Politics: a reminder

By Richard North - April 23, 2023

The Times and Sunday Times together are serialising a book entitled Johnson at 10: The Inside Story written by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.

The two extracts so far published do not make for pleasant reading but they, or the complete book (or both) should be read by everyone with the slightest interest in politics. For, as the title indicates, it takes the lid off the complete train-wreck that was the Johnson administration.

The first extract is headed, “‘I’m the Führer, the king’: inside Boris Johnson’s chaotic world”, which takes up the first period of Johnson’s administration after his meteoric rise to prime minister in July 2019.

The detail verges on the sort of palace gossip in which the newspaper so often revels, and I would prefer to take the lofty historical view and stick to the substantive issues but, in this case, the gossip is the story, illustrating quite how ramshackle Johnson’s tenure actually was.

The train-wreck starts, of course, with the appointment of Dominic Cummings as Johnson’s special adviser, but laid bare is not only Cummings’s baleful influence as the power behind the throne, but also the tensions between him and the other pretender to that title, Carrie Symonds.

In the first instance, we are told – as if we didn’t already know – that the decision to bring in Cummings was the most fateful of Boris Johnson’s premiership. “Johnson”, the authors say, was “effectively bringing a sledgehammer into No 10″. He was almost gleeful at the prospect, feeling a childlike sense of mischief”, even though he acknowledged to cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill that it would “probably end in tears”.

It took less than two months for divisions to bubble up to the surface between the prime minister and Cummings, but a lid was kept on them until the general election. Johnson, an aide says, was willing to accept directions from Cummings because it was clear his fate depended upon it.

This changed with the election on 12 December 2019, which Johnson regarded as his own personal victory, a total endorsement of his brilliance personally, not the Conservative party’s victory. He would regularly refer to “my majority” and say, “They would be nowhere without me”.

He dodged a root and branch reshuffle after the election and, although he was no longer politically vulnerable, he came to resent Cummings’ rudeness and domineering manner. True to form, though, he gave no other thought to a different way of running No 10. He still relied on Cummings, yet became increasingly unhappy with his treating him, if not like Jeeves and Wooster, “then perhaps like the lord protector with a young and inexperienced king”.

Cummings, we learn, was deeply suspicious “of the stench of landslide hubris he detected around Johnson’s study”, and the air of self-congratulation. He thought it was incomprehensible, believing the post-election period to be the moment to spend physical capital (sic) and do unpopular things.

Johnson, it appears, hadn’t a clue what Cummings was up to most of the time but became jealous of his special adviser and frustrated that he did not respect him. Cummings, it was said, had a huge ego thinking he should be the PM and was telling everyone Boris was just his vessel.

Johnson on the other hand no longer wanted to be treated as a tempestuous thoroughbred, with a strong whip and bridle to keep him in order. Cummings could be insulting and rude. Some days the prime minister could laugh it off, but other days he didn’t.

Then, in the close background, there was Carrie Symonds, also growing resentful of Cummings and antagonised by his barely concealed contempt for her partner. It was believed she was constantly whispering in Johnson’s ear that he “didn’t need Dom now”.

The full details then become far too tedious to recount, but we have the Cummings coup against the then chancellor Savid Javid which culminated in his resignation, a situation which Johnson is said to have completely misread. For this, he took a “clattering from Carrie”, leading to some “shocking” horse trading over new ministerial posts.

As an indication of where the Johnson administration then stood, we have Seldon and Newell telling us that Cummings “wasn’t interested in democracy”. He was interested in change. Keeping Johnson away from MPs, not least because of his fear that he would say stupid things, was an article of faith. The fact the prime minister owed his position solely to the support of MPs no longer troubled him now they had such a large majority.

Says Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, “Cummings had contempt for our MPs and thought that we should be grateful for being in government, for the general election result, and that our job was now merely to behave”.

Cummings had no time for parliament and thought cabinet too was a waste of time. “Symbolically he refused to attend cabinet as a symbol of his disdain for the institution. He governed round rather than through cabinet”, an official said.

In the second extract which deals with the handling of the Covid epidemic, we get the gruesome details of that particular train-wreck, including how Johnson came to be admitted to hospital after succumbing to the disease.

Picking up the bit of the story as Johnson returned to work, Cummings – we are told – was adopting the voice of the prime minister brazenly. Civil servants began to talk openly about what they termed “Potemkin government”, with the system no longer knowing who was running the country.

“Don’t tell the PM”, was a regular Cummings utterance to staff or, “Oh, don’t bother him with this.” It was a struggle not just for officials, but ministers too. Within No 10, one third of the staff would report to Cummings, a third (including all of communications) to Cummings’s ally, Lee Cain, and a final third direct to Johnson.

Here, a “senior adviser” is cited, saying, “This last group realised that the PM would say anything to them and there would be no follow-through. Nothing happened.”

An official is then used to tell us that: “It was desperately worrying, because he would say three different things on the same day to three different sets of people, and then deny that he had changed his mind or that the positions were mutually contradictory.”

Yet another official has it that, “The PM’s wishes were no longer holding, because everyone knew he would change his mind”. Those close to Johnson noticed him becoming increasingly troubled by being bypassed. “‘I am meant to be in control. I am the Führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions’, he would say in frustration. It was totally dysfunctional,” says a special adviser.

As for Symonds, her relationship with Cummings deteriorated further after Johnson’s illness. “It was toxic. Anyone who was a friend of Dom was under constant scrutiny. Carrie and her allies were on the warpath”, an ally of Cummings is cited as saying.

She had grown to resent his unabashed contempt for her partner and the way he pushed him around. Johnson in turn regularly vented his frustrations with his chief to her. Cummings too had grown frustrated with the woman to whom he and allies now referred as “Princess Nut Nut”.
By the late summer of 2020, No 10 was in meltdown. One adviser notes that, “Everybody was knackered, weary, meetings lacking any structure. People were focused internally on the disarray within No 10, and the briefing wars between the teams didn’t help.”

Cummings’ efforts on Covid had neutered his ability to control No 10. “It made clear there was nobody in No 10 who had a grip across government. The prime minister basically had no chief of staff. Dom was too busy elsewhere”, says an aide. Rather than working in the outer office, he was tucked away pursuing his own agenda.

And so it goes on, but the authors take care to attribute the blame for the deteriorating situation “foursquare” on Johnson. But what must be said is that no-one with any brains or analytical ability could have been at all surprised at the detail Seldon and Newell are throwing at us.

This is down to the MPs who voted for Johnson as their leader, and to the Conservative Party membership who endorsed his leadership by a large margin, leaving the electorate with a choice in the 2019 election that they should never have had to make.

This is a period of our national history that we can only look upon with a sense of frustration and shame, that the office of prime minister of a great nation was so debased by so base a creature. The details need to be lodged as a reminder to us that such a situation should never be repeated.