Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

The political implications were as acute as the personal. A prime minister who had seemed impregnably strong was suddenly dangerously weak and fighting for her career. An election called to strengthen Britain’s hand in negotiations on the country’s exit from the European Union – ‘Brexit’ as it was now known to everyone – had left the UK disempowered at a critical moment in her history. May’s two closest aides, who had been as dominant a duopoly as 10 Downing Street has ever seen, saw their power evaporate. Timothy and Hill had helped to create the public being of Theresa May. They were her greatest cheerleaders and defenders. Now they were to be sacrificial lambs for the disaster that was unfolding, their best service to throw themselves to the wolves so that she might escape their jaws.

It had all been very different on results night a year earlier. Nick Timothy was in a remote Sicilian mountain-top village with his then fiancée Nike Trost on the night of the EU referendum. He was a convinced Brexiteer but did not think Leave would win. Halfway through the night his phone began beeping with messages saying ‘Are you watching?’ Timothy took out his laptop and began live streaming Sky News as the biggest electoral earthquake in modern political history unfolded. His partner, a German citizen, realised what was happening and groaned, ‘Oh my God!’ By dawn it was clear that, after forty-four years, Britain had voted to leave the European Union by a margin of 52 per cent to 48 per cent.

Over his hotel breakfast, Timothy watched David Cameron resign as prime minister. A German family at the next table lectured him about how bad the result was for Europe. The Italian woman who owned the hotel was more enthusiastic: ‘This is British Brexit, it’s the Italians next!’ As the sun came out Timothy and Trost booked their flights home. He knew this was a defining moment in his life. By then he had already spoken with the two other women in his life: Theresa May and Fiona Hill. For a decade they had discussed how to make the Conservative Party more electable and had quietly positioned May for a tilt at the top. Timothy had a leadership campaign to run, perhaps a country to run. This time he was convinced he would win. This is a play with many actors, but overwhelmingly it is the story of those three people and how they took charge of the most complex political conundrum since the Second World War, one which unfolded in the small hours of 23 June 2016.

The road that brought them to that moment four minutes before ten has many tributaries. The first came in a geography tutorial meeting at Oxford University in the mid-1970s when the young Theresa Brasier turned to a fellow student, Alicia Collinson, and first expressed a desire to become prime minister. Collinson was already the girlfriend of another future cabinet minister, Damian Green, and the two students spent their university years in a social circle around the Conservative Association and the Oxford Union which included others who would find future fame in Westminster: Alan Duncan, Michael Crick and Philip Hammond. Brasier’s most significant meeting in those years – famously at the instigation of Benazir Bhutto, the future leader of Pakistan – was with Philip May, a president of the union who was to become her husband in 1980 and her ‘rock’ thereafter.

The serious, dogged devotion to ‘public service’ and May’s occasionally pious insistence that her only goal was to ‘do what I think is right’ appeared to come from her father, Anglican vicar the Revd Hubert Brasier. The cabinet colleague who said, ‘She is extraordinarily self-contained,’ sought an explanation no deeper than her status as an only child, the death of both her parents in her mid-twenties and the Mays’ subsequent discovery that they could not have children. Hubert Brasier died in a car crash in October 1981; his wife Zaidee succumbed to multiple sclerosis a few months later. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Barack Obama all lost parents when they were young.

When Andrea Leadsom, against whom May faced off for the Tory leadership in July 2016, questioned her suitability for the job because she was not a mother, it was Leadsom who was forced to drop out. Yet the questions she raised about May’s emotional intelligence were to become a feature of her difficulties eleven months later. Leadsom had been the third major rival to self-immolate. George Osborne had gone down with David Cameron’s ship after lashing himself to the mast of the Remain campaign during the EU referendum. Then, as the battle to replace him began, Boris Johnson showed less commitment to victory than his campaign manager, Michael Gove, would have liked, prompting Gove to declare him unfit for the top job, a shot fired from such an angle that it ricocheted into Gove’s own foot. The result was that May inherited the Tory crown without either her colleagues or herself learning what she was like under sustained fire during a campaign. They were soon to know.

Those looking for clues about the sort of prime minister she would be would have found contradictory messages from her past. After twelve years at the Bank of England and a council career in Merton, south-west London, where she crossed paths with another future colleague, Chris Grayling, May became an MP in the Labour landslide of 1997. These were the darkest days of opposition. She was the first of her intake into the shadow cabinet two years later. Initially, May was seen as a moderniser. As the first female party chairman in 2002, she delivered a few home truths from the conference platform, urging the grassroots to change. ‘You know what people call us? The nasty party.’ Katie Perrior, May’s press mouthpiece at the time, recalled, ‘The traditionalists around Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory leader, were ordering Mrs May to remove the words “nasty party” from the speech. On the floor below, a gang of modernisers including Mrs May, staring two huge electoral defeats in the face, were thinking there was not much to lose and were determined to press on.’1 May did not endorse the ‘nasty party’ label but to many members she had legitimised criticism of her own team. Yet, her analysis that the public were losing faith in politics was ahead of its time.

May’s appointment as home secretary by David Cameron in 2010, when the coalition government was formed, added further layers of complexity to her politics. Cameron joked that he and May were the only two ministers who supported the Tory commitment to reduce net immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’. Yet May also led a crackdown on police ‘stop and search’ powers, which she felt were directed unfairly at young black men, and a crusade to stamp out modern slavery. May was hard to categorise politically. Nick Timothy said, ‘Those things aren’t mutually exclusive but hearing it from the same person leads people to think, “I don’t really understand what that person stands for.” She doesn’t allow herself to be put into ideological boxes.’2 Colleagues think being home secretary changed her. A former special adviser said, ‘If you spend years and years saying something you do end up believing it. When she was shadow work and pensions I used to work with her on things like parental leave. She was into gender equality and social liberalism. Being home secretary for six years does something to you.’ Willie Whitelaw, who lost the 1975 leadership contest to Margaret Thatcher and then became her home secretary, is said to have remarked that no home secretary should ever become prime minister because they spend their time trying to stop things from happening rather than leading from the front.

The pattern May set in the first decade became a blueprint for her premiership – pathological caution punctuated by moments of great boldness and bravery. She fought a tenacious and ultimately successful battle to deport Abu Qatada, the ‘hate preacher’ branded Osama bin Laden’s ambassador in Europe – in the face of a Human Rights Act that appeared to make it impossible. She woke up one morning in 2012 and used the human rights of Asperger’s sufferer Gary McKinnon as reason not to deport him to face hacking charges in the United States, a decision that took guts even if it did virtually guarantee the support of the Daily Mail, which had been campaigning for McKinnon, in a future leadership contest. Former Home Office official Alasdair Palmer said, ‘When she is convinced that her cause is right, May can be determined, even obstinate.’

In the Cameron cabinet, May was an oddity, someone the Cameroons would have liked to ignore but knew they could not. Her abilities and virtues stood in direct counterpoint to those of Cameron and his sidekick George Osborne. Where Cameron excelled at presentation and pulling victory from the jaws of defeat with glib displays of concentration and political charisma, May was a grinder, a determined reader of documents who moved towards her conclusions with all the facility of a static caravan on a low loader. Having reached those conclusions, she was unbending in their defence however inconvenient her colleagues found it.

Where Cameron was open, May was secretive. One civil service official said May and her Home Office permanent secretary Helen Ghosh ‘would go for weeks without speaking’. May regularly kept both Number 10’s staff and her own in the dark about her intentions. A longstanding aide added, ‘She’ll tell you the truth. If she doesn’t want to tell you, she won’t make any bones about it, she just won’t tell you. That’s not an insult, it’s just that she’s keeping her own counsel.’ Where Osborne was imaginatively political and tactical, May obsessed about doing the right thing after due consideration, sticking to her principles. ‘Politics,’ she was fond of saying, ‘is not a game.’ Cameron and Osborne revelled in being the best game players in town.

While the Cameroons shared dinner parties as well as political views, May dined in the Commons with her husband. In her leadership launch speech, she explained, ‘I don’t gossip about people over lunch. I don’t go drinking in Parliament’s bars.’ A senior party official said, ‘She is the least clubbable politician I know.’ Alasdair Palmer had a typical lunch experience: ‘She lacks the personal charm of most politicians. Conversation was not easy. Somewhat to my alarm, May had no small talk whatsoever. She was perfectly comfortable with silence, which I found extremely disorienting.’3 This detachment would continue in Downing Street, where one aide observed, ‘She’s so removed from the world her colleagues live in.’ The aide said, ‘Gavin [Williamson, the chief whip] would come in and explain that this MP was having an affair. The “ins and outs” stuff the whips call it. She’d just be exasperated and say, “Why can’t they just do the job.”’

There was a peculiarly English social edge to May’s differences with the Cameroons. They were public schoolboys, easy company in the salons of the capital; she was a provincial grammar-school girl with no small talk. Although she and Cameron shared a home counties Conservatism, his social circle touched the lower hem of the aristocracy while May was the product of genteel vicarage austerity. Cameron’s Christianity, it was said, ‘comes and goes’ like ‘Magic FM in the Chilterns’; May’s was steadfast if seldom talked about. Where Cameron’s approach to those less well-off found voice in a Macmillanite soft paternalism, May’s simmered with the determined rage of one disgusted by injustice, but a rage that her buttoned-up personality never quite allowed her to express in a way that would have turned voters’ heads.

May’s ordinariness was on display when she moved into Downing Street. The new prime minister was asked whether she wanted the gents’ loo outside her office converted for her use. It had previously been for the sole use of Cameron. May replied, ‘Absolutely not, I’m not wasting a penny of taxpayers’ money. I’ll go down the corridor like everybody else.’ The same humble approach ensured she went door-knocking in her constituency every weekend. Hill explained to friends, ‘She thinks if she underestimates Corbyn and Labour then it will come back to bite her in the bum. She doesn’t take her majority for granted.’ Another aide saw it as a chance of escape: ‘There is a point where she has had enough of being in Number 10. It’s a decompression thing, when she goes back and has that connectivity with people that she is comfortable with. When she doesn’t have that she gets ratty and you can see the pressure start to build on her.’

May preferred people with knowledge rather than rank. ‘She didn’t want senior bullshitters,’ a Downing Street aide said, ‘she wanted younger people who knew what they were talking about.’ A civil servant saw the same down-to-earth approach: ‘The custodial staff in Number 10 and the ones who take her tea or sandwiches, they were all happier when she arrived after Cameron because she would address them by name. They felt that she treated them like people who were helping her rather than lackeys.’

May’s social awkwardness and secrecy meant even close colleagues knew little about her. Some who worked closely with her were perplexed by the efforts of journalists and MPs to discover the ‘real’ Theresa May. One Tory who worked for her said, ‘I’m not sure there’s much there. She’s very sensible. There’s no interest in ideas. Philip is a very sweet man but it takes a certain type of character to marry someone who is so bland. Their conversation is completely banal.’

May appeared determined, even when she became prime minister, to deny there was any such thing as ‘Mayism’. ‘She’s quite anti-intellectual,’ a former minister said. ‘She’s not a great thinker. To admit of an “ism” would be to suggest there was a great Heseltinian long-term plan to be leader – which of course there was.’ The plan, though, was not May’s but that of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.

The fact that Theresa May seemed the only possible option for prime minister by 13 July 2016 was the work of her two closest aides, who were rewarded with the top staff jobs in Downing Street – for ever more known as ‘the chiefs’. Nick Timothy grew up in a working-class family in the Tile Cross district of Birmingham. His father left school at fourteen and worked his way up from the factory floor to become head of international sales at a local steel works. His mother did secretarial work at a school. Margaret Thatcher converted his parents to the Tory Party and Timothy was politicised by the 1992 general election because the Labour Party was threatening to close the grammar school – Edward VI Aston School – which had given him a chance in life. He went on to get a first-class degree in politics from Sheffield University and then landed a job in the Conservative research department, where his path first crossed with May’s.

May and Timothy quickly realised they were political soulmates. Over a period of fifteen years they fashioned an analysis of how the Conservative Party should reposition itself to broaden its appeal, with ‘a conservatism that is about the welfare and interests of the whole of the country across class divides and geographical divides’ and the belief that ‘there needs to be more of a role for the state’. Katie Perrior said, ‘For her it was always about putting the party back in touch with ordinary working people – the Conservatives should no longer be the party of the rich and the privileged.’4 A colleague of Timothy said, ‘He wanted to complete the process of Tory modernisation, but his brand of modernisation was always about class.’ Timothy was adamant that he was not ‘Theresa’s brain’, the title he had been awarded by journalists. ‘Suggesting I’m the creator of those ideas is absurd and insulting to her,’ he said. ‘I do think there’s more than a hint of sexism.’5 A cabinet minister close to May agreed: ‘The idea that she is this wax palette which can be inscribed by this curious pair is not correct. She has a very, very strong sense of public service and believes from a place deep within herself that injustice is wrong.’ Like May, Timothy was a man of contradictions. ‘He’s very traditional,’ a close friend said. ‘Even as a twenty-something he had a flat that looked like a man in his mid-forties. It’s all old-fashioned paintings and dark antique furniture.’ Yet this arch-Brexiteer’s two longest relationships had been with European women, a Belgian and a German.

In 2006, Timothy met Fiona Hill outside The Speaker pub in Westminster and the cerebral staff officer acquired an artillery commander. ‘I just immediately knew we were politically in the exact same place,’ she told friends. Hill had a blunter approach, once declaring, ‘We fucking hate socialism and we want to crush it in a generation.’ Hill also came from a poor background, growing up in Greenock outside Glasgow. She forced her way into a job on the Scotsman newspaper, writing football reports and features, developing the news sense and sharp elbows that would take her to Sky News, where she worked on the newsdesk and met her husband, Tim Cunningham, whose name she was to take until they divorced. When she joined the Conservative Party press office in 2006 Timothy introduced her to May. ‘They know each other inside out,’ said one who has worked closely with both. ‘Sometimes Fi can say something and Nick will say, “That was literally in my head.” They both like working hard. It sounds too pious to say they believe in fairness, but they do – and that is what they share with Theresa.’

Hill and Timothy were equals but Hill’s media background meant she was seen by the outside world as primarily a communications professional. As someone who had helped May develop legislation on modern slavery and domestic violence it grated. ‘She’s very sensitive about the idea that Nick is the policy brain and she’s just a comms person,’ a colleague said. Hill was also resentful of claims that she was May’s personal stylist, even though she did advise her on clothes. On one foreign trip Hill erupted with rage when the events team passed her May’s handbag. It made her late for a meeting with Vladimir Putin. ‘They never give Nick the handbag,’ she complained to Katie Perrior. ‘What am I? The fucking handbag carrier?’ When Perrior said she would take the handbag instead, Hill attacked: ‘This is why you don’t have any gravitas – because you’re willing to take the handbag.’ In pointing out the different treatment of Timothy and the senior women, Hill had a point.

Colleagues say Hill’s most important attribute – in matters of both policy and appearance – was to act as May’s cheering section, boosting her morale. ‘Fi operates as the emotional support: “You’re fine, you look great, you don’t need to care about this”,’ a colleague said. At one meeting in Downing Street May had been put off by something. ‘Fi leant across and put her hand on her arm and said, “Don’t worry, we said there would be days like this,”’ a witness said. ‘I thought that was a tragic sight, but it also illustrated how connected she is to both of them. They are literally the people who reach out and put an arm around her and tell her it is going to be all right.’ A senior Home Office official agreed: ‘Theresa was unable to take big decisions without the clear steer and guidance of Fiona.’

The relationship between Timothy and Hill was compared by colleagues to that between brother and sister or even lovers, which they had never been – often fractious but with a united front presented to the world. ‘They never let a cigarette paper come between them in public,’ a colleague said. Another observed, ‘They’re like siblings, they fight a lot. They don’t care what they say about each other. But there’s a loyalty there. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done, it doesn’t matter how bad the other person’s behaved, they’ll always cover the other’s arse.’

Timothy and Hill had a devotion to May which surpassed the usual relationship between politician and staff. A former minister who discussed May with Timothy recalled, ‘I was talking about her appeal, I said, “I know this sounds almost religious which it’s not,” and he said something like, “Yes, it is religious.”’ Timothy was joking but his zeal left an impression on the MP: ‘That was a glimpse of how strongly her supporters had come to see her as the messiah.’

Together, ‘the twins’ set themselves up as May’s gatekeepers. ‘You had to go through them for everything,’ a senior Border Force official said. Some said May’s personal limitations and lack of feel for people meant she needed Hill and Timothy’s guidance. ‘She didn’t have the character to elicit the information she might want,’ a Home Office official said, ‘or know what’s true and what’s not true. You and I will hear a story and know if it’s right or not. I think she found that very difficult. She became reliant on others to do that screening, shielding, interpreting on her behalf.’ Others disliked the way Hill and Timothy substituted their judgement for May’s. When Alasdair Palmer, a Home Office speechwriter, did once see the home secretary alone, he wrote the speech to reflect May’s views and then submitted it to the twins. Hill asked, ‘Have you been talking to the home secretary?’ Palmer said he had. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she should say these things.’ Palmer suggested that was up to May. ‘It’s up to me,’ Hill said.6

Their determination to go to any lengths to protect May led to disaster in June 2014. Hill’s downfall came as a result of a feud between May’s team and Michael Gove, then the education secretary, over the issue of extremism in schools. Gove briefed journalists from The Times that the Home Office was to blame for the failure to tackle the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ plot to take over schools in Birmingham. He singled out for criticism Charles Farr, director of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, saying officials only took on Islamist extremists when they turned to violence, an approach Gove compared to ‘just beating back the crocodiles that come close to the boat rather than draining the swamp’. At that time Farr was in a relationship with Hill.

Furious, she retaliated by releasing onto the Home Office website a letter May had written to Gove, accusing his department of failing to act when concerns about the Birmingham schools were brought to its attention in 2010. The document was published in the small hours of the morning, after Hill and Timothy had enjoyed a night out at the Loose Box restaurant in Westminster with journalists from the Daily Mail. To make matters worse, Hill gave quotes to journalists suggesting Gove had endangered children. ‘Lord knows what more they have overlooked on the subject of the protection of kids in state schools,’ she said. ‘It scares me.’ Following an investigation by Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, David Cameron ordered that Hill be sacked, and that Gove issue a written apology to both May and Farr.

Hill found work at the Centre for Social Justice, a thinktank founded by Iain Duncan Smith, where she wrote a report calling for more effort by the authorities to tackle modern slavery, before taking up a post at lobbying firm Lexington Communications.

Timothy got his comeuppance a few months later in December 2014 when he and Stephen Parkinson – another of May’s Home Office special advisers – were kicked off the list of Conservative candidates for refusing to campaign in the Rochester by-election. The decision was taken by Grant Shapps, then the party chairman, who had decreed that all candidates and special advisers had to help out. Shapps felt they ‘thought themselves above the process’ and made an example of them. May phoned Shapps twice to ask for their reinstatement and also collared him in the margins of a cabinet meeting, but he stood firm. He reflected afterwards that, despite being a cabinet colleague for three years, it was the only time May had bothered to talk to him. It was a ripple in a pool which was to have further implications later.

In July 2015, Timothy became director of the New Schools Network. Yet he continued to exercise influence from afar, contacting his protégé Will Tanner, another special adviser, regularly about the running of May’s office. A year later the gang was back together in Number 10. An MP close to May summed up the relationship: ‘She wouldn’t be in Downing Street without their support. And she wouldn’t have got to Downing Street, if she didn’t have something about her. What Nick and Fi added to that was the ability to make the political weather. Very few people are capable of that.’