Rees-mogg has cover blown on secret trip to see the Queen
Leavers demand to know whether a civil servant leaked carefully laid plan to prorogue Parliament
IT WAS supposed to be the most secret of government missions as Jacob Reesmogg boarded a British Airways flight to Aberdeen at 8.45am yesterday.
Together with Baroness Evans, the Leader of the Lords, and Mark Spencer, the Chief Whip, he was leading a Privy Council delegation to Balmoral, with instructions to ask the Queen to prorogue Parliament.
Downing Street was so determined to keep their errand under wraps that Mr Rees-mogg, the most recognisable of the trio, travelled separately to minimise the chances of fellow passengers working out what was going on.
But their cover had been blown after a leak – said to have come from within Whitehall – forced No 10 to confirm what was afoot just 15 minutes into the flight, hours before the formal request could be put to the Queen.
To the embarrassment of Downing Street, Boris Johnson had to bring forward a phone call to Her Majesty to ask her to prorogue Parliament so that she would know about it before the rest of the nation heard it on the news.
Last night, Brexiteers were demanding to know whether a Remain-friendly civil servant within Downing Street or the wider Government had leaked the news to opposition MPS in an act of hostility towards the Prime Minister.
Only six Cabinet ministers, together with Mr Johnson, knew of the plans to suspend Parliament for a month, starting in the second week of September.
Together with Mr Johnson’s inner circle of Downing Street advisers, Sajid Javid, the Chancellor, Michael Gove, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General, had been discussing for weeks the possibility of proroguing Parliament as a means of ensuring MPS could not block a no-deal Brexit.
The plan was so hush-hush that none of the ministers told their staff or junior ministerial colleagues what they were up to, keeping the meetings strictly off-diary.
Mr Cox is understood to have been asked for his legal opinion shortly after Mr Johnson became Prime Minister last month, and agreed that ending the longest parliamentary session for nearly 400 years, in order to bring forward a Queen’s Speech in October, was entirely in order.
Over the past month, proroguing Parliament became one of several options under discussion in Mr Johnson’s inner circle.
Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief strategist and former architect of the successful Vote Leave campaign, was, as ever, the spider at the centre of the web. Sir Edward Lister, Mr Johnson’s chief of staff, Lee Cain, his communications secretary, Nikki da Costa, his constitutional expert, and Munira Mirza, his policy adviser, are understood to be among the handful of other staff who were in on the secret.
“The number of people who knew about this was next to none,” said one government source. “Most ministers heard about it first via the news on
‘The number of people who knew about this was next to none. Most ministers heard about it first via the news’
Wednesday morning, and even the ministers who knew about it in advance only told their most senior staff about it on Tuesday night.”
Mr Johnson’s decision to bring in Mr Gove, the man who scuppered his leadership ambitions in 2016 and ran against him again this year, will be seen as a final redemption for the man whose loyalty had been called into question.
Mr Javid, meanwhile, had been in on the discussions for some time and when he was told on Tuesday to cancel his first major speech as Chancellor – due to have happened yesterday – he was aware that Aug 28 had been nailed down as D-day for the prorogation announcement.
The Government had claimed the speech had been cancelled because a major spending review next week would take its place – a classic diversionary tactic by No10.
Mr Rees-mogg, as Leader of the Commons, along with Baroness Evans and Mr Spencer in their roles, had been earmarked from an early stage as the privy counsellors who would meet the Queen to make the formal request that she end the current parliamentary session, which began in June 2017.
Mr Rees-mogg, who is in charge of setting out parliamentary business, was a natural choice, not only because of his role, but because he is fiercely loyal to Mr Johnson and a pivotal link between the Government and backbench Brexiteers, as a former chairman of the European Research Group of Tory Eurosceptics.
So it was that Mr Rees-mogg boarded a flight at Heathrow yesterday morning, making sure he was not seen with his cohorts.
One government source said: “If anyone had seen all three of them getting on a plane together, it might have been a bit obvious. It was like Napoleon having La Grande Armée going in different sections to confuse the enemy.”
But hours earlier, news of a Privy Council meeting had started to reach the ears of Remain-supporting MPS.
One senior SNP figure described getting a phone call at 2am and staying up for the rest of the night to alert as many people as possible. The Scottish MP claimed the leak “came out from No 10”.
By 8.30am, news had reached Nick
Robinson, the presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, who tweeted the rumour that an announcement on prorogation was coming.
Just half an hour later, with other journalists getting similar tip-offs, Downing Street was forced to confirm the story was true.
A government source said: “The announcement was supposed to have been in the afternoon, after Jacob and the other ministers had sat down with the Queen.
“But everything had to be brought forward after it became obvious the news was going to break much sooner than that.
“The Prime Minister spoke to the Queen before anything was made public, then he held a 25-minute conference call with the Cabinet to tell them what was happening.”
Mr Rees-mogg had boarded the flight to Scotland carrying a copy of Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott, featuring the celebrated creations of PG Wodehouse. By the time he landed in Aberdeen, his mission had more of the air of Bertie Wooster than of the unflappable Jeeves.