Martin Selmayr is notorious and he loves it. While his influence is currently most keenly felt within the Brussels Beltway, the German lawyer, 46, sitting in an office festooned with euro memorabilia, jelly sweets and bumper crisp packets, is about to play a pivotal role in Brexit. Viewed by some in London as a dark force and in Brussels as possessing almost mystical powers, few doubt his crucial role in the talks that will reset Britain’s future.
A half-smile crosses Selmayr’s lips as he is asked about his fearsome nicknames, which range from Rasputin to “the monster”, an affectionate moniker from his boss, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. “If you look into the history of Rasputin, that can be both flattering and not — Lenin can be flattering or not,” he says. “If it means there is an efficient manager, somebody who is not a wimp, I’m OK with that. You can’t run the European Commission like a Montessori school.”
When the history of Brexit comes to be told, Selmayr — an official who rose spectacularly through the Brussels ranks to become Juncker’s all-powerful chief of staff — will be a central figure. “Do you know the difference between Selmayr and God?” Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s veteran finance minister, once joked. “God knows he’s not Selmayr.”
Brexit was a body blow to the EU, but Selmayr sees the “tragedy” as a jolt that will re-energise his cherished European project and reforge it without Britain, its most reluctant member. He is confident Britain will pay a price for leaving. And his bossy, whip-smart legalism has come to embody all that No 10 loves to hate about Brussels.
But as negotiations begin and the clock counts down to Britain’s scheduled departure in March 2019, Selmayr may be about to meet his match. If the clean-cut German has been compared to Rasputin, Nick Timothy actually looks the part. Standing at six foot, with hooded eyes and a beard that, in the words of Paul Goodman, the executive editor of the influential ConservativeHome website, makes him look like “a Greek Orthodox archimandrite”, he oversees a Downing Street regime every bit as centralised as the Selmayr machine. Ministers and officials alike have learnt not to cross him.
While Selmayr sees Brexit as a case study in the essential value of the EU, Timothy sees it as a chance to grab back sovereignty and remodel his country in favour of working people. Brussels symbolises everything the grammar-school boy from Birmingham despises: remote elitism that has failed to deliver for the people.
Being called Rasputin? I’m OK with that. You can’t run the European Commission like a Montessori school. Timothy, 37, is Theresa May’s co-chief of staff, working alongside Fiona Hill, a former journalist. Both are paid £140,000 a year, almost the same as cabinet ministers — and deploy more power than most of them. They are ferociously loyal, demand total control and, behind the scenes, are helping to set the terms of Brexit. “They don’t stop at anything,” says one Tory staffer. “They are streetfighters.”
Timothy and Hill work as a team on everything, constructing a fortress around May. But in the context of Brexit, it is the softly spoken Timothy who commands attention. While Hill supported Remain in last year’s referendum, he voted to take Britain out of the EU.
It was Timothy who crafted the speeches that articulated May’s world view, including January’s key Brexit statement at Lancaster House. Timothy was attracted to Brexit principally by the idea of restoring national sovereignty. “I am not altogether comfortable with our participation in the Ryder Cup team,” he once joked.
Timothy and Selmayr sit on top of extraordinarily centralised bureaucracies. They are not the official negotiators for Brexit and ultimately it will be their bosses — frontline politicians — who make the decisions. But the clout of these back-room svengalis and their crucial role in the big strategic calls is in little doubt. They are two of the youngest and most powerful characters to serve in their chief of staff positions. Both wield great influence over their bosses, have survived attempts to bring them down and are not afraid to dish out punishment. Both are classic insiders who break the mould. Their political destinies are bound up with Brexit.
Remarkably they have never met, at least not formally. Selmayr thinks he saw Timothy, pre-beard, years ago at a meeting in Brussels on home affairs; Timothy is well aware of Selmayr but insists they have never encountered each other.
"Vote Leave" demonstrators outside the Houses of Parliament in London, ahead of the referendum vote in June 2016“It’s a pity that the key people in Downing St were never here in Brussels to talk to us,” Selmayr tells the Financial Times from his office, facing that of his boss, Juncker. “So it’s very difficult to judge how they see things.”
To get a sense of how Timothy sees things, one has to start at Tile Cross, a suburb east of Birmingham, named after the quarry from which tiles were hewn. There is nothing especially remarkable about it. Timothy’s father worked for Allied Steel and Wire, his mother as a school assistant. Timothy went to a local primary and then to the state grammar in Aston: he is a devout supporter of Aston Villa. He tells friends his background is resolutely “normal”, yet it defines his political outlook. He refused a request to be interviewed for this article.
The normality of Timothy’s upbringing is only remarkable when seen in the context of the Cameron era. Out of the five people principally involved in writing David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto, four attended Eton College; George Osborne, the fifth, attended the elite St Paul’s school. Theresa May’s arrival in Downing St marked a brutal purge of this old guard, with Timothy and Hill in the vanguard.
“Nick is anti-establishment,” says one Tory MP. “He sees himself as a challenger to their values, whether it is on Europe or whatever else.” It was Timothy — who delivers his onslaughts on elites with a twinkle in his eye — who devised May’s Tory conference attack on “citizens of the world”.
Visitors to Downing St are confronted in the waiting room with the text of May’s speech upon arriving at No 10 last July. Crafted by Timothy, it declared a new set of priorities. “If you’re from an ordinary working-class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise,” May said.
Timothy’s hero is Joseph Chamberlain, the can-do Liberal mayor of Birmingham, who focused on raising working-class conditions.
Yet Timothy has spent his entire working life in Westminster’s orbit. After obtaining a first in politics at Sheffield University, he worked as a researcher in Conservative central office, then with Hill at the Home Office, steering May away from danger, dispensing with enemies and playing a long game.
He is defined by what Goodman calls his “contra mundum” spirit. “There’s a lot of anger,” says one former Home Office colleague. “He defines himself by his battle with others.”
Compared to Timothy, Selmayr’s background is more peripatetic. He was born to a bookish family. His father Gerhard, also a lawyer, advised the German president Karl Carstens before a prominent career running universities. Selmayr criss-crossed the country through his youth: Bonn, Berlin, Munich, Karlsruhe, Passau for his studies.
It was in London, where he studied briefly at King’s College, that he had one of his formative political experiences, encountering authentic British Euroscepticism in the form of Margaret Thatcher. She was billed to promote her memoirs at the Barbican theatre. What Selmayr witnessed was more a political assassination, as Thatcher “basically blasted” her successor John Major and the European project to which he had surrendered. “Alone among the countries of Europe we have not been invaded for over 1,000 years and we have developed the taste for running our affairs,” she said. “I do not wish it to go any further.”
There is a lot of anger,’ says one former Home Office colleague. ‘[Timothy] defines himself by his battle with othersTo an inquisitive twentysomething, this was a moment to remember. He queued for a signed copy of the book, and took from that day an understanding that British politicians had a different perspective. “I saw that there is a big misunderstanding between Britain and the rest of the EU,” he says. “For the Germans and French it is unthinkable to see the European project only as a market; the market is an instrument to achieve something more.”
To pinpoint that “something more”, you can look back to a teenage Selmayr’s visit to Verdun with his war-veteran grandfather, or the bomb-shelter tragedies witnessed by his grandmother. But whatever the motivation — peace, social harmony or just a fascination with power and politics — it is this “higher political purpose” for Europe that Selmayr has turned into something of an obsession.
After two years at the European Central Bank’s legal service while completing his doctorate on euro area law, Selmayr spent three years in Brussels with the media group Bertelsmann, where he worked with his political godfather Elmar Brok, an influential if at times bumptious German MEP. Finally, in 2004, aged 34, he entered the Commission as a spokesperson for Luxembourger Viviane Reding.
There, with a touch of bureaucratic alchemy, Selmayr turned a job handling press for a telecoms commissioner into a perch of huge influence. Championing populist causes such as capping mobile roaming fees, he showed little respect for orthodoxy. Selmayr understood how to bring the limelight to Reding, shoving aside veteran bureaucrats. Within a year he was all but running the show.
“There was something implacable about him, perhaps slightly intimidating,” recalls Kip Meek, a British regulator who worked closely with Selmayr in Brussels. “He did not threaten. But he was totally in control. Politicians can be like that. Martin was an official but he played it like a politician. He knew how to use power.”
David Cameron with Angela Merkel at Chequers in October 2015. But, like Timothy, he is also an insider who doesn’t quite fit. When he left for the ECB, his father complained he was part of an anti-Deutsche Mark conspiracy. Selmayr has channels into Berlin but he is no creature of German politics; he readily admits Chancellor Angela Merkel was unhappy about his appointment. The Brits and many other Europeans worry that he is too German, too hardline and too integrationist; the Germans worry that he is not German enough.
Brussels has long made legends of its master bureaucrats. The doyen is Emile Noël, a man who ran the executive for its first 30 years. Colleagues called him “a secular European monk”. Over the years power has concentrated in the chef de cabinet, the political right hand of Commissioners and occasional purveyor of the dark arts. Some have been known for all the wrong reasons: one serving president’s chef was murdered with a hunting rifle by his estranged Italian wife.
If Selmayr is not the most powerful chef in Brussels history, he is certainly the most high profile. He has become a public figure in his own right, memorably tweeting in May last year that a G7 meeting with “Trump, Le Pen, Boris Johnson and Beppe Grillo” would be “a horror scenario that shows well why it is worth fighting populism”.