Oliver ‘Olly’ Robbins, the top bureaucrat who has become Theresa May’s key adviser on Brexit, may be snapped up by an investment banking corporation after the EU negotiations are complete.
The unelected civil servant has previously expressed his admiration for the Soviet Union, noting that the left-wing tyranny’s Communist leaders transformed Russia “from a backward peasant autocracy, despised by the West, into a technological giant at whom the world cowered in fear for half a century”.
Such sentiments have helped to fuel a widespread belief among Leave-supporting politicians that Robbins would rather Britain would not leave the European Union at all, and has been the driving force pushing the Prime Minister towards a soft ‘Brexit In Name Only’ in which the UK will remain subject to the EU’s institutions and regulations in many respects.
However, his theoretically neutral position has now been further compromised by news that he is being headhunted by investment banking corporations willing to pay him a million pounds a year to advise them on Brexit.
Many such banking corporations, including Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup poured big money into the Remain campaign, and there are concerns that the prospect of a salary many times larger than Robbins could expect to earn even at the very top of the Civil Service could impact his decision-making in the EU negotiations.
“Olly has his exit strategy,” a source remarked to the Sunday Times. “Every man and his dog in the City wants him.”
Nigel Evans MP, the Executive Secretary to the Tory Party’s powerful 1922 Committee which may decide the Prime Minister’s fate at a crunch meeting on Wednesday, has described Robbins as having “Europe running through his veins”.
Officially an impartial standing bureaucracy which supports the government of the day to deliver their political agenda without fear or favour, the Civil Service has fiercely defended Mr Robbins — but a belief that it is an institutionally europhile organisation is not without evidence, considering every living former Cabinet Secretary has expressed vocal opposition to Brexit.
Lord Robin Butler, who served as Cabinet Secretary under former prime ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair for more than a decade, went so far as to say the Brexit vote “Strikes a dagger to my soul”, dismissing Brexiteers’ desire to restore British sovereignty as “an illusory quest for independence”.
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