Collateral Damage

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‘I think it’s a very great thing that has happened … basically, they took back their country’

– presidential candidate Donald Trump, 24 June 2016

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‘WHAT YOU need to do now is develop a career anchor.’

These words of advice came from a friend in the human resources department of the Foreign Office. His point was well judged. After twelve years in the office, I had been a junior press spokesman; I had spent four years in Japan, but not as a language specialist; I had done two years running the Channel Tunnel treaty negotiations; and I was in the middle of three years as senior private secretary to the minister of state dealing with the Middle East. Meanwhile, my colleagues had been learning ‘hard’ languages like Chinese and Arabic, and developing career specialisations. Having early in my career achieved a historically low score in the hard language aptitude test, none of this was for me; I had instead been following an enjoyable but utterly random path.

I pondered these words and, a few weeks later, talked to him again. I said that I wanted to become a specialist in the European Community – the EC, as it was known around the system. He was taken aback. This was a career path that tended to involve future postings in Brussels; pleasant enough but no one’s idea of a glamorous city. And it had the reputation around the corridors of being a sixty-hour-a-week grind, mostly spent in airless conference rooms negotiating the widgets directive. So there wasn’t much of a queue at the door for this particular career path. But I told him that I liked the idea of negotiating for a living; and that I thought the European Community was ‘the future’, in that it would come to play an increasingly large role in British politics and governance. As we talked it over, he started to agree.

When I finished as private secretary a few months later, there wasn’t anything available in Brussels. So I was asked to go to Rome as first secretary (EC and Economic). This involved a course on economics of, well, all of four and a half days – leading my colleagues to dub me ‘the Economic Miracle’ when I subsequently opined on the subject. It also involved a month in Florence learning Italian, and then three years of living in an extraordinary apartment in the sixteenth-century English College, the Venerabile Collegio Inglese for trainee Catholic priests, in the Centro Storico, the ancient heart of Rome: hardship piled upon hardship. The college had a picturesque history; and our showcase high-ceilinged apartment was where, back in the 1700s, the most famous British visitors, including in 1635 Thomas Hobbes, the English political philosopher, would stay before making the short walk to the Vatican. Just as our days in Rome were drawing to an end, we learnt that the apartment was rumoured to be haunted. It was as well that Vanessa hadn’t discovered this earlier. As for me, looking back, I rather warm to the idea that the ghosts of illustrious guests of the past are still roaming those corridors. If Hobbes is amongst them, he must be gratified that his concept of the absolute leader, wielding supreme and unchecked power over his subjects, has such notable modern-day adherents.

After a joyous three years of la dolce vita, I returned to London as deputy head of the European Union Department. I subsequently took time out from what was now known, post-Maastricht Treaty, as the EU, the European Union, to lead the department dealing with the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Bosnia war; and then a couple of years as the Foreign Secretary’s press spokesman. But after that, it was back to the EU for more than a decade: director of the Foreign Office European departments: then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Europe adviser: and then over four years as British ambassador to the European Union.

The Foreign Office is somewhat lazily characterised in parts of the British media as a den of crazed Europhiles, eager to sell out their country if it contributes to the next stage of the construction of the European superstate. The reality is that there are both enthusiasts and sceptics inside the machine – both remainers and leavers, in these more tribal days – though it would be a fair guess that remainers are the majority. I personally was, and am, neither a sceptic nor a super-enthusiast. I took the pragmatic view that, overall, it served British interests to be part of the European project.

I felt this in particular because I had grown up during an era of seemingly relentless British decline, culminating in the three-day week of 1974 and then the uncollected rubbish and the unburied bodies of the 1978–79 Winter of Discontent. In comparison with these convulsions, Europe had seemed to be flourishing. I thought that the single market, essentially a British idea, was one of the greatest projects of the twentieth century. I felt equally strongly about the EU offering membership to central and Eastern European states, a project to which I felt I had contributed by chairing the EU Enlargement Working Group during the British EU presidency of 1998 (the ‘presidency’ of the European Union rotates among the member states, each getting six months). But I also recognised what a strange, ‘un-British’ construction was the European Commission. I despaired at times about the lowest common denominator outcomes of internal EU negotiations. And I thought that the British Treasury had a point in its critique of the euro: that it wouldn’t work without a single fiscal and budgetary policy across the single currency zone, and large-scale financial transfers from the richer regions to the poorer. I was also conscious, however, that, for our European partners, the European project was about much more than trade and economics. Only a generation or two earlier, they had lived through two world wars, with millions killed and their cities destroyed. Indeed, the entire history of Europe had been one of wars between neighbours. So their attachment to the ideals and ambitions of building Europe was rooted in history. It was emotional as well as intellectual, and was fundamentally about peace and security, and an end to war in Europe forever.

Whatever my mixed feelings about the characteristics and policies of the European Union, I thought from the outset, privately, that the Cameron proposition of holding a referendum on membership of the European Union was seriously risky. I could see a lot wrong with the EU. I could sense the mounting unhappiness within the Conservative Party. No one could miss the rise of UKIP. All of us British officials working in Brussels would, on occasion, become incensed at the seemingly magisterial powers of unelected Commission officials, especially when their proposals were wrong-headed, as with the catastrophically misguided Working Time Directive of the 1990s. A decade later, the Eurozone became a low growth disaster area after the 2008 financial crisis. And members of the euro responded to that crisis as if they were a privileged inner court within the EU, entitled to take decisions without recourse to the views of the rest. But overall, it was still, surely, in our interests to work for reform from within? And what if we lost?

David Cameron has written about his thought processes before making his famous announcement on an EU referendum at Bloomberg’s London headquarters in January 2013. He relates that he concluded that the best way of keeping the UK within the EU was to renegotiate the terms of our membership, get a better deal, then put the question to the British people and win the argument, settling the Europe issue for party and country for a generation. I worked for Cameron for almost four years. I thought he was a seriously talented politician, streets ahead of his contemporaries as a leader; that he made a lot of good, often brave, decisions; and that he was a thoroughly decent human being. But I have never accepted the argument that the referendum was unavoidable and unstoppable – that it was somehow written in the stars. The fact was that we had negotiated for ourselves a privileged form of EU membership, full of British exceptionalism: Mrs Thatcher’s rebate, our unique permanent exclusion from the euro, and our partial exclusion from those bits of Schengen, ‘Europe without Frontiers’, that we didn’t like. In short, we had managed to get ourselves effectively the best of both worlds; the advantages of membership, absent the obligations we didn’t like, and with a special discount on costs. But then, as a civil servant, I have never had to run for election and navigate the tides of public opinion.

Whatever my personal feelings on the issue, I arrived in Washington with the referendum only six months away, with the renegotiation of our EU membership in full swing, and with a US administration frankly puzzled about why the British government had decided, from choice not necessity, to take such a huge risk. On my round of introductory calls, I would be asked repeatedly, ‘Can you just explain again why you are doing this?’ I would use the approved lines, which centred on the supposedly unstoppable public pressure for a vote, given how much the European project had changed from the one they had supported in the 1975 referendum. I could tell from their body language that none of the Obama team bought this; and I could readily imagine the US Embassy in London reporting that the referendum promise had been about heading off the UKIP threat in the 2015 election, and that Europe never featured in polls listing the top ten concerns of the British electorate. The more assertive of my contacts would then say, ‘We really need you inside the EU, so we trust you will win this.’ I tried to reassure them: winning was the plan.

The concerns of the Obama team were real. But in telling us how important we were to them, there was an element of flattery. I vividly recall an informal drink with a friend from the Obama team, who revealed that on a lot of European business, their first call was to Berlin: Merkel was seen as the one calling the shots, while we were perceived to be somewhat marginalised. The areas where we ranked ahead of the Germans were wider international affairs, especially defence and security. But even here, our reputation had been tarnished by the British Parliament’s vote, in August 2013, against UK involvement in proposed air strikes against President Assad’s forces in Syria, following his use of chemical weapons against his own people. That said, they were ready to help. And there was an opportunity coming with a presidential visit to London in April 2016.

This was to be Obama’s last trip to London as President. The Obamas got on famously with the royal family, so the programme involved a private lunch with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, and a private dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (where the photos of the US President meeting two-year-old Prince George made front pages everywhere). With Cameron, there was an afternoon meeting and a big press conference in one of the Foreign Office’s grand conference rooms. I worked with Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, and Jeff Zients, his economic adviser, on the agenda for the talks. Jeff asked me whether the Prime Minister would want the President to say anything at the press conference about the referendum. I said I thought it was likely that he would; that in any case, the President was bound to be asked about it at the press conference; but that the precise words would have to be for discussion between the two of them.

In the event, unsurprisingly, the referendum was the first, and dominant, subject of the discussion. Obama had already written a piece for the Daily Telegraph saying that, while the decision was a matter for British voters, the EU magnified British influence across the world. Cameron set out how the Remain campaign were doing, conveying simultaneously that it was close, but that he was confident of winning. The discussion turned to the arguments of the Leave campaign, in particular their claim that the single market could be replaced by a multiplicity of free trade deals around the world, including with the United States. Obama said that, given the much bigger markets with which deals could be done, he couldn’t see a free trade deal between the US and the UK being a priority. George Osborne suggested he say something to that effect during the press conference.

At the end of the meeting, we duly walked across to the Foreign Office, and into a Locarno Room packed with journalists. When the moment came, Obama said: ‘I think it’s fair to say that maybe, some point down the line, there might be a UK–US trade agreement; but it’s not going to happen any time soon, because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done, and the UK is going to be in the back of the queue. Not because we don’t have a special relationship, but because, given the heavy lift on any trade agreement, we need to be having access to a big market with a lot of countries rather than trying to do piecemeal trade agreements, which is hugely inefficient.’

As the Obama convoy left the Foreign Office, the heavens opened, leaving us in the UK team wondering whether it was an ill omen. The President’s words on a trade deal immediately captured the news cycle, leading all the TV news bulletins and most front pages the following morning. The Leave campaign reacted angrily. Dominic Raab, then justice minister, said that he didn’t believe Obama’s comments would reflect future US trade policy, and that ‘what you had here was a lame duck American President doing an old British friend a political favour’. Boris Johnson, at the time in his last days as mayor of London, called Obama ‘hypocritical’. Nigel Farage said he was the most anti-British American President ever. Some in the British media, noting that Obama had said ‘back of the queue’ rather than the more American ‘back of the line’, speculated that the Prime Minister had given him a script. I was there: he didn’t. The choice of words was Obama’s own.

Over the ensuing months, I would be asked many times by members of Obama’s team whether the President’s intervention had been counter-productive. Some of the instant opinion polls after the visit suggested that more people in the UK had been offended than had supported his words; other polls suggested it was fifty-fifty. Personally, I thought ‘back of the queue’ was a little harsh and sharp-edged; a softer formulation would have been better. But I also think that it made no difference one way or the other. People weren’t interested in ‘technicalities’ like trade deals; they were voting to punish the Establishment.

The Obama visit stirred up a new wave of US interest in the referendum. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were asked about it. Clinton sided with Obama: her senior policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, told the Observer that she ‘valued a strong United Kingdom in a strong European Union’. Trump took the opposite view. He said to Fox News, ‘I know Great Britain very well. I have a lot of investments there. I would say that they’re better off without the EU. But I want them to make their own decision.’ All of this was as expected. Whitehall took it entirely calmly. They took it less serenely, however, when we picked up rumours that Trump would be visiting the UK at around the time of the actual vote, on 23 June. We were asked to check with the Trump camp. It turned out that he was indeed visiting, for personal and business reasons; he would be presiding over a ceremony to mark the relaunch of one of his two Scottish golf courses, Trump Turnberry, after a £200 million redevelopment. But, we learnt, he would be flying overnight and not arriving until the morning of 24 June, after the polls had closed. So no campaigning; the Foreign Office calmed down. Until, that is, they realised the next question coming down the track: should the Prime Minister offer him a meeting?

There was form between Donald Trump and David Cameron. Back at the beginning of the year, in the context of Trump’s campaign-trail rhetoric attacking Muslims, Cameron had said, when challenged at Prime Minister’s Questions, that Trump’s words were ‘stupid, divisive and wrong’. He had also said, however, after Trump had nailed down his party’s nomination, that ‘anyone who makes it through the primary process deserves respect’. And somewhat uncharacteristically, Trump hadn’t really retaliated to Cameron’s criticism of his comments on Muslims. As for the possible meeting, the thoroughly sensible line that emerged from No. 10 was that the Prime Minister would in principle of course be ready to see Donald Trump, as was the tradition with visiting US presidential candidates. We in the embassy were, however, asked to talk privately to the Trump team to warn them that, if they asked for a call on 24 June, the Prime Minister might be rather busy. Prescient words, as it turned out, though not for the reasons we might have hoped.

I had fallen into the habit of checking in with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, every few weeks through the campaign, ostensibly so I could have some inside knowledge when talking to the White House, but also just because I wanted to know how things were. Ed was entirely consistent throughout: he always sounded extremely worried. He told me that the private polls from the Northern and Midlands towns were ‘terrible’. He was deeply critical of the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, for his failure to do any serious campaigning in the Labour Party heartlands. He said to me, once or twice, ‘We can lose this, you know.’

So perhaps I should have been better prepared when a group of us from the embassy assembled at my deputy’s house on the evening of 23 June to watch the results come in. Instructions had, incidentally, gone out from the centre to the entire diplomatic network that there should be no public ‘watch parties’, so there were no outside guests. But the final opinion polls, or at least those that I saw, suggested that Remain had recovered a narrow lead. And I was guessing that all of the warnings about the implications of leaving for the economy, for jobs and for incomes, would prey on people’s minds as they went into the privacy of the polling booth. A British friend had emailed me a sort of ready reckoner for the results, a constituency-by-constituency table showing what the figures should be if the final opinion polls were right.

At about 7 p.m. Washington time the results started to flow. It was the Sunderland result that rocked me back. I knew the town from my time at Durham University; I used to go and watch the Sunderland football team play at Roker Park, long since demolished to make way for the optimistically named Stadium of Light. In those days, Sunderland had been the epitome of post-industrial decline. Once known as ‘the largest shipbuilding town in the world’, with more than four hundred shipyards, by the Seventies it was better known for its appallingly high unemployment rate. Standing in the upper reaches of the football stadium, I could look out over rows and rows of terraced houses towards abandoned shipyards, and beyond to a grey, bleak North Sea. Sunderland’s luck had turned, however: it was revitalised through being chosen, in 1984, as the location for the first Nissan car plant in Europe. The plant is still thriving, now making a best-selling electric car. Most of its output goes to Europe.

Sunderland was nevertheless expected to vote Leave, but by a majority of about 6 per cent. The returning officer, on live TV, announced a result that sounded instantly way out of line with that estimate. A quick calculation showed a Leave vote of 61 per cent, as against Remain at 39 per cent. A longstanding British friend of mine happened to be one of the country’s top pollsters, a regular on BBC election nights. I texted him to ask what I should make of Sunderland. He texted back almost immediately to say that he thought it was an outlier, and that later results would be more in line with the pre-vote opinion polls.

They weren’t. The Newcastle result was another killer. And throughout Northern and Midland cities, Leave was winning by huge margins, approaching 70–30 in some cases. I knew that London and the South-East were expected to vote heavily for Remain. But I started to question whether it would be enough. Then my pollster friend texted again to say that he was ‘now much less confident about the accuracy of the polling data and the final result’.

We didn’t stay much longer at the gathering. I thought I could see the lie of the land. But I also thought that it would be hours before the result was certain. At 4 a.m., however, I woke and knew I had to catch up on the news. I went through to the study, where my phone was charging. I pressed the Home button. The screen flashed: ‘David Cameron announces his resignation as Prime Minister’.

Further sleep being impossible, I was early in the embassy that morning. There must have been colleagues who had voted Leave, as they had every right to do. But no one was skipping down the corridors. People looked shocked. The atmosphere was funereal. One or two were in tears. I did a quick all-staff meeting, at which I set out what I thought would happen next, including that David Cameron would stay on as caretaker Prime Minister until a successor had been chosen through that convoluted two-stage Conservative Party process. And I emphasised that, however individuals felt about the outcome, whether jubilation or despair, the face we should present to the outside world was one of calm acceptance of the result and confidence about the future: this had been democracy in action. Fortunately, it was a Friday, with the weekend beckoning. By the following Monday, the mood had lightened a bit.

As for the world outside the embassy gates, a rare thing was happening; the UK was leading the US news. There were dozens of requests for me to do interviews; the instruction from London to every one of us around the network, however, was that we should decline all bids, at least for the moment, and let the Prime Minister’s words from Downing Street speak for themselves.

David Cameron phoned President Obama later that day. As he himself has recorded, he told Obama that he’d had a strategy to keep the UK in the EU, that he’d executed it, that it hadn’t worked and that he was sorry. I didn’t listen to the call, but the subsequent record showed that Obama had replied in classily empathetic terms. Within a day or two, however, I was hearing from friendly White House journalists that the private reaction inside the building was much harsher, with the President asking his staff, ‘How could Cameron even ask the question without being sure of the answer he would get?’ Or as one of the White House team put it to me: ‘we think you guys are screwed’.

A different line was, however, emerging on home soil. Donald Trump had landed in Scotland and had arrived at Turnberry, to be met by a small crowd of onlookers and a large crowd of journalists and cameras. An hour after Cameron had announced his resignation, Trump was doing an impromptu press conference in front of the Turnberry clubhouse. He said: ‘I think it’s a great thing that happened, an amazing vote, very historic. Basically, they took their country back.’ On David Cameron, he said, ‘He’s a good man, but he didn’t get the mood of his country right.’ Asked why Leave had won, he replied: ‘People are angry. They are angry over borders, they are angry over people coming into the country and taking over and nobody even noticing. They are angry about many, many things.’ On the European Union, he said that break-up ‘looks like it’s on its way’. He observed that lots of Germans, some of whom were ‘members of Mar-a-Lago’ – the Trump-owned Florida resort – had told him they were leaving Germany ‘because of the tremendous influx of people’. And asked about the implications of the vote for the British economy, he said, ‘When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly.’

In short, it was vintage Trump: outspoken, opinionated, dismissive of contrary views, occasionally unattached to the facts, but also newsworthy and crystal clear; no one could wonder afterwards where exactly he stood on the issues. And approve of the underlying thought or not, there was undoubtedly truth in his assertion that immigration had been a central issue in the referendum outcome. There was, however, one notable false step. Trump tweeted on arriving in Scotland: ‘Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back!’ Almost right: Scotland voted by 62 per cent to 38 per cent to remain in the EU.