Britain’s antidote to serious government entered Phase III trials in November. With Brexit’s long prologue closing on 1 January 2021, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has ensured a smooth transition to disaster, fast-tracking its own development from sound election victors to European basket case in under 12 months. Immediate side-effects include inflammation in devolved regions, visible Allegra Stratton and potentially chronic Priti Patel. Perhaps they see it as shock therapy: a normalisation of crisis that might dull the public senses. Certainly they know there’s a lot more pain to come.
November’s cabinet cockfight flung up plenty of feathers but was by no means decisive. No doubt there were clear losers: the fall of the Cummings Cult – and in such humiliating circumstances. First, communications chief Lee Cain left to wander east of Eden just hours after being tipped for promotion. Heaping insult upon injury, his former colleagues took time to recount his career highlights: they claim he was the Daily Mirror’s stuntman during the 2010 general election campaign – the hack in the chicken-suit, stalking Tory candidates and debate-dodger David Cameron at their public events. Then Cummings himself: a victim of his own clucking arrogance, spectacularly wrong-footed as the other side called his bluff – his mass walkout, it emerged, had only two legs. And so, at long last, Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s hopes for the nation were realised: the people (the ones that matter: government ministers) could learn again to ‘live without fear’. A joy indeed, though surely tinged with regret when they realise they’ll have to run their own departments.
It was also an opportunity for Boris Johnson to reset relations with his MPs, the Westminster press pack and a wounded civil service. A long line of anonymous party colleagues confided to the morning papers that they missed the old Boris: how they had despaired as he cut himself off from them, lost between Scylla and Charybdis – betwixt the SpAD and the WAG. If only he’d now adopt a more collegiate style of government, the damage between Num-ber 10 and the par-liamen-tary party could be re-paired – the once two-term Mayor of London might prove a two-term Prime Minister after all. There were promising signs. What better way to dispel Trumpian notions of draining the Tory lagoon than by appealing directly to it – all of it, libertarian shallows to crawling, gloomy depths? The timing was perfect – just days after the cabinet exorcism, a crowd-pleasing triple announcement: first, the separation of science and state for five holy nights in December; second, a ten-point plan for Britain’s Green Industrial Revolution and, third – because all revolutions have a duty to defend themselves – a substantial hike in military spending. Freedom-lovers, guilty consciences, laser-canon-loving maniacs – there was something for everyone.
Sadly, the ‘great reset’ of government communications proved to be a case of turning it off and on again. In his eagerness to please all, Johnson lost the run of himself: six months before key local elections, he delighted an online meeting of northern Tories, riffing on the mess north of the border – Tony Blair’s decision to devolve toil and trouble to Holyrood had proved ‘a disaster’, he said. Throwing his chief lieutenants overboard had clearly done little to fix a leaky ship as these private comments were being reported days later – in the same week that he presented his crowd-pleasing triplets to the nation. Scuppered. Again.
At the heart of the row with Cummings & Co was Allegra Stratton, the former Guardian journalist and BBC presenter. Once Labour voting, now a Brexit-backing ‘Johnson Tory’, she joined the Treasury in April 2020 when her old friend Rishi Sunak put her in charge of public relations. Now she’s government press secretary. Setting up shop in 9 Downing Street, this spin-doctor-with-a-difference fronts the new televised press briefings designed to set the evening news agenda – an innovation plucked straight from the White House Rose Garden. This is said to have been the brainchild of Cain and Cummings – only they favoured the BBC’s Ellie Price for the role. Now Stratton is the calm, smiling face of a government in disarray.
Still, probably the most immediate beneficiary of the Cabinet upheaval is Johnson’s director of policy Munira Mirza. Doctor of sociology; libertarian culture warrior; once dabbled in leftism – this is another of Johnson’s poacher-to-gamekeeper appointments, only this time dating back to his pre-Brexit, mayoral period when Mirza served as his deputy. There’s no doubt that Cummings’ ouster increases her influence. Cain meanwhile is replaced as head of communications by tribune-of-the-people James Slack. In 2016, after the High Court ruled on the need for parliamentary consent to Brexit, it was Slack who penned the Daily Mail’s infamous ‘Enemies of the people’ editorial. Not exactly a sea change then.
Still, Boris Johnson – fit as a butcher’s dog, full of tripe – having patched things up with his party and wooed the media all over again, now only had to solve the Whitehall problem: usher in a new dawn of civil peace in the ministries, a farewell to appointees, Britain’s honourable civil servant restored to his rightful place in policy. Let bygones be bygones – surely there’d be no hard feelings? Oh dear. Before he could even extend the hand of friendship, the underlings were in revolt again; Johnson was fighting yet another rearguard action, his devotees ordered to form a square around a Priti unpalatable Home Secretary.
The trouble with ‘the Pritster’ is all governments set their sights on the next election – even those that see little else beyond their own snout. Having painted the Red Wall blue last December, these Johnson Tories know they won’t hold it forever – not as they veer away from their levelling-up, power-to-the-parish manifesto. But, so long as a splash of greenwash stems that small but significant flow of votes to the Lib Dems, holding on to the odd northern rampart can keep Labour out of office. And that’s what the queen of darkness is there for. Perhaps she’ll be shunted elsewhere in a Brexit-got-done reshuffle – but, for the time being, Priti Patel is slightly more help than hindrance. A pantomime villain at the Home Office, soliloquising on leaky borders and foreign criminals, keeps up some populist appeal – both to the Old Labour diaspora and New Tory rank-and-file.
But leave nothing to chance – or chancers. In November the Public Accounts Committee published its report on the selection process for the government’s Towns Fund. As we knew already, cowboy housing minister Wild Bob Jenrick spent much of 2019 on the electoral frontier. With both pork barrels blazing, he brought his £3.6 billion ‘deprived towns’ funding scheme to the territories. For the purposes of the scheme, deprivation could mean, for example, living in a town deprived of a secure Tory majority. From a possible 541 towns, ranked from most deprived to least, 101 were selected for the scheme – 61 of them handpicked by Jenrick’s men. The chosen few included, for instance:
- Cheadle, a Tory marginal constituency targeted by the Lib Dems, ranked 536th most deprived town out of 541;
- St Ives, home to another Tory marginal seat targeted by the Lib Dems, ranked 437th;
- Todmorden (435th) and Brighouse (493rd), both in the bellwether Calder Valley constituency where the Tory incumbent held a majority of just 609 votes over his Labour challenger before the last election;
- And, of course, Bob’s own constituency of Newark.
- Corruption investigations, backroom briefings, conducting internal inquiries, suppressing internal inquiries, party infighting, civil service shake-ups, public service shakedowns, cabinet reshuffles – gosh. It must all be rather stressful. It really begs the question, why on earth do they put themselves through it?
- House of Commons MP: £81,932 basic annual salary, plus expenses;
- Pay Band 4 special adviser Munira Mirza: £145,000pa;
- Chris Grayling MP: paid £100,000 pa (on top of his parliamentary salary) by Hutchison Ports for seven hours ‘advisory work’ a week;
- David Davis MP: £3,000 an hour from digger-maker JCB;
- Home Secretary Priti Patel: £1,000 an hour for advising US communication systems firm Viasat, which bids for Ministry of Defence contracts;
- Theresa May MP: over £1m in after-dinner speaking fees during 2020.
Again: why do they do it? I suppose we’ll never know. More to the point: why do you let them get away with it?
Patrick Casey
