UK's ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, resigns

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The UK's ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, has resigned.

Sir Ivan, appointed to the job by David Cameron in 2013, had been expected to play a key role in Brexit talks expected to start within months.

Brexiteers have welcomed the resignation of the Remainer, with former Ukip leader Nigel Farage saying: "The Foreign Office needs a complete clear-out."

UK's ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers resigns

BBC News
3 January 2017

Sir Ivan Rogers (right) was appointed by former Prime Minister David Cameron

The UK's ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, has resigned.

Sir Ivan, appointed to the job by David Cameron in 2013, had been expected to play a key role in Brexit talks expected to start within months.

The government said Sir Ivan had quit early so a successor could be in place before negotiations start.

Last month the BBC revealed he had privately told ministers a UK-EU trade deal might take 10 years to finalise, sparking criticism from some MPs.

He told them this was also the view of the EU's other 27 member states.

Ministers have said a deal can be done within two years.

BBC Brussels correspondent Kevin Connolly said it appeared there had been "some failure of synchronisation" between Sir Ivan - who had been due to leave his post in November- and the UK government.

A government spokeswoman said: "Sir Ivan Rogers has resigned a few months early as UK permanent representative to the European Union.

"Sir Ivan has taken this decision now to enable a successor to be appointed before the UK invokes Article 50 by the end of March. We are grateful for his work and commitment over the last three years."

Prime Minister Theresa May says she will trigger formal talks between the UK and the EU by the end of March, setting in place a two-year negotiation process.

Sir Ivan is a veteran civil servant whose previous roles include private secretary to ex-chancellor Ken Clarke, principal private secretary to ex-PM Tony Blair and Mr Cameron's Europe adviser.

He was criticised in some quarters for "pessimism" over Brexit after his advice to ministers on the negotiating timescale was reported.

Pro-EU figures raised concern about the impact of Sir Ivan's departure, while Brexit campaigners welcomed his decision.

Former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who once worked for Sir Ivan in Brussels, described his resignation as a "body blow to the government's Brexit plans".

He added: "If the reports are true that he has been hounded out by hostile Brexiteers in government, it counts as a spectacular own goal."

Labour MP Hilary Benn, who chairs the Brexit select committee, said it had come at a "crucial" point and urged the government to "get its skates on" in finding a replacement. "It couldn't be a more difficult time to organise a handover," he added.

Mr Benn told BBC Radio 4's The World at One the permanent representative's job was to convey the view of the UK to other member states, as well as "honestly and fearlessly reporting back" what those countries in turn said about the negotiations.

But former Conservative cabinet minister John Redwood said Sir Ivan had made a "very wise decision", saying his leaked advice suggested he did "not really have his heart in" Brexit, believing it to be "very difficult and long-winded".

The diplomat's exit is a 'very wise decision', said John Redwood (above)

He said the new ambassador should be someone "who thinks it's straightforward".

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage said he welcomed Sir Ivan's resignation, adding: "The Foreign Office needs a complete clear-out."

But former chancellor George Osborne said Sir Ivan was a "perceptive, pragmatic and patriotic public servant" while the Treasury's former top civil servant, Lord Macpherson - who is now a crossbench peer - said his departure marked a "wilful" and "total destruction" of EU expertise within Whitehall."

Analysis - by Kevin Connolly, BBC Europe correspondent

The official UK statement announcing the departure of Sir Ivan Rogers makes it sound like a routine piece of bureaucratic house-keeping - bringing forward the departure of the current incumbent to give his successor time to get his teeth into Brexit.

It seems certain there's more to it than that.

Sir Ivan endured an uncomfortable time at the last EU summit in December after his confidential advice to the government about Brexit potentially taking 10 years was leaked to the BBC. No ambassador relishes "becoming the story" in that way.

There's a sense in Brussels that he may been seen as a pessimist by cabinet Brexiteers because it fell to him to convey the hostility and scepticism with which other governments view Brexit.

One British insider here, though, called him a key adviser who'd be a huge loss.

Whoever replaces him faces one of the trickiest British diplomatic assignments of modern times.

UK's ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers resigns - BBC News

 

[Blackleaf]

Another victory for the Brexiteers over the Remainers: the ousting of Britain's Remainer ambassador to the EU...

The arrogant merchant of gloom Mrs May will be glad to see the back of: ANDREW PIERCE on how the writing was on the wall for Sir Ivan Rogers for months before he quit as Our Man in Brussels

Sir Ivan Rogers was principal private secretary to Eurosceptic Ken Clarke
He often threw tantrums and Theresa May will not miss him as Brexit approaches

By Andrew Pierce, Consultant Editor of the Daily Mail
4 January 2017
Daily Mail

At the height of David Cameron’s botched negotiations with the EU in the run-up to the referendum, the British ambassador in Brussels, Sir Ivan Rogers, had another tantrum.

In increasingly heated exchanges in emails and curt telephone calls with political aides in Downing Street the Foreign Office mandarin threatened to resign. Again.

Oxford-educated Rogers was said to be contemptuous of people, especially politicians, whom he regarded as his intellectual inferiors.

Sir Ivan Rogers (pictured, right) threatened to resign at the height of David Cameron's key negotiations with the EU in the run-up to the referendum

‘He would send emails that were the stuff of legend,’ one Downing Street aide was quoted saying in All Out War, a new book on the referendum campaign.

‘I lost count of the times he threatened to resign,’ he said.

When he told Downing Street he was quitting yesterday there was no attempt to persuade him to stay. Quite the contrary, Theresa May and David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, will have breathed sighs of relief.

After months of bickering and disagreements, not to mention even more acrimonious emails, they were tiring of Rogers, a staunch and uncompromising supporter of Britain’s membership of the EU. The only surprise is that it took Rogers so long to agree to go.

‘He presided over the negotiations before the referendum, which were an utter failure, so it was surprising that he didn’t leave with Cameron,’ says a senior political source.

‘Neither Mrs May nor her Brexit Secretary expected him to stick around. He never believed in what we were doing, and never tried to hide the fact. The PM is hugely optimistic, he is a gloomy pessimist. It’s so draining.

‘He was like a grieving man who couldn’t come to terms with the fact the British people voted for Brexit.

Sir Ivan Rogers (pictured) was said to be contemptuous of people, especially politicians, whom he regarded as his intellectual inferiors

‘Instead of coming with us he dug in his heels, fought us on everything, telling everyone the PM is too thin-skinned to accept the EU won’t deliver what she wants. He was shown the way to the door. It was a matter of time before he walked through it.’

So it seems the writing had been on the wall for months for a man some say was a sour and sullen presence at the Brexit discussions. ‘Someone with more emotional intelligence would have cottoned on a bit sooner,’ says the source.

With his contract up for renewal in November, the diplomat knew there was no prospect of being asked to stay on, so he fell on his sword.

He will move into another comfortable Whitehall sinecure, but will lose his luxurious grace-and-favour home in Brussels.

The resignation is another political scalp for David Davis, a former SAS reservist, who saw off several Labour home secretaries when he was their shadow in the Tories’ opposition years.

Clever, tough, and a veteran Eurosceptic, his last job in government was Europe Minister under Sir John Major. A political bruiser in more ways than one, Davis’s distinctive flat nose is the result of breaking it five times – three times playing rugby, once in a swimming accident, and once in a fight on Clapham Common.

David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union

He was always going to be a match for the scruffy, donnish Rogers who is a classic Sir Humphrey Appleby, the fictional diplomat from Yes Minister.

Rogers, 56, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. A career civil servant, his appointment in 2013 as Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to the European Union, to give him his full moniker, was always provocative to Eurosceptics, since even a cursory glance at his CV speaks volumes about his allegiances.

He was principal private secretary to Ken Clarke, the former Tory Chancellor, whose passion for the EU cost him his chance of becoming Tory leader. Clarke was the only Tory MP to vote last month against giving the PM the authority to trigger Article 50, which begins the formal divorce from the EU.

Rogers also served as chief of staff to the former vice-president of the European Commission, the late Lord Brittan. Clarke and Brittan were champions of Britain joining the euro, and of closer political integration with Brussels.

Rogers, who was knighted last year – a standard procedure for senior civil servants – also served as principal private secretary to Tony Blair, who is now talking of setting up a pressure group to block Brexit. He makes little secret of his disdain of Tory Eurosceptics.

‘He hated the idea of dancing to their tune in the Brexit negotiations,’ says one senior Tory.

While Rogers conceded the Eurosceptics were right to say the EU was in urgent need of reform, he was aghast at the Brexit result because he had become a fully paid-up member of the Brussels Establishment.

Married with two children, he spent five years outside the Civil Service working in the City for Citigroup, heading up their Brussels arm, and with Barclays Capital.

He was made David Cameron’s EU adviser in 2011, and ambassador two years later on a salary of £175,000.

Thus it fell to Rogers to mastermind Cameron’s renegotiation with the other 27 EU leaders before the referendum. Even the former prime minister’s most ardent supporters concede his efforts were a miserable failure.

He ‘diluted’ Cameron’s attempts to win significant reforms by repeatedly warning that they would be rejected by Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. This world view meant that he appears to have taken a negative stance on Brexit – which made Downing Street increasingly restless.

When, last month, it was leaked to the BBC that he had warned ministers it could take ‘ten years’ to negotiate a free trade deal with Europe, Brexiteers were enraged – though there was also a suspicion his comments had been leaked from within Whitehall to undermine him.

‘There would be an agreed line between us and the team in Brussels,’ says another Whitehall source. ‘It was felt that he would go off message and give his own views, which made things impossible.’

Little wonder perhaps that protests over his resignation yesterday were led by arch Europhiles Nick Clegg, the former Lib Dem leader, Lord Mandelson, the former Labour EU Commissioner, and Lord Macpherson, an ex-Treasury mandarin who was ennobled by Cameron. The Brexiteers, meanwhile, were all delighted.

Out now

Read more: ANDREW PIERCE on how writing had been on wall for Sir Ivan Rogers for months* | Daily Mail Online
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