‘I don’t know if she’ll offer me a job,’ Boris confessed to Jake Berry on 13 July, sitting in his Westminster office, ‘and if she did, I don’t know which I would accept.’ Googling the size of all the government departments, Boris listed the options. ‘I wouldn’t take DCMS [Department of Culture, Media and Sport], that would be less than being the mayor, but I would take Health or Welfare.’ His chances, he sighed, were nil. He had not concealed his dislike of May as a characterless phantom, and she had snatched every opportunity to humiliate him.
‘You’re as popular as the man who’s just told his wife that he’s got a dose of genital herpes,’ laughed Berry.
Their conversation was interrupted by a call – a summons to Downing Street.
The vicar’s daughter enjoyed mocking men. ‘You and I have a patchy history,’ May said to Boris with a schoolmarm’s disdain, ‘but I know there are two Borises: a serious intellectual, a capable and effective person; and a play-around Boris. I want this to be your opportunity to show you can be the good Boris.’1 In normal circumstances, Boris would have snapped that unlike her, he had won two elections in London and successfully led the Leave campaign. She had won nothing except the leadership by default. But what followed stunned him: ‘I want you to be Foreign Secretary.’
‘I was very, very surprised,’ he admitted. ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather.’ Stunned by the offer, he did not hesitate to consider whether it was a poisoned chalice. Clearly, May wanted him in the tent pissing out. He failed to ask what limitations would be imposed on him. Nor did he ask what she had meant by ‘Brexit means Brexit’. She had already cast doubt on the automatic right of EU citizens to remain in Britain and suggested that corporations make lists of foreign employees. He did not question how her protectionism would match his belief in global, open Britain. May had already publicly said, ‘Leave means leave’ and ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’. The largely monosyllabic jargon had complicated her negotiating position. Some Brexiteers had hoped to do a trade deal which left Britain in the single market. May wanted the same, but by saying ‘No deal is better than a bad deal’ she appeared to exclude any chance of an accommodation with the EU. It was a bad place to start, not least because the EU had refused the Brexiteers’ preference. In truth, May herself had no idea of her final destination. Instead of questioning her confusion, Boris grabbed the unexpected lifebelt and the lure of his first ministerial job. The chance to sit in the Cabinet was priceless. Others realised that he had walked into a trap set to destroy him.
From Downing Street to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is a very short walk. In his excitement, Boris is unlikely to have noticed the faded splendour of the building’s grand entrance and the shabby carpets. Instead, he was thrilled to enter his huge personal office – the very room where outstanding statesmen had taken critical decisions about Britain’s fate. More mundanely, he would assume the political responsibility over 14,000 employees in 270 postings across the world.
Standing by his side was Simon McDonald, the Foreign Office’s senior official, the permanent undersecretary. With a big smile, McDonald had welcomed Boris and escorted him up the wide curved staircase to his hallowed office. Unctuous and fluent, McDonald was well trained to camouflage his true sentiments. For good reason, his welcome glowed with insincerity. Over the past forty-three years, the Foreign Office had integrated itself into the EU. To remain in lockstep with the EU was the diplomats’ life mission. Foreign Office officials were seconded to Brussels, and in most international dilemmas, their first call was to consult Brussels as well as other European capitals. In parallel, the officials prided themselves that Washington’s first call to discover the EU’s policy was often to the Foreign Office. Now the ‘buffoon’ responsible for destroying their life’s work was inside their citadel. The leader of those who neither trusted nor respected Boris was McDonald himself. Yet, McDonald’s department was the architect of its own misfortune. Despite their boasts of orchestrating a Rolls-Royce machine, McDonald’s diplomats had failed to persuade the twenty-seven EU governments to make the obvious concessions to Cameron in order to secure a Remain vote. Naturally, their anger was not directed at themselves. McDonald’s clan blamed Boris. McDonald, a fifty-five year old from Salford, had little reason to protect Boris from his own mistakes during his period as Foreign Secretary.
In his unsuspecting manner, Boris did not appreciate that McDonald had married into the Foreign Office’s aristocracy. Sir Patrick Wright, his father-in-law, had also been the Foreign Office’s top official. Gossips suggested that McDonald had secured the senior post in 2015 because ‘he knew which way the wind was going’. He pledged to improve diversity. Ever since, his annual reports and tweets focused on the numbers of female, black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) recruits, and disabled staff. Just before Boris’s arrival, McDonald boasted, ‘I was delighted to appoint Joanna Roper as the FCO’s Special Envoy for Gender Equality. I have resolved to place gender equality at the heart of all we do.’ McDonald’s tweets never mentioned Britain’s policy on Syria, Russia or the Gulf. Grinding down the complicated options on foreign policy was sacrificed to his ‘personal priorities’. Unlike Boris’s belief in excellence in education, McDonald espoused social engineering even if that meant diluting his diplomats’ collective intellectual qualifications. Running the Foreign Office’s supervisory board – the department’s management forum – was McDonald’s fiefdom. Boris would be excluded. In his tick-box process, McDonald dictated the line to take. While he supported Boris’s attempts to secure more money from the Treasury, he resisted any interference in the quality of those recruited from university.
McDonald was not to blame for his inheritance. During the Blair decade, the Foreign Office had been stripped of responsibility by Downing Street. Under weak leadership, McDonald’s predecessors had avoided any challenge of the government’s lies to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under McDonald’s predecessors, the Foreign Office’s famed Camel Corps of Arabists had disappeared and the strict requirement for linguists was diluted. Officials were dispatched to capitals unable to speak the local language and with superficial knowledge about the culture. Spellbound by the EU, some of Britain’s diplomats had lost their way, and became tumbleweed upset about the reduction of knighthoods for ambassadors. In recent years, crippled by severe budget cuts, especially under Gordon Brown, their diminished department’s ability to host international conferences, seduce potential allies with favours and hospitality, and intervene in Britain’s interests had robbed the Foreign Office of its historic self-confidence. The decline had gathered pace in the wake of David Cameron losing the Commons vote in 2013 to bomb Syria in retaliation for a chemical-weapons attack on civilians. Under Philip Hammond, Boris’s predecessor as Foreign Secretary, the decline had accelerated. ‘The Foreign Office has had its limbs amputated,’ wrote Peter Ricketts, the former head of the Diplomatic Service, about the Hammond era.2 ‘Institutionally, the Foreign Office is a bit timid,’ admitted Simon Fraser, McDonald’s immediate predecessor.3 McDonald never appeared concerned that the Foreign Office had become a shadow of its former greatness.
Boris was only marginally aware of those problems. Still not genuinely interested in the machinery of government – a puzzling attribute for someone eager for new responsibilities – his first priority was to attract his staff’s affection. For that purpose, he immediately rescinded Philip Hammond’s veto and allowed the rainbow flag for LGBTs to be flown. Next, he eagerly accepted McDonald’s invitation to address the Foreign Office staff in the atrium known as Durbar Court. On occasions such as this, Boris excelled. His enthusiasm, voice, delivery and humour combined to give a great pep talk. Faced with a suspicious audience who viewed Brexit with horror, he memorably spelt out a vision of the Foreign Office, no longer a supplicant to Brussels but entrusted with new authority to assert ‘Global Britain’ – a revived nation pursuing its own interests and policies through a reconstituted network of international relationships. To transform ‘Global Britain’ from a slogan into substance depended upon leadership, expertise and intellect. Since Theresa May was not interested in foreign policy and Boris lacked the expertise, the new minister would expect his officials to help restore Britain’s role in the world.
None of his audience understood Boris’s method of exercising power. After eight years at City Hall, he had perfected the art of setting out an agenda, asking pertinent questions, encouraging discussion, issuing an instruction and then delegating the execution of his policy to his team. His senior team had performed that task smoothly and efficiently. He expected Foreign Office officials to follow that practice. McDonald’s duty was to craft ‘Global Britain’ into a substantive policy.
By nature, diplomats tend to be cautious, conservative – and identified by an insider’s chuckle. With a self-satisfied smirk, McDonald declared ‘diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way’.4 Except the opposite had happened. Boris’s expectation to reassert British influence in the Middle East and elsewhere was, McDonald thought, risible. Instinctively, most of his senior officials were similarly antagonistic. Compared to those ‘analogues’, the converts to ‘Global Britain’ were the ‘digitals’, the younger elite enthused by the prospect of reversing the decline of British influence. The sight of Boris eating lunch in the canteen and chatting with everyone persuaded them that former ambassador Christopher Meyer’s judgement might possibly be right: ‘It’s an inspired appointment. Imaginative, clever, bold and offering Britain just the voice it needs at a time of major rebuilding of our foreign policy.’ Meyer’s only caution was Boris’s ‘need to erase the gaffes’.5
Boris’s first hurdle was to work out how the Foreign Office functioned. Assuming it would be similar to City Hall, and in stark contrast to his absorption of the complexities of the property world when mayor, he failed to ask the right questions at the right time. Gradually he slipped into Whitehall’s swamp.
At the end of his first week, the gloss of the job began to fade. The straitjacket imposed by May became obvious. Downing Street forbade the employment of his trusted aides, including Will Walden. Only Ben Gasgoine, his private aide, could join him. Not only was Boris deliberately isolated but May appointed Alan Duncan, her key supporter and friend from Oxford, as a junior Foreign Office minister. Elected to the Commons in 1992 after a successful career in the oil industry, Duncan had been irritated by Boris’s arrival in Westminster in 2001. While Duncan’s political career was flatlining, Boris basked endlessly in the media. Unimpressed by that success, Duncan had referred during the recent leadership elections to ‘the theatrical and comic antics of Silvio Borisconi’, an allusion to Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian former prime minister, infamous for his ‘bunga bunga’ sex parties and allegations of corruption. Weeks later, soon after his own appointment, Duncan told BBC TV that Boris had only joined the Leave campaign to position himself for the leadership. In truth, said Duncan, Boris had hoped Leave would lose.6 Among those watching Duncan’s performance was Steve Baker, the Brexiteer Tory MP. Baker was surprised. He recalled Duncan approaching him in 2015 to ask if he, Duncan, could be the ‘chairman of Vote Leave’. During their conversation, Baker assumed that Duncan now wanted to replace Boris.7 Not only was Duncan an unfriendly critic and May’s spy within the Foreign Office, but, to enhance his own position, he appointed himself as Boris’s deputy.
With mischievous glee, the cuckoo in Boris’s nest watched the dismay of European politicians to Boris’s appointment. Preceded by his reputation for reckless hyperbole and clownish self-promotion – not least hanging from the zip wire during the Olympics – the Brussels bureaucrats cancelled an informal dinner for all twenty-eight foreign ministers. At a Bastille Day reception in the French Embassy, Boris was booed, reflecting the ridicule heaped on him by Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s foreign minister. ‘During the [referendum] campaign,’ said Ayrault, ‘Boris lied a lot to the British people.’ Ayrault doubted whether Boris was ‘clear, credible and reliable’. Echoing that disdain, a German TV presenter had laughed while he read the news of his appointment. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, criticised Boris for failing to take his responsibilities seriously in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result: ‘Instead he played cricket. To be honest, I find this outrageous.’ Similarly, Carl Bildt, the Swedish former prime minister, tweeted ‘Wish it was a joke.’ Undaunted, Boris replied, ‘It is inevitable there is going to be a certain amount of plaster coming off the ceiling in the chancelleries of Europe.’
Influenced by that scorn, Caroline Wilson, the Foreign Office’s newly appointed director of Europe, did not appear as Boris’s natural friend. In her opinion, he lacked a grip on reality, especially in his conviction that a Brexit deal would be easy. In despair, she told her colleagues, her efforts were to ensure ‘he does not go off the rails’. Wilson knew that Boris and the Foreign Office would be excluded from the Brexit negotiations by May. The Foreign Secretary would not receive key official papers and would be encouraged to scrabble with Liam Fox and David Davis, the other Brexiteer ministers appointed by May to negotiate the withdrawal and the new trade agreements.
At the outset, May denied him the sole use of Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s grace-and-favour seventeenth-century, 115-room neoclassical mansion near Sevenoaks. Her order that he share it with Liam Fox and David Davis would eventually be overthrown by Chevening’s trustees.
Like Boris, Fox was set up to fail. Whitehall had lost the expertise to negotiate trade deals after the UK joined the EU. Forty-three years later, the government could not even agree a trade policy – whether Britain should be protectionist or liberalise its tariff barriers. To further muddy the waters, Philip Hammond, the new Chancellor and a Remainer who disliked both Boris and Fox, announced that a British tariff system would be too expensive. Hammond, David Davis realised, was intentionally ‘undermining the Brexit talks as a desperate strategy to keep Britain in the single market’. The Treasury was empowered by May’s indecision to block Britain leaving the single market.
The confusion was compounded by disagreements between the Brexit ministers. David Davis had told senior European politicians that Britain would stay in the single market, probably by paying for access.8 At the same time, Boris told a Czech newspaper that Britain would ‘probably’ leave the single market.9 On the same day, a Foreign Office spokesman contradicted Boris: ‘No decision has been taken. It will be a matter for future discussion.’
‘We’re being stitched up,’ Fox said to Davis after a Cabinet meeting. ‘They’re conspiring against us.’ Davis agreed. The Remainers would not accept the referendum result and May refused to thwart the Remainers. Secretive and duplicitous, as Davis discovered, May agreed in the Cabinet to propose a temporary customs arrangement to the EU but, he discovered, her agreement was not included in the Cabinet minutes. ‘I objected,’ recalled Davis, ‘but it wasn’t changed.’ Just as May sidelined Boris and Fox, she had also isolated Davis by telling the Irish government to deal with David Liddington, her deputy, and not Davis. May planned to survive by divide and rule. In the first weeks, her strategy was successful.
Frustrated by the prime minister’s refusal to delegate any authority to his limited staff, Fox asked Boris to transfer the Foreign Office’s trade and investment teams to his department. Boris refused. Fox, said the Foreign Office spokesman, was ‘nutty and obsessive. There’s something strange about him.’ To humiliate Fox further, Downing Street criticised the Brexiteer for spending his time drinking champagne with friends on the Commons terrace.10 In retaliation, Fox attacked the Foreign Office as a department with a ‘cartographer’s view of the world’ – too interested in politics at the expense of trade – and mocked British businessmen as ‘fat and lazy’. Just three months after her election, with the Treasury, the Foreign Office and Downing Street pursuing different objectives, May’s Brexit policy was in chaos.
To overcome Downing Street’s marginalisation, Boris appointed David Frost, a career diplomat, as his special Brexit adviser. (Frost had left the Foreign Office in 2014 to become the Scottish Whisky Association’s chief executive.) Simultaneously, he and David Davis agreed to disregard Ivan Rogers, the Foreign Office’s representative to the EU in Brussels. As an uncompromising Remainer, Rogers’ singular failure was to negotiate on Cameron’s behalf a good deal with the EU. Impervious to his own deficiencies, Rogers constantly berated Boris and Davis for misunderstanding the EU. He said the same about the prime minister. May puzzled the Europeans. Over lunch in Paris with Jean-Marc Ayrault, Boris was told that there was a need for clarity from London. May was uncertain what she wanted in the withdrawal agreement. On his return to London, to fill the vacuum Boris listed to May his red lines for an agreement with the EU: she must reject calls to stay in the single market, veto any compulsory payment into EU budgets, impose proper immigration controls with an Australian-style points-based system, remove the authority of the European Court of Justice, and stop any EU legislation applying to the UK. By sheer willpower, he hoped that by pushing against May – rather like in Eton’s wall game – he would win. Whitehall’s fissures were apparent. May listened and said nothing; David Davis complained that Boris was not a tactician with a strategy; and Liam Fox, ignoring reality, set off on a global tour to sign trade agreements.
The Brexiteers’ shenanigans did not impress Simon McDonald and his senior staff. As the officials waited in Boris’s outer office to attend the regular Wednesday morning ‘Prayer Meetings’ to brief the minister, the staid Foreign Office mandarins gazed at the portraits of Foreign Secretaries over the past centuries and reflected about their current minister. Despite Philip Hammond’s limitations, they had welcomed his scrupulous perusal of every file, scribbling comments of appreciation of an official’s deep thoughts and purposefully approving a recommendation. In contrast to Hammond’s dry freakery, officials watched Boris speed-read through their files. Pages were rarely scrutinised, they muttered, and key points were not diligently underlined. Tellingly, Boris seldom demanded the background files. Their wariness became apparent during the Wednesday meetings. After cracking a joke, Boris asked questions and wanted a discussion about the Big Picture, the presentation and where he could pounce. In his unconventional manner, he refused to discuss ‘the desired outcome’ in Foreign Office patter. In response, McDonald led the officials’ lack of enthusiasm to engage. In foreign affairs, McDonald liked to imagine, there was no absolutely fireproof opinion and, unlike in City Hall, the Foreign Secretary was not the master able to take a clear-cut decision. Boris, he decided, failed to realise the scale of difference between the mayor’s responsibility to keep the Tube running and maintaining relations with over one hundred governments. Even David Davis was struck by the Foreign Office’s disloyalty: ‘If May sacked Boris,’ one British ambassador told him, ‘that would take £10 billion off the price of Brexit.’ Boris’s manner made him easy to mock, but while German and French politicians belittled him, the foreign ministers of Denmark, Hungary and the smaller countries liked him (they even jogged together at summit meetings). Sensing his lack of power and the atmosphere of malice, Boris was cautious at the regular meetings of Whitehall’s National Security Council.
Seated next to May – not an ideal position – Boris broke with his predecessors’ performance and refused to take the lead. To his officials’ disappointment, he chose not to be assertive and shape the discussion. Hammond and other ministers were allowed to have their say and only at the end did Boris read the Foreign Office brief, adding a few comments. By avoiding dissent and debate, he gave the impression that he lacked any ideas. In reality, he was playing the game. Horrified to be working for a dull leader, he decided to avoid arguing with May in public. She remained uninterested in foreign affairs and rarely revealed her own opinion – either because she did not have an opinion, or if she did, was uncertain whether it was right. She had also let slip that the top-secret briefings Boris received from the heads of MI6 and GCHQ should be limited ‘in case he blurts it out’. To avoid humiliation, the best course was to remain neutral but that was difficult. On the eve of the Tory Party conference, only 16 per cent approved of May’s performance on Brexit.11 So, with unexpected honesty Boris replied when asked about his ambition to be prime minister: ‘If the ball comes loose from the back of the scrum, it would be a great thing to have a crack at.’12
For the moment that was a forlorn hope but his lifestyle offered comfortable compensation. Although the Foreign Secretary’s spacious private flat on the top floors of the official residence in Carlton Gardens overlooking the Mall was shabby, Marina and their children found a similarity with their Islington home. Being Foreign Secretary also offered many advantages. The house was staffed, a chauffeured car was always available, the foreign trips were often fun, the frequent official dinners with interesting foreign visitors were stimulating, and jogging in St James’s Park was pleasant. The only disappointment was the Foreign Office itself.
Just as he could not master the machinery of government within the Foreign Office, he lacked empathy with foreign-policy experts. Instead of acknowledging the seriousness of their subject and communicating with them about themes and policies in their special language, he tended to speak light-heartedly from notes on scraps of paper, winging it with familiar jokes. Needing laughs for reassurance, he looked uncertain if his audience gazed back stony-faced. Regardless of his virtues, Boris soon discovered that his tabloid tactics incited gossip from his officials.
During a visit to Rome in November 2016, Boris told the Italian government that Italy should back London as a financial centre after Brexit. The alternative, he declared, would be tariffs on Prosecco, ‘and every year we drink 300 million litres of Prosecco’. His statement accurately summarised the mutual advantages of a trade deal but his reputation encouraged the Italians to make out they were ‘insulted’. If Prosecco was taxed, the foreign ministry said, Britain would sell less fish and chips in Europe. ‘Outraged’ Foreign Office officials sniggered to the media about the Foreign Secretary’s clumsiness.
Soon after, Boris arrived in Ankara to ‘make it up with the Turks’ after his ‘wankerer’ limerick. ‘I am delighted to say,’ he said after meeting the Turkish foreign minister, ‘that the trivial issue did not come up. Much to my amazement it has not come up at all.’ Having blitzed Turks with praise, including ‘I am certainly the proud possessor of a beautiful, well-functioning Turkish washing machine,’ he then baffled them about his fondness for Jaffa cakes manufactured by a Turkish corporation in Britain. So far, no new problems had arisen. But then he advocated Turkey’s right to enter the EU. Foreign Office officials were quick to publicly highlight that he said the opposite during the referendum, and to add that he had also defended Turkey’s right to reintroduce the death penalty.13
Next, during a visit to Cairo, a Foreign Office official leaked to the BBC that Boris’s flippancy had insulted President Sisi of Egypt who abruptly got up and walked out of the room. That report was never confirmed by the Egyptian government and the British official responsible consistently refused to confirm his slur.
Reports of those incidents reaching London encouraged Alan Duncan to describe his task as the ‘deputy’ Foreign Secretary to the media: ‘I’m Boris’s pooper-scooper – clearing up the mess he leaves behind,’ he declared.14
Perfectionists of the Foreign Office’s black arts were thrilled when another spat erupted in Germany.
During a visit to the United Nations in New York in late September 2016, Boris had predicted that Article 50 to trigger Brexit would be invoked in early 2017. ‘We should go for a jumbo free trade deal and take back control of immigration policy,’ he said. Sceptics told him that Britain could not get a free trade deal with the EU’s single market and also limit free movement. ‘Cobblers,’ he struck back. ‘Complete baloney, absolute baloney.’15 Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, was scathing. ‘He should read the Lisbon treaty,’ Schäuble said. ‘The link between the single market and the EU’s four core principles – including free movement – is unbreakable.’ Boris hit back: ‘Freedom of movement’ as one of the EU’s fundamental freedoms was, he barked, a ‘total myth’ and ‘bollocks’. People don’t have a ‘fundamental God-given right to move wherever they want’. Angela Merkel told Boris publicly he was wrong.16 The Foreign Secretary, she said, did not understand the implications of Brexit.
Two months later, Boris arrived with Alan Duncan in Berlin. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, was openly contemptuous of Boris. For the Protestant civil servant, embodying the Prussian tradition of civic duty, the bumbling English gentleman who, in his opinion, treated life as a joke excited the German’s visceral dislike. Antagonistic anyway towards Britain, Steinmeier did not bother to understand Boris’s point of view. His uncompromising purpose was to promote German interests. Just as he had crushed Greece during its economic crisis, Steinmeier was certainly not prepared to contemplate that many Britons had voted Leave to escape Berlin’s diktat.
Boris was warned before his visit that Germans do not understand British humour, but he insisted on deliberately misquoting John F. Kennedy’s 1963 phrase ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ as ‘Ich bin nicht ein Berliner’. ‘He’s a clown,’ muttered Steinmeier loudly. At their press conference, Steinmeier made clear his disapproval: ‘You were on the side of those who saw the future of Britain outside the EU. I am making no secret of the fact, and you know that, that I was not particularly amused about this.’17 Boris laughed off the insult and went with Alan Duncan to see Angela Merkel. ‘Please don’t make any public-schoolboy jokes with her,’ Duncan warned. Boris smiled. ‘Agar’s Plough,’ Boris said to Merkel, referring to one of Eton’s games fields, ‘reminds me of Berlin.’ Merkel looked puzzled – and Duncan was infuriated. Playing games with the Chancellor was not clever. Two weeks later, Boris’s joke came back to haunt Theresa May. During her visit to Berlin to meet Merkel, she was told to wait at the British Embassy until she was summoned to the Chancellery. By then, the Chancellor’s aides had discovered what ‘Agar’s Plough’ referred to.
The Brussels bureaucrats joined the attack. Pascal Lamy, a fierce federalist in the European Commission, recalled: ‘We had known Mr Johnson as a child in Brussels … I saw Boris as a nasty young kid – and he never changed.’ Boris, he believed, had been appointed as ‘a fake foreign minister’ to make sure that Brexit didn’t happen.18
On her return to London, May reasserted herself. Downing Street leaked to newspapers that at a Cabinet Brexit committee meeting Boris had read from the wrong briefing papers and May was ‘coming to the end of her tether’ over Boris’s ‘gaffes’ and ‘bungles’.19 It was just the latest of May’s put-downs. In her party conference speech in October, she had sniped ‘When we came to Birmingham this week, some big questions were hanging in the air … Can Boris stay on message for a full four days? Just about.’ More recently, at the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year event in November, she watched Boris win the ‘Comeback of the Year’ award. ‘I hope my comeback will be a bit longer than Kim the Alsatian,’ he said, comparing his feat with Heseltine’s recent story of how he had accidentally choked his mother’s Alsatian, Kim,who survived but was put down shortly after. Theresa May spoke next. Boris’s reference to Heseltine’s story, May accurately commented, missed the salient point: ‘Boris, the dog was put down … when its master decided it wasn’t needed anymore.’
Added to May’s contempt had been Sadiq Khan’s decision to abandon the Routemaster and the Garden Bridge, despite adequate finance. Mocked and under pressure, Boris toughened up. ‘If I’m hated, I’ll have to get used to it,’ he told a City Hall confidant. ‘I‘m not going to let them rob me of the referendum.’
‘You must stop making gaffes,’ Bernard Jenkin suggested.
‘It’s my personality,’ Boris replied. ‘I gaffe.’
Both May and McDonald, he felt, were robbing him of authority. On 2 December, he made a well-considered speech at Chatham House summarising ‘Global Britain’: ‘I believe this country is overwhelmingly a force for the good with the potential to do even more and we should not be nervous in the projection of our values and our priorities. We have our own distinctive identity and contribution. We should never underestimate the catalytic power of our creativity and the sheer concentration of intellectual resources to be found on this island. It is in the interests of global order that we are at the centre of a network of relationships and alliances that span the world to promote British interests.’
Despite Boris’s clear presentation, Robin Niblett, Chatham House’s director, had already categorised his guest as a blustering buffoon. In self-interest, Niblett avoided finding fault with Simon McDonald, who had not directed his staff to offer a substantive interpretation of the choices for ‘Global Britain’.20 ‘Clearly,’ McDonald would later admit, ‘there have been shortcomings with the label because other people are in charge of interpretation’ and ‘we have to make choices’. The permanent undersecretary had shifted the responsibility of reassessing Britain’s foreign policy into the ether.
Rather than addressing Britain’s fate after Brexit, McDonald left London to frenetically visit British embassies around the world. Excited tweets devoid of foreign policy recounted his breakneck adventures. He left behind Karen Pierce, the feisty fifty-seven-year-old who would be promoted as the political director. Unlike McDonald, Pierce was impressed by Boris’s focus and grasp of detail when required and on issues which interested him, but she could not save him from the Marmite prejudice dividing the Foreign Office.
That hostility hurt, particularly as he watched the destruction of Syria. Under bombardment, Aleppo, a breathtaking ancient city, was burning. Ten million Syrians had been forced from their homes and hundreds of thousands had been killed. Ever since Labour refused to vote in favour of retaliation for President Assad’s use of sarin in 2013 and President Obama lost his nerve to destroy Syria’s stores of nerve gas, Russia had exploited the vacuum and protected Assad’s position. As Foreign Secretary, Boris found himself relying on diplomats lacking any influence to prevent Russia and Iran collaborating against western interests, or to negotiate Britain’s alignment with Israel to sway events. Worse, he faced McDonald’s advocacy of Britain meekly supporting Obama, a president without self-confidence, to change Syria’s fate. Forlornly, Boris relied on an empty husk which had abandoned any influence in the Middle East. Instead of admitting their own errors, the foreign affairs club led by Simon McDonald and Robin Niblett preferred to blame Boris for their impotence.
Although now anxious to stop the slaughter in Syria, Boris had written the previous year, ‘Let’s deal with the Devil – we should work with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.’ While acknowledging that Putin was a ‘ruthless and manipulative tyrant’ and Assad was ‘a monster, a dictator’, he had supported both for attacking the murderous ISIS groups (and later for saving the ancient site of Palmyra from total destruction).21 As Foreign Secretary, he wanted to improve relations with Russia. In August 2016, he had contacted Sergei Lavrov, the veteran Russian foreign minister. Ever since the Russians had murdered the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, Britain’s diplomacy with Moscow had been frozen. Relations had become even worse after Philip Hammond, as Foreign Secretary, had accused Putin of being a wife-beater. Hammond had also issued a pointless demand that Russia return Crimea to Ukraine. In Boris’s opinion, that hard line should be tempered. He had learned a valuable lesson during his visit to Baghdad in 2003 after Saddam was deposed: ‘It is better sometimes to have a tyrant than not to have a ruler at all.’22 That truth was revealed in Libya after Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow and, he thought, applied to Assad too. But Aleppo’s destruction in the later months of 2016 persuaded him to reconsider. Nearly 5 million people had fled the city. In ‘The agony of Aleppo’, Boris wrote, ‘we are forced to watch one of the most ancient homes of civilisation being literally pulverised, the lives of innocent families shattered by every kind of munition from barrel bombs to chlorine gas.’ It was ‘enough to make you weep that 400,000 have been killed’. Putin’s rocket launchers had been targeted against civilians yet Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, refused to protest about Russia’s war crimes. Now Boris supported military intervention but Obama refused.23 In frustration, Boris publicly called for demonstrations outside the Russian embassy, a gesture which outraged the Foreign Office mandarins for endangering British diplomats in Moscow. The only result was the Kremlin’s curse of Boris’s ‘Russophobic hysteria’.24 Undeterred, Boris proposed to visit Moscow. Britain, he said, must challenge Russia. His idea was instantly rejected by Theresa May. She would not allow the Foreign Secretary to stand on principle.25 That would be her task.
Without dwelling on the rebuke, Boris headed to the Gulf in December. At a regional security summit in Bahrain, he was cheered by the officials and politicians in the audience, an unusual response to speakers at those formal meetings.26 His success annoyed Downing Street. Retaliation was swift. In a private conversation, he correctly observed that Saudi Arabia and Iran were ‘twisting and abusing’ Islam for political objectives in the Yemen war. Instantly Downing Street leaked that Boris had been summoned by May for a reprimand. Saudi Arabia, she told the ‘schoolboy Foreign Secretary’, must not be criticised.27 Boris refused to back down. Every serious attempt he made to re-establish Britain’s independent foreign policy was crushed by Downing Street. Her personal vendetta, he said, had to stop. ‘Instead of letting it die,’ he complained, ‘they put paraffin on the fire.’ Through a newspaper interview, Boris warned, ‘It’s time to call off the dogs or Boris will snap.’28
His hope to restore any understanding with May was dead. His chance of a leadership bid at the time was also hopeless. May’s popularity was rising in the polls, helped by the public’s distaste of Jeremy Corbyn. Walking through a Commons corridor, Conor Burns, a friendly MP whom Boris had met in 2016, watched him pass some Tory MPs. Boris’s hands were in his pockets and his head was down. ‘Why don’t you say hi to them?’ Burns asked. ‘I don’t know them,’ he replied. To another MP, Boris admitted that since Brexit he had lost friends and was separated from the people he loved most, especially his family. In his loneliness, he regularly called Petronella Wyatt. Over one lunch while he was still mayor she had asked whether he was doing anything stupid, like having another affair. No, he replied. Good, she said. You must stay domesticated. As his affair with Jennifer Arcuri had ended, he asked Petronella whether she wanted to revive their relationship. She declined. That meant there was a vacancy. He headed to Chevening for Christmas to contemplate his future.
Among his many irritations was Alan Duncan, the prime minister’s ally. In the days before Christmas, Boris discovered that Duncan had been sending text messages to Chris Bryant, a Labour MP and foreign-affairs specialist. ‘Give him hell,’ Duncan texted Bryant, a contemporary of Boris’s at Oxford. ‘I thought Boris was a fraud then,’ says Bryant, who when a student was ‘a proper Tory’. Bryant was grateful for the information Duncan supplied to question Boris in the Commons. Unaccustomed to hostile manoeuvring within his own office, Boris was flummoxed. There was no solution. He could only wait for events to unfold.
Chevening at Christmas offered temporary respite from the Foreign Office’s malignancy. Over twenty Johnsons – including Charlotte, his mother, her four children and her grandchildren – descended on the house to enjoy ‘Marina’s Magic’ – days of good food, dancing and party games including Assassination, a game invented by the Wheeler family. The Johnsons would look back at that Christmas and their other visits to the house as probably their happiest reunions. More than in recent years, the relationship between Boris and Marina appeared to be calm and stable. Rachel and Stanley were enjoying considerable success writing for newspapers and appearing on TV; while Jo had become a high-profile minister responsible for universities. Looking at their youngest sibling, neither Boris nor Rachel could forget their telephone conversation twenty-two years earlier at the end of Jo’s studies in Oxford. ‘Have you heard the bad news about Jo?’ Rachel had asked Boris. ‘He got a first.’ Even in 2013, when asked about Jo’s appointment as the head of Cameron’s policy unit in Downing Street, Boris said, ‘A little piece of me dies but otherwise I rejoice in his success.’ Only Leo had kept himself out of the spotlight and uninvolved in the family’s frantic competitiveness. None of the family leaving the house after the holiday imagined that Boris’s happiness would soon end.
In the first days of 2017, Boris heard that the Foreign Office officials were unable to establish a relationship with the key staff close to Donald Trump, the newly elected president, ahead of his inauguration on 20 January. One of the reasons was Trump’s antagonism towards Kim Darroch, the British ambassador. In his secret reports to the Foreign Office, Darroch had not only predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the election but was also disparaging about the Republican candidate. Darroch’s opinions were leaked to Trump, possibly by Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader. To Farage’s glee, Steve Bannon, Trump’s mercurial strategist, had invited Farage to meet Trump. The result in December was an embarrassment for Simon McDonald. The Trump team was ignoring Darroch’s attempts to arrange for Theresa May to be among the first leaders called after the new president’s inauguration. For the cheerleaders of the ‘special relationship’, to be one of the first to receive Trump’s call was vital. To remedy Darroch’s failure, in December May had sent her closest advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, to Washington. Both had sat in the embassy only to discover that they too were unable to establish any contacts with Trump’s staff, and returned to London. Their embarrassment was compounded after a photograph appeared of Farage with Trump. May realised that the only person who might be able to protect her from humiliation was Boris – not because he and Trump had much in common, but because instinctively Boris made friends rather than enemies; and although she hated the idea of Boris meeting Trump, the two mavericks did already have a relationship.
At the outset, that relationship had been fractious. In the wake of an Islamic terrorist attack in California in December 2015, Trump had called for a ‘total shutdown’ of Muslims entering America. He added that parts of London were so radicalised that the police feared for their lives. ‘Complete and utter nonsense,’ replied Mayor Johnson. ‘When Donald Trump says there are parts of London that are “no-go” areas, I think he’s betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States. I would invite him to see the whole of London and take him around the city except that I wouldn’t want to expose Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump.’29 Eleven months later, with Bannon’s help, relations between Boris and Trump had been repaired. During a visit to Scotland after the referendum, Trump praised Brexit as a ‘beautiful, beautiful thing’ and promised if he became president, Britain would be ‘at the front’ of the queue in trade talks. ‘Congratulations to Donald Trump’ Boris texted in November 2016 after the US election. ‘We are much looking forward to working with his administration on global stability and prosperity.’ Provocatively, he criticised the EU’s ‘hysteria’ and ‘collective whinge-o-rama’ about Trump: ‘There is every reason to be positive about a liberal guy from New York who believes firmly in the values I believe in too – freedom and democracy.’30 In early January 2017, May asked Boris to approach Trump.
On 8 January, Boris met Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Bannon in New York’s Trump Tower. After a robust discussion about the advantages of free trade (they agreed about the EU’s vices) and Iran (they disagreed about lifting sanctions), Boris emerged to declare that the UK had been pushed to ‘the front of the queue’.31 To underline Britain’s commitment to the new president, Boris refused to sign an EU declaration at a Middle East conference critical of Israel. But despite his best efforts, Theresa May was the tenth world leader Trump called after his inauguration. The leaders of Egypt, India and Ireland preceded her.
Britain’s prime minister was her own worst enemy. With limited emotional intelligence, she struggled to forge personal relationships with foreign leaders, especially the Europeans. Not only was she unsympathetic towards Europe, but she misunderstood Brexit – not least because she did not really believe in its benefits. Six months after becoming prime minister, the confusion continued. In her varying demands for a hard Brexit and Britain’s departure from the single market, she outlined no meaningful trade deal to Brussels. Occasionally, she even suggested that Britain might after all remain in the single market. May, briefed Downing Street, had ‘an open mind’ but others concluded she had no idea about how to fashion an acceptable trade deal. Nor was she certain whether EU nationals living in Britain could stay. Without formulated policies, her three Brexit ministers also failed to agree a negotiating plan for a defined relationship with the EU.
Contemptuous of the government’s ‘muddled thinking’, Ivan Rogers resigned from the Foreign Office in early January. Davis, Boris and Fox, he complained, were ignorant about the single market and inexperienced in negotiations. The politicians, he warned, had not listened to his warnings about the chaos of a no-deal Brexit. Nor had May. She had said ‘No deal would be better than a bad deal’. Boris endorsed that fatalism. ‘It would be perfectly OK,’ he said, ‘if we aren’t able to get an agreement and leave without a deal.’ The consequences, he added, would ‘not be as apocalyptic as some people like to pretend’. Boris shared Davis’s irritation about Rogers, whom both believed was intent on reversing the referendum. Like so many civil servants, Rogers’s anger encouraged the BBC to denigrate Brexiteers as ‘populists’ and ‘racists’ who had ‘lied’ to win the Leave vote. In the irreconcilable division between Brexiteers and Remainers, the absence of leadership from Downing Street left many questions unasked. Neither May nor Boris questioned why David Davis had not costed or made any contingency preparations for a no-deal Brexit.
In the vacuum, Boris assessed his tactics – and resorted to doing exactly the opposite to expectations. Exasperated by the clichés popular among diplomats, he resorted to gung-ho banter towards Europe. Asked to comment about President François Hollande’s truism that Britain could not expect the same trading relationship with the EU after Brexit, Boris stuck the boot in: ‘If Monsieur Hollande wants to administer punishment beatings to anyone who chooses to escape, rather in the manner of some World War Two movie, then I don’t think that’s the way forward.’ European politicians were outraged. ‘Abhorrent and deeply unhelpful,’ said Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chief negotiator. ‘There is no government policy of not mentioning the war,’ said Downing Street, for once defending Boris. Still intent on annoying the Europeans, in February 2017 Boris arrived with Alan Duncan at the annual Munich security conference. In that serious forum, Boris was unwilling to engage in foreign-policy discussions. Rather, he joked, ‘Brexit is liberation’, like Europe’s liberation from the Nazis. ‘He can never resist a gag,’ Duncan told the appalled audience. ‘Boris is rude, offensive and dumb,’ Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Labour MP Chris Bryant.
Unable to unite her Cabinet and without sufficient preparation, May ordered the delivery of the letter to the EU on 29 March 2017 to trigger Article 50, the two-year countdown to Britain’s departure. ‘A magnificent moment,’ said Boris, although he had been forbidden until the last moment to read the letter. In a mix of messages, May warned the EU that a punitive approach would be ‘an act of calamitous self-harm’ and urged them to agree ‘a deep and special partnership’. If the EU demanded a hefty divorce bill, she wrote, then Britain would cease co-operating on security. ‘Blackmail,’ screeched the Eurocrats. Britain, said Juncker, would ‘regret’ its decision, forecasting gridlock at Dover and the disruption of flights. His Eurocrats demanded a £100 billion payment while Liam Fox estimated £3 billion was appropriate. ‘The EU can go whistle if it wants £100 billion for exit payment,’ said Boris. ‘It’s extortionate. We’ll leave and pay nothing.’ Sniping at Boris, Philip Hammond, who had read the letter, said ‘We can’t cherry-pick, and we can’t have our cake and eat it.’ Boris’s no-deal exit, he added, was ‘Ridiculous’. Parliament would never agree to a no-deal exit and he refused to spend billions of pounds planning for the event.
Amid that dissent, May fell at the first hurdle. Although Article 50 stipulated that the negotiations for the exit terms and the future trade relationship should be simultaneous, Angela Merkel instantly rejected that provision.32 Britain would have to settle its debts first, ordered the German Chancellor, and then proceed to its future trade relations with Europe, including the City’s access. Foolishly, May had failed to fix the sequencing before triggering Article 50. Worse, Whitehall had failed to produce a detailed proposal for Britain’s future relationship with the EU. Solutions would be needed to a myriad of contradictions. With her usual lack of anticipation, May had sown the seeds for a constitutional crisis.
The Leavers wanted Britain to have the power to walk away from a bad deal. Only that threat, they argued, would force the EU at the last moment to agree to tolerable terms. The Remainers wanted Parliament to retain the power to prevent a no-deal Brexit. To prevent a no-deal Brexit, the Remainers started judicial proceedings to compel the government to abide by Parliament’s wishes. A constitutional time bomb was triggered.
Fighting on so many fronts, Downing Street was keen to deny Boris opportunities to destabilise the government. With a quiet word, the Foreign Office was encouraged to keep him away from Europe. At McDonald’s suggestion, Boris flew to East Africa, visiting Somalia, Uganda and Kenya, and then on to Washington where he hoped to agree with Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State, that Assad should be removed. Tillerson was puzzled.
For months, Boris had praised Assad for protecting Palmyra from ISIS – ‘The terrorists are on the run. I say bravo – and keep going,’ he wrote – and he had also praised Putin’s support for Assad. But shortly before he arrived in Washington, he somersaulted. On 4 April, Assad had dropped sarin on civilians, killing about eighty people. Four days later, American bombers struck a Syrian airbase. Boris planned to visit Moscow one week later. In their discussions, Boris told Tillerson he intended to threaten Russia with sanctions for its direct complicity in Assad’s war crime. He returned to London anticipating his visit to Russia, the first by a British Foreign Secretary in five years. But at the last moment, he was ordered to stay put. Tillerson insisted on visiting Moscow first. He arrived with a foolish demand that Putin remove Assad. Russia had supported Syria against Israel since the early 1950s. Putin would never abandon Syria, just as America would not forsake Israel.
Still eager, in spite of May’s endorsement of Tillerson’s snub, to show his effectiveness, in April Boris next headed for a G7 meeting in Lucca, Italy. In advance, he said he was a man with a plan to punish the Russian and Syrian warmongers. The German and French governments, he was told by his officials, were ‘four-square’ behind him. Instead, he discovered that both countries and Italy opposed sanctions. The responsibility for making him look foolish at the conference was unclear but Downing Street was delighted by his humiliation. May, said the prime minister’s spokesman, was ‘unimpressed with Boris’. After hearing that Downing Street described the Foreign Secretary’s influence as ‘neutralised’, he was cast by Labour as ‘the figurehead of Britain’s floundering foreign policy … the cartoon character at the helm’ orchestrating ‘another pratfall’.33 What followed was bizarre. Boris told the Commons that Assad was ‘a monster’ in need of ‘decapitating’ and Britain would support future American attacks against Syria. Hours later, Downing Street contradicted ‘Bungling Boris’. Britain would not support American bombing, said May’s spokesman. However hard he tried, lamented Boris to a senior official, Downing Street contrived to make him fail.
Squashing Boris had become an amusing sideshow for Theresa May’s calculations. Her rising popularity against Jeremy Corbyn had produced outstanding victories in recent local elections. With opinion polls recording a 24 per cent Tory lead, David Davis was among many urging May to call a snap general election.34 This was, she thought, the ideal moment to increase the Tory majority of just seventeen MPs to push Brexit through the Commons. Among the few urging her to resist was Lynton Crosby. Boris ranked among the many who were told of her plan only at the last moment. He was not among the few fearful of the result of the election set for 8 June. Nor did he warn about the prospect of a seven-week campaign focused on an uncharismatic leader without the common touch.
Surrounded by her praetorian guard, Boris and other Cabinet ministers were denied the opportunity to read and discuss the party’s manifesto in advance. There was good reason for May’s unusual secrecy. Her pledge of higher taxes and more regulation was distinctly un-Conservative. Boris’s impotence was aggravated by further humiliation. Downing Street leaked that, in a panic, Boris had asked May for reassurance he would not be sacked after the expected landslide. She refused to give him that comfort.
Over the following weeks, May’s arrogance crumbled. While she addressed small, selected audiences offering neither inspiration nor excitement, Jeremy Corbyn was taking the country by storm. Reawakening the idealism of Old Labour, thousands of voters – young and old – were enthusiastically packing into arenas aroused by his vision of an egalitarian socialist state. Four days after her manifesto launch, May self-destructed. The manifesto referred to legislation to compel old-age homeowners to sell their homes to pay for their care. Hammered as the ‘dementia tax’, May retreated, abandoned the proposal, and thereafter struggled to survive. Against her, Corbyn’s vision of glorious socialism included the cancellation of student debts, the promise of cheap housing and a wages bonanza for all public workers.
In the final week, the Tories’ original 24 per cent lead fell towards zero. Boris’s own campaign was struggling. On May’s orders, he had been excluded from the spotlight. His critics pounced whenever possible. At a Sikh temple in Bristol, he enthusiastically predicted increased whisky exports to India. The media focused on the anger of teetotal Sikhs in his audience, but ignored the Sikhs who drank alcohol. Then the news broke that Rachel Johnson had joined the Lib Dems to fight against Brexit. The Tories, she complained, treated her ‘like a brainwashed member of a cult’. That unfortunate headline was eclipsed by a painful sting during his return to Balliol to celebrate the eightieth birthday of his favourite tutor, Jasper Griffin. In the middle of the campaign, Boris composed a witty poem written in Griffin’s honour. While he read it out loud, he was shunned by several guests opposed to Brexit. In particular, Oswyn Murray, his ancient-history tutor, was openly incensed by Boris’s presence. ‘Probably the worst scholar Eton ever sent us,’ he said shortly after. ‘A buffoon and an idler.’35
As Boris left the college, undergraduates hissed and booed. Anthony Kenny, Balliol’s former master, reflected ruefully on the college’s part in Boris’s education: ‘We had been privileged to be given the task of bringing up members of the nation’s political elite. But what had we done for Boris? Had we taught him truthfulness? No. Had we taught him wisdom? No. What had we taught? Was it only how to make witty and brilliant speeches? I comforted myself with the thought that even Socrates was very doubtful whether virtue could be taught.’
Eight days later, Boris was asked to give the warm-up speech in Birmingham for May’s last appearance before polling day. In his speech, he warned, Jeremy Corbyn was not the ‘mutton-headed old mugwump’ tending his allotment that Boris had described in April, but a dangerous Marxist. Salvation, said Boris, depended on ‘Our wonderful prime minister.’
Over the previous seven weeks, ‘Maybot’ had proven to be reluctant to risk exposure to the public. The last YouGov opinion poll accurately predicted the outcome. Fifty-eight hours later, on 9 June, the final results confirmed that the Tories had lost thirteen seats and were eight seats short of an overall majority. Corbyn had done spectacularly well. The Labour Party had won 3.5 million more votes than in 2015. The Tories, even with a record 42 per cent of the vote, were saved from total humiliation by a popular wave in Scotland. In revenge for the manner of May’s dismissal of him as Chancellor in July the previous year, George Osborne (now editor of the Evening Standard) wrote: ‘Theresa May is a dead woman walking. It’s just how long she’s going to remain on death row.’ Osborne also attacked Boris for being ‘in a permanent leadership campaign’.
During that night, many assumed that May, humiliated and tearful, would resign. Several Cabinet ministers phoned or texted Boris to urge him to bid for the leadership.36 Opinion polls cast him as the firm favourite to beat David Davis as the next leader. Boris, however, feared that little had changed over the past year. Too many MPs did not trust him. There were rumours that Hammond and Davis were already aligning against him. Indeed, at the Spectator’s summer party one month later, Davis told Boris openly, ‘You’re a failure.’
‘I’ll kick you in the bollocks,’ retorted Boris, suspecting Davis of spreading rumours about Boris’s affairs.
Uncertain of his prospects, Boris decided to await May’s resignation. The ghost of Michael Heseltine – the unsuccessful plotter against Thatcher for the leadership – haunted Boris. A display of his ultra loyalty was required.
That night, Boris texted May that he would not force her departure. Relieved, the shell-shocked woman held up her phone to show the message to her advisers. In return, Boris would remain at the Foreign Office. ‘Folks,’ Boris emailed some MPs, ‘we need to calm down and get behind the prime minister.’ Despite Corbyn’s demands that May resign, Labour had been defeated. The public, Boris wrote two days later in the Sun, ‘are fed up to the back teeth’ after three elections in three years. They did not want any more turmoil. He supported May – ‘a woman of extraordinary qualities’. She could remain because there was no obvious, outright successor.
The government’s fate now depended on forging an agreement with Ulster’s DUP party. With the DUP’s ten MPs, the Tories would have a Commons majority. The hazards of any deal with them were well known. The Ulster Unionists were opposed to a Brexit agreement which made a united Ireland more likely. That presented May with a near-insoluble problem. The DUP’s version of Brexit meant that a trade border would be resurrected across Ireland. But, at Dublin’s behest, Brussels insisted on free movement between the two parts of Ireland. Despite warnings, Boris had ignored the Irish border while campaigning for Brexit. But since the DUP loathed Corbyn for supporting the IRA, a deal with the Conservatives was certain.
‘I’m the one who got us into this mess,’ May told Tory MPs four days after the election, ‘and I’m the one who will get us out of it.’ As a public duty, she had offered unselfishly to serve the national interest and keep the job she always yearned to have. Her hollow crown left her powerless to control her rebel ministers, her Cabinet, or Parliament.