The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  Rydon, the firm that carried out the Grenfell regeneration, said its work had “met all required building regulations — as well as fire regulations and health and safety standards”.

  HELMUT KOHL

  Obituary

  JUNE 17 2017

  HELMUT KOHL was nine when the Second World War broke out. The conflict “abruptly and mercilessly ended an almost ideal childhood”, he recalled. His father, Johann, a civil servant who loathed the Nazis, was forced to join the Wehrmacht and sent to Poland. Eighty per cent of his home town of Ludwigshafen, an industrial centre near the French border, was destroyed by seemingly endless waves of allied bombing raids. His brother, Walter, was crushed to death when an allied bomber crashed into a pylon.

  As a young teenager Kohl helped firemen to retrieve charred bodies from wrecked buildings. In late 1944 he was sent to a pre-military training camp as part of Hitler’s desperate effort to save the Third Reich by enlisting boys and old men, and ended up in Bavaria. At the war’s end he and three classmates walked 250 miles back to Ludwigshafen through a country in ruins. They scavenged for food, were attacked by liberated Polish prisoners, and saw the bodies of deserters hanging from trees.

  Those searing experiences shaped Kohl’s life. They inspired him to enter politics to rebuild his country and to pursue European integration to ensure that there would never again be war on the Continent.

  He was strikingly successful. Along with Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher, he helped to bring the Cold War to an end. As the longest-serving chancellor since Otto von Bismarck a century earlier he played a central role in ending the postwar division of Germany and of Europe. He forced the pace of European integration, primarily by championing the monetary union that created the euro. And he helped to re-establish Germany as a strong and positive force in Europe, Nato and the broader international community. Much of that he achieved despite enormous obstacles and substantial opposition. It was a remarkable record for a man who was a butt of jokes and fodder for comedians for much of his political career.

  Kohl was no intellectual. He was not charismatic. He spoke only German, and that with a thick provincial accent. He was a poor public performer, prompting one rival to joke that his television performances gave “the impression that anybody could become chancellor”. He was 6ft 4in, weighed more than 300lb, and was dubbed the birne, or “pear”, because of his great bulk. President Clinton once told Kohl at a Nato summit that he reminded him of a sumo wrestler.

  However, Kohl’s provincialism, his lack of airs and graces, was an important part of his appeal. Germans identified with him, trusted him and liked the aura of stability and reassurance that he exuded. Rather than rely on advisers, he spent hours calling lowly officials around the country to find out what ordinary Germans were thinking. Even as chancellor he spent weekends at his neat, comfortable bungalow in a suburb of Ludwigshafen called Oggersheim, mingling with the townsfolk. He took holidays in the same Austrian village each year. He liked to wear well-worn cardigans and slippers in his office. “I am certainly not the embodiment of elegance,” he readily admitted.

  He was jovial, gregarious and loved to eat, especially hearty traditional German food, which he gleefully inflicted on visiting foreign leaders. “Lunch consisted of potato soup, pig’s stomach [which the German chancellor clearly enjoyed], sausage, liver dumplings and sauerkraut,” Margaret Thatcher recalled with evident distaste after spending a day with Kohl in Ludwigshafen.

  By and large he got on well with foreign leaders. They appreciated his directness. He forged a special bond with President Mitterrand of France, with whom he held a memorable meeting on the First World War battlefield at Verdun in 1984. Their long handshake became a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation, and the two men subsequently became a powerful force for deeper European integration. Kohl shed tears at Mitterrand’s funeral.

  He also built friendships with the elder President Bush and Gorbachev, the Soviet president, that served him well when he required international approval for German reunification. He shared saunas with Boris Yeltsin and big meals with Bill Clinton, another notorious trencherman. He and John Major enjoyed each other’s company.

  The one leader with whom he never managed to establish a strong relationship was Thatcher. Their political differences were obvious: Kohl regarded European integration as the key to ensuring peace in Europe, while Thatcher saw it as a threat to British sovereignty and a back-door route to German domination of the Continent.

  There was little personal chemistry. One of their first meetings was in Salzburg, Austria, where Thatcher was on holiday. Kohl tired of her company and cut the meeting short, claiming that he had another important engagement. Thatcher, with time on her hands, walked around the streets and found Kohl sitting outside a tea house eating a huge cream cake. “My God! That man is so German!” she exclaimed after another of their meetings.

  Kohl, in his memoirs, said of his British nemesis: “It was very unpleasant to have her as an opponent. The enmity didn’t finish at the end of the day. It carried on the next morning.” He told her: “Margaret, the difference between you and me is that I live in a time after Churchill and you live in the time before him.”

  Kohl was far shrewder than he looked: “I have been underestimated for decades. I have done very well that way,” he once remarked, and for a while he hung magazine articles predicting his political demise on a wall outside his office. His rather slow, clumsy appearance masked a ruthlessness, a sharp political brain and a hunger for power that matched his appetite for food. He built networks, dispensed patronage and seldom forgave those who crossed him. He perfected the policy of aussitzen — waiting till a problem disappeared or opponents gave in. Having spent a lifetime working his way up the political ladder, he also enjoyed total dominance of his party, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union.

  That dominance contributed to his eventual downfall. Soon after losing his bid for an unprecedented fifth term as chancellor, Kohl was found to have accepted illegal donations to his party. He refused to name the anonymous donors. In 2000 he was forced to resign as the CDU’s honorary president and criminal charges were dropped only after he agreed to pay a £100,000 fine.

  That scandal was closely followed by a personal disaster. In 2001 Hannelore, his dutiful wife of 40 years, killed herself. Kohl had met her at a dance in Ludwigshafen when she was 15, although they did not marry for another 12 years. She was a refugee from Leipzig, which had been occupied by the Red Army at the end of the war, and a Soviet soldier had raped her at the age of 12. Her suicide was attributed to a condition called photodermatitis, an allergy to sunlight from which she had suffered for many years, but some commentators also blamed his neglect of her and his political disgrace.

  Kohl subsequently married Maike Richter, a woman 34 years his junior who had worked as an economist in his chancellery. Neither of Kohl’s two sons by Hannelore was invited to the wedding. Walter Kohl, a businessman who is married to a Korean, and Peter Kohl, an author and entrepreneur married to a Turkish banker, were estranged from their father. They accused their stepmother of having had an affair with him before their mother’s death and of keeping him “like a prisoner” in his Ludwigshafen bungalow in his old age.

  Kohl was the most successful German chancellor of modern times and shaped the history of the late 20th century, but his family paid the price.

  Helmut Kohl was born into a conservative, Roman Catholic family in Ludwigshafen in 1930. By the time he returned to his home town at the end of the Second World War he was a young man with a mission. “Materially and morally Germany was in ruins,” he said. “The thought of being able to shape and help build something fascinated me.”

  He joined the newly formed CDU at 17, and in one youthful escapade with political overtones he and some friends tore down signs on the German-French border near Ludwigshafen. After studying law in Frankfurt, gaining a PhD in political science in Heidelberg and working briefly in the chemical i
ndustry that dominates Ludwigshafen he became, at 30, the youngest member of the state legislature in Rhineland-Palatinate. At 39 he became the youngest state premier, at 43 the youngest national chairman of the CDU and at 52 Germany’s youngest chancellor — although not through an election.

  As the CDU’s leader in 1976 Kohl had won 48.6 per cent of the vote, but was denied the chancellorship when Helmut Schmidt’s centre-left Social Democrats formed a coalition government with the liberal Free Democratic Party. In 1980 Franz Josef Strauss, leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU, was the centre-right’s candidate and lost. Kohl became chancellor two years later only because the FDP abandoned the Social Democrats and formed a coalition with the CDU instead. He governed without a mandate until the elections of March 1983, when he won a resounding victory — the first of three during his 16 years at the helm.

  Kohl soon showed his mettle by accepting US intermediate-range nuclear missiles on German soil, despite huge domestic protests that reflected the anti-war, anti-American sentiment sweeping western Europe. It was a courageous decision that dashed Soviet hopes of splitting Nato and bolstered the resolve of the western alliance at a time when it was faltering. Kohl called the debate “one of the most dramatic in German postwar history”. It helped, perhaps, that his family had received care packages from the US in the desperate days after the war, leaving him with an unshakeable affection for America.

  Kohl was the first German chancellor since the war to visit Israel. He also visited Auschwitz in Poland, where he vowed that there would be no repetition of the “unspeakable harm” perpetrated by the Nazis. He sought to develop ties with eastern Europe generally, and was the first chancellor to invite an East German president, Erich Honecker, to Bonn when that city was still the capital of West Germany.

  Kohl’s invitation to President Reagan to join him at a German military cemetery in Bitburg proved a less successful symbol of reconciliation. The visit generated great controversy because the cemetery was found to contain the graves of 49 members of Hitler’s SS.

  The crowning achievement of Kohl’s chancellorship was undoubtedly the peaceful reunification of Germany with Soviet consent, an outcome that was far from certain immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Thatcher spoke for many Europeans when she voiced fears of a huge, resurgent Germany dominating Europe — “We defeated the Germans twice, and now they’re back!” she famously declared at a Strasbourg summit that December, and convened a meeting of historians at Chequers to discuss the question of “how dangerous are the Germans?” Whether Gorbachev, as a reform-minded president, would permit — or could survive — the loss of a Warsaw Pact state to Nato was not clear.

  Kohl seized the moment, or at the very least exploited a rapidly unfolding series of events that nobody could control. As other western leaders dithered he announced, with prior consultation, a ten-point plan for eventual reunification. The CDU’s sister party in the German Democratic Republic trounced the old communists in the GDR’s first free elections. The GDR’s new parliament formally sought accession to the Federal German Republic. East Germany’s economy collapsed and the deutschmark replaced the ostmark.

  Kohl obtained Gorbachev’s approval for reunification in return for economic and technical aid. He assuaged Polish fears by renouncing claims to territory that was historically German. George HW Bush, the US President, insisted only that the enlarged Germany remain a Nato member. Thatcher and Mitterrand found they had little choice but to acquiesce, and the prime minister later called her opposition to reunification an “unambiguous failure”.

  At midnight on October 3, 1990 — scarcely 11 months after the Wall fell — East and West Germany officially became one, with Berlin as the capital. It was a huge personal triumph for Kohl, who stormed to a third victory in the first federal elections to be held in a reunited Germany that December. The chancellor was well aware of the fears that an enlarged Germany raised in the rest of Europe. Indeed, he shared them. Reunification spurred his efforts to achieve greater European integration, even if that meant ditching the mighty deutschmark. It inspired a “rush to European federalism as a way of tying down Gulliver”, Thatcher wrote in her memoirs. This, she added, “formed the background to the ever more intense battles on monetary and political union in which I henceforth found myself engaged”.

  The result was the Maastricht treaty of 1992, which paved the way for monetary union and the introduction of the euro in 1999 — with Britain opting out. The motivation was as much political as economic, as Kohl readily acknowledged. “We want the political union of Europe. If there’s no monetary union then there can’t be political union, and vice versa,” he explained. In the event political union did not materialise to anything like the degree he envisaged, and a decade later the consequences for the single currency became painfully apparent.

  Reunification had another consequence that Kohl did not foresee. Absorbing East Germany proved a huge drag on the entire German economy, causing sluggish growth and high unemployment. He won a fourth election in 1994, but rashly sought a record fifth term in 1998. By that time Germany was no longer Europe’s economic pacesetter. It yearned for new and younger leadership. Kohl’s CDU suffered its worst defeat in half a century at the hands of Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats, losing even in Ludwigshafen. He wept openly as he stepped down as chairman of the CDU after 25 years.

  Worse was to follow in the form of the funding scandal and his wife’s suicide. In 2004 he had to be airlifted from a Sri Lankan hotel after the Asian tsunami. In 2008 his driver found him lying on the floor of his Ludwigshafen kitchen, a pool of blood by his head, having apparently suffered a stroke. By the end of his life he could not walk and had difficulty speaking, and the euro was in crisis. Yet the setbacks of his later years appear slight when balanced against his historic achievements. Kohl will be remembered as one of the most influential statesmen of modern Europe.

  NICK TIMOTHY AND FIONA HILL: HOW CIVIL SERVANTS LIVED IN FEAR OF THE TERRIBLE TWINS AT No 10

  Oliver Wright, Francis Elliott, Bruno Waterfield

  JUNE 17 2017

  IT MUST HAVE seemed at the time like an innocent enough sentiment.

  As the former shadow chancellor Ed Balls left Strictly Come Dancing last November a press officer working in Downing Street tweeted: “Alas it’s over. Well done Ed Balls for getting this far & entertaining us.” Robin Gordon-Farleigh knew he was being followed by Theresa May’s chief of staff Nick Timothy. What he could not have predicted was his reaction.

  Mr Timothy called aside the prime minister’s principal private secretary, Simon Case, and demanded that Mr Gordon-Farleigh be reprimanded for breaking the rules on civil service neutrality. By the time the reprimand reached Mr Gordon-Farleigh it was more of a warning: “Be careful, they’re watching everything you do.” A few months later Mr Gordon-Farleigh decided to leave government.

  He was one of the lucky ones. In their time in government, The Times has been told, Mr Timothy and his fellow chief of staff Fiona Hill forced out or sidelined supposedly independent civil servants, some after a period of alleged bullying, in direct contravention of Whitehall codes of conduct.

  As far back as 2011 Ms Hill was officially reprimanded by Gus O’Donnell, the cabinet secretary, for her behaviour. On several occasions the senior civil service union was called in to represent those who had fallen foul of Ms Hill.

  Now that they have departed serious questions are being asked about how two unelected political aides could ride roughshod over the civil service while exercising such an iron grip on everything the prime minister saw or heard.

  The role of the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, is also under scrutiny, with senior civil servants questioning why he did so little to rein in the pair.

  “He abdicated his responsibility as leader of the civil service,” one senior former No 10 staff member told The Times. “You were on your own and the people you looked up to in the house — people like Jeremy Heywood �
� to give you that cover absolutely didn’t.”

  Joey Jones, a former adviser to Mrs May, said: “Responsibility for the toxic dynamic in Downing Street was not Nick and Fi’s alone. Senior people in the civil service should also ask themselves searching questions.” The Times has been told that at least one senior official intimately involved in the Brexit negotiations was at one stage prevented from seeing the prime minister by Mr Timothy. Sir Ivan Rogers, who was then Britain’s permanent representative to the EU, tried to alert Mrs May to what he believed were flaws in the government’s understanding of Brussels.

  “He was told that he couldn’t write submissions to the prime minister and that everything had to go through the chief of staff,” one insider said.

  “He tried to get one-to-one meetings with Mrs May and was rebuffed. Everything that the prime minister saw or heard was controlled by Nick.”

  Senior sources said no attempt was made by Sir Jeremy to ensure Sir Ivan got access to Mrs May. Believing he had been frozen out, Sir Ivan quit. A former senior Whitehall figure said that had disastrous consequences for the initial stages of Brexit preparations.

  “Losing Ivan Rogers at that point was really bad just as we were preparing our position on Article 50,” they said. “He was ex-Treasury and knew about budgets and financial services and how Brussels works. They just lost that. You’ve ended up with yes men and they’re bloody useless to everybody.”

  Sir Ivan’s isolation was possible because the pair ripped up the previous practice in Downing Street that senior civil servants could directly put submissions and papers into the prime minister’s nightly and weekend red boxes.

  Under the new regime material seen by the prime minister had to be vetted first either by Mr Timothy or Ms Hill. That not only dismayed Whitehall but gummed up the process of decision-making by inserting a fresh layer of bureaucracy into the No 10 operation.