ANDREW PIERCE: Sir Jeremy Heywood is the die-hard Remainer who really runs Britain (aided and abetted by his influential Europhile wife)

By Andrew Pierce for the Daily Mail 00:09 14 Oct 2017, updated 10:37 14 Oct 2017

Every Wednesday, a meeting of the most powerful figures in the government takes place in Whitehall — and significantly, not a single minister is present.

The 'Wednesday Meeting of Colleagues', or the WMC, is attended by the Permanent Secretaries — the most senior civil servants in each department — and is a 'b****-fest' about ministers, according to one observer.

But the gathering of the mandarins also has another more troubling soubriquet: the 'Real Cabinet Meeting'.

It's chaired by Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, who wields a level of power not dreamed of by his predecessors.

Nicknamed Sir Cover-Up because of his proclivity for secrecy, his job is essentially to ensure that the government delivers on its policies.

But his most important role is to be the senior adviser to the prime minister of the day on everything from warring ministers to national security.

Since a very much weakened Theresa May was returned to Downing Street after the general election having lost her majority, he has become even more dominant. 

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that today, with a badly wounded Prime Minister, Sir Cover-Up is really the most powerful person in Britain.

'Be in no doubt Heywood runs the country,' one senior minister said this week. 

More disturbing is the fact that, on the most pressing issue of our times — Brexit — the Cabinet Secretary, a committed Remainer, is in charge.

Driven to work by a government chauffeur, he is at his mahogany desk by 7.30am in a wood-panelled stately room in the Cabinet Office overlooking Horse Guards Parade. 

Heywood goes in and out of 10 Downing Street without the need to step outside the building.

He attends the Prime Minister's daily 8.30am and 4pm meetings, where policy initiatives are discussed, Press stories are summarised, and lines of attack against the Opposition explored.

He also goes to Cabinet meetings, sitting by the Prime Minister's side, and after Mrs May he speaks the most.

His brief includes matters such as reviewing the estimated £55 billion cost of the HS2 high-speed rail link.

But it is with Brexit that Heywood has most firmly made his mark.

Eurosceptics believe that before the EU referendum he had regular meetings with Britain Stronger in Europe, the principal Remain pressure group whose board included Europhiles such as Peter Mandelson, former M&S boss Stuart Rose, and the City PR man Roland Rudd. But while Heywood's office confirmed it had information about such meetings, it refused to release any further information.

Significantly, in what has been seen as a mixture of bias and woeful negligence, he failed to ensure that the Civil Service he heads made contingency plans for a Brexit victory.

He was also involved in the controversial decision to send every household in the country propaganda leaflets, paid for from the public purse at a cost of nearly £10 million, about the benefits of staying in the EU.

Since the referendum last year, Heywood has also been criticised for not making plans to ensure that ports, trade links and airlines can operate smoothly if Britain leaves without a deal.

As one minister said: 'The failure to plan ahead was a shameful dereliction of duty by Heywood.'

Increasingly, critics are asking whether — being such a committed Remainer — Heywood is to be trusted to oversee our departure from Europe. 

After the referendum, Heywood persuaded the Prime Minister to establish the Department for Exiting the European Union, presumably hoping he would be able to guide the progress of the talks with Brussels.

But in the Brexit Secretary David Davis, he met his match.Davis is on the record in public and private for saying that 'no deal with the EU is better than a bad deal'. But Heywood takes the opposite view.

He is desperate for Britain to stay on good terms with the EU, and continue to comply with its laws and regulations for as long as possible. So it is that a power struggle has unfolded behind the scenes.

In the summer, Heywood poached Ollie Robbins, the Permanent Secretary at the Brexit department, who now works in the Cabinet Office. One senior source said: 'It was an audacious power-grab by Heywood. 

He set up the new Brexit department, but when it wouldn't dance to his tune, he pinched the most senior negotiator. 

It's been dressed up as the PM taking control, but it's Heywood who's in the driving seat.'

Make no mistake, the man is able. Seamlessly, he has served four very different prime ministers. 

Having first come to prominence as principal private secretary to Chancellor Norman Lamont in the Nineties, this political chameleon became the senior civil servant during the Labour administrations run by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

He performed the same role in the Coalition and was made Cabinet Secretary in 2012.

David Cameron knighted him the same year. So it is that he has been a uniquely influential constant in Downing Street; a fixer, enforcer, and confidante.

As a shrewd networker, Heywood long ago worked out that Theresa May was a potential prime minister.

He befriended her when she was Home Secretary, and they often dined together. When she moved into No 10 he was a familiar face.

But his problem was that when she became PM the real power was vested in her joint chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. 

Their desks were outside her study. No one could enter without their say so, including the Cabinet Secretary, who was often humbled by the acid tongue of Hill.

At the Wednesday Meeting of Colleagues before the last general election, civil servants regularly berated Heywood for not standing up to Timothy and Hill. 

But calculating as ever, Heywood decided to absorb the duo's insults to keep on the right side of them.

He was then ideally placed to fill the vacuum caused by their humiliating resignations in June as they paid the price for the Tories' failure to secure a majority. 

While former MP Gavin Barwell has become Mrs May's chief of staff, he does not have the clout with the PM of his predecessors, who had worked with her for years.

No, it's Jeremy Heywood who wields the power in Britain — even if most people have never heard of him. 

'Jeremy hasn't got where he is by being a shrinking violet,' said a senior Whitehall source. 'As soon as Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill were out the door, he took over.

He is now the master of all he surveys. He always seems to be in the room with the PM, and he's on most of her conference calls. Things have worked out very nicely for him.'

While politicians come and go, after more than two decades in Whitehall, Heywood is extremely knowledgeable on subjects from the economy to defence procurement, nuclear power, and public services.

He is the consummate power-broker: most permanent secretaries in government ministries owe their positions to his patronage, and he makes himself indispensable to prime ministers due to his experience. 

Yet in his rimless glasses, with his tirelessly precise sentences, he looks and sounds more like a senior accountant or a management consultant than the de facto prime minister.

Born in Yorkshire in 1961, Heywood, 55, went to Bootham, a private Quaker school in York, before studying history and economics at Oxford.

 He also studied at the LSE and Harvard, and spent time with the International Monetary Fund.

In 1997, he married Suzanne Cook, now 48, a Cambridge science graduate he met at the Treasury. For those concerned about the political neutrality of the Civil Service her role is, arguably, as controversial, if not more so, than her husband's.

For Lady Heywood is a passionate Europhile. Last year she left her job as a partner at international management consultants McKinsey to work for the billionaire Agnelli family, who are one of Europe's richest dynasties. 

She is now managing director at Exor, the £5.8 billion investment company controlled by the Agnellis, who have been dubbed Italy's Kennedy clan.

She is also on the board of The Economist magazine, which is vehemently opposed to Brexit.

Lady Heywood regularly attends dinners for business leaders held by the Prime Minister at Downing Street. 

Intriguingly, Sir Jeremy is involved not just in the guest lists for these occasions, but also the seating plans, which govern who gets access to Theresa May's ear.

Lady Heywood is not exactly reticent at these soirees. 'She's always got plenty to say,' adds my source. 'The dinners are another important part of Heywood's empire. Since he invites the guests, he controls who the PM gets to hear from.'

His wife is also deputy chairman of the Royal Opera House, which has served her well in the past. 

In 2013, when she was still at McKinsey, she landed a £600,000 contract with the BBC to lead a two-month review into making the Corporation a 'simpler place to work'.

Some observers concluded this was thanks to her cosy relationship with Lord Hall, the BBC director-general, who used to run the Royal Opera House. McKinsey insist they won the contract after a competitive process.

What fascinating pillow-talk the Heywoods must share as they watch David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson wrestling to shake the EU's negotiators out of their intransigence.

While Heywood never makes speeches, ministers say that behind the scenes — though he is committed to delivering Brexit on behalf of the Prime Minister — he is, like most of the Civil Service's bureaucrats, philosophically wedded to Brussels where, of course, the pen-pushers notoriously control the politicians.

As the Prime Minister attempts to reassert her authority after a shambolic party conference speech, she's facing renewed criticism that her administration is bereft of radical ideas.

And senior Tories blame Heywood for the policy drought. 'He doesn't want big new ideas because he's so consumed by Brexit he hasn't time for anything else,' said one minister.

Another minister told me: 'Heywood is viscerally opposed to outsiders coming in who might have fresh new ideas. He wants to promote from within the Civil Service because he controls the patronage.'

He has not always been enmeshed in politics.

During a four-year break from the Civil Service, starting in 2003, he joined the commercial bankers Morgan Stanley as a managing director. 

They happened to be at the heart of a profoundly controversial attempt in 2012 to merge the British defence giant BAE with the French-German aerospace company EADS — something the Mail's City Editor Alex Brummer argued passionately against.

Heywood had advocated to David Cameron that the merger should go ahead, and held a series of meetings with BAE and Morgan Stanley, which was advising the defence firm and was in line to get millions from its work on the deal.

Though the deal collapsed, Morgan Stanley continues to have a strong relationship with Downing Street. Theresa May's former adviser Fiona Hill used to attend regular breakfasts with senior staff from the bank.

And in March, the Prime Minister spoke at the company's 40th anniversary dinner at the British Museum.

Some Downing Street officials were uneasy about her accepting the invitation because they feared other banks would feel Morgan Stanley was being given a commercial advantage.

The source added: 'Morgan Stanley must have been chuffed to bits when the PM agreed to speak. You couldn't buy that sort of PR.'

Most incoming prime ministers are wary of the incumbent Cabinet Secretary, who they assume is too identified with the policies of their predecessor. But Mrs May, coping with the loss of her two chiefs of staff, has come to rely heavily on Heywood.

With no one taking responsibility for long-term strategic thinking, Heywood rules the roost.

As one minister told me: 'The Cabinet reshuffle talk is about whether Boris Johnson stays as Foreign Secretary. 

But if the PM wants to put the government on a radical footing, she should reshuffle Jeremy Heywood out of the Cabinet Office. I'm sure Morgan Stanley would give him another job.'