46 Britain The EconomistAugust 24th 2019
A
t its best,the Downing Street Policy Unit can be one of the
great engines of British government—a generator of new ideas
and a recruiter of bright outsiders. Under Margaret Thatcher it
championed privatisation and deregulation. Under Tony Blair it
powered public-sector reform. But under Theresa May it withered
into insignificance. In Mrs May’s glory days—they did exist!—Nick
Timothy tried to do all the thinking and after her disastrous elec-
tion the lights in the Policy Unit went out completely.
They are blazing once again. The Policy Unit is now more than
20-strong, with impressive new recruits such as Liam Booth-
Smith, a think-tanker, and John Bew, a professor at King’s College
London and author of an excellent biography of Clement Attlee. So
far the atmosphere is all energy and camaraderie. The unit’s mem-
bers feel like commandos who have been given a momentous mis-
sion (taking Britain through Brexit) and have survived a hazing by a
tough sergeant (Dominic Cummings). The day starts with a meet-
ing at 8am and ends with another one at 7pm.
Boris Johnson has a journalist’s interest in ideas—the bigger
and brighter the better. He also has a Churchillian taste for maver-
icks. During the second world war Churchill surrounded himself
with oddballs like Frederick Lindemann (“the Prof”), reasoning
that unconventional times required unconventional solutions.
Mr Johnson has concluded from the past two years of paralysis that
the safest option may be the riskiest, and the riskiest the safest.
The maverick-in-chief is Mr Cummings, who sits above the
Policy Unit rather than in it but whose influence is omnipresent.
Mr Cummings is nothing if not an ideas man and frequently sets
his underlings weekend homework such as finding areas of British
comparative advantage that will strike fear into the European Un-
ion. The head of the Policy Unit, Munira Mirza, is a former member
of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Trotskyite groupuscule,
and enthusiastic contributor to its house organ, Living Marxism.
Many of her former comrades-in-arms such as Claire Fox, a mem-
ber of the European Parliament for the Brexit Party, are prominent
in Conservative Eurosceptic circles.
Will the Policy Unit be able to preserve its place at the heart of
government? It is one thing to work yourself up into a frenzy of en-
thusiasm when Parliament is in recess and you’ve been in your jobfor a month. It is another to keep going when Parliament is in tur-
moil and hundreds of thousands of protesters are on the streets.
Mr Johnson’s government could easily end up being one of the
shortest-lived in history. Yet if it survives—and particularly if it
survives with an enhanced majority after an autumn election—
there is a good chance that the Policy Unit will remain at the heart
of Boris-world. Mr Johnson has a close relationship with Ms Mirza,
forged when she was one of his deputies as mayor of London and
reinforced when she defended ill-judged comments he had made
about burqas. During Mr Johnson’s first few weeks he has demon-
strated the value of energy in the executive, setting a clear agenda
for government, issuing a flurry of domestic-policy initiatives and
centralising power in Downing Street.
Which all raises an intriguing question: what policies will the
Policy Unit produce if Mr Johnson gets to stay in office for the lon-
ger term? The easiest way to answer this question is to study Policy
Exchange, a centre-right think-tank whose alumni, including Ms
Mirza and Messrs Booth-Smith and Bew, dominate the Policy Unit
and are scattered throughout government. The think-tank has a
library of papers on everything from the Irish backstop to social
care. At the moment it is particularly interested in using infra-
structure spending to bind the United Kingdom together. It is a
measure of Policy Exchange’s influence that Mr Johnson referred
to its recent paper on creating a British space programme in his
first speech on the steps of Downing Street.
A second way is to study Mr Cummings’s voluminous blog
postings. Mr Cummings is an inveterate champion of reforming
Whitehall and taking on vested interests (which he calls “the
blob”). But perhaps his most interesting recent musings focus on
how Britain is falling behind in the race to apply science and tech-
nology to solving practical problems—for example, using big data
to tackle crime and agri-tech to boost productivity on farms.Defining Johnsonism
A third way is to study Mr Johnson himself. This is harder than you
think. Though he has basked in the public eye for decades, Mr
Johnson is a consummate shape-shifter. But a couple of things
strike Bagehot about the prime minister in his current incarna-
tion. One is that he sees himself as a liberal Tory who is fulfilling
the party’s historical function of adjusting to the arrival of a new
force in British life—in this case nationalist populism. Mr Johnson
is likely to embrace a peculiar mixture of liberal causes (such as en-
vironmentalism) and populist ones (such as stiffer prison sen-
tences). The second is that Mr Johnson sees politics through the
prism of City Hall, his former base as mayor, just as Mrs May saw it
through the prism of the Home Office, which she ran before Down-
ing Street. His main focus other than Brexit is on basic public ser-
vices such as policing and transport. He has a (sometimes fatal)
fascination with big infrastructure projects. Leaving aside Eur-
ope—admittedly a big aside—Mr Johnson is intellectually closer to
Michael Heseltine, with his enthusiasm for fixing the problems of
the left-behind with state activism, than he is to Thatcher.
All this suggests that, if Mr Johnson survives the next few
months, Britain will be bombarded with a strange mix of policies.
A bit of liberalism here and a bit of populism there, a flurry of ini-
tiatives for left-behind Britain one moment and a flurry for high-
tech Britain the next. The challenge for the Policy Unit will not be
remaining at the heart of government. It will be trying to produce
some coherence out of this mish-mash—and trying to turn hot air
into concrete policies that have some impact on the real world. 7Bagehot Boris’s brain
The Downing Street Policy Unit is back at the heart of government