Who’s really in charge at No 10?

Rather like his master Boris Johnson, Dilyn the dog doesn’t seem to care where he cocks his leg. Last year, for example, it was allegedly the turn of a handbag belonging to Downing Street adviser Katie Lam to get a golden shower. In the fracas that reportedly ensued in the usually tranquil garden of 10 Downing Street, Carrie Symonds, the prime minister’s fiancée, is said to have intervened to protect the little terrier. According to some possibly fanciful reports, the incident did not endear Lam to Symonds, and may have contributed to Lam leaving her job this month. Poignantly, Lam had some responsibility for HR. More likely, her departure was part of a continuing clear-out of those associated with Dominic Cummings and the Vote Leave campaign. This has resembled not so much a reshuffle as an exorcism.

The other recent victim of the purge was old Cummings ally Oliver “Sonic” Lewis, so-called because of his supposed resemblance to the computer game character, though in fact he looks more like the Duke of Gloucester. He was supposedly briefing against Michael Gove, though Lewis denies it. After a month or so, he is no longer responsible for the union unit. No one is.

That such a trivial matter as Dilyn’s house training should find itself woven into the nation’s affairs says a lot about how Downing Street is being run these days: badly. It’s been likened to the court of Henry VIII, with, to give a high-profile example, Carrie Symonds playing Anne Boleyn to Dominic Cummings’s Cardinal Wolsey.

The Court of King Boris comprises a series of factions, overlapping, underlapping, shifting loyalties, briefing and counter-briefing the press, gossiping, manoeuvring and generally spending more time on office politics than the real thing. If the tales are even half true, people are threatening to resign, quitting, getting sacked and usurping each other all the time.

Lord Frost’s appointment to the cabinet and acquisition of Michael Gove’s responsibilities for EU relations was a particularly egregious example of gang warfare. Though that shift will probably damage further UK relations with Europe, little, if any, of the bickering seems to have much bearing on material issues of policy. The differences are complicated and dynamic, and ultimately unimportant, that it is possibly not worth the time it would take to chart them, because, by the time you have, another one would have been sacked, and the alliances and friendships of convenience realigned again.

What does matter is the hard fact of dysfunction at the heart of government, something that has been going on for some time. It is a caricature, but an irresistible one with too much truth to it, to see Downing Street as a sort of squabbling petty royal court neglecting the problems of the common people. It doesn’t matter that much who’s friends with who and who’s winning the ear of Boris; what matters is that such things are absorbing their energies while the pandemic, the aftermath of Brexit and the very future of the union with Scotland are expected to somehow sort themselves out. It’s chaos in there, and it’s bad for the country. That’s all you have to understand.

For what it’s worth, though, here is a short guide to the more or less distinct gangs. As ever in such matters we are indebted to Paul Goodman and Conservative Home for some acute analysis:

Gang 1: Mayor Johnson loyalists. When he was mayor of London (2008-2016), Johnson, naturally enough, liked to surround himself with loyal aides who he could trust implicitly and share his confidences. This is his preferred method of operating (you could call it cronyism) and a few of the old guard have survived. Notable long-term associates include Munira Mirza (head of the policy unit) and Ben Gascoigne, political secretary. Gascoigne, or “Gazza”, recently threatened to quit over the appointment of two Gove-ites, Baroness Finn and Henry Newman to the Downing Street “team”. Eddie Lister, previously a senior adviser to the PM, is now serving in the upper house as Lord Udny-Lister. You get the impression his steady authority is missed.

Gang 2: Vote Leave vets. Most Vote Leavers now sleep with the fishes, and the spectacular departure of Dominic Cummings, their chief, last November was the defining moment in their unexpected decline. Others who’ve gone include Lee Cain and Cleo Watson. The main and still very powerful representative figure in this group is Lord Frost. Frost finds himself in the strange position of being a junior minister to Gove in Gove’s “department”, the Cabinet Office, but, as a full cabinet member in charge of EU affairs, reporting to Gove’s boss, Johnson. You couldn’t really design a more certain way to create friction. The grand plan to turn the sleepy Cabinet Office into a Nasa control room run by artificial intelligence has now turned to dust, but Frost’s influence seems set to grow.

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Gang 3: Friends of Symonds. As is the way of things, friends of Symonds can also have links to other gangs, as Allegra Stratton, the prime minister’s new spokesperson, does. The two new Gove-ites Newman and Finn (the latter was Gove’s girlfriend long ago) are in this camp, and they were part of Gove’s leadership campaign in 2016, the one where Gove declared Johnson not up to the job and “stabbed Boris in the front”. Gove has not been entirely trusted ever since by Johnson or by some members of Gang 1 and Gang 2, though of course Cummings was largely the creation of Gove. I told you it was complicated.

Friends of Symonds can also be, and are, friends of Rishi Sunak, and friends of “The Saj” (recently Sajid Javid, ex-chancellor, was touted as a chief of staff for Johnson). Cummings allies’ nickname for Symonds was reportedly “Princess Nut Nut”, which tells you all you need about the collegiate culture of Downing Street.

Gang 4: The grown-ups. This is a small, vulnerable group containing the likes of Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and Dan Rosenfield, chief of staff. They were appointed last year and have a civil service/city background, and are supposed to get things done. Case replaced Sir Mark Sedwill, who was effectively forced out during a previous gangland clash. Rosenfield now has a deputy, Finn, who could end up as a bit of a rival. The gossip is that Rosenfield, who has only been in post a few months is “too nice” (though set against his predecessor Cummings almost anyone would be), too much like David Brent, and “lacks chemistry” with the prime minister. A recent addition to the group is Sir Stephen Lovegrove, national security adviser.

Gang 5: The cabinet. With few exceptions, this gang is usually the last to know what’s going on and the least likely to make a difference to anything. These schmucks may be safely ignored, and they are.

Courts and kitchen cabinets in No 10, and indeed royal palaces, are nothing new, and tend to be associated with strong, charismatic leaders who dominated their parties. They were particularly powerful and fractious during the premierships of David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and in modern times created legendary personalities such as Marcia Williams, Bernard Ingham and Alastair Campbell, all in their ways as controversial as Cummings. Prime ministerial spouses have also sometimes had some influence, if only, like Denis Thatcher, to validate prime ministerial prejudices. Such things are maybe inevitable and do not always make for bad government. However, so far as us peasants can see, the way Johnson is running his court seems not to be doing the people much good. No doubt Johnson could organise things a bit better, but, just like Dilyn and his delinquencies, he doesn’t know any better.