The Brexit Gang Is Back in Charge in Britain
The Brexit Gang Is Back in Charge in Britain
The best way to get a decision out of Boris Johnson, according to those who work with him, is to persuade him to start talking. The British prime minister likes to think out loud, improvising his way to his conclusions as he goes.
His predecessor Theresa May would often make her mind up, according to one aide, alone in her study, sometimes at 3 a.m. with a glass of whiskey in her hand. Where May demanded detailed evidence, consuming a “red box” briefcase full of official documents each night, one official says Johnson might make it through just two boxes a week, although another insists he gets through more.
What is not in doubt is that the 56-year-old Johnson has little time for conventions. Despite being a product of the English establishment -- educated at Eton and Oxford -- he has surrounded himself with the band of brothers who upended the existing order with their 2016 Brexit campaign and are bent on continuing the revolution in government.
The tight-knit group of trusted aides is determined to reshape the country, bringing investment to depressed areas and overhauling how the government is run. After three months battling the coronavirus pandemic, which nearly killed Johnson and damaged his reputation for competence, the premier and his team of revolutionaries are now re-asserting their reforming agenda.
Powerful Aides
Among the most influential members of Johnson’s inner circle is his senior adviser Dominic Cummings, who faced demands to quit over allegedly breaking his own government’s lockdown rules during the peak of the pandemic, but is now as powerful as ever. Cummings masterminded the 2016 Brexit campaign which Johnson presented, while the prime minister’s communications director Lee Cain is another Vote Leave veteran. Cain was at Johnson’s side while he was Foreign Secretary and stayed loyal in the lonely days after he quit May’s cabinet.
Together, Johnson’s team designed a mission to reshape the economy and “level up” those deprived parts of the country that voted for Brexit and then backed the Conservatives -- often for the first time -- in last year’s election.
According to Downing Street and Tory officials, Johnson and his pro-Brexit aides often lock themselves away to hammer out decisions in a small group. While he has an instinct for the mood of the nation, Johnson delegates a great deal of government work to Cummings and others. He is also happy to see lively debates break out in his court, and doesn’t mind arguments, according to one witness.
Aside from the Vote Leave set, many of Johnson’s highest profile advisers won his trust at City Hall during his eight years as Mayor of London. They include his chief of staff Edward Lister and the head of the Downing Street policy unit, Munira Mirza.
“The prime minister leads the government from the front, supported by his senior advisors and the civil service,” a spokesman for Johnson’s office said.
Defiant Johnson
In May, Cummings was accused of breaking the government’s own lockdown rules on a 260 mile drive when the public was being told to stay at home. Johnson decided to keep the aide, defying political and public pressure to fire him. In the aftermath, there were reports that Cummings was on his last chance and would not linger long in the job.
But with the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak now over, Cummings is stamping his authority on Number 10 again and Cain has returned to his plans to shake up the way the government communicates with the public. A new televised daily question-and-answer session will begin every afternoon to replace the convention of off-camera briefings involving political journalists and Johnson’s aides.
The reforming zeal of Johnson’s Brexit gang claimed its highest profile casualty this week when the U.K.’s most senior civil servant resigned. Mark Sedwill, who is also the national security adviser, will depart in September and be replaced by Johnson’s trusted political aide David Frost as the new security chief, a move that dismayed Johnson’s more conventional predecessor, May.
Sedwill apparently paid the price for what Johnson’s allies regard as the failings of the civil service machine to handle the coronavirus pandemic.
Sedwill’s exit was also a victory for Cummings in particular and a sign that he is back in charge, according to one person familiar with the group. In public, Johnson and other ministers have been fulsome in their praise for Sedwill.
Bad Dream
In a speech designed to relaunch his political agenda on Tuesday, Johnson complained about “parts of government that seemed to respond so sluggishly, so that sometimes it seemed like that recurring bad dream when you are telling your feet to run and your feet won’t move.”
Cummings has also attacked civil servants for blocking innovation and failing to deliver. He began the year by calling for “weirdos and misfits” to come and help him change the face of government. The most high-profile of the people hired as a result quit in February after it was revealed that he’d argued intelligence was linked to race.
But Cummings was unabashed by that, or by the attacks on his own actions during the lockdown. He has resumed his briefings to the team of “special advisers” -- political aides -- who report to him from different government departments.
If some aides are a little less in awe of Cummings after his recent humiliations, they still follow his instructions. On Tuesday, he instructed the government’s political advisers to read books before an away day this month -- Philip Tetlock’s “Superforecasting” and Andrew Grove’s “High Output Management.”
As a result, the books were the two biggest gainers in Amazon’s sales chart the next day, along with a second Grove book, “Only The Paranoid Survive.” Meanwhile, the prime minister has his own reading list. A trolley in his office is piled high with books, on subjects ranging from diplomacy to the ethics of big game hunting.
A former colleague of Johnson’s observes that he is at his happiest with a book.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.