Philip Hammond has given an interview that has once more ripped open the wounds of the Conservative party over Brexit. He says some deliberately revealing things: that Theresa May genuinely had no idea what sort of a Brexit she intended, so that when she made him chancellor after the referendum. “I sat in the cabinet room on that evening – and the only other person in the room was Fiona Hill – I did ask her about Brexit, and she said to me, ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ That was it. That was the only discussion we had about it.”
“I think she believed that she could park Brexit as just something we will get done: ‘It has been decided. Now let’s move on, and let me tell you about the Theresa May vision of the future’ … what the masterplan was, she didn’t know – because Nick Timothy hadn’t formulated it at that stage.”
And his character sketch of the man who had to negotiate with the EU as Brexit secretary is unforgettable: “David [Davis] … was the trouble-shooter for Tate & Lyle. When there was a problem, they sent David Davis. Shut down a refinery, fire a load of people, get rid of the troublemakers: the bare-knuckle fighter. That’s how he liked to see himself. David Davis’ approach to negotiation is you slap it on the table, you lean across, and you eyeball them. If they don’t give way immediately, you say, ‘I’ll see you round the back.’ That was always his view on this.”
He believes that the person ultimately responsible for Brexit was Tony Blair, who allowed unlimited immigration from eastern Europe after 2005 – but he also believes that something like Blair’s policy was essential and quite right. Even a Britain that managed its own borders would follow it: “We’d decide our regime and then, in practice, let in hundreds of thousands of European workers because our economy would have collapsed without them.”
No active politician could possibly say these things in public and survive, though many will say much worse, and worse expressed, about their colleagues in private. People think that success in politics depends on the ability to lie convincingly. It does not. What Hammond shows is that a politician needs the ability to ignore convincingly the inconvenient truth.
Lying is different; not because no one in politics does it, but because when it happens it’s usually pretty obvious. When a chancellor hears his own prime minister talking down their own currency, however, he has to pretend that it’s not happening. In the autumn of 2016, when Theresa May at last spelled out her vision of the hardest possible Brexit in a conference speech, Hammond was completely unprepared for what she would say and horrified by it. But all he could think of – sitting in the conference hall, under the eye of the television cameras – was that he must maintain an expression of polite interest for fear that the pound would crash even harder if his real emotions were to show.
But although this code is well enough understood by insiders, there is always a risk that outsiders will take them at face value. About David Cameron’s repeated promises to bring down immigration, Hammond says: “No one in the senior ranks of the Tory party, I don’t think – at that time ever believed that this was a pledge that would be delivered in practice … It was never a credible proposition.”
If any voters did, well, that was their problem – at least until the referendum made it everyone else’s, too.
Similarly, he takes for granted that when he was chancellor, the prime minister would try to mislead him, and she would try to mislead his enemies in cabinet as well. It was all part of the game. There was a certain tactical skill in doing so without actually saying anything false – simply allowing the other player to believe it – but the intention to mislead was taken for granted.
That he feels no need to spell any of this out is at least as revealing about the way that power actually works, and is understood to work by those who have it, than any of the poisoned barbs of gossip he has planted in his former colleagues’ backs.
Yet there is a cost to these games. Hammond’s candour reminds us that almost the most dangerous thing in modern politics is to be caught out telling a really obvious truth. Orwell famously wrote that it is a constant struggle to see what is in front of your own nose; making other people see what’s right in front of theirs is harder, and you won’t be thanked.