 Good evening all. It's a great pleasure for me to invite you this evening through this session with Sir Ivan Rogers, who has had a very distinguished career in the British Civil Service, his last position being as UK perm rep in Brussels, from which he resigned about two years ago. The initial conversation between myself and Sir Ivan will be on the record for about 20, 25 minutes. And then we will have a session for discussion and for question and answer until about 7 o'clock, which will be under the Chatham House rule. You can use the information, but please don't identify the person and don't identify the place. Can I just ask you to make sure before we start that your phones are either turned off or are on silent? I should mention, too, before we start, that Sir Ivan's book, which is now on the Times bestseller list, is available downstairs afterwards for a very modest sum. You'll all be able to afford it. And Ivan will be very happy to sign it for you if you wish. So once again, thank you very much for coming out. It's a great pleasure to have you here. We've been a little bit surprised here at the manner in which Mrs. May has carried out this negotiation. We've been a bit surprised that very early on at the Conservative Party conference and then at the Ancaster House, she laid out red lines, which were in a way quite strict and quite severe. And we were also a little bit surprised at the manner in which the Article 50 was put down so quickly. Without, it seemed to us, any clear notion of where the British wanted to be at the end of the negotiation. It seemed to us a little bit that maybe they were not taking sufficient account of how difficult the negotiation can be with the European Union. And just like your thoughts on that. Well, first of all, it's a great pleasure to be here. I'm great honoured to be invited. Thank you very much for inviting me. And as you say, I'm very happy to sign copies of my book available in all good book chops and plenty of bad ones, I'm sure. I mean, it's a very difficult question. Prime Minister took office, we should remember, back in the summer of 2016, after a leadership election that turned into a coronation because other competitors for the job, how do I put this politely, eliminated themselves or each other. And therefore, she was last person standing. And she inherited the job several weeks before we had all expected her to arrive in early September. She took office at the most difficult time, I think, really for any British prime minister to take office since the Second World War, with the biggest challenge. I think those of us who were expert insiders knew that it was the most complex and difficult set of negotiations. After all, we've only had one of the negotiations, and we haven't yet completed that. It's the withdrawal negotiation with the withdrawal agreement, the political declaration. The big and difficult negotiation is, in my view, still to come, which is part of what I say in the book. This was an enormously difficult time to arrive in office. And the pressure from her own back benches and within the party, which is, after all, more enthusiastic about Brexit than the opposition and the party in the country is even more enthusiastic than the parliamentarians, was to get on with it and to deliver. And she, as somebody who had marketed herself as a quiet remainder, had to persuade the party that she wasn't going to betray and undermine the revolution and wasn't going to sabotage it. That's all by way of explanation of why, at her first party conference, bear in mind, her first party conference as party leader, when you've been, as I say, elected essentially in a coronation, I'm sure there would have been tremendous amount of advice from her political entourage saying, you have to demonstrate that your heart is in this, you see Brexit as an opportunity rather than a damage limitation exercise. You must really go for it and put a hard line, a Brexiteer message on the table. As I say, she had considerable European experience as well, but it is in the field of justice and home affairs. And I've worked for her closely in that. The JHA Council, as it's called in the Dragon of Brussels, is really very different from other councils. And indeed that world is very different from the economic world, but she hadn't really dealt with the economic world and the world of customs union and single market and monetary union, because that's not her bag. So I think there was a tendency at the outset to think that the kind of pick and choose relationship that we had in justice and home affairs, opt-ins and opt-outs and multiple ways of slightly having our cake and eating it, which is available and has been available in the world of justice and home affairs, might be something that she could mimic elsewhere. So I think it's all explicable in terms of the management of domestic politics, demonstrating to her party that she was with the program, not against it, demonstrating that she wanted to get on and it was tremendous pressure on her in the autumn of 2016, and on people like me, we have to get on with it. Of course then, as the boring bureaucrat expert in the room and the person probably most versed in European union issues in the entire UK system, I'm saying this is an inordinately complex set of negotiations. The withdrawal agreement itself with the political declaration is just one stage in the process. We won't even get to the trade and economic negotiations until 2019, which is obviously what's happened at a time when several cabinet ministers around her cabinet table were saying to me, as they were saying to her, this is the easiest trade negotiation in history and we'll have the trade deal with the EU and the trade deal with all other partners around the world ready by the time that Article 50 is ended. That was always a fantasy, it was never gonna happen, but she was under immense pressure therefore to get on with it. And therefore, I think that led us down the path of, I will give a date certain to my party to guarantee that I'm going to invoke Article 50, but by the time we invoked Article 50, we didn't have a compelling and serious strategy and the destination in mind. Then what's happened since is blindingly obvious that as she's then worked through the issues and negotiated with European opposite numbers and worked out kind of what the art of the navigable and possible is negotiable, of course, then any step back from the party conference speech of October 2016 and Lancaster House is represented in her own party and by some in the media as a betrayal of a kind of, you had a blueprint and now you're walking away from the blueprint in the face of reality, you're compromising with reality and it's unacceptable. And so I think it was, I'm afraid, obvious to me in autumn 2016 that that was going to be the dynamic and that has been the dynamic and the other thing I would say but you've probably brought a broader conversation you might want to have is the European side is very, very good at processes and processology. The European Union does processology better than any organization on earth, that's both a good thing and a bad thing. But it's set up a sort of legalistic and technocratic process, it's run it very well. It's achieved overwhelmingly the objectives that the European Union 27 had in the table. I wouldn't say it's generated a huge amount of sort of strategic thinking about the British question. Now, people are quite tired of the British question in my experience and I'm still in touch with loads of old friends of opposite numbers and they're quite fed up with thinking about the British question at all and maybe there isn't a bandwidth, there are plenty of other crises in the European Union and why do you have to think about the British all the time and you chose to leave so why do we have to think about? The difficulty is if you just reduce it to a sort of technocratic grinding process and grind the British a bit into the dust in the way that's happened in the last couple of years, there then comes a point where there may be a political reaction and a political backlash and we discover that the deal is unsustainable and won't pass the House of Commons and that is of course the crisis we're now facing. Thank you very much indeed. I'd like to pick you up a little bit on one issue that you mentioned there which is justice and home affairs. We're very conscious here of difficulties in the relationship between Britain and Ireland over the years on extradition. It was a very serious problem for us until it was resolved with the European arrest warrant. Now I would presume that if there is a deal and during the negotiations which will follow that these issues will be dealt with properly, the issues of things like police cooperation, judicial cooperation, intelligence, exchanges of information and so on. But if there is a no deal, we could fall off the cliff in this area with really, in my view, horrendous results, not only for the relationship within these islands but for the relationship within Europe. Do you have a view? Well, I completely agree and I think there is, I mean, we come onto the question of whether there's a risk of a no deal. I think there is still an appreciable risk of a no deal not necessarily now but later in the year. I think the Prime Minister will be well aware of the consequences of no deal in areas like this. The problem with no deal is that in multiple areas, you simply, it's the obvious that there would be no deal, there's no legal arrangement. Unless you replace one set of legal arrangements which are part of membership with another set of legal arrangements which have been negotiated, then by definition there is no deal. And if there is no deal, then various things fall apart because you have nothing legal with which to replace them. That's not me being a bureaucrat and obstructive, it's just a statement of reality. And when people then say who are the avid Brexiteers who want to get on with it and say, let's jump to our freedom and let's liberate ourselves from the shackles of the corpse, et cetera, and we can go to WTO only and it'll be fine, well, there's a lot of the world, both economic and non-economic, that isn't covered by WTO rules. So I think the Prime Minister will be acutely aware of this and acutely conscious of it because she understood it very well when she was Home Secretary. She is also in these areas, as we saw on the European arrest warrant when we were in the European Union because we had complex negotiations going on when she was Home Secretary and she wanted then to stay in the European arrest warrant for all that she had, serious reservations about the way in which she was operating. And she took some real risks because a hundred of her own back benches, many of the kind of key Brexiteers, were fervently against remaining in the European arrest warrant when we were in the European Union because they didn't like the institutional implications of it and they didn't like justiciability in the European Court of Justice. So all those issues were there when we were members. She takes a very, in my experience with her, very operationally focused view and wants to do the things that maximise public safety, both in security for British citizens, for EU citizens. I think she would be in good faith and want to negotiate as part of a new deal, a set of arrangements which in many operational areas mimics as closely as possible what we have by dint of membership. The trouble is the boring theologians and lawyers and people like me who's neither a theologian nor a lawyer, I should add, say, yeah, but in the absence of accepting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, this is quite a problem. We can't just mimic everything that you like about European Union membership and neither the economic or the justice domain without any of the institutional implications. Now, an awful lot of this over time in a lengthy and difficult negotiation could, I think, be sorted with good will on both sides, but it's not unproblematic. Will we get as good extradition arrangements when we're outside the European Union and will those function as smoothly as they do when we're in the European arrest warrant? I fear not. I can't say otherwise. Do I think that we will go back to the world pre-European arrest warrant where bilateral extradition arrangements didn't work very well? No, I think we can do a lot better than that. And I think we can end up with an extradition agreement with the European Union and the UK, which functions better, but it won't be the same as being inside the Union. Of course, that is actually true of everything. Once you're outside, you're in a different space. And it's intrigued me a little bit that there's one issue which Mrs May has left almost entirely out of the negotiation, which is the issue of services. And services are so important to the United Kingdom. And by the way, our connection with British services is also very important to us. Why? Why has this happened? Well, it's a fascinating question and it is a puzzle to many people on the 27th side of the table with whom I talk about these things because it's been a British obsession, as you say, primarily around financial services, but not solely. And we're very heavily services-based economy. And if you look at our exports, as a proportion of total exports, we export more services than any other major economy in the world. So you would think it would be one of our defining economic interests. And the EU as a services market for British exports is the size of the next eight markets put together. That includes the US market. So our overwhelming, overwhelmingly our home market and one in which we have a massive trade surplus with the European Union is in services, whereas we have a massive trade deficit in goods now. These things are not completely indissociable. So goods and services are often mixed, but we are a services economy and very high proportion of our economy is services and we're very competitive in services. And it's not just financial services, it's business and accountancy and legal and tertiary education and all kinds of things. It is very bizarre, I agree, if you look at British politics at the moment, that you have a bunch of politicians who appear to be very obsessed about trade policy and getting sovereignty and autonomy in trade policy and seems to be one of the key tests of whether we've genuinely left the European Union. But they talk far more about tariffs and tariff rate quotas than they talk about services. And this is a source of endless consternation to me and I don't think I'm alone in that. Plenty of services industries who talk to me and seek my advice who are also a bit puzzled why ministers are not more focused on services given that the British spent most of their time in the European Union talking about the need for services, single market. We've gone cold on the idea of a single market because of the justice implications and the European Court of Justice. And that's a big issue, so we'll leave that aside. I think it's puzzling because why have we ended up here? You asked that question, come to that question first. We've ended up here essentially because the Prime Minister's interpretation of the referendum result prioritized the ending of free movement of people above pretty much all else. I'm not saying that negatively, I'm just saying the Prime Minister thought, thinks that the question of control of our borders and the question of control of free movement and of external migration into the UK was one of the central questions on the public's mind and that she needed to demonstrate that as a consequence of Brexit we had ended permanently free movement of people. And she accepted, including from people like me early on, the stuff about the indivisibility of the four freedoms. So the four freedoms constituting the single market free circulation of goods, services, capital and people went together. And therefore if she was ending free movement of people there would be consequences. You can see from her point of view that there is a more intrinsic connection between the supply of services cross-border and people moving cross-borders than there is with goods. And candidly I suppose if I put this rather brutally there is more politics in key constituencies around the land in the preservation of close alignment on goods than there is on services. So there's been more effective pressure from, I suppose the car industry, aviation industry, chemicals industry, you know, various key manufactured regulated goods sectors where the regulation is at EU level have made more of an impact on this government's policy than services industries. And we've ended up for an agglomeration of those reasons prioritizing the goods sectors and talking more about regulatory alignment in goods sectors and talking very little about services. And I have had a lot of puzzlement from old friends in Brussels, Paris, Berlin and other capitals saying, why have the Brits stopped talking about services when they were dealing with people like me? We talked about little else. I think that will change again. Once you get into the trade negotiation I think we have to be mature about this. This is a long, serious process ahead. Whatever happens now, even if it fell apart and no deal, in the end we're still going to have to do a deal with each other in preferential terms and we're going to have to explore all this. When that happens and we move on to the economics of this, I would be amazed if British negotiators didn't put more adventurous services demands back on the table. Because if you look at some of the best academic evidence at the moment, I mean it rather alarms me when I do. The best academic evidence I've seen says that if we end up with no better than bog standard third country access in the way that Americans and others do, then we are talking about a serious diminution in trade flows to and from the EU. And by serious, I mean a reduction in trade volumes in the services sectors of somewhere between 25 and 50% if you were to believe the best academic. So this is a non-negligible hit on the UK economy and indeed potentially on the Irish economy. And it's not obvious why either set of politicians on either side of the channel would ultimately want to go there. Why would you deliberately massively curtail your trade when you're talking about being a global free trading nation? So my long answer to this is I think we will come back to these questions in the next three to five years. I think gradually British priorities will shift a bit in the face of reality and what really matters to sustain a vibrant UK economy. That will raise very big and complex questions about whether we have to give ground again on free movement to people because, you know, when you're doing services deals, you know, outside with India or US or China, issues of free movement to personnel, they're going to come back on the table. There's no avoiding that. Interesting. Can I turn now, if I may, to Northern Ireland and to Ireland? Between our two countries, we've had great difficulties over the years. And it was only when the two governments came together in the 1980s and since. And when they addressed the problems of Northern Ireland together, it was only then that peace came about in Northern Ireland. I think we all see, when we look at Northern Ireland today, how difficult it is for the two communities in Northern Ireland and the two political sides in Northern Ireland to work together. There's been no assembly, no executive for over two years. It only worked because of the pressure and the driving nature of the two governments operating together with trust and respect for one another, which they built up from the mid-1980s. I have to say I'm a little bit fearful about the future because it seems to me that now, with London on one side of the table and Dublin certainly on the other side of the table, that that trust, that continuous connection between the two cities, both to work together within the European Union and to work together on Northern Ireland, it seems to me that it's not going to be the same in the future as it has been in the past. And maybe we're a little bit oversensitive here, but we do notice a lot of people in the UK, both politicians and others who are, as it were, putting a little bit of the blame on the position you now find yourself in on us, whereas we feel quite strongly that the future of the peace in Northern Ireland is being seriously disrupted by Brexit. Well, I completely agree with your account of the history and indeed for my generation of civil servants is probably one of the proudest, if not the proudest achievements of the last 30 years as the peace process and the radical improvement in relations that we've had and kind of my generation went through that under successive Prime Ministers who invested a huge amount of personal effort in it just as their counterparts did here. And that was a massive breakthrough and we've seen all the implications of that for Irish-British relationships over the last 25, 30 years, which are just in a completely different plane from where they were before. This has been, we have to be honest about this, the biggest single obstacle and setback to this and the biggest problem, the Brexit process and the management of the Brexit process and you're not wrong, we can all read it in each other's presses about the name calling in the blame game. I think I share the anxieties and the qualms and the worries and the belief as well that the European Union helped there give us a framework, even sometimes if only for the kind of private conversations around the delegation rooms that used to happen in the kind of corridors which were therefore the physical forum in which these engagements could happen. I think it's in both sides overwhelming interest that this doesn't fall apart as a result of Brexit. So I think you've got to get over these bumps and the sooner we get over these bumps in the withdrawal agreement where this has now become the central question and maybe the central stumbling block to the conclusion of this deal and sooner we get back to the terrain of what's the future relationship going to look like both with the EU as a whole and then what does the Anglo-Irish relationship look like and how do we improve it again? The better in my view. So I don't think this is a permanent start. I do think we've taken a lot of blows. I do think the political temperature has risen a lot. I do think, I recognize entirely if you read the UK press, you can see the phenomena you're describing. I don't think this is a permanent state of things. I do think I have to be honest that the treatment or the absence of the treatment of the whole Irish border issue in the referendum campaign was extraordinary and cavalier. It barely got a mention I think in mainstream UK media and even after the referendum when it was blindingly obvious to me sitting in Brussels that this was potentially the biggest single problem in the withdrawal agreement, it was very difficult to get political attention on in the autumn of 16. That has obviously changed because it's now, reality has now dawned on people that it is the central question and there's no getting round it. And just what, you know, I mean, there are some who want to get around it by walking away from the table and saying, let's go to WTO and let's walk away from this whole process and show courage and guts and then it'll all be all right. If we ever did, the reality is the EU 27 side of the table would say unless and until we deliver something which looks like a backstop and you deliver financial contributions at the same scale your prime minister promised at the end of 2017, you know, we're not even getting to the economic, you know, there's no way around this. So I think this discussion has to mature in both places. We have to ride these bumps. They have been bumpy and I don't think the bumps are yet at an end. We have to move beyond it and we have to ensure the kind of bilateral relationship works. And that's just a lot of very hard pounding at the bureaucratic level and the ministerial level. And again, no criticism of any of our ministers on it. There is less institutional knowledge base inside probably the current cabinet, partly because of course, a great deal of the hard pounding and the hard work was done by several previous prime ministers who really engaged and I'd worked for prime ministers who daily engaged very heavily on the construction and the maintenance of the peace process. And that hasn't been the experience in the last few years because a lot of these issues were sorted before this prime minister took office. We are going to have to get back to that level and intensity of engagement and level of understanding in the UK system of what the issues are. I do think the absence of an executive over a sustained period is one hell of a problem. And we're going to have to get over that as well. I mean, more than three quarters of this prime minister's lifetime in office, we haven't had an executive in place. We have to get back to having an executive in place somehow or other. Thank you very much, Owen.