What Philip Hammond's Brexit candour tells us about politics
"Philip Hammond has given an interview that has once more ripped open the wounds of the Conservative party over Brexit. He says some deliberately revealing things: that Theresa May genuinely had no idea what sort of a Brexit she intended, so that when she made him chancellor after the referendum. “I sat in the cabinet room on that evening – and the only other person in the room was Fiona Hill – I did ask her about Brexit, and she said to me, ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ That was it. That was the only discussion we had about it.”
“I think she believed that she could park Brexit as just something we will get done: ‘It has been decided. Now let’s move on, and let me tell you about the Theresa May vision of the future’ … what the masterplan was, she didn’t know – because Nick Timothy hadn’t formulated it at that stage.”
And his character sketch of the man who had to negotiate with the EU as Brexit secretary is unforgettable: “David [Davis] … was the trouble-shooter for Tate & Lyle. When there was a problem, they sent David Davis. Shut down a refinery, fire a load of people, get rid of the troublemakers: the bare-knuckle fighter. That’s how he liked to see himself. David Davis’ approach to negotiation is you slap it on the table, you lean across, and you eyeball them. If they don’t give way immediately, you say, ‘I’ll see you round the back.’ That was always his view on this.”
He believes that the person ultimately responsible for Brexit was Tony Blair, who allowed unlimited immigration from eastern Europe after 2005 – but he also believes that something like Blair’s policy was essential and quite right. Even a Britain that managed its own borders would follow it: “We’d decide our regime and then, in practice, let in hundreds of thousands of European workers because our economy would have collapsed without them.”
About David Cameron’s repeated promises to bring down immigration, Hammond says: “No one in the senior ranks of the Tory party, I don’t think – at that time ever believed that this was a pledge that would be delivered in practice … It was never a credible proposition.”
Similarly, he takes for granted that when he was chancellor, the prime minister would try to mislead him, and she would try to mislead his enemies in cabinet as well. It was all part of the game. There was a certain tactical skill in doing so without actually saying anything false – simply allowing the other player to believe it – but the intention to mislead was taken for granted."
[
Guardian]
