Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster
straightforward victory. We should have known, however, that nothing is simple in the Tory party.
Gove, his campaign team, and his wife, the journalist Sarah Vine, began – according to their side of the story – to have doubts about Johnson’s ability to be prime minister, leading Gove, just a week after the vote, to withdraw support from Johnson, announce he was standing himself and decry the leadership qualities of his friend and colleague.
The betrayal stunned Johnson, who swiftly pulled out, leaving May, the home secretary, the clear favourite, and his team went to war on Gove. One suggested there was a ‘deep pit reserved in hell’ for Gove, Johnson’s sister Rachel accused Gove of being a political psychopath, and Ben Wallace, another Johnson campaign aide, said Gove could not be trusted to be prime minister because he has ‘an emotional need to gossip, particularly when drink is taken, as it all too often seemed to be’. The governing party was in turmoil.
How did the two men who had done more than any, apart from Farage, to bring Brexit about fall out so spectacularly and so quickly?
Friends told me that Johnson had asked Gove to be his campaign manager on the Friday after the vote. Gove asked for twenty-four hours to think it over and was approached by several colleagues to run. He pointed out that he had always said he did not want to be prime minister and felt that Boris was the man.
Gove’s friends said that, although he had known Boris for twenty years, he had never worked closely with him. Johnson had risen to the occasion during the campaign and Gove assumed he was ready for the top job. But that confidence was to be swiftly shattered. According to friends, he found that Johnson had only a ramshackle leadership campaign operation in place and did not appear to be taking seriously the coming moment when he switched from the populist ex-mayor liked by the voters to the serious job of prime minister. Little work had been done on setting out a programme or vision for leadership.
For three days Gove campaigned for Johnson, growing more and more concerned that he seemed unfocused on the task in hand. For Boris, it was vital to have Andrea Leadsom, who had won plaudits for her role during the referendum campaign, on board. I have learnt that on the morning of Wednesday, 29 June, an astonishing meeting took place in a Commons office. Three of the leaders of the Brexit cause met privately to discuss what jobs would be allocated if Johnson won.
They were Johnson, Gove and Leadsom. The latter, at the time an energy minister, asked to be chancellor in return for supporting Johnson. Gove pointed out there were two top jobs, the other being deputy prime minister, who would also have the job of running the negotiations with the EU on Brexit. Leadsom said she assumed Gove would do the latter job but Johnson said he wanted Gove to be chancellor. Finally it was agreed that Leadsom would have one of the top jobs and that Johnson would make this clear in a letter, and send out a tweet saying that Leadsom was on board with his campaign.
As has been revealed since, the letter did not reach Leadsom by the time she had stipulated and the tweet did not materialize. As a result she prepared to announce that she would stand, having already built up a serious level of support among MPs. That Wednesday, Johnson was also supposed to be writing his launch speech for the next day, but by midnight he had scarcely done any of it. The Leadsom fiasco and the failure to prepare were two last straws.
Gove and other figures like Nick Boles, the skills minister, were dismayed, and Gove finally decided that Johnson did not have the qualities to be prime minister. He told allies: ‘I could not in those circumstances bring myself to recommend to my friends and fellow MPs that Boris was suitable to be PM. When Gordon Brown was about to become prime minister a lot of senior people believed he would not be up to it but stayed silent. I could not do that. I had to be honest about what I saw as Boris’s failings.’
Gove then announced he would stand, and within minutes Johnson, appearing at what would have been his launch, pulled out, stunning his supporters in the audience who had not been forewarned.
Gove was surprised. He had expected Johnson to stay in the race and to tell him (Gove) that he would show him that he was good enough, friends said. May, who had a long-running dispute with Johnson when he was mayor when she opposed the use of water cannon on the streets of the capital, had barely launched her campaign when she learnt her long-time foe was out of the race.
As the carnage continued, Johnson backed Leadsom, stressing her trustworthiness in what was clearly a rebuke to Gove. Johnson’s team claimed that Gove had planned his desertion all along and that he had used their man to get the Brexit result and then stabbed him in the back and front, while running over him at the same time. That is denied by Gove’s team, who point to his constant disavowals of interest in the job.
After the first round of voting May was ahead, with Leadsom second and Gove third, his standing obviously harmed by his treatment of Johnson and Johnson’s decision to fall in behind Leadsom. Then came another twist. Boles quietly approached figures in the May campaign and asked if they could ‘lend’ Gove some votes so that he could finish second in the next ballot and keep Leadsom out of the final two-way run-off which would be decided by some 150,000 party members and not the MPs.
May would hear none of it and one of her team, I understand, told Boles that she was ‘going for gold’ and believed that the higher the number of MPs backing her, the greater her chance of defeating Leadsom or Gove, whoever came second. So Boles embarked on an extraordinary freelance operation which probably cost Gove any chance of making the final two.
Boles sent an e-mail to ten friends in the May camp suggesting there was a risk that if Leadsom’s name went through, members might back her because she shared their attitudes to modern life. He added that Gove would not mind taking a ‘good thrashing’ for May in the party’s interest.
By now the political world was immune to shocks in this astonishing saga but the Boles e-mail – which was leaked by a disaffected recipient and swiftly made public by Sam Coates of The Times – took a prize for infamy. Gove, having stopped Boris, was now it seemed prepared to go to any lengths to kill Leadsom’s hopes. This was unfair because Boles did not tell Gove about his manoeuvre. But the damage was done – and fatally.
I reproduce the e-mail in full. It said:
I would be really grateful if you would treat this in strict confidence. You are my friend. I respect the fact that you want Theresa May to be PM. It is overwhelmingly likely that she will be. And if she does I will sleep easily at night.
But I am seriously frightened about the risk of allowing Andrea Leadsom onto the membership ballot. What if Theresa stumbles? Are we really confident that the membership won’t vote for a fresh face who shares their attitudes about much of modern life? Like they did with IDS.
I am not asking you to respond unless you positively want to have a chat. But I hope that you will reflect on this carefully. Michael doesn’t mind spending 2 months taking a good thrashing from Theresa if that’s what it takes but in the party’s interest and the national interest surely we must work together to stop AL? x
Gove had stabbed Johnson, Boris had stabbed Gove, Gove’s friends had tried to stab Andrea. There were times during this period when an hour seemed a long time in politics.
Leadsom finished second in the next ballot and Gove was eliminated. Members were left with a choice between May’s substantial experience, including six years as home secretary, and her cautious but modern conservatism – it was she who first told the party to throw off its ‘nasty’ image – and Leadsom’s appeal to the party’s traditional core values: self-reliance, dislike of regulation, suspicion of social change such as same-sex marriage, and deep Euroscepticism.
The run-off began no less controversially than the early legs of the contest. Leadsom received a barrage of attacks after her ‘motherhood’ remarks to The Times on 9 July 2016. She was criticized by MPs for her lack of experience and naivety. Then on Monday, 11 July, just as May was officially launching her campaign in Birmingham and Cameron was speaking at the Farnborough air show, word emerged that Leadsom had had enough.
Surrounded by her supporters, she came out of her house and said she had decided to withdraw. Although she had won the backing of eighty-four MPs, she said