No Way Out — Tim Shipman on Brexit, Theresa May and the death of a premiership
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Tim Shipman, chief political commentator for The Sunday Times, is the doyen of contemporary chroniclers of the Brexit era. No Way Out is the third instalment of a quartet of books on the high politics of a turbulent and traumatic period, documenting the travails of the British political elite from the Brexit referendum in 2016 to Rishi Sunak’s arrival at 10 Downing Street in 2022.
Like its best-selling predecessors, All Out War and Fall Out, this new book is meticulously sourced, merciless and revelatory. It charts the bitter divisions, relentless setbacks and slow death of Theresa May’s premiership. It is a closely observed study of power, and how it is gained, used and lost. It is testament to Shipman’s journalistic skills that he can make a lengthy account of a prolonged, agonisingly protracted political failure into a fast-paced narrative.
May’s Brexit negotiations — within her own government as well as with Brussels, Conservative MPs and parliament — are the core of Shipman’s tale. The EU has a strategy for the sequencing, conduct and substantive outcomes of the Brexit talks; Britain does not. To compound this, May makes early mistakes, triggering the withdrawal process before Britain has any idea of what it wants to achieve, setting red lines that box her in and fatally conceding ground to the Eurosceptics in her party. Whitehall’s Brexit machinery is set up to fail and diplomatic expertise is squandered. Fantasies are indulged and trade-offs ignored. Tory unity is prized over parliamentary consensus.
The signature achievement of her negotiations — a bespoke all-UK customs alignment with the EU that largely obviates the need for a border in the Irish Sea — is politically undeliverable at home. MPs reject it three times. Facing its stiffest test in 80 years, British statecraft is found wanting.
In this febrile world, alliances are formed and political strategies negotiated in WhatsApp groups — those secluded, scheming shadowlands of modern politics. There is a “Trains and Buses” group of ex-transport ministers, and a cross-party “Mating Porcupines” group. There are “The Birthday Club”, “Room 34”, “January 15th” and “Tally-ho” groups. A “Croissant Club” of soft Brexit ministers is formed against the “Pizza Club” of Eurosceptics. When the hardcore Brexiter MPs style themselves the “Spartans” — curiously, in honour of the 300 warriors who were betrayed and slaughtered defending the pass at Thermopylae in 480BC — the Croissant Club feel they need “to arm themselves with something more threatening than flaky pastries”, and so become “the Rebel Alliance”.
Military metaphors abound. Boris Johnson imagines the “paleosceptic” Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of the Tory party, as an RAF wing commander, flying sorties over Bremen. A fellow MP concludes that Jacob Rees-Mogg is “not a man for close bayonet work”.
Shipman compares Westminster in these years to the TV drama Game of Thrones, the “pseudo-medieval swords and shagging epic pitching warring factions against each other in the quest for the iron throne”. As with his previous books, the text is liberally peppered with puerile, scatological and misogynist quotes. A minister who resigns is called the “Godzilla of c*nts”. Crucial legal advice of the attorney-general, baritone barrister Geoffrey Cox, becomes known as “Cox’s codpiece”. And so on.
The author pays due regard to the gravity of the decisions that MPs are called upon to take, and to the ideas and values that inform their judgments. But few reputations will be rescued from the condescension of posterity by his painstaking account. Key figures in May’s cabinet are, by turns, strategically misguided, politically naive, duplicitous or simply bad at playing the game. The Calvinist certainties of the Spartans betray their ignorance of the economic and political realities; when they are not sabotaging May’s premiership, they are riding Brexit unicorns.
Preoccupied with other issues, the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is mostly irrelevant to the fate of the nation, while Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party is short-sighted; simultaneously intransigent and easily duped. The Speaker, John Bercow, is partisan and puffed-up. An extended walk-on part is reserved for the breakaway Independent Group of MPs, who leave their parties in the hope of realigning politics, but flop and fail. Only the Brexit party, born out of the United Kingdom Independence party, succeeds in achieving its political mission, surging to victory in the European Parliamentary elections of 2019.
For its part, Brussels is stubborn and unyielding, and almost too successful for its own good. British civil servants fare better than they do in the standard Brexiter demonology of the “deep state”, but Shipman is critical of the excessive secrecy of May’s “kindred spirit” and lead negotiator, Olly Robbins. Perhaps the most surprisingly positive portrait is of Martin Selmayr, secretary-general and éminence grise of the European Commission, who demonstrates flexibility and sympathy for the British case and operates a high-level, discreet back channel to Robbins.
May herself is a dutiful and devoted public servant. There is none of the mendacity and chaos of the two regimes that follow hers at No 10. Her commitment to the union is genuine, unlike that of her successor Johnson, whom Shipman’s sources describe as dismissive of Northern Ireland.
But the central argument of the book is that May was a failure. She lacked the strategy, political acumen, communication skills and negotiating abilities demanded of a prime minister, particularly one called upon to deliver Brexit. She paves the way for Johnson: indeed, Shipman concludes that for many in her party, she made him necessary if the referendum result was to be respected.
No Way Out does not try to explain the larger forces at work, such as the forceful shift of the Conservative party to the radical Eurosceptic right, or why Britain’s business class and trade unions did so little to oppose a hard Brexit that was plainly not in their interests. But for those historians and political scientists seeking to study the past decade in British politics — and even those trying to chart a path to national renewal beyond Brexit — Shipman’s books are invaluable sources.
No Way Out: Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris by Tim Shipman William Collins £26, 736 pages
Nick Pearce is professor of public policy at the University of Bath and a former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit
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