretary appeared to have killed off any lingering hope he may have had, at 67, of making the Cabinet. Her name was Theresa May.
Which is why no one was more shocked than Davis when he was invited to No10 on Wednesday. ‘She said, “I have decided to create a Department for Leaving or Exiting the EU.”
‘I said I prefer exiting because that makes it Department X,’ he laughs.
‘I told her I was both surprised and delighted,’ he adds in his first interview as the Cabinet Brexit supremo, as he sits in his office overlooking Horse Guards Parade.
‘If you’d said six months ago I would be sitting here doing this with Theresa as Prime Minister I would have said you must be on something. It still feels dream-like.’
He says they are not such an odd couple: ‘When I backed Theresa it was a character call. You get to know more about people through skirmishes.’
It sometimes seems that Davis’s chequered Tory career has been one skirmish after another since he was tipped as a future leader 30 years ago. He was sacked as party chairman after falling out with Iain Duncan Smith in 2002, flopped when he stood against David Cameron as Conservative leader in 2005, enraged Cameron by subsequently quitting the Tory front bench in a civil rights protest and, extraordinarily, quit as an MP to fight a by-election over the same issue.
Admirers of ‘DD’ saw it as the actions of a courageous principled hero; critics saw it as an act of vanity.
Has he promised Mrs May he won’t storm out again? ‘I didn’t need to – she knows I mean to succeed,’ he says, narrowing his eyes.
Bruiser Davis’s reputation as a political knuckleduster earned him the nicknames ‘Charming Bastard’ and ‘Monsieur Non’ when he was briefly Europe Minister in John Major’s government in the 1990s.
When he joked at the time that although he could speak a little French, he would no longer do so, French socialist government counterpart Elisabeth Guigou got the wrong end of the stick.
‘When she wanted to say something she didn’t want me hear she switched to French – it was very useful,’ Davis smirks.
He is confident his tough negotiating skills will help Britain retain access to the single market while winning control over its borders, even though the EU has flatly ruled it out.
‘Everybody is taking starting positions. Of course they are talking tough. If I was negotiating to buy your house or your car my first offer wouldn’t be my final one, would it?
‘Don’t forget, we have an amazing mandate – 17million votes. It is natural the EU Commission was shocked by it all. But they must realise the British public have made it clear where they stand on regaining control of our borders. At the end of the day the initial anger will be replaced by common interest.’
The EU Commission may be horrified by Brexit, but it is a different story outside Brussels, says Davis, who claims many national leaders share British fears about the direction Jean-Claude Juncker and co are heading in towards a European superstate.
‘Don’t underestimate the extent to which smarter European national politicians know where we are coming from,’ he says.
As for Mrs May’s fears of a pre-Brexit surge in EU migrants coming to the UK before the door slams shut, action man Davis won’t shrink from the necessary measures.
‘We may have to deal with that. There are a variety of possibilities. We may have to say that the right to indefinite leave to remain protection only applies before a certain date. But you have to make those judgments on reality, not speculation.’
However, he is quick to dispel the notion that EU migrants already here will not be treated fairly.
‘We will get a generous settlement for EU migrants here now and a generous settlement for British citizens in the EU.’
He is equally dismissive of the EU Commission’s claim that it will refuse to have talks with the UK before Mrs May invokes Article 50, setting us irrevocably on the EU exit path.
‘We don’t have to do any negotiations, just find out where their interests are. It’s not the same thing. When we sign up [to Article 50] we will know the shape of deal. Boris [Johnson] is going to the EU foreign affairs council this weekend. Are they going to say, “Oh, I can’t mention this to you?” Of course not.’
Davis expects the UK to invoke Article 50 by the end of the year and be out of the EU altogether by 2019, though he concedes the Brexit talks are so complex that ‘even within [Mrs May’s] Government there’ll be tensions.’
He can say that again. Of her three-man Brexit team, veteran Eurosceptics Davis and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox are not bosom pals. And you can’t imagine Foreign Secretary Johnson inviting either to a supper party.
Some Tories believe wily Remainer May has handed Mission Impossible to the Three Brexiteers so they have to fall on their swords if it ends in tears, not her.
When I met Davis on Friday morning, they still hadn’t met face to face since being appointed two days earlier. He is adamant he can pull rank on both.
Johnson, one place above him at number three in the official Cabinet pecking order, may disagree.
On the other hand, Mrs May has moved Davis next door into 9 Downing Street, officially the Cabinet Office, closer than Boris’s new HQ.
Davis’s background is a long way from the Bullingdon Club. Brought up by a single mother in a council flat, and educated at a South London grammar school, the former SAS reservist who has had his nose broken five times, revels in his tough guy image. Too much for some.
He once boasted to me how he single-handedly took on the leader of a gang of thugs at his school who bullied a gay boy.
I told him I didn’t believe him and would track down the gang leader. I did and, somewhat to my surprise, he more or less confirmed Davis’s story.
Davis is still pinching himself at his belated Cabinet call-up.
‘Sometimes I think I’ll wake up at a lathe in Coventry doing the job my life would lead you to expect I’d be doing. The truth is I’m just bloody normal.’
He says Mrs May’s decision to
‘Initial anger by Europe will be replaced by common interest’
have more ‘bloody normal’ and fewer so-called Cameron and Osborne ‘posh boys’ in the Cabinet reduces the risk of extremism in the UK – what Davis calls ‘the Donald Trump tendency’.
‘That comes partly from people feeling the Government doesn’t represent them, these people are out of touch. Nobody can say that about Theresa or the team she has picked.
‘It only matters when things go wrong. The British working class are not snobs or inverted snobs. They don’t care if the guy at the top is a Macmillan or a Cameron. But when you can’t get a job or haven’t had a pay rise for ten years, the symbolism of where you come from becomes important.’ When I suggest that, for all his confidence, invoking Article 50 will be a leap in the dark, parliamentary historian Davis seizes on it.
It was exactly what Prime Minister Lord Derby said in 1867 when votes were given to the working class, he says. ‘The toffs saw it as a leap in the dark but it was greatest ever extension of democracy.’
Davis says curbing immigration could have similar benefits for the working class he comes from. It was the industrial working classes of the North and Midlands who were responsible for Brexit, and their wages that had stagnated partly as a result of EU migrants, he says with feeling. He would have no truck with any attempt to use Brexit as an excuse to curb their rights.
He denies he is daunted by his mammoth Brexit task and as he leans forward says: ‘Many years ago I went on a course and my commander said, “The only thing that can defeat you is your imagination – don’t let it frighten you.” We are changing history.’
Fine words. Now ‘DD’ must deliver.
‘The truth is, I’m just bloody normal’