6 2GM Saturday November 14 2020 | the times
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Boris Johnson was not a happy man.
After a week of internecine warfare in
Downing Street, he was said to be
“f***ed off with everyone”.
“He thinks it looks so bad to the
public,” one government source said.
“He’s really unhappy about the tone
and the mood it sends. Privately he
accepts it had to happen but it looks
dysfunctional.”
In the end he decided to bring mat-
ters to an early close yesterday. He held
a 45-minute meeting with Dominic
Cummings, his most senior adviser, and
Lee Cain, his director of communica-
tions, in his office in Downing Street.
Mr Johnson made clear that both
should leave at the end of the day rather
than wait until Christmas. They
discussed concerns about morale in
No 10 if they stayed.
“A lot of people are very upset in the
building,” one source said. “It’s all been
very emotional.”
They reminisced about Brexit and
the general election then gathered
their belongings and left.
In keeping with a week of bitter
briefings and counter-briefings, others
had a different version of events. The
two men emerged as the losers in an
extraordinary power struggle with
Carrie Symonds, the prime minister’s
fiancée. One ally of Ms Symonds said
that Mr Johnson “was very uncomfort-
able with them being in the building”.
Another said that they were “squatters”
who had to go.
It represents the end of an era in
Downing Street, with the Vote Leave
faction that has had a stranglehold on
power since Mr Johnson took office
being purged. It has left Downing
Street, where many aides and officials
owe their careers to Mr Cummings and
Mr Cain, facing a political vacuum.
“The atmosphere is horrible,” said
one staffer. “People have been drinking
a lot in the evening, everyone is briefing
against each other. It’s toxic.”
Another Downing Street source said
it was a scene of destruction. “A lot of
people are very sad, very unhappy.
They’ve been a band of brothers and
sisters.”
The men’s departure represents a
victory for Ms Symonds and Allegra
Stratton, the prime minister’s new press
secretary, both of whom argued that
Mr Johnson had been poorly advised
and needed to reset his premiership.
And for those who were never part of
the Cummings project, his demise has
been a cause for celebration.
“Dom may have talked about bring-
ing hard rain down on the civil service,”
one Whitehall source said. “But there’s
a new Bob Dylan song doing the rounds
now: The times they are a-changin’.
“Republics of fear always fall.”
The civil war erupted after The Times
disclosed on Tuesday that Mr Johnson
intended to promote Mr Cain to the
role of chief of staff. Mr Cain was said to
have felt undermined by the decision to
go against his advice and give Ms Strat-
ton the role of hosting No 10’s new
White House-style televised press
briefings. He threatened to resign last
week, and in an effort to keep both Mr
Cain and Ms Stratton the prime minis-
ter offered him a promotion. When
details of the offer were made public in
The Times, No 10 went “nuclear”.
Allies of Ms Symonds made clear
that she believed Mr Johnson had not
been getting good advice and that those
around him had been “running him
into the ground”. Ms Stratton also made
clear that she believed appointing Mr
Cain would be a mistake.
By the end of the day Mr Cain had
D
ominic Cummings may
win referendum campaigns
but he will never top a
popularity contest. The
Conservative Party’s
opponents rejoice at his departure.
They have that in common with much
of the Conservative Party itself: many
of its MPs are convinced he despises
them, and return the compliment. The
civil service is breathing a sigh of
relief. An answering echo can faintly
be heard from Brussels.
You may say that if Mr Cummings
is disliked so widely, by bodies and
people that many voters kick against,
he must have been doing something
right. You would have a point. He is
the great right-wing campaigner of
our times — deploying an agile
guerrilla force, the Vote Leave
campaign, to use his opponents’
weight against themselves.
Vote Leave did so first for the 2016
EU referendum. Then, taken into
government by Boris Johnson as his
chief adviser last year, Mr Cummings
managed a repeat: manoeuvring the
anti-no-deal majority in the House of
Commons into a general election thatA maverick ill suited to
destroyed it and delivered Mr
Johnson a handsome majority.
But campaigning is not the same as
governing. An election campaign is
concentrated on one end: winning.
Governing means balancing the
variety of ends that a modern
electorate demands, some of which,
like tackling the coronavirus, catch
governments unprepared.
The pandemic is one of the main
reasons why Mr Cummings is leaving
Downing Street with his Vote Leave
vision undelivered. Both he and it are
widely misunderstood. Some of those
Tory MPs seem to see him as a New
Labour-style media manipulator,
whose policy focus is concentrated on
a populist “levelling-up”.
In reality he has had increasingly
little to do with the government's
day-to-day business. Mr Cummings’s
preoccupation is with making the
state work more effectively, whether
in procurement or within the civil
service or technologically.
He has also been hard at it
supplementing the NHS’s creaking
Test and Trace scheme with a
delivery network for the “moonshot
tests”. A second reason why his
Bismarckian ambitions have been
frustrated is bound up with the size of
that Vote Leave team — key members
of which, like Lee Cain, No 10’sPaul Goodman
CommentDominic Cummings was alone
outside Downing Street last night
after the departure of his ally Lee
Cain, above with Boris Johnson. Their
exit was a victory for Carrie Symondswanted to set up parallel
structures that reported to
him. For someone who was so
keen on management books he was
remarkably ineffective.
“The other problem is they never saw
themselves as serving the prime
minister. The prime minister was an
instrument to them. They were not
interested in his agenda; they only
cared about their own.”
Some in Downing Street were de-
lighted by news of Mr Cummings’s and
Mr Cain’s departure. “The thaw has
come to Narnia,” one staffer said.
Others were “absolutely gutted”.
“The PM talks a lot about loyalty but
he’s pushed out the two people who
were most loyal to him,” one said.
An official who visited the building
yesterday said: “You have one lot of
people walking around with massive
grins and another looking like their
whole family had just died.”
Once both men had decided to quit
— willingly or not — Mr Johnson
decided they could not be allowed to
stay on, potentially fomenting dissent.
Last night Mr Cummings was seen
leaving Downing Street carrying a
cardboard box of his belongings.
Downing Street said last night that
Mr Cummings, once one of the most
feared men in Whitehall, would be
serving the remainder of his notice
period by working from home.
Johnson can save himself,
Matthew Parris, page 33
Downing St turmoil, letters, page 36
Power struggle, leading article, page 37committed the cardinal sin
of a spinner — he had
become the story. He
handed in his notice
and made clear
that he was leav-
ing by Christ-
mas. Mr Cum-
mings was infu-
riated that his
ally had been
barred from the
chief of staff role
and was leaving.
In a meeting on
Thursday evening Mr
Cummings suggested
that the prime minister
should appoint Cleo Watson,
another of his allies, to the role. Mr
Johnson rejected the proposal and one
source claimed that there had been
raised voices. Others said the claim was
nonsense and that the meeting had
been cordial.
Regardless, the outcome was clear.
That night Mr Cummings told Laura
Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor,
that he was leaving. He highlighted an
old blog post in which he had written
that he wanted to improve perform-
ance to such an extent that his role
would be redundant by the end of the
year.
Others said that Mr Cummings had
jumped before he was pushed. One
Downing Street source said that Mr
Johnson’s relationship with his adviser
had been strained since he drove to
Barnard Castle during the lockdown.
“The prime minister thought it
stretched credulity,” the source said.
“Things haven’t ever really recovered.”
An opponent of Mr Cummings said
that the prime minister came to the
conclusion that his adviser had become
a liability. “What has Dom actually
done? In Whitehall, to get stuff done
you have to do it through the civil
service but there has never been an
acceptance of that from Team Dom,”
they said.
“He kicked out a load of civil servants
to set up his own ridiculous control
room in the Cabinet Office — but he
didn’t even sit there himself. He alwayswwwwwanted to s
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Get out, Johnson told Brexit
Steven Swinford Deputy Political Editor
Oliver Wright Policy Editor