This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Most accounts of the final phase of Britain’s negotiations with the EU, the phase that actually delivered Brexit and the trade deal, have so far come from the EU side. For those with the patience, My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier gives a blow-by-blow account of the negotiations, albeit with the detail fading as Barnier himself was gradually elbowed out of the process. 

There have been more techy accounts out of the EU negotiating team. But from our side, nothing, until Boris Johnson’s own memoir this autumn and now, the final volume of Tim Shipman’s tetralogy of the Brexit years, Out.

For now — at least until my own book is written — Shipman’s account of the Brexit years seems likely to be the definitive story. This final volume, covering the Johnson, Truss and Sunak governments, fills in a lot of hitherto unreported detail. It is valuable even for people like me who were closely involved, since there is much we necessarily didn’t know, for example about the self-destructive second referendum campaign, the tactics of the parliamentary opposition to Boris and the Windsor Framework negotiation.

The strength of Shipman’s work is twofold. First, he is pretty objective and fair. He doesn’t come to the task with the obvious agenda of so many writers. The protagonists generally speak for themselves, sometimes at considerable length and with much colour. Second, he actually understands Brexit: what was at stake, what the talks were about and why so many people cared so much. In this, his book is distinct from other British accounts of the politics of this era, in which Brexit is either a self-evidently crazy idea or an incomprehensible backdrop to a story which is essentially about the mad mad world of Boris Johnson. 

The book’s weakness is really the consequence of these strengths. Letting people speak and giving so much detail means it’s quite long, at nearly a thousand pages. We leave the EU just a quarter of the way in. Perhaps more importantly (for the book is after all for political nerds and the historians) the colour sometimes hides the story. At least for the period I was involved, the key moments are all there, but often it’s hard to discern them amidst the “he said she said” accounts of the critical moments. 

Still, Shipman captures the mood at the heart of the story, the actual exit from the EU and its consequences: the compelling drama of Britain’s greatest peacetime political crisis since the People’s Budget — worse than Eden’s Suez, worse also than Callaghan and the IMF, because the rules of the game itself were breaking down. 

And it was the Remainers seeking to overturn the referendum result who were willing to break them — Grieve, Burt, Benn, and of course Bercow, the guilty men who tried to trash the constitution and enable an unaccountable Parliament to take over the Brexit process.

And there was Lady Hale too, ascending from the depths of the deep state to kill Boris’ prorogation plans with her deadly kiss of the spiderwoman: Shipman hints heavily at the behind-the-scenes arm-twisting that secured the implausible unanimity of eleven judges for the propositions that the courts could overrule Parliament and that the Lord Chief Justice had got centuries of constitutional practice wrong. 

Shipman makes clear how badly all these people misread the situation and misjudged Boris. They never understood, or even believed, that we had a deliberate strategy to get a deal by running down the clock and leaving the crucial discussions until the final few weeks before the planned Brexit day of 31 October — the time when we judged the EU would actually be ready to talk. We were right about that. 

But Benn, Burt and co. obsessed about whether we were putting in policy papers and how often I was visiting Brussels, and, by putting the Surrender Act in place, they materially damaged our negotiating prospects and objectively harmed Britain’s national interests. Shipman sums it up: “the Benn Act probably ensured there was a deal” — there would have been anyway — “but also that it would be less favourable to the UK”.

Boris’ government was never quite the same after Cummings’ departure

Shipman also conveys a good idea of what it was like to work in Boris’ government. The chaotic initial assembling of what was to become the 2019 team of advisers tells you much of what was to follow. Boris himself never actually asked me to come back; it was just assumed. I certainly had my doubts, and for me the decisive conversation was actually with Simon Fraser, ex-Foreign Office boss and now prominent Brexit critic. “Do it, David: you’ll always regret it if you don’t.” 

Like many, I was reassured by the fact that Boris was bringing in Dominic Cummings, apart from Boris himself the most compelling character in the book. Dom and I may have disagreed over lockdowns, but I remain an admirer, and Shipman’s book shows why. Dom’s strategic focus, his determination to stick to his guns and see the logic of the strategy through and the loyalty he could command amongst those who worked closest with him were crucial in autumn 2019. 

His raising of the stakes on 8 October in his briefing to the Spectator — “we will focus on winning the election on a manifesto of immediately revoking the entire EU legal order without further talks, and then we will leave” — focused EU minds, got Varadkar to give ground in the Wirral Summit meeting and opened the way for a deal.

A few weeks later, Parliament decided once again to block the agreement and Boris decided to press Labour and the Lib Dems every day to vote for an election. Some doubted this plan. I vividly remember Dom telling one of them, in words reminiscent of Wellington to Sir John Colborne at Waterloo: “They won’t stand. They’ll crack and we will win.” He was right. 

Boris’ government was never quite the same after Cummings’ departure. Shipman’s account of the comedy of misjudgements that caused his and Lee Cain’s final exit conveys well the absolute dysfunctionality of Boris’ No.10 at critical moments and accurately points at the underlying cause: Boris’ own inability to take a decision and stick to it. The government may thereafter have been more congenial to work in, at least until the final crash and burn, but it had lost its sense of direction.

Brexit will of course be Boris’ greatest achievement

How much stronger would the Tories’ position have been in 2024 if Boris had stuck to his guns in 2021 on planning reform? Or imagine that the Party had not broken its manifesto pledge and pushed through tax rises that apparently, according to Shipman, no-one really wanted, but which only three people — Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and myself — had the guts to actually oppose in Cabinet. It’s difficult to believe such errors would have been made if Cummings had been around and as influential as in 2019.

In retrospect that Cabinet discussion marked a decisive moment in the cooling of my own relationship with Boris, a process that took me out of the government three months later. That was all the more traumatic because we had worked so closely together till that point. We had essentially identical views on Brexit — indeed, if anything, Boris was tougher than me. 

The EU’s negotiators believed until almost the end that if they could just get round “Frosty the no man” they would be able to work with Boris. Only when Barnier was sidelined, at times humiliated and effectively replaced by Von der Leyen’s sidekick Stephanie Riso did they realise that there was no alternative to working through the difficult stuff with me and my team if they wanted a trade deal in 2020. And so they did. 

Brexit will of course be Boris’ greatest achievement. I agree with Shipman that much of the post-referendum mess could have been avoided if Boris had become prime minister, as everyone had expected. The long-drawn-out agony of the May government could have been avoided. A Boris government, with his 2019 advisers around him, would never have got into the awful Northern Ireland mess which still haunts us years later.

In the end, Shipman reinforces my own view, which is, to quote Wellington again, that Brexit was “the nearest-run thing you ever saw”. Without that mix of personalities in No. 10 in 2019, without me, Cummings, Oliver Lewis, Danny Kruger but above all Boris himself — the “chaotically effective crisis manager”, as Shipman has it — I believe we would still be in the EU today. He got Brexit done. That’s why Boris will have his place in history when his more conventional, less anarchic, less colourful contemporaries are long forgotten.