BoJo looks weak now, making decisions based on what his gf tells him
Westminster Politics
- Thread starter altodevil
- Start date
If anyone believed that Cummings line that is.
No doubt he has always been weak, but listening to the women in his life doesn't seem to be his M.O.
They were and still are very much The Nasty Party.
And anyone who supports them is welcome to them and their compulsive lying.
That's fecking horrible isn't it? Just a massive splodge of Tory gangbang spaff.
The melodramaNot his biggest fan, not even close, but wish him a speedy recovery
BoJo doesn't know if he is Cummings or Goings.
So Boris is resetting himself and the party to welcome in the Biden Administration.
The nepotism at the heart of British Government
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There might be a little bit of truth in that. Biden is an Irish American, proud of his roots and is very much adamant if UK feck Ireland over, there’s no trade deals to be had
that's right
As opposed to ????
Man I wish I could photoshop, what an opportunity.
I should have said “weaker”
You wonder how he could be seen as less incompetent at this stage.
Sadly I think this is true. We have to follow the lead of the US whomever is president. In this case it’s for the best ultimately given the crappy trade deal BoJo was under pressure to sign under Trump and the softer Brexit that will likely occur. Hopefully we’ll also see an end to the aggressive and subversive Trumpian tactics they were using too.
I don’t think Cummings wanted to be associated with the new direction but I think it’s actually more in line with who Boris is politically. I think the other factor is how much his party hated Cummings. If Boris had kept him on he‘d have dwindling support for a second term.
Fair point. Especially an administration that will perceive any infringement on the Good Friday Agreement negatively.
I do think no Trump = no hard Brexit. We're probably headed to another extension for at least a year.
Seems an inevitable consequence of a political system where 3/4 of PMs since the 1720s come from the same two Universities and a huge number of the leading figures in politics did exactly the same university course:
MONDAY, 13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labour party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticised by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls.
Elsewhere in the country, with the election three weeks away, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander, was preparing to visit Kingston and Surbiton, a vulnerable London seat held by a fellow Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Davey. In Kent, one of Ukip’s two MPs, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless, was campaigning in his constituency, Rochester and Strood. Comments on the day’s developments were being posted online by Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News.
On the BBC Radio 4 website, the Financial Times statistics expert and Oxford PPE graduate Tim Harford presented his first election podcast. On BBC1, Oxford PPE graduate and Newsnight presenter Evan Davies conducted the first of a series of interviews with party leaders. In the print media, there was an election special in the Economist magazine, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Zanny Minton-Beddoes; a clutch of election articles in the political magazine Prospect, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Bronwen Maddox; an election column in the Guardian by Oxford PPE graduate Simon Jenkins; and more election coverage in the Times and the Sun, whose proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, studied PPE at Oxford.
Elsewhere in the country, with the election three weeks away, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander, was preparing to visit Kingston and Surbiton, a vulnerable London seat held by a fellow Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Davey. In Kent, one of Ukip’s two MPs, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless, was campaigning in his constituency, Rochester and Strood. Comments on the day’s developments were being posted online by Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News.
On the BBC Radio 4 website, the Financial Times statistics expert and Oxford PPE graduate Tim Harford presented his first election podcast. On BBC1, Oxford PPE graduate and Newsnight presenter Evan Davies conducted the first of a series of interviews with party leaders. In the print media, there was an election special in the Economist magazine, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Zanny Minton-Beddoes; a clutch of election articles in the political magazine Prospect, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Bronwen Maddox; an election column in the Guardian by Oxford PPE graduate Simon Jenkins; and more election coverage in the Times and the Sun, whose proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, studied PPE at Oxford.
Among the many issues with that is the fact that PMs will then be surrounded by people they already know and have any opportunity to appoint more people they already know. The "qualified options" come pre-narrowed to their own extended social circle.
Three things I don't really understand why British people think that :
1) The UK would have got a better or worse trade deal with Biden or Trump, both are only interested in the USA's interests as would any US President - will they get any type of trade deal?
2) That there's a special relationship between the USA and the UK, it's only the UK that think this.
3) Why would there be an extension to the transition period? Trade deal negotiations can continue after the transition period finishes and would have done any way. Only a very basic outline could have been negotiated by the end of it. The fact is that the UK has wasted the last year and in fact the last four and a half years with chest beating . The Uk have left the Customs Union, that's the important part and they're not rejoining.
1) The UK would have got a better or worse trade deal with Biden or Trump, both are only interested in the USA's interests as would any US President - will they get any type of trade deal?
2) That there's a special relationship between the USA and the UK, it's only the UK that think this.
3) Why would there be an extension to the transition period? Trade deal negotiations can continue after the transition period finishes and would have done any way. Only a very basic outline could have been negotiated by the end of it. The fact is that the UK has wasted the last year and in fact the last four and a half years with chest beating . The Uk have left the Customs Union, that's the important part and they're not rejoining.
BBC doing the Tories' PR for them yet again with the headline of their lead story today.
"Cummings exit gives chance to reset government"
They know exactly what they're doing.
Maybe. Not sure how well that will work if he's established himself as the UK's version of Trump in the Democrats' mind. In fact Biden himself previously described Johnson as a physical and emotional clone of the President.
Plus I doubt they will have forgotten Johnson's previous claim that Obama had a Kenyan ancestral hangup about British colonialism either. In fact within the last couple of weeks a former Obama spokesman specifically said they hadn't forgotten those racist comments and that Johnson was a "shapeshifting creep".
Not sure ditching Cummings will be enough to rebuild a reputation Johnson has spent a long time earning.
Is Johnson and the media going to try and memory hole the last 2 years of his tenure?
No. 10’s communication director subtly changing the narrative towards a much softer Brexit?
Tommy vietor?... if so I'd take it in the context of his crooked media / podcast work rather than being reflective of people in anyway shape or form associated with the administration
I would also question just how long boris might be around after brexit... so it might not even be relevant by the time(if?) Biden gets sworn in though if gove gets in Johnson might look by comparison less of a shape shifting creep
Both good points.
Christ how did I miss that.
Has Cummings been fired?
Very good long read on the demise of Cummings
There were three in this marriage: Boris, Carrie and Dominic Cummings
Tim Shipman thetimes.co.uk 18-22 minutes
There were three in this marriage: Boris, Carrie and Dominic Cummings
Tim Shipman thetimes.co.uk 18-22 minutes
There were three in this marriage: Boris, Carrie and Dominic Cummings
Tim Shipman thetimes.co.uk 18-22 minutes
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/there-were-three-of-them-in-this-marriage-33xpxgmn7
The crunch moment of a week that shook Boris Johnson’s premiership came on Wednesday evening as he was having conversations with the two most
important women in his life — the Queen and his fiancée. At 6.30pm the prime minister was in his study with Lee Cain, his director of communications, discussing a plan to make him the Downing Street chief of staff. News of the appointment had broken the night before and had led to a backlash from ministers and MPs.
At that moment a call came through from Buckingham Palace putting Johnson through for his weekly audience with the Queen, now a remote event because of the coronavirus.
Cain left the room. When he returned, it became clear to him that Johnson had also had a conversation with his fiancée Carrie Symonds. It was equally clear that she was implacably opposed to Cain making the step up. “Lee realised he would not have the support of Carrie to do the job,” a friend said. “It was not a secret in the building that she had intervened.” Cain told Johnson: “It won’t be in your best interests for me to do the job. The best thing you can do would be to accept my resignation.”
Johnson’s partner had staged an intervention that changed the face of government and led one minister to waspishly compare Symonds to Elizabeth I in Blackadder II. “This week we’ve seen who’s queen,” he said.
After another 48 hours of tumultuous personal drama and vicious infighting, both Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, and Cain were gone from No 10 and his premiership was set on a different path.
The fall of Cummings appeared to be fallout from a bitter power struggle over government communications between Cain, a former tabloid reporter, and Allegra Stratton, the former television reporter Johnson had recruited to be his new press secretary.
But the real story is that the events of last week lay in three meals Johnson had at Chequers, his country retreat, plus an impromptu sausage-and-mash supper in Downing Street. Call it four dinners and a political funeral.
Underlying it all was the conclusion the prime minister had come to that his government was not working with Cummings at its head. “This whole thing started about a month or six weeks ago, when Boris finally resolved that he had to get rid of Cummings,” a senior Tory said.
More intriguing still, it was Cain, Cummings’s loyal lieutenant, who had helped Johnson to conclude that something had to change, setting in train events that would sweep them both away.
This is not just a story of internecine warfare at the heart of government; it was vivid dramatisation of the contradictions in the prime minister’s own political identity and character, a battle for the soul of Johnson.
At its simplest, it was a division between the Vote Leave faction of Brexiteer buccaneers — led by Cummings and Cain — who guided Johnson to his victories in the 2016 EU referendum, the Tory leadership contest and last year’s election — and others, led by Symonds and Stratton, who remember more fondly the consensual figure who twice won the London mayoralty in a Labour city.
In the end, Johnson decided he quite liked that version of himself too. As one cabinet minister put it: “Boris has finally decided that he wants to be the prime minister rather than a kidnap victim.”
The dossier dinner
The drama began in the third week of October when Simon Case, the new cabinet secretary, approached Cain “on behalf of the PM” about whether he would be interested in becoming chief of staff. Seeing his opportunity, Cain wrote a note for Johnson on what was wrong with the No 10 operation — a memo sent on October 26. “It was unforgiving about the problems with the operation,” one of those familiar with the document said. “About individuals and structures.”
Cain’s conclusion, the source said, was: “It was all about how there was no central figure. It said there were problems in the private office, with policy development and CCHQ” — Conservative campaign headquarters. Cain wanted a “central figure pulling it all together”. This implied criticism of Martin Reynolds, Johnson’s principal private secretary; Munira Mirza, the head of policy; and Tory chairwoman Amanda Milling. But the lack of a central figure could only refer to Cummings.
Two days later, on October 28, Cain had dinner at Chequers with the prime minister and Symonds. “They chatted about what was wrong with the operation, warts and all,” an insider said. Johnson said he agreed with Cain’s assessments and would be keen for him to implement them. Johnson did not make an explicit offer of the chief of staff role, but Cain appeared to be in pole position.
The situation had acquired urgency because Cummings had taken himself off to lead the government’s “moonshot” programme for mass testing and had even less bandwidth than usual for running the No 10 operation.
Johnson was already unhappy at the way No 10 was functioning, detecting a lack of grip over the debacle concerning the downgrading of exam results in September and funding free school meals, a mess that put the government at odds with the footballer Marcus Rashford. “He was very unhappy about that,” said a No 10 official. “It hasn’t been working for a long time and that was something he recognised.”
Several months ago Johnson discussed the chief of staff role with Sajid Javid, the former chancellor. Javid made clear he could not work with Cummings, who had engineered his ousting from the Treasury in a reshuffle earlier this year. More recently Johnson phoned Lord Feldman, David Cameron’s party chairman, and asked him to do the job. Feldman was also unprepared to work with Cummings.
Cain was already doing parts of the job. When Johnson and many other senior figures fell ill with Covid in spring, it was Cain who stepped up and “kept the show on the road” effectively running No 10 while Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, acted as chairman of the cabinet. In the past month, as Cummings focused on testing, Cain again assumed greater responsibilities. A No 10 colleague said: “Lee corrals the senior team — he makes sure things are done on deadline. Advisers go to Lee when they want decisions taken. He knows what Boris thinks.”
Stratton makes her pitch
These talks about shaking up the operation coincided with the recruitment of Stratton to front Downing Street press conferences. The idea of taking media briefings in front of camera was Cain’s idea, but he did not want Stratton — at that point Rishi Sunak’s spin doctor.
However, at a dinner at Chequers in July at which Johnson and Symonds hosted Sunak, Stratton and their partners, the prime minister had urged Stratton to do the job. “You used to be the most popular politician in Britain,” she told Johnson. She outlined ideas to help him win back public approval. “Boris wants to be loved and he saw that Allegra had helped Rishi become popular,” said a ministerial aide. “He wanted some of that.”
Cain is understood to have been furious when he heard about the exchanges. He was no longer in control of a process he had set in train. He sought to encourage others to apply for the job. In the interviews Stratton and the BBC’s Ellie Price were “by a distance” the best candidates and went forward to a mock press conference and a “chemistry test” interview with Johnson.
Those who were there say Price’s “folksy” approach was more effective than Stratton’s strident one to the mock press conference, but that Stratton’s interview with Johnson was better. He chose Stratton.
She took the job on the basis that she would report to the prime minister. Cain insisted she work to him. They clashed over whether Stratton would get a pay rise and an office (she didn’t). Cain insisted that he appoint her deputy and said he wanted Price. Stratton saw that as an attempt to install the “stop Allegra candidate”. She preferred Angus Walker, a former ITV colleague who is now special adviser to Gavin Williamson, the education secretary. Stratton told Cain: “I can’t work with you.” She texted Johnson that she would quit and he should appoint Price instead.
On November 4 — two Wednesdays ago — Johnson asked Stratton back to Chequers for lunch with him and Symonds: the third key meal. There he suggested that Cain would be chief of staff and the two women told him it was a bad move. Both felt his communications strategy had proved ineffective. Both also had concerns about the macho culture over which he and Cummings presided in Downing Street, which they felt had made life uncomfortable for several young women advisers.
“Carrie just felt very clearly and firmly that he was wrong for Boris and for the government and for the agenda and for his relationships with people,” a friend said. “She just felt he was at the heart of all the stuff that hadn’t been working.”
Cain got wind of the conversation and wrote a letter of resignation. Johnson texted him to say he would not accept it. On the Thursday, Johnson waved Cain’s letter at Stratton and made clear she would have to report to Cain. On her kitchen wall at home was a picture of Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted as Donald Trump’s communications director for 11 days. It had long been the joke in her family about whether she would make it to 12 days. That now looked doubtful.
Last Sunday, Johnson cooked sausages while Cain mashed potato and swede into a lumpy accompaniment and the two ate together in the Downing Street garden. Over more than two hours they discussed the shortcomings of the operation. “In the middle of this Covid crisis, it’s your duty to the country to stay,” Johnson said.
The volcano blows
The following day the mood in No 10 was strange. One witness said Cain was “walking around the building whistling”. Stratton considered resigning. Johnson told her it was her duty to serve. “It felt like a volcano was going to blow,” said one witness. “You could see the smoke starting to swirl. The birds were flying away.”
At 7pm that evening Johnson called in Cain and said he did want him to be chief of staff. He had sounded out Case and Lord Udny-Lister, his other senior adviser. They were keen on the idea. Case wanted more political grip. Lister, 71, agreed to remain in No 10 to help Cain bed into his new role. At this point Johnson had not consulted Cummings — something that belies the notion that the “dark lord” of Downing Street was behind a plot to install his closest ally.
Allies of Cain say he asked for 24 hours to think about it and stressed that he would need the backing of Symonds if he was to do the job. His enemies say Johnson had not made a firm offer. Either way, the following evening the story leaked to The Times, along with the view that access to Johnson should be restricted to Cummings, Cain, Case and Lister.
Cain’s enemies say his camp leaked the news to bounce Johnson into the appointment, his allies that it was done to stop the plan in its tracks. Whatever the intention, the backlash was swift and brutal. Ministers and MPs reacted with fury. They contacted Johnson and his chief whip, Mark Spencer, to say Cummings had to go and they would not tolerate his “Mini Me” being given a more prominent role. Spencer said the move would “lose the backbenchers”.
At lunchtime on Wednesday, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg tweeted that Symonds was “deeply unhappy about the plan”. Stratton told Johnson she would have to quit. Mirza was also furious, having got wind of Cain’s criticisms of her work.
The Cain mutiny
The row over the future of Cain exhumed long-standing ministerial hatred of Cummings and his culture of aggression. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, was furious when Cain peremptorily sacked Neil Tweedie, a special adviser to transport secretary, allegedly for leaking details of a meeting that Tweedie says he was not even in — a situation that is still the subject of HR negotiations.
Allies of Symonds refer to the duo as “the mad mullahs”. One senior cabinet minister calls Cummings David Koresh, after the cult leader who caused the tragic Waco siege in Texas in 1993. Symonds and Stratton, in close contact, both worked on Johnson. “Carrie was depressed,” another friend said. “She didn’t think this was who Boris is.”
Other ministers and donors had complained for months that Cummings would sit at the back of what were supposed to be one-on-one meetings with Johnson. One donor, irate at finding Cummings “huffing and puffing” in one encounter with Johnson asked him: “Are you on drugs?” When Cummings said, “No,” he added: “Surely you should be on some sort of medication.”
One ally said: “Dom has basically spent most of the last year telling people to f*** off. People who should have been his allies were not there for him this week.”
Insiders say Johnson’s relationship with Cummings had “effectively broken down”, beginning with the incident when Cummings drove 260 miles to Co Durham during the first lockdown. Multiple sources say Cummings treated Johnson with contempt, rejecting calls to apologise in a televised statement.
“Dom’s attitude, even to Boris, was: ‘I don’t answer to you.’” One recalls Cummings receiving a text message from Johnson and waving it around, making clear he was going to ignore it. “Dom didn’t bother returning calls for long periods of time,” another recalled.
Mistrust was sown further by the most damaging leak of Johnson’s premiership when two newspapers announced the plans for a second national lockdown even before Johnson had definitively made up his mind. “Boris was apocalyptically incandescent,” said a Whitehall source. He was forced into a hasty weekend announcement of the plans and demanded a leak inquiry.
In the bitter briefing wars last week Cain and Cummings were both accused of being the so-called “chatty rat”. Cain has been cleared of being the source of “part” of the leak, but the investigation continues.
Despite his growing distrust, Johnson fought on Wednesday night to stop other Vote Leave aides quitting. Some sources say Cummings, having lost Cain, sought to persuade others to go — a technique he used when MPs tried to oust him from Vote Leave in 2016. Cummings denies this, but Oliver Lewis, a Brexit team member, was close to quitting.
Lord Frost, the chief Brexit negotiator, telephoned Johnson to inform him he would not join a walkout, while Johnson sought to convince Lewis to stay, making clear he would not weaken his negotiating position.
But by Thursday, Cummings had also resolved to leave by Christmas. His last throw of the dice — demanding that Cleo Watson, his closest aide, be made chief of staff — was rejected by Johnson.
On Friday, even that plan was untenable. Brexiteers said Cummings has become vocal in private about Johnson’s shortcomings in recent months, labelling him “indecisive”. One characterised this view as: “Just make a f***ing decision and stick to it.” He added: “People are now openly questioning whether he is right for the job.”
With a full-blown briefing war under way, it was also open season on Symonds by allies of Cain and Cummings. One claimed she calls Johnson’s private office “more than 20 times a day demanding that he leave meetings to call her back” — a claim dismissed as untrue by her allies and impartial civil servants.
On Friday lunchtime Johnson called in Cain and Cummings to tell them it would be their last day in No 10. Both told friends the meeting was “warm with lots of laughter” as the trio recounted their battles together. “When you split up with a girlfriend, it’s best to move out quickly,” a friend said.
But Johnson had become angry over the media briefings against Symonds. A senior No 10 source said: “The prime minister was clear with them on Friday that the briefings had to stop and it was clear that they had not stopped.”
Some Tories are queasy about Symonds’s role in last week’s events. A former cabinet minister said: “We have a constitutional conundrum that the prime minister’s girlfriend is deciding senior non-ministerial appointments, which I think is without precedent.”
Friends of Symonds are furious about the way she has been depicted. One said: “Carrie was deliberately dragged into it at a key moment to damage her and to undermine the case she was making. They want her to look like Lady Macbeth. She is one of the very few people around the prime minister who understands the Conservative Party.”
Cain’s allies are equally incensed by what they see as a cabal of “posh southern women” who have ousted a working-class man from Ormskirk in Lancashire. “This bloke is a working-class outsider who went from dressing as a chicken to becoming the prime minister’s director of communications,” said a leading Tory strategist. “He got the job on merit without going to a fancy school or Oxford or being on the BBC. There’s something distasteful about the glee with which they have greeted his demise.”
The bitter personal animus also disguises a genuine disagreement about the future of government policy. The Vote Leave crew fear Stratton and Symonds will steer Johnson away from the policies that won him the election.
One accused Stratton of wanting Johnson to be “pink Stetson Boris” — a reference to when Johnson put on the headgear at a Pride parade. “Like it or not, he was elected by leave voters,” the former No 10 aide said. “These people need to respect his mandate. You’ve got to dance with them what brung ya, or we will lose the next election.”
This line of attack enrages Symonds and Stratton, who both voted to leave. Stratton has told friends she was the “only Brexiteer on television”. Her approach, outlined to her new colleagues, is not to change Johnson’s approach but to do better at working up policy that will transform the lives of working-class voters and communicating it better to them. “Allegra has tried for months to get them to talk about levelling up, but nothing was happening.
She’s very realistic about what people want from their government. It’s not about waffly Cameronism — it’s about being competent and delivering.”
Having ousted his key aides on Friday, Johnson, typically, sought to minimise the confrontation, telling officials: “I told them we should get the gang back together” to fight the next election.
Johnson visited Cain in his office and signed a pair of boxing gloves emblazoned with “Get Brexit done” before making a speech wishing him well. “He’s the only one of my staff who always answers phone calls, no matter what time of day or night,” Johnson said, adding: “I sometimes wait for days for Dom to return them.”
One colleague said: “Dom’s favourite gesture at the moment in conversations is to pull the pin from an imaginary hand grenade and then throw the grenade over his shoulder as he leaves the room. Everyone is braced.”
In the end, Cummings and Cain blew themselves up. What remains to be seen is whether their departure marks the start of a bright new future for Johnson or the beginning of the end.
Tim Shipman thetimes.co.uk 18-22 minutes
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/there-were-three-of-them-in-this-marriage-33xpxgmn7
The crunch moment of a week that shook Boris Johnson’s premiership came on Wednesday evening as he was having conversations with the two most
important women in his life — the Queen and his fiancée. At 6.30pm the prime minister was in his study with Lee Cain, his director of communications, discussing a plan to make him the Downing Street chief of staff. News of the appointment had broken the night before and had led to a backlash from ministers and MPs.
At that moment a call came through from Buckingham Palace putting Johnson through for his weekly audience with the Queen, now a remote event because of the coronavirus.
Cain left the room. When he returned, it became clear to him that Johnson had also had a conversation with his fiancée Carrie Symonds. It was equally clear that she was implacably opposed to Cain making the step up. “Lee realised he would not have the support of Carrie to do the job,” a friend said. “It was not a secret in the building that she had intervened.” Cain told Johnson: “It won’t be in your best interests for me to do the job. The best thing you can do would be to accept my resignation.”
Johnson’s partner had staged an intervention that changed the face of government and led one minister to waspishly compare Symonds to Elizabeth I in Blackadder II. “This week we’ve seen who’s queen,” he said.
After another 48 hours of tumultuous personal drama and vicious infighting, both Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser, and Cain were gone from No 10 and his premiership was set on a different path.
The fall of Cummings appeared to be fallout from a bitter power struggle over government communications between Cain, a former tabloid reporter, and Allegra Stratton, the former television reporter Johnson had recruited to be his new press secretary.
But the real story is that the events of last week lay in three meals Johnson had at Chequers, his country retreat, plus an impromptu sausage-and-mash supper in Downing Street. Call it four dinners and a political funeral.
Underlying it all was the conclusion the prime minister had come to that his government was not working with Cummings at its head. “This whole thing started about a month or six weeks ago, when Boris finally resolved that he had to get rid of Cummings,” a senior Tory said.
More intriguing still, it was Cain, Cummings’s loyal lieutenant, who had helped Johnson to conclude that something had to change, setting in train events that would sweep them both away.
This is not just a story of internecine warfare at the heart of government; it was vivid dramatisation of the contradictions in the prime minister’s own political identity and character, a battle for the soul of Johnson.
At its simplest, it was a division between the Vote Leave faction of Brexiteer buccaneers — led by Cummings and Cain — who guided Johnson to his victories in the 2016 EU referendum, the Tory leadership contest and last year’s election — and others, led by Symonds and Stratton, who remember more fondly the consensual figure who twice won the London mayoralty in a Labour city.
In the end, Johnson decided he quite liked that version of himself too. As one cabinet minister put it: “Boris has finally decided that he wants to be the prime minister rather than a kidnap victim.”
The dossier dinner
The drama began in the third week of October when Simon Case, the new cabinet secretary, approached Cain “on behalf of the PM” about whether he would be interested in becoming chief of staff. Seeing his opportunity, Cain wrote a note for Johnson on what was wrong with the No 10 operation — a memo sent on October 26. “It was unforgiving about the problems with the operation,” one of those familiar with the document said. “About individuals and structures.”
Cain’s conclusion, the source said, was: “It was all about how there was no central figure. It said there were problems in the private office, with policy development and CCHQ” — Conservative campaign headquarters. Cain wanted a “central figure pulling it all together”. This implied criticism of Martin Reynolds, Johnson’s principal private secretary; Munira Mirza, the head of policy; and Tory chairwoman Amanda Milling. But the lack of a central figure could only refer to Cummings.
Two days later, on October 28, Cain had dinner at Chequers with the prime minister and Symonds. “They chatted about what was wrong with the operation, warts and all,” an insider said. Johnson said he agreed with Cain’s assessments and would be keen for him to implement them. Johnson did not make an explicit offer of the chief of staff role, but Cain appeared to be in pole position.
The situation had acquired urgency because Cummings had taken himself off to lead the government’s “moonshot” programme for mass testing and had even less bandwidth than usual for running the No 10 operation.
Johnson was already unhappy at the way No 10 was functioning, detecting a lack of grip over the debacle concerning the downgrading of exam results in September and funding free school meals, a mess that put the government at odds with the footballer Marcus Rashford. “He was very unhappy about that,” said a No 10 official. “It hasn’t been working for a long time and that was something he recognised.”
Several months ago Johnson discussed the chief of staff role with Sajid Javid, the former chancellor. Javid made clear he could not work with Cummings, who had engineered his ousting from the Treasury in a reshuffle earlier this year. More recently Johnson phoned Lord Feldman, David Cameron’s party chairman, and asked him to do the job. Feldman was also unprepared to work with Cummings.
Cain was already doing parts of the job. When Johnson and many other senior figures fell ill with Covid in spring, it was Cain who stepped up and “kept the show on the road” effectively running No 10 while Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, acted as chairman of the cabinet. In the past month, as Cummings focused on testing, Cain again assumed greater responsibilities. A No 10 colleague said: “Lee corrals the senior team — he makes sure things are done on deadline. Advisers go to Lee when they want decisions taken. He knows what Boris thinks.”
Stratton makes her pitch
These talks about shaking up the operation coincided with the recruitment of Stratton to front Downing Street press conferences. The idea of taking media briefings in front of camera was Cain’s idea, but he did not want Stratton — at that point Rishi Sunak’s spin doctor.
However, at a dinner at Chequers in July at which Johnson and Symonds hosted Sunak, Stratton and their partners, the prime minister had urged Stratton to do the job. “You used to be the most popular politician in Britain,” she told Johnson. She outlined ideas to help him win back public approval. “Boris wants to be loved and he saw that Allegra had helped Rishi become popular,” said a ministerial aide. “He wanted some of that.”
Cain is understood to have been furious when he heard about the exchanges. He was no longer in control of a process he had set in train. He sought to encourage others to apply for the job. In the interviews Stratton and the BBC’s Ellie Price were “by a distance” the best candidates and went forward to a mock press conference and a “chemistry test” interview with Johnson.
Those who were there say Price’s “folksy” approach was more effective than Stratton’s strident one to the mock press conference, but that Stratton’s interview with Johnson was better. He chose Stratton.
She took the job on the basis that she would report to the prime minister. Cain insisted she work to him. They clashed over whether Stratton would get a pay rise and an office (she didn’t). Cain insisted that he appoint her deputy and said he wanted Price. Stratton saw that as an attempt to install the “stop Allegra candidate”. She preferred Angus Walker, a former ITV colleague who is now special adviser to Gavin Williamson, the education secretary. Stratton told Cain: “I can’t work with you.” She texted Johnson that she would quit and he should appoint Price instead.
On November 4 — two Wednesdays ago — Johnson asked Stratton back to Chequers for lunch with him and Symonds: the third key meal. There he suggested that Cain would be chief of staff and the two women told him it was a bad move. Both felt his communications strategy had proved ineffective. Both also had concerns about the macho culture over which he and Cummings presided in Downing Street, which they felt had made life uncomfortable for several young women advisers.
“Carrie just felt very clearly and firmly that he was wrong for Boris and for the government and for the agenda and for his relationships with people,” a friend said. “She just felt he was at the heart of all the stuff that hadn’t been working.”
Cain got wind of the conversation and wrote a letter of resignation. Johnson texted him to say he would not accept it. On the Thursday, Johnson waved Cain’s letter at Stratton and made clear she would have to report to Cain. On her kitchen wall at home was a picture of Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted as Donald Trump’s communications director for 11 days. It had long been the joke in her family about whether she would make it to 12 days. That now looked doubtful.
Last Sunday, Johnson cooked sausages while Cain mashed potato and swede into a lumpy accompaniment and the two ate together in the Downing Street garden. Over more than two hours they discussed the shortcomings of the operation. “In the middle of this Covid crisis, it’s your duty to the country to stay,” Johnson said.
The volcano blows
The following day the mood in No 10 was strange. One witness said Cain was “walking around the building whistling”. Stratton considered resigning. Johnson told her it was her duty to serve. “It felt like a volcano was going to blow,” said one witness. “You could see the smoke starting to swirl. The birds were flying away.”
At 7pm that evening Johnson called in Cain and said he did want him to be chief of staff. He had sounded out Case and Lord Udny-Lister, his other senior adviser. They were keen on the idea. Case wanted more political grip. Lister, 71, agreed to remain in No 10 to help Cain bed into his new role. At this point Johnson had not consulted Cummings — something that belies the notion that the “dark lord” of Downing Street was behind a plot to install his closest ally.
Allies of Cain say he asked for 24 hours to think about it and stressed that he would need the backing of Symonds if he was to do the job. His enemies say Johnson had not made a firm offer. Either way, the following evening the story leaked to The Times, along with the view that access to Johnson should be restricted to Cummings, Cain, Case and Lister.
Cain’s enemies say his camp leaked the news to bounce Johnson into the appointment, his allies that it was done to stop the plan in its tracks. Whatever the intention, the backlash was swift and brutal. Ministers and MPs reacted with fury. They contacted Johnson and his chief whip, Mark Spencer, to say Cummings had to go and they would not tolerate his “Mini Me” being given a more prominent role. Spencer said the move would “lose the backbenchers”.
At lunchtime on Wednesday, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg tweeted that Symonds was “deeply unhappy about the plan”. Stratton told Johnson she would have to quit. Mirza was also furious, having got wind of Cain’s criticisms of her work.
The Cain mutiny
The row over the future of Cain exhumed long-standing ministerial hatred of Cummings and his culture of aggression. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, was furious when Cain peremptorily sacked Neil Tweedie, a special adviser to transport secretary, allegedly for leaking details of a meeting that Tweedie says he was not even in — a situation that is still the subject of HR negotiations.
Allies of Symonds refer to the duo as “the mad mullahs”. One senior cabinet minister calls Cummings David Koresh, after the cult leader who caused the tragic Waco siege in Texas in 1993. Symonds and Stratton, in close contact, both worked on Johnson. “Carrie was depressed,” another friend said. “She didn’t think this was who Boris is.”
Other ministers and donors had complained for months that Cummings would sit at the back of what were supposed to be one-on-one meetings with Johnson. One donor, irate at finding Cummings “huffing and puffing” in one encounter with Johnson asked him: “Are you on drugs?” When Cummings said, “No,” he added: “Surely you should be on some sort of medication.”
One ally said: “Dom has basically spent most of the last year telling people to f*** off. People who should have been his allies were not there for him this week.”
Insiders say Johnson’s relationship with Cummings had “effectively broken down”, beginning with the incident when Cummings drove 260 miles to Co Durham during the first lockdown. Multiple sources say Cummings treated Johnson with contempt, rejecting calls to apologise in a televised statement.
“Dom’s attitude, even to Boris, was: ‘I don’t answer to you.’” One recalls Cummings receiving a text message from Johnson and waving it around, making clear he was going to ignore it. “Dom didn’t bother returning calls for long periods of time,” another recalled.
Mistrust was sown further by the most damaging leak of Johnson’s premiership when two newspapers announced the plans for a second national lockdown even before Johnson had definitively made up his mind. “Boris was apocalyptically incandescent,” said a Whitehall source. He was forced into a hasty weekend announcement of the plans and demanded a leak inquiry.
In the bitter briefing wars last week Cain and Cummings were both accused of being the so-called “chatty rat”. Cain has been cleared of being the source of “part” of the leak, but the investigation continues.
Despite his growing distrust, Johnson fought on Wednesday night to stop other Vote Leave aides quitting. Some sources say Cummings, having lost Cain, sought to persuade others to go — a technique he used when MPs tried to oust him from Vote Leave in 2016. Cummings denies this, but Oliver Lewis, a Brexit team member, was close to quitting.
Lord Frost, the chief Brexit negotiator, telephoned Johnson to inform him he would not join a walkout, while Johnson sought to convince Lewis to stay, making clear he would not weaken his negotiating position.
But by Thursday, Cummings had also resolved to leave by Christmas. His last throw of the dice — demanding that Cleo Watson, his closest aide, be made chief of staff — was rejected by Johnson.
On Friday, even that plan was untenable. Brexiteers said Cummings has become vocal in private about Johnson’s shortcomings in recent months, labelling him “indecisive”. One characterised this view as: “Just make a f***ing decision and stick to it.” He added: “People are now openly questioning whether he is right for the job.”
With a full-blown briefing war under way, it was also open season on Symonds by allies of Cain and Cummings. One claimed she calls Johnson’s private office “more than 20 times a day demanding that he leave meetings to call her back” — a claim dismissed as untrue by her allies and impartial civil servants.
On Friday lunchtime Johnson called in Cain and Cummings to tell them it would be their last day in No 10. Both told friends the meeting was “warm with lots of laughter” as the trio recounted their battles together. “When you split up with a girlfriend, it’s best to move out quickly,” a friend said.
But Johnson had become angry over the media briefings against Symonds. A senior No 10 source said: “The prime minister was clear with them on Friday that the briefings had to stop and it was clear that they had not stopped.”
Some Tories are queasy about Symonds’s role in last week’s events. A former cabinet minister said: “We have a constitutional conundrum that the prime minister’s girlfriend is deciding senior non-ministerial appointments, which I think is without precedent.”
Friends of Symonds are furious about the way she has been depicted. One said: “Carrie was deliberately dragged into it at a key moment to damage her and to undermine the case she was making. They want her to look like Lady Macbeth. She is one of the very few people around the prime minister who understands the Conservative Party.”
Cain’s allies are equally incensed by what they see as a cabal of “posh southern women” who have ousted a working-class man from Ormskirk in Lancashire. “This bloke is a working-class outsider who went from dressing as a chicken to becoming the prime minister’s director of communications,” said a leading Tory strategist. “He got the job on merit without going to a fancy school or Oxford or being on the BBC. There’s something distasteful about the glee with which they have greeted his demise.”
The bitter personal animus also disguises a genuine disagreement about the future of government policy. The Vote Leave crew fear Stratton and Symonds will steer Johnson away from the policies that won him the election.
One accused Stratton of wanting Johnson to be “pink Stetson Boris” — a reference to when Johnson put on the headgear at a Pride parade. “Like it or not, he was elected by leave voters,” the former No 10 aide said. “These people need to respect his mandate. You’ve got to dance with them what brung ya, or we will lose the next election.”
This line of attack enrages Symonds and Stratton, who both voted to leave. Stratton has told friends she was the “only Brexiteer on television”. Her approach, outlined to her new colleagues, is not to change Johnson’s approach but to do better at working up policy that will transform the lives of working-class voters and communicating it better to them. “Allegra has tried for months to get them to talk about levelling up, but nothing was happening.
She’s very realistic about what people want from their government. It’s not about waffly Cameronism — it’s about being competent and delivering.”
Having ousted his key aides on Friday, Johnson, typically, sought to minimise the confrontation, telling officials: “I told them we should get the gang back together” to fight the next election.
Johnson visited Cain in his office and signed a pair of boxing gloves emblazoned with “Get Brexit done” before making a speech wishing him well. “He’s the only one of my staff who always answers phone calls, no matter what time of day or night,” Johnson said, adding: “I sometimes wait for days for Dom to return them.”
One colleague said: “Dom’s favourite gesture at the moment in conversations is to pull the pin from an imaginary hand grenade and then throw the grenade over his shoulder as he leaves the room. Everyone is braced.”
In the end, Cummings and Cain blew themselves up. What remains to be seen is whether their departure marks the start of a bright new future for Johnson or the beginning of the end.
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Im not his biggest fan but i wish him a speedy recovery.
Impeccable timing. Just as the shit hits the fan he’s out of sight, out of mind and unavailable for interviews and interrogation while the hat settles.
Doing his usual trick of hiding when things get rough, no fridges around this time you bozo?
I thought you could only catch it once?. Not buying this for a second.
To be fair it doesn’t say he has it, just that he has been in contact with someone who has and the current guidelines make no concessions for people who have had the virus and recovered already because we don’t know enough about how immunity is achieved and how long it lasts.
I agree the timing is more than convenient though.