TheresaMay andthe Brexit snake pit

A nest of vipers? The phrase doesn’t even begin to do justice to Mrs May’s warring Cabinet and manic ex-advisers... as this excitable book shows

Fall Out: A Year Of Political Mayhem Tim Shipman William Collins €21.99 ★★★★★

Most people who watched BBC’s The Thick Of It on television thought of it as a comedy. Madcap characters screamed abuse and desperately plotted against one another, without having the foggiest idea of what was going on in the world beyond. But this extraordinary book convinces me that The Thick Of It was much closer to a documentary, and a rather gentle documentary at that.

Fall Out covers the period following Theresa May entering Downing Street, through her ill-judged General Election, virtually up to the present day. Written by a highly regarded political journalist, and, as far as one can tell, as accurate as can be, it reads like a roaring farce, its succession of plots and counter-plots contrived by absurd, over-promoted men and women, all of them whispering poisonous things in each other’s ears, while storming in and storming out, and frequently landing flat on their faces.

Though Tim Shipman begins his book with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt in praise of politicians who ‘strive valiantly’ and ends it with a brief homily of his own on the complications of the Brexit negotiations – ‘We should be grateful someone was willing to try’ – its 500 pages tell a completely different tale, quite at odds with his overview.

Regardless of whether they were ‘willing to try’, anything less ‘strong and stable’ than Mrs May’s crew would be hard to imagine. Might this be because she is the first Prime Minister in British history ever to be set on pushing through a key policy – Brexit – which she had voted against?

Judging by this book, the term ‘nest of vipers’ might have been coined for her senior aides and Cabinet, with Mrs May herself sitting alone at their centre, quivering with fear and doubt. That this collection of odd bods, chancers, loony tunes, hotheads and second-raters should be charged with steering Britain through what David Davis himself has called ‘maybe the most complicated negotiation of all time’ is a cause for laughter or horror, or perhaps, most appropriately, a bit of both. A pyramid of jellies on a paper raft a-wobble in a storm-tossed sea would be much stronger and more stable than Mrs May and her colleagues. For a start, none of them seems to have any faith in the others. One ‘Cabinet colleague’ thinks Andrea Leadsom is ‘completely out of her depth’ and ‘basically not really bright enough’. Philip Hammond thinks that Boris Johnson is ‘a plonker’, and that Mrs May is ‘economically illiterate’, while another ‘Cabinet colleague’ thinks Hammond is ‘mildly Aspergic’. During the last General Election, Mrs Leadsom, Liam Fox, Jeremy Hunt and Chris Grayling were considered so unappealing to the electorate that they were put on the ‘never use’ list, yet here they still are, shepherding us bossily to oblivion.

However busy they are grappling with the finer detail of Brexit – and David Davis is secretly described by his own officials as lazy in this area – they can always find time to bitch about each other to Tim Shipman. Virtually every page finds ‘a senior Tory’ or ‘a Cabinet Minister’ or ‘a senior figure’ whispering something sour in Shipman’s ear. ‘You know perfectly well that if you discussed anything in Cabinet it would be outside three minutes after Cabinet finished,’ complains ‘a Cabinet Minister’, seemingly unaware that he is at present leaking the news that his colleagues are leaky.

The best that can be said of Mrs May is that one or two of her col-