Britain’s man in Brussels bids goodbye
Good
news for hard Brexiteers. Bad news for everybody else.
By TOM MCTAGUE AND
CHARLIE COOPER 1/4/17, 5:36 AM CET Updated 1/4/17, 5:48 AM CET
LONDON – Ivan
Rogers had repeatedly threatened to quit as the U.K.’s ambassador
to the EU. On Tuesday he finally did, sending shockwaves through
London and Brussels.
Trying to bridge the
gap betweens Britain’s hopes for EU reform and the reality of what
the rest of Europe was willing to offer, Rogers had become
exasperated under former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, senior
officials in London have revealed. “I’ve lost count of the number
of times Ivan threatened to resign,” one Cameron adviser was quoted
as saying in All Out War, a book about the referendum.
Under the current
government’s demand of a full-blown Brexit that retains access to
the single market, the gulf became too wide, according to
conversations with senior officials in London and Brussels Tuesday.
When it came, his
resignation caught the British government off-guard, exposing cracks
in an administration struggling to contain the fallout from the
public’s rejection of the establishment in June’s referendum.
In Westminster,
there was only one interpretation Tuesday: Rogers’ decision to
throw in the towel before the Brexit talks have even begun is good
news for hard Brexiteers and bad news for everybody else.
In his resignation
note, which was obtained by the BBC, Rogers told colleagues: “I
hope you will continue to challenge ill-founded arguments and muddled
thinking and that you will never be afraid to speak the truth to
those in power.”
Despite Rogers’
widely-known concerns about Brexit, his resignation left Westminster
stunned and sparked allegations of chaos and amateurism at the heart
of government. With barely three months to go before the most complex
diplomatic negotiation in British history, the U.K. has lost its most
experienced Brussels fixer.
Nick Macpherson, the
permanent secretary at the Treasury to former Chancellor of the
Exchequer George Osborne, said Rogers’ decision was a “huge loss”
to the government. He said he could not understand the “wilful
[and] total destruction of EU expertise.” It was not clear from his
comment, made on Twitter, who was doing the destroying but on
decisions at this level of the civil service, the buck stops with
May.
Government
sources tried to play down the news, insisting it made sense for
Rogers to leave before the negotiations start in the spring.
Macpherson also
accused the prime minister of sidelining senior figures in the civil
service with expertise on Europe. Tom Scholar, Macpherson’s
replacement at the Treasury, is now “out of the loop,” on the
exit talks, Macpherson said, alongside other senior figures in
government, including the former British permanent representative to
the EU Jon Cunliffe, now at the Bank of England.
The unusually candid
remarks from a former senior civil servant expose mounting
frustration within government at the prime minister’s handling of
the Brexit negotiations. There is a growing perception that she is
pursuing a clean break from Brussels, driven by the demands of her
party and the hardliners in her government, led by the U.K.’s
Brexit Secretary David Davis, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and
Trade Secretary Liam Fox.
Osborne himself paid
tribute on Twitter to a “perceptive, pragmatic and patriotic public
servant.” His reference to Rogers’ commitment to the U.K.
appeared to be a thinly veiled rebuttal to the diplomat’s numerous
right-wing critics, many of whom viewed him as a signed-up Europhile
who went native many years ago. The description is ironic — many
pro-Europeans saw him as too Euroskeptic when he was appointed by
Cameron in 2013.
Former British Prime
Minister David Cameron walks with Britain's ambassador to the
European Union Ivan Rogers at the EU headquarters in Brussels on June
28, 2016
David Cameron, then
British prime minister, walks with Ivan Rogers at the EU headquarters
in Brussels on June 28, 2016 | Thierry Charlier/AFP via Getty Images
One early tip to
replace Rogers is Kim Darroch, a former EU permanent representative
who is currently the U.K. ambassador in Washington. Darroch is
already under pressure to be replaced, given U.S. President-elect
Donald Trump’s public courting of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
Despite Macpherson’s
concerns, Cunliffe and Scholar could also still be in the frame.
Exits before Brexit
Rogers’
resignation follows the departure of his deputy Shan Morgan in
November. The prime minister’s official spokeswoman Helen Bower —
an expert on Brussels — has also recently announced that she is
leaving her post, choosing to return to the Foreign Office instead of
continuing in Number 10.
Jill Rutter, a
director at the Institute for Government and former senior civil
servant, said it was a blow for the U.K.’s permanent representation
to the EU.
“To lose the top
two officials at the same time risks the loss of big networks of
contacts and potential capital assembled over years which could have
been useful in negotiations,” Rutter said.
Government sources
tried to play down the news, insisting it made sense for Rogers to
leave before the negotiations start in the spring and pointing out
that he was due to stand down at the end of October anyway.
However, the timing
of the announcement raised eyebrows in Whitehall as it came months
after the prime minister first announced plans to trigger Article 50
by the end of March. “It doesn’t appear to have been handled for
minimum impact,” one former high-ranking Whitehall official said.
“If they were trying, they certainly haven’t succeeded.”
Former Europe
Minister Denis MacShane said Rogers was “sending a signal on behalf
of his wing of the British establishment and state that Brexit can
turn into a monumental disaster unless handled carefully and with far
more political courage than the prime minister has managed so far.”
A government caught
off-guard
Rogers’ decision
appeared to catch British officials in Brussels and London by
surprise. There was no official announcement or polite exchange of
pleasantries as would normally be expected. The news leaked out
barely an hour after the prime minister’s team had briefed the
press on the day’s news without a mention of the impending
resignation.
It took two hours
before an official statement confirming the departure was released.
No explanation for his decision was given.
Rogers had become a
whipping boy for the Euroskeptic press after the leak of a memo from
him, warning Number 10 that a trade deal with the EU could take as
much as 10 years.
“The
Foreign Office needs a complete clear out” — Nigel
Farage
Leading Brexiteers
were quick to welcome his decision to quit. Farage suggested that
many other pro-EU civil servants should go the same way. “The
Foreign Office needs a complete clear out,” he said on Twitter.
Conservative MP
Dominic Raab, a close ally of Brexit Secretary Davis, told POLITICO:
“Sir Ivan is a distinguished diplomat with a long record of public
service. He didn’t exactly hide the fact that his heart wasn’t in
Brexit, and he was due to step down in the autumn anyway. It makes
sense all round to give the ambassador who will see the negotiations
through some lead time.”
On the other side of
the fence, there was barely concealed despair. Charles Grant,
director of the Centre for European Reform, said the resignation
makes “a good deal on Brexit less likely,” describing Rogers as
“one of the [very] few people at top of [the British government]
who understand EU.”
Paul Adamson, one of
the British grandees in Brussels and a longtime friend of Rogers,
said: “This is serious. This is worrying. This is troubling.”
Adamson, who now works as a consultant, said that “20 years ago
Ivan was the chief of staff to Commissioner Leon Brittan. This is a
man who knows his way around Europe. He is not someone who tries to
make trouble, to be difficult. He is someone with lots of
friendships, lots of access, perhaps more than any other perm rep,
and now that is lost.”
“It is rather
sinister, and feeds into the narrative that the government can’t
agree (on how to handle Brexit) and in effect doesn’t know what
it’s doing.”
Referring to the
demands of Farage and others, he added: “What do they want? An
ethnic cleansing of diplomats? It makes everyone rather incredulous
[here in Brussels] if the only way to be considered a team player for
the U.K. is to be blindly oblivious to how Europe works.”
Ryan Heath in
Brussels contributed reporting.
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