PM’s human shield is used to taking hits for his masters – but is he dangerously exposed?

Long before he became the public face of the Brexit negotiations, Olly Robbins was well known to journalists at the Guardian. This week he has been castigated in the pro-leave press as a kind of Machiavelli secretly operating in the pro-European cause, “the unelected civil servant who has usurped the Brexit secretary and seized control of the negotiations,” according to the Telegraph.

But five years ago, at the height of the revelations from the former CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, he was deputy national security adviser to David Cameron. The then prime minister, infuriated by the leaks about intelligence operations at the CIA and GCHQ, demanded action. Jeremy Heywood, the head of the civil service, insisted the Guardian curtail its reporting. And for the detailed negotiations to achieve that, they turned to the steely but punctiliously polite Robbins.

The government’s efforts to shut down the Snowden story significantly lowered the UK’s standing in the global press freedom league. Robbins is unlikely to have flinched. “He’s a securocrat,” says one former minister who knew him at the Home Office, where, after seven years doing senior security jobs in Whitehall, Robbins became second permanent secretary.

Robbins is used to taking the hits for his political masters. Two years ago he engaged in a memorable spat with MPs on the home affairs select committee after he refused to say whether a promise Theresa May had made on immigration budgeting had been met. He was thrown out of the hearing for giving “unsatisfactory” answers.

One of the very few personal criticisms of Robbins – and none were made attributably – is that he keeps his cards close to his chest. Knowledge is power. Jill Rutter, who watches him closely from her vantage point at the Institute for Government, says: “He is presumed to have an entire giant Brexit masterplan in his brain. And no one else has the same grasp.”

That makes him entirely comfortable with the notoriously secretive way that May operates in Downing Street. He is part of a shrinking circle of people with whom May has worked since she was home secretary. Nick Timothy, Fiona Hill and Damian Green have all gone. Robbins remains. The tightness of their relationship is the basis for his power.

May has been quoted as saying Robbins should be cloned. Whitehall critics say he’s a clone already, a mandarin from central casting – a south Londoner who went from a fee-paying school to Oxford to the Treasury.

Officials are professionally obliged to be anonymous, but even so his private life is exceptionally private. Hardly anyone was prepared to talk on the record about him, only partly out of respect for the convention that civil servants are just that – servants of the politicians. Robbins is married with three sons and likes walking and cooking, according to his Who’s Who entry.

Political colleagues are aware more of what they don’t know about him. “He is not the kind of person who kicks off his shoes and settles for a chat.” The most striking known things about him are his youth – 43 this year – and how much thinner he looks now than at the time of the EU referendum.

For the Brexiters, all this makes him the embodiment the metropolitan elite. At university in the 1990s he ran a pro-federal Europe outfit called the Oxford Reform Club, a rival to the arch-Brexiter Daniel Hannan’s contemporaneous Campaign for an Independent Britain. Robbins can expect no let-up in the personal attacks, even though Jacob Rees-Mogg rightly points out that he is entirely the creature of May.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robbins at Theresa May’s Florence speech on Brexit in September 2017. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

It was Cameron, in the brief interregnum after the EU referendum in 2016, who sent Robbins to run a new Brexit unit in the Cabinet Office. May, as Cameron’s successor, asked Robbins to become permanent secretary at the newly formed Department for Exiting the EU (DexEU) in tandem with being her adviser.

“It was an impossible job,” the ex-minister said. “But he was happy to do it. You don’t get on in Whitehall by saying no.”

Others, like the Institute for Government, questioned outsourcing such a huge, complex, cross-departmental task as the EU negotiations to a new and untested department, with David Davies as a Brexit secretary with his own agenda.

Sure enough, the arrangement has been slowly unpicked. In December Robbins was replaced as permanent secretary at DexEU. This week it was confirmed that No 10 was in charge of the Brexit talks. DexEU was downgraded and Robbins was formally crowned as Britain’s answer to Michel Barnier.

The immediate impact could not have been more vividly illustrated than in Tuesday’s DexEU committee hearing. The new Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, who once confidently predicted Brexit could be accomplished in six months, sat like a nervous hostage wondering what the ransom demand would be, alongside the physically and intellectually dominant figure of Robbins.

The imbalance of knowledge and power was brutally exposed. The fury of the Brexiters, on the committee and beyond, was matched only by their impotence as Westminster’s rival armies went off for the summer.

One former special adviser to a Labour minister encountered Robbins early in his career when they were negotiating a tricky privatisation. “It was very complicated, highly difficult legally, it needed private finance and it was very political. A miniature Brexit. He could do it,” the adviser recalls.

Robbins has a reputation for being good at managing difficult egos. He was recruited by the Treasury in 1996 and prospered in Gordon Brown’s notoriously dysfunctional fiefdom, disarming the rival chiefs with weapons-grade charm and tact. He also established a reputation for dealing with complex detail. In 2006 he was scouted by Downing Street and became Tony Blair’s principal private secretary.

The remarkable thing about Robbins in his Brexit role is that, like his patron Heywood, the cabinet secretary, he has no experience of dealing with the EU. This outsider strategy appears to be part of the message that London thinks Brussels is up to no good.

That was the case so powerfully made by Ivan Rogers when he resigned as UK permanent representative in January 2017. In a blistering sign-off he warned, among other things, of the consequences of deliberate ignorance of multilateral negotiations.

“Contrary to the beliefs of some, free trade does not just happen when it is not thwarted by authorities: increasing market access to other markets and consumer choice in our own depends on the deals – multilateral, plurilateral and bilateral – that we strike and the terms that we agree,” he wrote.

John Kerr, who negotiated article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, believes that lack of experience leaves Robbins, for all his interpersonal skills, dangerously exposed.

“His greatest difficulty is that he is not an experienced international negotiator. He doesn’t really know the Brussels scene, where knowing which arguments to use, which buttons to press, which analogies to draw, which bits of history to recall is really quite useful.”

Lord Kerr, who in the 1990s had a ringside seat for the first rounds of the Tory psychodrama, says the new structure putting Robbins on the frontline as May’s human shield is risky for another reason.

Where is the court of appeal, he asks, in the last, toughest round of bargaining where someone is bound to lose. If, as it seems, it is to be May’s warring cabinet, then she has given her rancorous ministers the power of life and death over her own political future – and maybe that of her consigliere, Olly Robbins, too.



