The PM has seen off deluded Dominic Cummings, but more trouble is brewing in the Tory party
If he isn't careful, Boris Johnson will soon run out of true believers in his premiership
Stewart Jackson 21 July 2021 • 2:00pm
You really didn't need to be Nostradamus to have predicted that the relationship between Boris Johnson and his erstwhile guru and chief of staff would end up resembling a dumpster fire. Dominic Cummings' intellectual arrogance, impatience, addiction to bare-knuckled conflict and visceral loathing of politicians and the Westminster-Whitehall nexus was set aside due to his campaign-strategy brilliance, ability to instill fear and message, discipline, and sheer chutzpah. It was always going to get toxic. He was handed the most sweeping powers of any unelected official in British political history, the likes of which made Alistair Campbell – Tony Blair's potty-mouthed Svengali – look like a choirboy.
Cummings has never been elected, hasn't invented anything, has made no fortune, and has been a wonk all his adult life, but he's also never lacked self-belief and self-discipline. When you are portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch as a genius-level philosopher king, the hubris leads inevitably to nemesis. The epic lack of self-awareness involved in speculating on launching a "coup" against the PM, days after his landslide election win, is evidence of a lack of emotional intelligence as to how such conduct looks to all but the most rabid Boris haters.
The Prime Minister, however, is relaxed, knowing that the nation's verdict on Dom was in some time ago: the Barnard Castle sight-testing debacle sealed his fate in the public imagination. The round of Monday morning quarterback analysis in the media was ironic, given that most of these same commentators saw Cummings as a malign pestilence before his reinvention as a font of empirical wisdom and sober prognostication. Well, that view won't cut the mustard.
Most Tories will write Dom off as deluded. They detest his betrayal of confidences and leaking of private messages. But many will also note that some of his criticisms ring true. It's significant that Sir Graham Brady was reelected just last week as chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee – a shot across Downing Street's bows that warns that when Parliament returns in September, things will get serious.
Although he dislikes it, Boris needs to get back into mingling with the faithful in the Commons tearoom. His technocratic chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, should put that in the grid as a matter of urgency.
Abrupt policy changes, opaque messaging, genuine mistakes, poor intra-party and media communications and an estrangement between Number 10 and the Parliamentary Conservative Party have all caused problems in the last year or so. The lack of definition as to the practical and political benefits of "levelling up" in Boris' speech last week will also give jumpy Tory MPs the willies. Having blown through billions of pounds and seemingly abandoning Thatcherite fiscal discipline, post-Brexit, post-Covid, they ask – where's the beef?
The Prime Minister has some major battles ahead: home counties versus the North, Nimbys versus pro-housing advocates, libertarians versus social conservatives and communitarians, ideologues versus the policy-lite, mercantilists and globalists versus China sceptics and nationalists. The Tory party was always a fractious family of competing interests, united only in a ruthless desire to maintain power.
The pensions triple-lock is hard to justify over 10 years since Gordon Brown's 50p pensions increase. Widespread pensioner poverty must be addressed, however, as must the monster that is social care. Planning and construction are also issues that can't be fudged forever. Thoughtful Tories know that the young will judge them harshly in an era of low interest rates and financial largesse if yet another government fails to build enough houses. And then there's Net Zero, which has the potential to split the Tories as fundamentally as tariff reform, the Corn Laws or the European Union.
For all that, the Prime Minister has a big majority, historically exceptional polling, a benign economy, a hopeless Opposition (for now) and some strong political offerings – on immigration, Brexit, the culture wars –which energise his backbenchers. He also has some impressive performers on the Front Bench – Grant Shapps, Steve Barclay, Ben Wallace and vaccines supremo Nadhim Zahawi, who is surely ready for a promotion.
Margaret Thatcher would ask: "Is he one of us?" Boris might inquire: "Where are the true believers?" When the polls turn and things get uglier, the Boris bashers, the passed-over Parliamentary undead, careerists and pragmatists will turn their face as the political cock crows thrice. Politics is brutal like that. Just ask the perennially friendless Theresa May.
It's for that reason that Boris has to show so much more love and appreciation to his colleagues, even if just as an insurance policy. As Enoch Powell rightly said, all political careers end in failure, but Boris is undoubtedly lucky enough and clever enough to put off the evil day. If he wants to.
Stewart Jackson is Founder and Director at UK Political Insight and was a former Conservative MP and Chief of Staff 2005-18
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