No staff left – but it’s OK, Boris Johnson is stronger than ever
It was not, as far as I’m aware, Johnson’s promise to have everyone leave in a sudden panic. But that doesn’t matter: it is all part of the ‘freshening up’ process
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Your support makes all the difference.A show of strength from the prime minister, then. Four – nope, hang on, make that five – resignations from 10 Downing Street in a matter of hours is, we have been told, proof that Boris Johnson is delivering on his word, by “freshening up” the “No 10 operation”, just as he promised to do.
Down in the Tory MP WhatsApp groups on Thursday night, there had been panicked discussions about how best to spin the mass walkout of nearly all of the most senior Downing Street staff. All members of said pro-Johnson WhatsApp groups must submit to a complete shame-ectomy as a condition of entry, and most agree to the lobotomy, too.
In the space of a couple of hours, the country’s executive found itself without a policy chief, a chief of staff, or a director of communications, and the prime minister was left without his own senior civil servant. But this, we have been repeatedly (if not reliably) told, is all evidence that Johnson is now in a “stronger” position; that he’s already delivering on his promise to turn things around.
It was not, as far as I’m aware, Johnson’s promise to have everyone leave in a sudden panic, long before replacements had been found. But that doesn’t matter.
Who knows, maybe sacking everyone and blaming everyone but himself will turn Johnson’s fortunes around. Johnson, after all, has been made to look more than a bit ridiculous, having to claim that there hadn’t been any parties – hang on, apart from the one that he went to – but hang on, which he didn’t know was a party, even after he’d been to it. So it is only right and proper that the man who sent the email about all that should resign. Which Martin Reynolds, a politically neutral, career civil servant, has now done.
Jack Doyle, the director of communications, apparently handed out some humorous awards at some sort of Christmas party – the same one that Allegra Stratton resigned for making a joke about, even though she wasn’t there. So it’s absolutely right that Johnson, with a heavy heart, should accept Doyle’s resignation too.
Dan Rosenfield, the chief of staff, is also out the door. It’s for the best. He was definitely the main problem. After all, he’d been in the job for just over one whole year, which began when the previous lot of senior staff all left in a pyroclastic cloud of complete chaos. Rosenfield was supposed to calm things down; to make it more professional. He was going to turn things around after Downing Street had descended into a full-blown civil war between Carrie Johnson and Dominic Cummings.
When all that got resolved, in what is now the usual Johnson way – which is to say, everybody losing their jobs apart from him – we were told that that too had made him stronger.
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And then there was Munira Mirza, the No 10 “policy chief”, who appears to have quit in a sudden burst of moral righteousness, blasting Johnson for his “scurrilous attack” on Keir Starmer over Jimmy Savile. This one, apparently, is the most damaging one. That she quit after the publication of the levelling up white paper, which has been two and a half years in the making and contains lengthy passages about the settlement of the city of Jericho in 7000BC, is mere coincidence. Viewed from the outside, and on the evidence of those two and a half years, it would appear that the loss of his policy brain is perhaps the least of his worries.
But what everyone can see – and so too can he, in all likelihood – is that the problem might not be everyone around him. Having dispensed with his second entire Downing Street operation in as many years, could it be – maybe, just maybe – that the problem is Johnson himself? At the time of typing, about 20 of his own MPs have publicly stated that they’ve worked this out, and have written the appropriate letters to Sir Graham Brady. At least that many again are believed to have done so privately.
The chances of the police investigation – and then, in theory, the full Sue Gray report – not conspiring to push that number over the threshold seems vanishingly thin.
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