LONDON — Theresa May has found her Willie.

Every prime minister needs one, Margaret Thatcher famously quipped, in praise of her long-serving and long-suffering deputy Willie Whitelaw. Until this summer's U.K. general election, May was so dominant she didn’t feel the need for a loyal No. 2, preferring to rule alone with her attack dog chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.

Disaster at the ballot box on June 8 changed everything. Out went the two chiefs and much of the prime minister’s authority. Cabinet ministers, already split between soft Brexiteers — like Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond — and hard-line Leavers — like David Davis and Boris Johnson — were liberated to fight among themselves.

The prime minister had asked the country to strengthen her negotiating position with Brussels, but emerged from the bruising seven-week campaign with one hand tied behind her back. She had to reshape her team in Downing Street — and more importantly her approach to governing — to stand any chance of delivering Brexit with the consent of all wings of her party and the 10 Democratic Unionist Party MPs upon whose support her government rests.

May quickly concluded she needed a broker, according to senior government officials, and turned to Damian Green, the prime minister’s oldest friend in politics — a passionate pro-European, liberal Tory and May loyalist with friends across both wings of the party.

Green is the peacemaker finding compromise between the competing demands of the hard and soft Brexiteers.

On Saturday June 10, barely 24 hours after confirmation that the government had lost its majority, Green was called into No. 10 Downing Street and promoted to first secretary of state — the most senior position in government below the office of prime minister. His promotion was announced by email that day. It was a stellar rise for the work and pensions secretary who had only been in the Cabinet since July 2016, having been sacked from the government in 2014 for being, it was whispered by Tory MPs at the time, too “old, pale and stale.”

Along with the prime minister and Brexit Secretary Davis, Green is now, officially, one of the three most important people in the Brexit process. His role, he said in an interview with POLITICO, is to act as the oil in the government machine, keeping it ticking along whenever it shows signs of grinding to a halt in acrimony, dispute or petty rivalry. Green is the prime minister's Brexit broker, the peacemaker finding compromise between the competing demands of the hard and soft Brexiteers sitting around the Cabinet table.

“Every government needs a fixer,” Green said last week, sitting in his office a short walk from the prime minister's in the heart of the Whitehall government machine. “There will be conflicting interests between departments and they need solving. Every government needs this to happen. Different governments find different ways of doing it.”

A negotiator, not an enforcer

Many who know Green say he is well-suited to his new role at the prime minister’s side. His job, he said, is not to enforce her will — as the former chiefs of staff Timothy and Hill saw their role — but to negotiate problems between other Cabinet ministers. The power dynamics have shifted and so too must the way the prime minister handles them.

Green is a daily presence inside May’s new-look Downing Street operation, which is headed up by "the Gavins" — chief of staff Gavin Barwell and chief whip Gavin Williamson — and new Director of Communications Robbie Gibb.

“The atmosphere is indescribably better since the election, and Damian is a big part of that,” one senior No. 10 official said. “He is a good guy to have around. You cannot help but like him. But he’s also very sharp and crucially he gets media — he used to be a hack.”

Aides refer to Green ubiquitously as the FSS — First Secretary of State — and say his affable manner chimes with that of the calm and collected Barwell and Gibb. “Everyone is saying how much better it is in terms of being listened to compared with the old regime,” said one former No. 10 staffer. "MPs and Cabinet ministers, Leave or Remain — Damian gets on with everyone.”

A serving Tory minister, who said he could not speak on the record, agreed. "He is an excellent choice as fixer-in-chief. At a time when we need grown ups around the place, Damian fits the bill perfectly.”

Others are less effusive, though. One former ministerial colleague in the Home Office, who did not wish to be named, damned him with faint praise. “He’s a reasonably nice guy," the former minister said. "He’s more left of center than most, but his appointment demonstrates a lack of confidence that she [May] has to surround herself with Home Office people.”

Green is centrist, amiable and a consistent media performer, but his career in parliament has not been without controversy.

In 2008 he was arrested by counterterrorism police on suspicion of "conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office, and aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office" after obtaining leaked Whitehall documents. After a political furor over Green's arrest, he was acquitted without charge. Green would later go on to be police minister in the Home Office.

The ace up Green's sleeve is that elusive asset in British politics at the moment — having the trust of the prime minister, according to government officials familiar with his relationship.

May has known Green since university in the 1970s, when they were contemporaries at Oxford. They met through Green’s then girlfriend and now wife, Alicia Collinson, who was May’s tutorial partner. Collinson, who studied geography with May at St Hugh’s College, would later reveal how the young Theresa Brasier had her eyes on No. 10 even then, she told the Spectator magazine.

Both Green and May were elected to parliament in 1997, both appointed to junior education roles a year later and then worked together in the Home Office from 2010.

Brexit fixer

Even in the three months he’s been in the job, Green has been forced to call in bickering Cabinet ministers to resolve their disputes in person around his grand, coffin-shaped desk in his room in the cabinet office, he said.

Cabinet fallouts, common in any government, have taken on even more significance as the clock ticks down to March 29, 2019, when Britain leaves the European Union with or without an exit deal. Rows over money, or ideology, cannot be kicked into the long grass — they need to be resolved, and resolved quickly, or Brexit could spiral out of control.

Green has had to mobilize on two occasions over the summer to rescue key government legislation caught between the competing demands of hard and soft Brexiteers in the Cabinet, senior officials said.

The upcoming trade white paper, which government officials said was penciled in for publication in "the coming weeks," split Philip Hammond’s Treasury and Liam Fox’s Department for International Trade. The two departments were in conflict over the future rules the U.K. will operate under, according to one well-placed minister familiar with the nature of the discussions. Green was also involved in smoothing out a Cabinet disagreement over future immigration rules set to be published in the coming weeks in another white paper, one official added.

Green said it is in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, not in London, where the crisis over Brexit may become most acute.

Green admits the calamitous general election result changed how May's government went about its business.

“I think the general election changed the political situation and we set up the government in a different way,” he said. “But we still have the same issues that were facing the government before the election.”

In his role keeping the government machine ticking, Green serves as deputy chair for May on every major Cabinet committee (the crucial decision-making bodies governing Brexit policy), attends the daily 8:30 a.m. meeting in No. 10 that sets the agenda for the day ahead, and has been given the task of minimizing conflict with the devolved administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.

Green said it is here, not in London, where the crisis over Brexit may become most acute.

“All the devolution settlements were created while we were a member of the EU and when they were being written, none of the various governments which wrote them thought, 'Well, what happens if?' There is just no provision in the devolution settlements for leaving the EU.”

If Britain is not careful, Green said, it could endanger not only its access to the single European market but the essence of the single U.K. market as well.



“We must ensure the benefits of free trade around the U.K., which we’ve all taken for granted because we are one country, are preserved after Brexit because a lot of the rules about trade have been operated at a European level rather than at a U.K. level.”

Green said that without proper controls “subsidy wars” between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland could spiral out of control as each devolved government makes use of its newfound freedoms.

“Agriculture is clearly an area where most of the rules were set at European level but those that weren’t are devolved down and we want to continue that," Green said. "We need to make sure that we don’t have subsidy wars to try to help sheep farmers, some in Scotland and some in Wales and so on.”