Infighting can be dangerous for Boris Johnson’s cabinet – voters will only accept it if things are going well

It is often said that the hardest job in government is the home secretary’s, but when money is under the microscope, that title almost certainly belongs to the chancellor. Poor Rishi Sunak is forever batting away constant requests for cash injections.

If it's not Covid, its energy companies and countless other things. It’s very hard to be popular in such tight circumstances, when you’re the only person saying no.

Is it any wonder that a source at Her Majesty’s Treasury reportedly hit out at the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, after Kwarteng said he’d been engaging with Rishi’s department on support for energy intensive industries. The source claimed “it was not the first time” Kwarteng “has made things up in interviews”. Well, if that doesn’t deserve an eyes emoji followed by fire, what else could possibly reach the benchmark?

After months of negotiating a deal on social care, wrangling over the removal of the £20 universal credit uplift and just about everything else, it’s obvious that Treasury sources will have had just about enough of the begging bowl and probably snapped in reaction to a regular follow-up question from a journalist. It appears to me just a classic bad day with unfortunate far-reaching implications.

The problem with the water-cooler chat in Westminster is that everything you say matters. The Kwasi-Rishi spat has morphed into No 10 taking sides and unsurprisingly it’s sticking by the business secretary – saying that the government was open to looking at “mitigations” to help industry. Not exactly a comms win for team Treasury or the government as a whole.

This is a particularly strange example of a government spat. It doesn’t feel like a strategic play to undermine an issue, rather a bit of an emotional response to the circumstances – but nonetheless does signify a breakdown in discipline. The roots of this are in Theresa May’s failure in the 2017 election, when the Brexit briefing wars were a free for all. There hasn’t quite been the same level of self-censoring since.

There wasn’t a week that went by that didn’t reveal another leaked cabinet letter or exaggerated tittle tattle designed to undermine May’s premiership, such was the damage that political loss can inflict. Much of it was orchestrated to destabilise her and force a leadership contest, so the leaks and spats were absolutely driven by a clear motive. Fighting like that will leave a scar and much of it is being worn by this third generation of the current Tory tenure.

I saw this culture myself at the height of the Brexit wars. Those trying to land blows in the papers with acerbic quips and personal attacks against perceived enemies forget that this is merely short-term satisfaction. It damages everyone in the process; reputations are tarnished and relationships irrevocably damaged, and the impact of it is unpredictable. It speaks to a defensiveness about one’s position.

Of course the legendary animosity between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown has been well documented and is currently the subject of a BBC programme. Theirs – it is claimed – was more of an ideological battle of wills and not just the resentment harboured by Brown for missing a shot at the top job. But even those spats had some consistency to them. The motives of the players and the predictability of those arguments were somehow reassuring.

Today we face a different issue altogether, because there is no clear direction about what this government believes in terms of the economy. It is caught between its populist success and its fiscal worries, never really being able to satisfy either side. If this government is unable to find a compromise and chart a course through to the next election, the electorate will be unforgiving of the constant spats and arguments. Bad behaviour is only ever tolerated when things are going well.

Salma Shah was special adviser to Sajid Javid from 2018 to 2019. She was also a special adviser at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport