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.’

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 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.’

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.’

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.

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.’

Thrown into the deep end, May’s authenticity made her popular. A cabinet colleague said, ‘There are a very small collection of politicians who are immediately attractive to the public, because they’re normal human beings, they see someone who’s true to themselves – Ken Clarke is the classic example. You will never hear Ken say something in private that he would not say in public. The PM is the same.’ During the leadership contest, Clarke had given May a helping hand, calling her a ‘bloody difficult woman’. May adopted the phrase as her calling card. Those looking for her weaknesses might have reflected that Clarke had explained her better than she had ever managed herself.

There were other clues too about what was to come. During the leadership election one of her aides said, ‘A large number of MPs said I’m backing Theresa because she came to my constituency for the dinner fifteen years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. She has met and engaged with a huge number of people, and most of those people really like her. The problem is people who’ve never engaged with her. And that’s where her appeal falls short. She can’t stand on a stage.’ An official who worked with May in the Home Office said, ‘She instils loyalty in people when you’re close. At a distance, it’s much more difficult to get that. She doesn’t reach out to people. She knows who she is and expects you to come to her.’ Knowing how difficult that was for May, Hill and Timothy devised for her a ‘submarine strategy’ whereby she kept her head down, surfacing rarely to make carefully planned set-piece interventions. At the Home Office, where most news is bad news, it was a shrewd strategy. May dodged public scrutiny but made three of the boldest speeches of the Cameron years – a 2013 party conference speech which was a leadership pitch in all but name; a 2014 warning to the Police Federation that officers should ‘face up to reality’; and a party conference speech in 2015 in which she threw raw red meat to the party faithful on immigration that earned her the appellation ‘Enoch Powell in a dress’.

In Number 10, Hill and Timothy took the same approach. On the steps of Downing Street May gave a very well received speech vowing to ‘fight against the burning injustices’ of poverty, race, class and health and make Britain ‘a country that works for everyone’. When it came time to set out May’s plans for Brexit, they knew it was the moment to write a big speech.

PART ONE

‘Brexit Means Brexit’

It all began with a phrase and an idea. The phrase, in a perfect encapsulation of so much that was to follow, was part Nick Timothy, part Theresa May. The two of them and Fiona Hill were in May’s parliamentary office. It was July 2016 and David Cameron had resigned. The Conservative leadership contest was under way and they were discussing how May, a leading though not prominent Remainer, could reassure the party base that she would respect the results of the EU referendum. As they tossed around phrases, Timothy said, ‘Brexit means Brexit,’ at which point May chimed in, mimicking the jingle-like cadence Timothy had used and adding the coda, ‘… and we’ll make a success of it’.

It was a phrase, as Timothy was to put it, ‘with many lives’. The immediate purpose ‘was to be very clear that she, as someone who had voted remain, respected the result and Brexit was going to happen’. In the months to come the phrase evolved. ‘It also became a message to people who didn’t like the result that they had to respect it. Brexit had to mean actually leaving and limiting the relationship, not having us effectively rejoin.’

‘Brexit means Brexit’ was a statement of intent, but there was still the question of what that meant in practice. Britain had voted to leave the European Union, but the destination had not been on the ballot paper. The Leave campaign deliberately never specified which model of future relationship should be pursued. Public debate dissolved into whether the UK would mimic Norway, Switzerland, Turkey or Canada.

Norway was a member of the European Economic Area (EEA) along with all twenty-eight EU countries, plus Liechtenstein and Iceland, giving it full membership of the single market, an area of 500 million people within which the free movement of goods, capital, services and labour – the ‘four freedoms’ – was guaranteed. While outside the European Union, Norway paid money into the EU budget and had to agree to all the standards and regulations of the market, except those on agriculture, fisheries, and justice and home affairs. The downside was that Norway was a ‘rule taker, not a rule maker’ and had no say over the future rules of the market.

Switzerland was a member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) but not of the single market, and its access to the market was governed by a series of more than one hundred bilateral agreements with the EU governing key sectors of the economy, though crucially not its banking or services sector. The Swiss made a smaller financial contribution to the budget than Norway and had to implement EU regulations to enable trade. A referendum in 2014 to end the free movement of people had led to retaliation from the EU.

Turkey, like Andorra and San Marino, was in a customs union with the EU, while outside the EEA and EFTA. That meant it faced no quotas, tariffs, taxes and duties on imports or exports on industrial goods sold into the EU and had to apply the EU’s external tariff on goods imported from the rest of the world. The deal did not extend to services or agricultural goods.

Canada had just concluded a comprehensive economic and trade agreement (CETA) with the EU after seven years of negotiations, which eliminated tariffs on most goods, excluding services and sensitive food items like eggs and chicken. The deal gave Canada preferential access to the single market without many of the obligations faced by Norway and Switzerland, for goods that were entirely ‘made in Canada’, but for Britain it would not have given the financial services sector ‘passporting’ rights to operate in the EU.

The alternative to all these models was to leave with no deal and revert to the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which imposed set tariffs on different products. Supporters of free trade said the average 3 per cent tariffs were not burdensome but on cars, a key industry for Britain, they were 10 per cent. Removing all tariffs would also be expected to see the market flooded with cheap food and steel, threatening the UK’s farming and manufacturing.

At this point the phrase ‘soft Brexit’ was taken to mean membership of the single market and the customs union, while ‘hard Brexit’ meant an alternative arrangement, though these terms were to evolve.

This approach was anathema to May, who rejected all attempts to compare the deal Britain might negotiate to any of the existing models. She told her aides, ‘That’s entirely the wrong way of looking at it.’ From the beginning May knew she wanted a new bespoke deal for Britain. The prime minister, with encouragement from Hill, saw the process as similar to negotiation she had carried out as home secretary in October 2012 when she opted out of 130 EU directives on justice and home affairs and then negotiated re-entry into thirty-five of them, including the European Arrest Warrant, several months later. ‘We have already done what was in effect an EU negotiation,’ a source close to May said. ‘We know how it works, we know what levers to pull and we know how to get what we want out of a negotiation.’

The first thing they wanted – the big idea – was a dedicated department to run Brexit. May, Hill and Timothy believed the ‘bandwidth’ in Whitehall was seriously lacking. ‘We knew we’d have a big challenge to get preparation for Brexit up and running quickly,’ a source close to May said. During a meeting in Nick Timothy’s front room the weekend before May became leader they decided they would create a standalone department, a move that put noses out of joint at the Foreign Office and the Treasury in particular. ‘We know Whitehall, we know how it works,’ the source said. ‘Unless you have a standalone department heading in the same direction then everyone works in silos.’ It was the first of many decisions with far-reaching consequences made on the hoof.

The idea of a new department for Brexit was enthusiastically supported by Sir Jeremy Heywood. The owlish cabinet secretary was a problem solver par excellence who had made himself indispensable to four prime ministers in succession, but his enemies saw a mandarin whose first priority in all situations was to maintain his own power base. As the official who had carried out the review that led to Hill’s departure from the Home Office, Heywood was understandably on edge after Team May’s arrival in Number 10. Under Cameron, the cabinet secretary had been driven to Downing Street every morning and then walked through Number 10 to the Cabinet Office. It was a symbol of his status. ‘When she came in that changed, he went through the Cabinet Office door,’ a senior civil servant said. ‘That was symbolic, putting him in his place.’

Heywood and May were well acquainted. They had dined together when she was home secretary. ‘He used to say that he didn’t look forward to these dinners because they had run out of things to talk about by the main course,’ a fellow mandarin recalled. However, the dinners served a purpose on both sides. ‘She did it because

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