THE QUEEN OF FLIP-FLOPS FLOUNCES OUT ON BORIS
After ignoring the Prime Minister’s phone calls for FIVE HOURS...
THE manner of Amber Rudd’s departure yesterday was in keeping with her capricious – some would say duplicitous – political career.
Rumours that the Pensions Secretary might be on the verge of quitting first reached Boris Johnson yesterday afternoon, as he was travelling from the Queen’s estate at Balmoral to Chequers.
For more than five hours, the Prime Minister tried to reach Ms Rudd on the phone – but she decided to ‘screen’ his calls until after the news was announced at 9pm.
Relations between the Cheltenham Ladies’ College old girl and Mr Johnson have now executed a full flip-flop from the infamous moment during the 2016 referendum campaign when she described Boris as a man obsessed with becoming PM and saying he was ‘not the man you want to drive you home at the end of the evening’.
Despite the goading, in the wake of the campaign they became regular dining companions during Theresa May’s Brexit travails – to such a degree that they were being talked up (mainly by Rudd allies) as a dream cross-party leadership ticket which was dubbed ‘Bamber’.
Characteristically, by the time this summer’s leadership race was under way, Ms Rudd had cooled on the idea because of her opposition to a No Deal Brexit. After flirting with the idea of backing Michael Gove, she plumped for Jeremy Hunt after the then Foreign Secretary wooed her over breakfast.
To add insult, she even repeated her infamous joke when asked who she was going to support, quipping: ‘I am still thinking very carefully about lifts home with Boris.’
After Mr Johnson then won comfortably, Ms Rudd had to execute another pivot if she was to have any hope of keeping her Cabinet job – by ditching her opposition to No Deal.
Having once joined with her Cabinet colleagues David Gauke and Greg Clark to force Theresa May to take No Deal off the table for the previous March Brexit deadline, and with Mr Johnson on the brink of No10, she declared: ‘Both candidates have said that No Deal is part of the armoury going forward, and I have accepted that. The situation is that we are leaving at the end of October but it would be so much better to get a deal.’
Now she has flounced out of the Cabinet – and the party – altogether, having decided that the expulsion of 21 colleagues who oppose No Deal amounts to an act of ‘political vandalism’.
While that swift recantation of her opposition to a hard Brexit was enough to win her a brief stay of execution on the Front Bench, in truth Mr Johnson’s allies – and his chief enforcer Dominic Cummings in particular – never truly felt comfortable with her being in Cabinet meetings as No10 plotted its way through the Brexit minefield.
Their suspicions were enhanced by the fact that her brother, the multi-millionaire financial PR guru Roland Rudd, has been masterminding a plot to overturn the Brexit result.
The chair of the People’s Vote campaign for a second Brexit referendum used his Grade I listed country pile to host weekend brainstorming sessions planing how to thwart the 2016 result.
Mr Rudd, whose close friends include the Labour Europhiles Peter Mandelson and David Miliband, attracted mockery last year when he called for Brexit to be stopped during an interview from Davos where he was attending the annual meeting of the global financial elite. His interviewer said incredulously: ‘You’re talking to us from Davos. If you’re listening to this and you’re in Stoke and you voted to Leave, it is going to sound like a coup being organised behind your back.’
Mr Rudd, who also has a £23million mansion in London’s Holland Park, is on friendly terms with Tony Blair – another leading proponent of a second referendum – and offered his son Euan work experience at Finsbury, his financial PR company.
Last night, Mr Rudd was one of the first to respond to her resignation, saying on Twitter: ‘So proud of my sister. She’s principled, brave, honest and loyal to her friends.’
Ms Rudd had a gilded upbringing – the first MP since Oscar-winner Glenda Jackson to have her name appear in the titles of a major movie, being credited in Four Weddings And A Funeral as the ‘aristocracy co-ordinator’.
She enjoys telling the story of how the film’s budget was so stretched that they could not afford to hire dozens of morning suits for the male cast members – so instead relied on her flooding the set with her wellheeled friends in their own clothes.
Her late ex-husband, the critic A.A. Gill, used to refer to her in his restaurant reviews and columns under the alias of ‘Silver Spoon.’
The pair married in 1990 and they had two children before separating in 1995.
After Cheltenham she studied history at Edinburgh University before embarking on a lucrative career in investment banking in London and New York. One former colleague said: ‘Amber was always one of those people who made it look very easy. Money always goes to money.’
After being elected to the marginal Labour seat of Hastings and Rye as one of ‘Cameron’s Cuties’ in 2010, she quickly rose up the ministerial ranks under the patronage of fellow ultra-Remainer and former Chancellor George Osborne.
Being part of a ‘Friends of George’ or FOG clique led to her being rewarded handsomely with posts, firstly as Mr Osborne’s private secretary, then later Climate Change Secretary.
Ms Rudd became Home Secretary
‘All the polling showed she was dead already’
under Theresa May after being quick to back her to stop Mr Johnson’s doomed tilt at No 10 in 2016.
However, even after joining Mrs May’s Government, Ms Rudd was quickly agitating for a second referendum, infuriating Downing Street by telling her brother’s close friend Robert Peston that ‘I could see there would be a plausible argument for it.’
The first major glitch hit her in April 2018 when the Windrush scandal engulfed her department.
The immigration crisis that saw black Britons who have lived here all their lives be deported back to the West Indies toppled her tenure as Home Secretary after she was found to have lied to Parliament – albeit inadvertently.
As one Minister reflected at the time: ‘At the end of the day she had not done her homework.
‘Yes her civil servants stitched her up, but a good Home Secretary would have been on top of the detail and she got caught out.’
However in typical Whitehall style, those civil servants were given a slap on the wrist and promoted and Ms Rudd was exonerated of any wrongdoing, clearing her path for a Cabinet return.
It was Brexit that allowed her to return to Government, replacing Esther McVey who stormed out of Mrs May’s administration in November 2018. After she was forced to resign as Home Secretary in 2018 over the Windrush scandal, she took some time out – reading, relaxing, going to the gym and even Interrailing around Europe for a month.
A friend said: ‘She was wining and dining Boris all the time she was in the wilderness, dinners at Boisdale’s jazz club and even round at Mr Johnson’s girlfriend’s house.
‘She did everything she could to try to bury the hatchet’ for the driving home quip. ‘I guess she knew he was going to win.’
She let it be known that she was seriously considering backing Mr Johnson, with reports of her
constant dinners and meetings with the Tory frontrunner well-briefed by her allies. Within weeks of being back in the Cabinet, Mr Johnson’s aides noted that Ms Rudd seemed more dedicated to working towards delaying Brexit and hampering No Deal.
Working closely with the Chancellor Philip Hammond, she had been a key driver behind Brexit being delayed in March, catching No 10 totally off guard with unexpected media interventions and front-page interviews spouting the opposite to what Downing Street wanted her to say. ‘When she came back she basically thought she was untouchable and set about trying to play the Brexiteers at their own game: government guerrilla warfare,’ said one former colleague.
A No10 source concluded last night: ‘As the polls show, the voters are quite happy for the PM to get rid of people who don’t want us to sort out Brexit. There are plenty of talented younger MPs to replace any deadwood.’
A source close to Mr Johnson added: ‘All the expensive polling she got [political strategist] Lynton Crosby to do showed that she was dead already. There is going to be an Election in a couple of weeks and she was probably going to lose her seat. So that explains her dramatics.’