How Distrust And Division In The Downing Street Bunker Doomed Theresa May's Premiership
Prime Minister Theresa May leaves after she announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street.
While they put on a unified front for the media scrum, in truth the relationships between May and her aides had been tested to the extreme over the last two years. Those who worked with the PM's top team throughout their time in office say it was this siege mentality that ultimately caused her downfall.had been filled with the chaotic scenes that summed up a premiership characterised by distrust, miscommunication, and an insular PM whose mind even her highest-ranking aides never fully knew.
That same day Barwell told a cabinet minister and another Conservative MP that her team knew she had no option but to quit. But May ignored Smith’s attempted interventions and ploughed ahead with her proposal. According to a cabinet minister present, as ministers trudged out of the room with the PM determined to put the bill to a vote, an exasperated Smith commented under his breath: “Well, you’re going to lose.”From left to right: Theresa May's director of communications Robbie Gibb, her chief of staff Gavin Barwell, her parliamentary private secretary Andrew Bowie, and her husband Philip.
On December 8, cabinet ministers came out of a conversation with the PM privately declaring the backstop “fine”. Gibb insisted to other Leavers that the government was pursuing a “clean Brexit” closer to a Canada-style free trade deal than remaining closely aligned to the EU in a type of customs union.In July 2018, Boris Johnson and David Davis resigned from the government in protest at May’s proposed ‘Chequers’ plan, which would have seen the UK have a much closer future relationship with Brussels than they had expected.
Journalists from the Spectator, Telegraph, BrexitCentral, LBC and others sat as Barwell — a Remain voter who tweeted the day after the referendum that the Leave result was a victory for “the politics of hate and division” — explained that they could not have the type of Brexit they wanted. Another government aide said of their Number 10 superiors: “They became quite fundamentalist, almost religious in their belief that there was no Brexit but theirs, and that Brexiteers opposing them were apostates deserving of nothing but contempt.”
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