Who is Olly Robbins, the civil servant on whose shoulders Brexit deal rests?
The man charged with taking the PM's demands to Brussels and getting the EU to listen is profiled by Sky's Mark Stone.
Monday 15 October 2018 03:20, UK
Throughout the protracted, complex Brexit process, ministers have come and then gone, political infighting has threatened to collapse the whole process and loyalties have been tested to the limit.
But one man has been a constant, a survivor; a civil servant on whose shoulders the Brexit deal rests.
In Whitehall circles, Olly Robbins is a well-known figure and has been for years.
He has served four prime ministers, becoming Tony Blair's principal private secretary aged just 31.
Since then, through Brown, Cameron and now May he has been the director-general of the civil service, second permanent secretary at the Home Office, permanent secretary at the Department for Exiting the EU and now the prime minister's Europe adviser - a role created just for him, to execute Brexit.
Outside Whitehall, civil servants tend to enjoy anonymity - quietly advising and enacting the policies set them by their political masters. It's telling that until Mr Robbins came along, the most well-known British civil servant was a fictional character - Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Brexit changed everything for Mr Robbins. For more than two years now, on an almost weekly basis, a small anonymous team led by him has been shuttling back and forth on the Eurostar with Britain's post-Brexit future in their heads.
As the politics lurches from one Brexit crisis to the next, their job has been to calmly plot the route forward, to tweak their negotiations according to the political demands and to find a deliverable deal that pleases everyone. Mission Impossible? The coming days will be crucial.
An incident with a handbag first put Mr Robbins in the media spotlight. It was February 2017 and Theresa May was in Malta for an EU meeting.
As the Maltese prime minister approached, she needed to jettison her handbag. At her side, as he so often is, was Olly Robbins.
With just the briefest of glances towards him which displayed an implicit reliance, she thrust the handbag into his hand. He duly took it and then backed off into the shadows once again.
"Theresa May embarrasses burly 6ft 3in aide by making him carry her handbag," one tabloid screamed, the focus firmly on the 43-year-old.
At the time he was permanent secretary in the newly created Department for Exiting the EU. He's since been moved to head up his own "Europe unit" within the Cabinet Office, from where he runs Brexit.
As well as being Mrs May's bag carrier, he is her confidante, her adviser, her Brexit brain. He is always there in the background and far too close for some.
"Where do you see your authority as deriving from?" arch-Eurosceptic Jacob Rees-Mogg asked Mr Robbins in a recent select committee hearing in Westminster.
It was a loaded question. Rees-Mogg and the Brexiteers he stands alongside have long believed that Brexit has become the "Olly Show" - an attempt by Mr Robbins to achieve the softest possible Brexit and not the clean "out" they want.
"It's straightforward, Mr Rees-Mogg. I report to the prime minister, I work very closely with the secretary of state," Mr Robbins replied.
On the numerous occasions when he has been "doorstepped" by the media he marches on, head high, taking advantage of his lofty stature. As a civil servant he is not authorised to speak to the media.
"It's not the Olly Robbins Show," former British diplomat in Brussels Sir Jonathan Faull tells me.
"It's not even a show at all. It's a very serious, difficult, unprecedented international negotiation," he says.
Until his retirement last year, Sir Jonathan was a director-general in the European Commission - one of Britain's most senior civil servants in Brussels.
He adds: "I think part of the problem in all of this is the idea that this should have been simple; that there is some reason why it has taken this long and people are still arguing about it.
"It's (taken this long) not because people are wicked or betraying one side or the other. It is because it is objectively, inherently, a very difficult thing to negotiate."
Sir Jonathan scoffs at the suggestion that Mr Robbins - an unelected official - is too involved in the Brexit process.
"I don't quite understand that. I mean he is involved in presenting and arguing for the decisions which his political masters and mistresses have told him to. That's the way the civil service operates, it's the way the European Commission operates... the political decisions, guidelines, red lines are set by the politicians and civil servants do a lot of the day-to-day work," Sir Jonathan says.
"He is a very competent, able civil servant. He is clever - he understands things quickly. He is a good negotiator in carrying out what he is being asked to carry out."
There have been several key "waypoints" on the road to Brexit. The prime minister's speeches at Lancaster House, Mansion House and in Florence plotted the course she wanted Britain's EU exit to take.
It was Mr Robbins who steered events and policy towards the Chequers cabinet meeting in July. Images from the tense talks show him at her side as she tried to sell her Brexit blueprint to the cabinet.
David Davis, Brexit secretary, subsequently resigned. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson went too. Later, at the Conservative Party conference, mentions of the name Olly Robbins in speeches were met with boos.
In the minds of Brexiteer ministers, Mr Robbins was running a shadow operation behind their backs and was trying to push through a soft, non-Brexit.
True or not, what was clear is that while politicians were failing to come up with workable solutions for Brexit, Mr Robbins was filling the vacuum.
Former Downing Street insider Jill Rutter is now a director at the Institute for Government.
"Big calls" and "strategy" are decided by the "prime Minister and her cabinet", she tells me.
She adds: "That is why the cabinet was all assembled at Chequers to try to get a collective position that then Olly Robbins and the officials could go and negotiate.
"The idea that the prime minister is a prisoner of the civil service, running their own agenda, is incredibly unflattering to the prime minister. She should be using Olly and the civil service to achieve the Brexit she wants."
Robbins's EU counterpart in Brussels is not Michel Barnier - the EU Brexit official we hear most about. Rather it is Barnier's deputy, Sabine Weyand, a German career civil servant who shines in a crowd of grey-suited Eurocrats thanks to her colourful cat's eye spectacles.
Those who know Robbins and Weyand talk of two of the sharpest minds around. She was at Cambridge, he at Oxford, and together, across the negotiating table, they are moulding Brexit for their political masters above.
Descriptions of Mr Robbins's "huge brain", his "charm", his "intellect", his "unflappable and level-headed" nature, his "ability to absorb huge documents" are countered by those who think he represents a "clique" and is not collegiate.
Director of the Open Europe think tank, Henry Newman, used to work as a special adviser in the Cabinet Office, alongside Mr Robbins.
"One criticism I heard from officials working to him was that a lot of the negotiation was really in Olly's head," Mr Newman says.
"What was the plan if Olly fell under the proverbial bus? Where would that leave our negotiating strategy?
"It's great if you can absorb all that material but do we have a worked out plan and a strategy?" Mr Newman wonders.
The most intriguing character assessments of Olly Robbins come from his counterparts in Brussels. You won't find anyone of any influence happy to talk openly about him at this crucial time in the negotiations.
But in private they speak of a formidable negotiator. I have found genuine respect for him as he attempts to pull together opposing views on Brexit.
One key Brexit character on the EU side said to me: "I'm one of the greatest admirers of the British civil service and Olly is a top example of this."
Mr Robbins was snapped outside a Brussels bar last week, phone in hand, glass of red wine in reach. It was the end of another long negotiating round.
If he bags a deal here in Brussels, one that all sides can live with, it will be a fine achievement for a civil service which seems to be respected all over.
But it's a big if.