The pair shared an office directly outside Mrs May’s and in a breach of usual practice they were given their own civil service private secretary in an attempt to smooth relations with other officials. It didn’t work.
One senior figure in the government department outside Downing Street told The Times that a policy would be agreed by No 10 officials only to be ripped up when it was sent for sign-off by the “twins”.
But it is the allegation that pressuring and ordering about of senior civil servants went unchallenged that is potentially the most damaging to Sir Jeremy.
In one instance Helen Bower, the prime minister’s official spokeswoman, was banned on the orders of Ms Hill from travelling to America when Mrs May first met Donald Trump. It was the first time in 20 years that the prime minister had not been accompanied by her official spokesman on such a trip.
“Fiona took umbrage with Helen and decided she could get lost,” was one insider’s take on what happened. “It was shambolic.” It is understood that Ms Hill was unhappy with Ms Bower, who had disagreed with decisions on media strategy. Ms Bower took up a new role in the foreign office.
Her replacement — in her civil service role — was James Slack, the political editor of the Daily Mail. While the £140,000 post was advertised, only seven people applied and none of them was internal. Unusually, recruitment consultants were not brought in to help to find a suitable candidate.
Mr Case, Mrs May’s principal private secretary, was also said to have been put under considerable pressure by the pair to the extent that he looked for jobs elsewhere in the civil service.
Another senior civil servant who worked in the Ministry of Justice was forced out of his job within days of Mrs May coming to power because he was seen as being too close to the prime minister’s old enemy Michael Gove.
The official was put on gardening leave at the taxpayers’ expense before taking on a role in the Cabinet Office, which suggested that instructions for his removal came from the Ministry of Justice. However, the civil servant believed that Ms Hill was involved in the decision.
Several of those who believe they were forced out, and who have spoken to The Times on the guarantee of anonymity, felt betrayed by their treatment. “One by one, May’s team got Heywood to replace permanent secretaries and senior Downing Street officials across Whitehall, plus the head of the UK’s delegation in Brussels, and brought in officials more compliant to Downing Street’s complete hegemony,” one source claimed.
Another said: “The prime minister’s team ran a coach and horses through the civil service rule book and no one seemed interested in stopping them.”
Sir Leigh Lewis, a former permanent secretary, suggested that the style of management in No 10 under Mrs May led to bad decision-making. “It seems to have been pretty common knowledge that Downing Street was characterised by powerful gatekeepers who were highly intolerant of anyone who challenged their view.”
A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “Sir Jeremy Heywood takes his responsibilities as head of the civil service very seriously, including ensuring special advisers comply with their code of conduct.”
The Times contacted Mr Timothy and Ms Hill. Mr Timothy declined to comment on “unsourced personal attacks”. Ms Hill did not respond.
FOOD AND SERVICE IN A TIME MACHINE
Giles Coren reviews Assaggi
JUNE 17 2017
FOR A LONG time, I believed that Assaggi in Notting Hill was the best restaurant in London. Because that was what everybody told me.
Michael Winner certainly loved it. So did AA Gill (I think). The wealthy parents of friends of mine in my relative youth, who had houses in Italy and professed to love plain honest peasant cooking and revile all fanciness and pretension, simply adored Assaggi. And friends of my generation who were still living in Notting Hill into the present century (none does now) were always insanely proud of being able to get a table there and bestowed seats at it upon their friends with the beaming munificence of oriental potentates offering a grubby traveller his pick from the royal harem.
So I used to go along when invited — I could never get a table of my own — and observe how they enjoyed being hugged by the owner and brought little nibbles of this and glasses of that and I’d think, “That looks a nice gang to be in.” The room was always very bright and airy, and it always seemed to be summer in there. The clientele was aged 30–60, very wealthy, very local, incredibly happy and usually drunk.
They loved the fact that downstairs was just a pub (the Chepstow, I think it was called) because this enabled them to say, “It’s just a dining room over a pub.” So you could tell they were just simple, honest folk. Totally unpretentious. And they were. After all, their houses down the road were then worth only £5–£10 million. Although I don’t think any of them ever set foot in the pub.
And the food would come out: simple pasta dishes, a fritto misto, veal chops, a panna cotta. So simple, so plain, so marvellous. There would be three or four bottles of “simple Italian wine”, coffee, and then the bill for six of us — that lovely table for six by the big window in the middle of the room — would be, ooh, maybe a thousand pounds. Honestly. Less than two hundred pounds a head. But then of course it was just a simple peasant supper in a room over a pub. You wouldn’t expect to pay real money.
So there it was: Assaggi in Notting Hill. Best restaurant in the best part of the best city in the world. My jealousy of its initiati knew no limits.
And then a couple of years ago I heard it had closed. Which I thought was odd, seeing as it was the best restaurant in London. But then of course restaurants in areas like that are struggling now. Because the £5–£10 million houses of 2002 have been going for more like £40–£50 million in recent years. And the people who have that sort of money to spend on a house can’t afford to live in it, because their tax arrangements keep them out of the country for most of the year. So the local restaurants do tend to struggle.
But then Assaggi reopened. And I gathered that it had all been about complications with the lease and that it was the same guy as before at the helm and he now had the whole building (this area really, really has no need for pubs), so that downstairs was no longer just a humble pub but a humble pizza restaurant owned by him.
The opportunity to try it arose when we invited our friends Katherine and Edward into town from their home in Berkshire for dinner. We needed somewhere close to Paddington station so they could get home afterwards, and of course Notting Hill is. Though I doubt the people who live round there these days know that.
I called to book using one of my usual crappy pseudonyms and had no trouble at all getting a four at 8pm the following Thursday, which was a little worrying. And then on the evening in question we drove quietly through the streets of Notting Hill, simply marvelling at the thought that 25 years ago these houses had normal people in them. English people. With jobs. And smiles. And children. Now they are immaculate multistorey palazzi with a permanent leaf-blowing guy and scampering Filipinas flitting past the windows, but nobody truly in residence at all.
Chepstow Place, the long residential road on which Assaggi is just about the only place of business, was completely quiet. Not a car in sight. Because although it is a residents’ zone that goes on till 10pm, the residents all park behind their security gates on revolving platforms that stack the cars all the way down to the water table and beyond. By day, this part of town is ablaze with the screech of angle grinders and the hammering of drills as the houses expand endlessly in every direction, but by night it is as empty and silent as the Zombie Dawn.
The new downstairs pizza restaurant was fully staffed but completely empty on a warm Thursday evening at 8pm. No appetite for casual pizza round here, it seems. I guess the Polish builders all bring their own sandwiches.
Upstairs in the famous old dining room — which is unchanged, with its orange walls and monochromatic modernist art — there were some people. But not as many as there used to be. And they are older than they were. I g
uess because it’s the same people. At 47, I am usually old enough to be the father of half the people in any given restaurant. Here, I could have been the son of any of them. Which from an inheritance point of view would have been most advantageous. Clearly they all live locally. You can tell from their red, angry faces that they are the very last of the old guard and feel lonely and embattled, like the final few Native Americans of the Old West, defiant in the face of smallpox, the 7th Cavalry, the Winchester repeater and “progress”.
The staff are lovely, friendly and comically old-school. The menu being printed only in Italian, they are desperate to recite it in its entirety with simultaneous translation. Not something I need (being familiar with Italian menus), but I wouldn’t have dreamt of preventing them from delivering what is clearly regarded as part of the “theatre”.
There was delicious pane carasau on the table (the cooking is broadly Sardinian) and I asked for an Ichnusa, a Sardinian beer. It came already in the glass, which is not how bottled beer should be served, and it was not cold. Beer that is not cold is as much use as a cat with no eyes. I sent it back and they brought a cold one in the bottle. Would have been classier to do that the first time.
The food that followed was okay. I had grilled fresh pecorino with rocket and San Daniele (£15.90), which I was directed to wrap in the flatbread provided. Quite jolly. Katherine’s stuffed courgette flowers (£14.90) were very deep-fried, all brown and crispy like spring rolls down the chippy. Esther liked her three scallops (£16.90) with pea purée and bacon, but found her piece of turbot (“Fish of the day” at £31), which ought to be a mild, meaty fish, to be a bit sloppy and fishy, served on quite tough vegetables, with nothing of interest (like a caper or two) to lift it.
The fritto misto was light, crispy, fresh and copious but the proud denial of the existence of aïoli or mayonnaise in the whole establishment, which was practically sung at me when I ordered, just made me yearn for it. For anything to alleviate the dryness. I suppose there were the soggy vegetables: courgettes like they used to do it in the old days — chopped, boiled, slung in a bowl — some shrivelled peas, some spinach. But I wasn’t impressed.
The wine list was short and expensive. We had the only gavi di gavi at £69.50, and a little tiramisu in a ramekin (£9) which was interesting only in that it was still on a menu in 2017.
I want to reiterate how lovely and attentive the staff were. I don’t want to dance on this restaurant’s grave. But the evening just demonstrated how much we have all moved on. This was food and service in a time machine. Not back to the red sauce and checked table cloths of the 1960s, but to the new bogusness of the 1990s, of Granita, Cibo and Conran’s Cantina del Ponte.
The already underpopulated room thinned further during our meal as the local oldsters shuffled out into the empty streets — haunted no doubt by memories of fun-filled evenings now almost a quarter-century gone — until soon it was just us and our £400 bill for an ordinary Italian meal with one bottle of wine. Just us in the empty restaurant in the empty street in the emptiest neighbourhood in England.
SOVEREIGN WEALTH
Leading Article
JUNE 24 2017
AMID THE CHAOS and the fury of the EU referendum campaign, the recriminations and denunciations, the pleas from executives and counsel from presidents, one short shibboleth pierced through the noise. “Take back control”, devastating in its simplicity, was once the clarion call of the Leave campaign. It is now the unofficial slogan of the government.
Yet a year after the vote, it is plain that to treat “control” as absolute, to view it as an end in itself divorced from its consequences, will not be in Britain’s interests. Brexit will work only if the government is open to co-operation, too.
Effectively elevated to her office by the political success of Brexiteers, Theresa May quickly assumed their three central ambitions: to take back control of our laws, borders and money. All spoke to decades of well-justified irritation at the overweening interference of European Union institutions and its political ambitions. Yet after a year beset by the quest for sovereignty, the government has found that it comes with costs. Some are imposed by the EU. Others flow from the basic tenets of economics and public policy.
Control of our laws was cast not just as a total repatriation of legislative powers from Brussels to Westminster, but also an end to the involvement of the European Court of Justice in the legal system. Already this is emerging as a flashpoint in the negotiation over citizens’ rights, as the EU demands a role for its own institutions in protecting its citizens after Brexit.
This may well be surmountable, but the government’s attitude to law-making will create bigger problems when it negotiates on trade. Even after months of conversation about Europe, senior politicians too often give the impression that their understanding of the European single market is hazy. They talk as if it were a club where EU leaders work as bouncers, granting or denying access. In truth it is a rule book. Where one country’s regulations line up with another’s, there is no need for arduous checks to make sure that goods and services crossing the border are legally compliant. That allows firms to do business unencumbered. Co-operating on laws is the essence of free trade.
Ministers have also been working to take back control of our borders. Here the prospect of absolute sovereignty is more perilous still. The peace process in Northern Ireland relies on a soft border between the North and the Republic. That means a border subject to little, not extra, control. When border checks were administered, they were symbols of division and targets for attack. Meanwhile the ambition to bear down on the number of people crossing Britain’s borders, cutting immigration to the tens of thousands, is routinely rebuffed by businesses leaders who need foreign labour. There are few Brits to fill the spots of EU workers since unemployment is at record lows.
The final aim, to take back control of our money, has perhaps proven the most paradoxical of all. Contributions to the EU budget were a major theme of the referendum campaign and it is right for the government to get them down. At the same time the British did not vote, as Philip Hammond said on Tuesday, to become poorer. Control of money will be bittersweet if there is less of it to control. That is all the more reason for the government to focus on free trade.
The prime minister has often been criticised for being too tight-lipped on Brexit, repeating slogans rather than going into detail. Since Mrs May’s Lancaster House speech in January, this critique has been unfair. She gave answers. However, the election revealed that her answers did not convince people. That is why pressure has been building since polling day for the government to think not just about taking control, but also taking responsibility for the future of the economy. This was a difficult year. Unless the government learns from the election, next year will be harder still.
THE PRIMITIVE LOST SOCIETY OF LOVE ISLAND
Ben Macintyre
JULY 1 2017
IN 1970 A GROUP of intrepid anthropologists approached North Sentinel Island, a speck of land in the middle of the Bay of Bengal that is home to the most isolated tribe on earth, a hunter-gatherer society without fire or agriculture, untouched by modern civilisation. The Sentinelese brandished spears and fired arrows from the shore. The scientists, not daring to land, watched from a safe distance.
“At this moment, a strange thing happened,” wrote one observer. “A woman paired off with a warrior and sat on the sand in a passionate embrace. This act was repeated by other women, each claiming a warrior for herself, a sort of community mating … When the tempo of this frenzied dance of desire abated, the couples retired into the shade of the jungle.”
This scene, baffling to the anthropologists, will be familiar to anyone who has been watching Love Island, the hugely popular ITV reality television show in which a group of young Britons in a villa on Mallorca have been cut off from the outside world and encouraged to mate.
Love Island is appallingly, compulsively watchable (one of the benefits of having a teenage daughter is th
at I have seen every episode). The contestants have beautiful bodies, extensive tattoos and, in some cases, very small brains. The coupling and recoupling takes place in a long dormitory, the equivalent of the shady Sentinelese jungle, where the islanders cavort beneath duvets in a strange half-light.
Love Island is manipulative, crass and oddly unerotic. But as an anthropological experiment it is quite remarkable: living evidence of how isolated communities swiftly evolve unique forms of behaviour. The culture of Love Island is artificial and ephemeral. Genuine island cultures shaped in seclusion, like that of the Sentinelese, are important, and in an increasingly homogenised world profoundly vulnerable. The very silliness of Love Island is a reminder of how real island cultures need to be preserved and protected.
The Love Islanders have already developed their own language, moulded by environment and community. “To mug someone off” (to take advantage of another’s feelings without reciprocation); “grafting” (flirting with sexual intent); “put it on” (sexual congress); “salty” (angry); “pie-ed” (to ditch a partner).
The contestants may be unaware that they are proof of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that perception is moulded by language, and vice versa. As Wittgenstein put it: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
The phrase “He was being super muggy, grafting on Montana and trying to put it on Tyla, so I got proper salty and pie-ed him” would not be comprehensible in the next-door villa. But the same is true of the Sentinelese, whose language is unclassified and unintelligible to their nearest neighbours.
The Love Islanders have their own mating rituals, pecking order and a special form of Darwinian selection in which only the fittest survive (as in: “Kem is well fit, so I will shag him, innit”). By implication, these naturally selected couples will breed together after the show to produce the next generation of handsome morons.
The Times Companion to 2017 Page 27