Why did Lee Cain’s possible promotion to No 10 chief of staff cause mayhem in Westminster?

Talk about a bomb in the bubble. The prime minister was “poised” to promote Lee Cain, his director of communications, to chief of staff, it was reported yesterday morning. This detonated a small explosion in the cloistered world of political advisers and journalists in and around Downing Street, and last night Cain announced he was resigning. 

To understand its significance, we need to rehearse the history of the prime minister’s office. The term “chief of staff” was first used in Margaret Thatcher’s time by David Wolfson, the businessman, but it was more of a grand title than an executive office. 

Tony Blair was the first to appoint a chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, as a political appointee to run No 10 in conjunction with the civil service. He served for the full 10 years. David Cameron had a similar administrative linchpin in the form of Ed Llewellyn for all his six years. 

Other prime ministers lacked that stability. Gordon Brown got through three chiefs of staff, two of them civil servants, in three years. Theresa May had the duumvirate of Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy for a year until they took the rap for losing her majority in the 2017 election, after which she had Gavin Barwell, an MP who lost his seat in that election, for her remaining two years. 

The situation in Boris Johnson’s No 10 was always more fluid in job titles, although there was rarely any doubt that Dominic Cummings was the pre-eminent political adviser. Cummings and Eddie Lister have both been referred to as chief of staff, but Lister – one of Johnson’s deputy mayors of London, who joined the House of Lords as Lord Udny-Lister last week – has settled on “chief strategic adviser”, while Cummings refuses to be pinned down on anybody’s organogram, so most journalists now describe him factually as the prime minister’s chief adviser. 

However, even Cummings’s admirers accept that organisation is not his strength: he is an intuitive reader of politics and policy, but the No 10 operation needs “grip” – hard to define but easy to recognise when you see it. 

Quite by coincidence, a number of former chiefs of staff and No 10 policy advisers gave evidence to a Commons select committee on Tuesday about the role. It featured a rare appearance by Fiona Hill, who said that, “despite never speaking to journalists and trying to get on with my day job”, she could not avoid being the media “story”. But she also said that dealing with staff matters, “interviewing people and negotiating salaries, took way too much of my time, because nobody else wanted to do it”. 

The trouble is that, even in the unusual and intense setup around a prime minister, someone needs to deal with the admin, in a way that integrates the political operation with the civil service. Cummings had started to do that by creating a war room in the Cabinet Office, which backs on to 10 Downing Street, and which has more space for back-up staff. But he is plainly not interested in running the show. 

At the same time, Lee Cain, who has been a loyal junior partner to Cummings since the Vote Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum, could see that his job as director of communications was going to be diminished by the appointment of Allegra Stratton, the prime minister’s spokesperson, who will deliver daily televised briefings in the new year. 

Putting Cain in charge of running the whole No 10 operation must have seemed logical to Johnson, who trusts him – they have been through the “retreat and return” of the Great Gove Betrayal after the referendum together. 

But the decision that the prime minister was “poised” to make went down badly with Conservative MPs – and with Carrie Symonds, Johnson’s fiancee. Tory MPs have been demanding a heavyweight be put in charge of No 10 for months, but they didn’t mean someone they regard as Cummings’s puppet. Before Rishi Sunak appeared in front of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers yesterday, one Tory MP said it was his “job interview” and that the only question to him would be: “When can you start?” 

Symonds’s opposition seems to arise from her clashes with Cain, such as when she ran a freelance media operation to portray her happy relationship with Johnson after the “wine on sofa” incident during the Tory leadership campaign. It recalls the despairing comment of Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, when the prime minister’s wife Cherie became involved in the tensions between No 10 staff, that it was all “getting a bit Peyton effing Place in Downing Street”, referring to the melodramatic 1960s soap opera. 

Now that Cain has announced his resignation – but in passing confirmed that he was offered the job of chief of staff – questions are being asked about Cummings’s position. It seems there are several more melodramatic episodes of this season yet to run.