Sir Ivan Rogers has earned himself a reputation as something of a Brexit bogeyman. Admittedly the UK’s former ambassador to the EU didn’t help matters with his pointed 1,400 resignation email in which he attacked the Prime Minister for her ‘muddled thinking’. That broadside was interpreted as a dyed-in-the-wool Europhile doing his best to be disruptive; it also resulted in the tabloids calling him ‘Ivan the terrible’. To make matters worse, Rogers – who has now retired from the civil service – was also fingered as the one to blame for David Cameron’s dismal deal he secured in the run-up to the referendum. As Katy Balls pointed out, in Tim Shipman’s Brexit book All Out War, Cameron’s aides complained that Rogers dominated the negotiation process and was too quick to take ‘no’ for an answer.
Yet at the Commons European Scrutiny Committee this morning, we saw something of a different Rogers. It is true that he made some points which will have left his critics riled. The task of leaving the EU will, Rogers said, involve talks on a ‘humungous scale’; and the negotiation will be ‘on a scale that we haven’t experienced probably ever, but probably since the second world war’, he warned. His remarks about a Brexit divorce bill – which, he said, could tally up to €60bn – will also not go down well with some. Leaving aside how that figure was calculated, which Rogers did little to explain, it’s difficult to picture an outcome where Britain would ever agree to fork out such a huge sum, even if it was demanded during negotiations. But for the flashes of exaggeration, there was also something on display that was curiously lacking from his resignation letter: optimism about Brexit. He stopped short of saying whether he ‘liked Brexit’. Rogers did, though, make it clear that leaving the EU presents an opportunity to Britain:
‘I think if we get it right, the country comes out of…the other side prosperous and healthy and maybe even, indeed, happier on sovereignty’.
Perhaps, without meaning to – as Richard Drax pointed out – Rogers also painted a compelling argument for why Britain should leave the EU in the first place. His detailed insight into the bureaucratic tangles of Brussels could easily have worked their way into a recruiting manual for the ‘Leave’ campaign. And as Rogers went on to point out, no one in their right mind has ever accused the EU of speed or nimbleness in trade negotiations – something the UK might be about to find out for itself. What’s more, his idea that it’ll be quite some task to disentangle Britain from 43 years of European integration, albeit presenting another image of the challenge ahead, also painted a powerful argument for why Britain was right to walk away. Outside the EU, he said: ‘I am in no doubt that we will negotiate faster FTAs (Free Trade Agreements) with other partners outside the EU faster than the EU could do it, no doubt at all’. He may have also surprised some of his critics with his own views on Brexit:
‘I am committed to Brexit. I think Brexit has got to happen, got to be made to happen and we’ve got to get the best possible Brexit.’
Rogers didn’t stop there with trying to make it clear that he was more open-minded than his critics would let on. He was also at pains to dispel the depth of his Europhilia, telling the committee that ‘one of the curiosities of coverage recently was that I am notorious in government for having thought for many years that it was reasonably likely that we would exit’. He said in the run-up to the referendum that he was convinced the chances of Brexit were 50-50 (which, if true, put him ahead of the pollsters, the bookies and the other assembled experts). He also defended himself from the accusation that he was the reason David Cameron ended up with that paltry deal from Brussels; ‘the levels of aspiration were set politically at a manifesto level,’ he told MPs.
Of course on these points the best we can say is that we’ll have to take Rogers’ word for it. Yet it was, at least, refreshing to hear a more rounded and optimistic view of Brexit coming from Rogers than anything offered up in his 1,400-word missive. Rogers, it seems, won’t be the last person to send an email in haste and then perhaps go on to regret it. But on the basis of his clear-headed and reasonable performance in Parliament today, it’s difficult not to conclude that – whatever the rights and wrongs of firing off that email – his departure will be a loss to the Government in the months and years ahead.
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