Is Gavin Williamson sackable?

So weak is Gavin Williamson’s grip on his post in the cabinet that Downing Street spin doctors are already briefing the name of his successor as education secretary – Kemi Badenoch, a treasury minister and minister for equalities (who doesn’t seem that bothered about equality). Badenoch is something of a favourite of the prime minister, an enemy of “wokeism” and an enthusiastic combatant in the culture wars. It is a peculiarly exquisite form of ritual humiliation mostly unknown outside the confines of politics, and even as resilient and self-confident a figure as Williamson must find it hurtful and ungrateful. Some may think he has brought his downfall on himself, with the mismanagement of school and university Covid closures, and the exams fiasco. He may respond that the chaos, if not the crisis, was made in Downing Street.

Williamson is a former Conservative chief whip, former leadership campaign manager for both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and has a reputation, at least, for being a master of the dark arts of politics. He famously has a pet tarantula by the name of Cronus, who he used to keep in a tank on his desk, occasionally letting him out for a walk when a recalcitrant backbencher popped by for a chat. According to legend, after Williamson was fired by May for leaking national security council secrets he was determined to destroy her, and switched his allegiance to Johnson to pursue that end. Now this necromancer of Whitehall has let it be known that Johnson would be foolish to sack him, or demote him, because he “knows where the bodies are”.

There is at least something in all of that, and the intelligence Williamson has gathered on Johnson, his advisors and some cabinet ministers must be radioactive stuff. A few years ago a spreadsheet was leaked from the Tory whips’ office that detailed the (mostly sexual) habits of some prominent Conservative politicians. Even in redacted form, they made for unnerving reading. We may assume there is much more than that lying around in Williamson’s hard drives. Students of history have come to expect that most contemporary quiet rumours about corruption and sexual adventuring turn out, when the papers are released and the memoirs written, to be even more dramatic than they seemed at the time: ask John Major or Edwina Currie about that sort of thing.

The problem for Williamson is that the prime minister is shameless and impossible to embarrass. Books could be written – indeed have been – about his morally questionable exploits over many decades. It has been a life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and he almost seems to revel in it. In interviews he brushes away questions about how many children he has, who pays for his holidays and the sulphurous atmosphere in the No 10 bunker. It is difficult to imagine that Williamson has anything that would shock either Johnson himself or a public long used to his ways. Nor is Johnson in any position, even if he were inclined, to be morally censorious about members of his government or parliamentary party.