The new purity cult of
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Hugo Rifkind
Page 31
How Johnson can survive his MPs’ cold anger
After being deserted by Lord Frost and failed by his chief whip, the PM needs frank and loyal advisers to restore order
Comment
heads have observed that Boris will
never change.
We have to hope, though, that he
can see amid all the latest chaos that
even the most outstanding of new
advisers can succeed only if he gives
them the authority to create the
order and consistency that
governments need to succeed.
Without that, this remarkable
prime minister, who would otherwise
have every expectation of a longterm of office, will soon be in serious
trouble. I have watched and listened
to MPs in every leadership crisis of
the past three decades or so,
including the overthrow of Margaret
Thatcher. They have always moved
slowly and agonisingly to act, torn by
inner conflict and uncertainty about
what to do.
This time I detect a cold anger,
shorn of much of the agonising, as
they begin to set their own private
deadlines for the narrative of chaos
to end. They are not yet reaching for
the assassins’ knives but they are
checking, with a business-like
efficiency, that they know where
they left them.
Boris needs his own James
Arbuthnots, while building a culture
in which good advice can flourish. If
I was him, I would build that with
the greatest of speed.He built his career as a mayor, not an
MP. He is the only Tory leader in
modern times who did not even
pretend loyalty to his immediate
predecessor. His career breaks all the
normal rules — just like his
conversation, which is never
sequential, hopping back and forth
between issues with intuitive flashes
of brilliance but not in any order that
most advisers can fathom. He has
the brain of a chaotic genius, which
helped him to win the votes of a vast
coalition that stretched from the
socially liberal centre to the
nationalistic right.
The trouble is that orderly
government is very sequential,
requiring minutes, rules, discipline,
standards of conduct and advice duly
weighed. While much of that has
survived, the errors are happening
when such processes are weak. WiseLord Frost was plucked from nowhere
to be a political soulmate for the PMabout Downing Street parties and it
does not take a top political analyst
to work out that the necessary
combination of frankness, loyalty
and well-judged deliberation is
missing from No 10.
Now there is talk of new advisers.
The foreign secretary conducting
negotiations with the EU is
undoubtedly an improvement. There
are rumours that Iain Duncan Smith
will be drafted in to add weight to the
Boris machine. But his staff already
includes a lot of very clever people.
The political operators in No 10 are
battle-hardened, and the civil
servants working directly for the PM
are among the best in the business.
Those of us who have depended
on such people think that the
problem is not the individuals but
the way they are being used. The
tone, culture and atmosphere of
government is set at the very top and
advisers, new or old, cannot change
that on their own.
Frank and loyal advisers need to
know that their views will be sought
and discussed, that big judgments
will not be made without them, that
their jobs are delineated from each
other to avoid rivalry, and that what
was decided today is still valid
tomorrow. If these things hold true,
they feel encouraged and
empowered, and will combine fierce
loyalty with speaking truth to power.
But that is not the atmosphere in
which core advisers such as Dominic
Cummings denounce their former
boss as a “shopping trolley” veering
this way and that, and Frost quits
and attacks the political direction of
the government.
Instead, Johnson famously told
Cummings that “Chaos isn’t that bad.
Chaos means everyone has to look
to me to see who is in charge.” The
prime minister is obviously a brilliant
but totally unconventional politician.P
olitical leaders need advisers
who are completely frank
and totally loyal. In the dark
and distant days when I was
Tory leader, my chief whip
was the laconic but brutally truthful
James Arbuthnot. Every Monday at
5pm he would come to see me with
an intimate account of what each
Conservative MP was thinking,
fearing or plotting: “X is most
unhappy, Y is having an affair, Z is
planning to defect”. If an MP was
desperate for a job, he told me that,
and if they were plotting my doom,
he somehow knew all about it and
would pass that on, too.
Quite often he would conclude
with: “Actually things are so bad I
really think I should resign”,
whereupon I would say he wasn’t
allowed to do that, we were in this
together and he had to carry on. And
he always did. We decided each week
who I should call, flatter, invite for a
drink or sideline. Thanks to James,
while I had truly massive problems
as party leader, being overthrown
wasn’t one of them.
I have been thinking about James
Arbuthnot during the last week of
Boris Johnson’s multiple setbacks.
We have to allow for the fact that
MPs are more difficult to control
than they were in my day. They chat
through encrypted — but leaky —
networks. They have social media
profiles which make them think they
are elected on their own merits
rather than as just the name on the
ballot paper next to “Conservative”.
Even so, it is a pretty grim
situation when a prime minister who
won a landslide victory only two
years ago is taken by surprise by the
revolt of 99 of his MPs on a matter
of core government policy — Covid
restrictions. As MPs seethe with
gossip about the party leadership,
that has to make us wonder what
else Downing Street doesn’t know.
Whatever relationship Boris has with
his chief whip, Mark Spencer, it looks
very much as if they need a new
relationship, or he needs a new
chief whip.
Then there was the resignation of
David Frost, who was supposed to be
exactly the sort of close, frank, loyal
lieutenant I have been describing. It
does not say much for him that,
having been plucked from nowhere
by Johnson to be a political
soulmate, elevated to the Lords and
seated at the cabinet table —
preferment that no other leader
would ever have given him — he
flounces off as soon as he disagrees
with something. But it also suggeststhere is something wrong at the very
centre of command when such a
close comrade walks off the
battlefield.
In the middle of all this was the
disastrous by-election result from
North Shropshire. There was a shred
of comfort for the Tories in that
many voters preferred to abstain
than to switch sides. Most MPs,
however, are incensed that the
election need never have taken place
at all, had the row over Owen
Paterson been handled with
appropriate sensitivity and
contrition. Throw in the deeply
damaging cascade of allegationsThe brain of a chaotic
genius helped win the
votes of a vast coalition
Potential assassins are
checking where they
have left their knives
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