“The smoke wreaked havoc on his throat, reducing his voice to a strangled croak,” Shipman writes. “She developed a general cold – not what the Prime Minister needed before a divisive week in Parliament.”
But, according to Shipman, May was “too polite to complain” – although one of her aides anonymously called Juncker a “rude bastard”.
The pair sealed revisions to May’s ill-fated Brexit deal at the meeting. As May subsequently tried to sell the revised deal in the House of Commons, her voice visibly cracked.
The book recounts how concerned parliamentary authorities were about May’s health at the time.
“Unbeknownst to MPs, a doctor had been called and the House of Commons authorities were so concerned about May’s health that the Sergeant-at-Arms (a House of Commons official) developed a plan to “evacuate,” Shipman writes.
In the vote that followed May’s presentation of the revised deal – agreed with Juncker at the so-called Strasbourg meeting – May was defeated by 149 votes, despite last-minute concessions she had obtained from the EU .
A week later, she told her party that she “would not lead the UK through the next stage of Brexit negotiations”, indicating her intention to resign soon. She left office two months later after her party finished 5th in the European Parliament elections.
“If she can’t even convince someone to quit smoking, she’ll get virtually nothing more from them,” Shipman quoted an unnamed Conservative minister as saying about May’s meeting with Juncker.
Politices
