There was a fleeting moment last week when Boris Johnson’s team felt as if it had time-travelled to Theresa May’s government — when a prime minister’s every action set leadership rivals plotting. As Johnson’s support for his senior aide Dominic Cummings — who had fled London during lockdown with his
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There was a fleeting moment last week when Boris Johnson’s team felt as if it had time-travelled to Theresa May’s government — when a prime minister’s every action set leadership rivals plotting. As Johnson’s support for his senior aide Dominic Cummings — who had fled London during lockdown with his wife and child — caused the prime minister’s standing to plummet in the polls, word reached the whips that Jeremy Hunt, who lost the contest for Conservative leader last July, was phoning MPs.
“Hunt was calling around backbenchers asking what they thought,” a Tory adviser said. “He was saying, ‘I’m considering what I’m going to say.’ The perception from backbenchers was that this had leadership connotations. Hunt and others were using this to get in with people.”
Hunt says he is “done with” such ambitions, only spoke to members of the health select committee he chairs and points out that he publicly said Cummings should not resign.
In a WhatsApp message to her Blue Collar Conservatism group, the former cabinet minister Esther McVey — another leadership hopeful last year — was also counselling opinion. “I’m anxious to hear (in private) what people think about the Dominic Cummings situation and whether or not he needs to resign to protect the PM and the party,” she wrote, adding: “I would appreciate people not reply on here as it may leak.” In the time-honoured tradition, it then did so.
This weekend Johnson’s team is wondering not whether Cummings is going, but what the effects of his staying will be.
The affair was revealing: of the way Johnson’s top team does its business — with an unbridled aggression that can be self-defeating — and the reliance a highly centralised administration has on Cummings himself.
It also flushed out the degree to which a below-par Johnson is still leaning on others after his personal brush with the coronavirus. Yet the episode concealed just as much. The conventional wisdom has it that Johnson did not recognise what his aide had done wrong, was unconcerned by his behaviour and did not realise the depth of public disquiet about his support for Cummings.
Conversations with more than a dozen ministers, officials, aides and allies of the prime minister make clear that in every regard this is wrong. Johnson was personally furious and knew he was taking a huge risk.
The question now is whether this was a pragmatic act of self-preservation or the moment the prime minister forfeited public trust and sowed the seeds of his own destruction.
Cabinet ministers believe the “Domnishambles” was caused as much by the cover-up as the original offence. When Downing Street was contacted on May 22 by The Guardian and the Daily Mirror, which were set to reveal that Cummings had fled to his parents’ home in Durham at the height of the lockdown, Cummings’s instinct was to ignore the story.
“He refused to comment and banned anyone else from commenting,” said one source. “His attitude was that this was a non-story, it’s left-wing papers and they can go f*** themselves. It was a five-day lesson in crisis mismanagement.”
The following day Downing Street issued a statement saying Cummings had gone north when his wife fell ill with coronavirus symptoms because he needed help to care for their four-year-old son. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, was sent out to say that once in Durham, Cummings had remained locked down.
Behind the scenes, Mark Spencer, the chief whip, and Ben Gascoigne, Johnson’s personal aide, contacted cabinet ministers asking them to tweet their support. Those in Johnson’s Covid-19 “quad” did so. Of the others, one said: “Dom has never been interested in my view. Why would he care if I’m backing him now?”
Even Cummings’s fans say he has never bothered to woo MPs. Andrew Bridgen, who defended him on television last week, observed: “They say if you want a friend in politics, get a dog — well, Cummings would kick the dog as well.”
Those further down the ladder received messages in which stick was more prominent than carrot. “The whips were saying you will have no future unless you get out there and back him,” said one MP.
The whips had rivals, however, with enemies of Cummings accused of seeking to drum up support for MPs to break cover and say he should resign. Penny Mordaunt, a Cabinet Office minister, has been dubbed “Poison Pen” for telling her constituents there were “inconsistencies” in Cummings’s account. Helen Whately, the care minister, and Alicia Kearns, a newly elected MP, are also suspected of disloyalty.
When it emerged last weekend that Cummings had taken a day trip to Barnard Castle in Co Durham, the initial defence was in tatters. Johnson, friends say, was angry with his most important aide but, like Cummings, never felt he should go.
“He understood what Dom did was wrong — both the original offence and the comms [communications] that followed it,” said one ally.
A Whitehall source added: “His view was, ‘I am buggered if I am going to be forced into firing an aide,’ but that doesn’t mean he is well disposed towards Dom. He’s extremely pissed off with him because he scooted off [to Durham] without telling him. Boris himself didn’t choose to decamp to Chequers when he was sick, which he could have done.”
One who knows Johnson well said: “I think at the root of all this is libertarianism.” The source added: “He doesn’t actually believe in locking everyone down. He knows he needs to, but he understands why people might transgress and he can’t bring himself to criticise it.”
Johnson also shared with Cummings a key world view. “They’re not two peas in a pod but where they do meet is on the idea of apologies,” a Tory source said. “Boris has always been clear that he doesn’t ever say sorry.”
Last Sunday morning Johnson called in Cummings and made him give a full account of his movements. He and his closest aides, including Lee Cain, the communications director, held a crisis meeting and agreed that Johnson should try to draw a line under the affair. “The idea was that he would make clear that he was satisfied with Dom’s account and try to shut it down,” said one insider.
But after being pounded with questions at a press conference on Sunday afternoon, Johnson had failed. “Boris took one for the team,” an official added. “After that press conference he came out and said that he had had his arse whipped live on national television and told Dom he would have to do the same.”
To make matters worse, several aides say Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, and Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, had refused to back him up publicly. “Whitty and Vallance refused to do the presser [press conference],” one ministerial aide said.
Ministers were also in revolt. “The cabinet moved in and said, ‘He has got to apologise, he has got to do something,’” a senior Tory said.
The decision that Cummings should make his own public appearance was confirmed at another crisis meeting on Monday morning. Cummings agreed, admitting the public reaction was worse than he had expected. “It has cut through,” he said.
But even Cummings’s allies could not persuade him to apologise. In the No 10 rose garden that afternoon, he said: “I don’t regret what I did.”
“He wouldn’t say sorry,” a source familiar with the discussions said. “The expectation in Downing Street was that the word ‘sorry’ would pass his lips for failing to clear things up earlier. But he wouldn’t do it and there was no one who could make him do it.”
Johnson was again in a foul mood, making clear his displeasure at having to do another press conference afterwards. “He was voicing what many people felt that we’ve all had a long couple of days,” said the source. As Johnson expressed regret for the “confusion and the anger and the pain that people feel” rather than the offence, a cabinet minister told a friend: “Why have we got the prime minister on television apologising for a special adviser. It’s insane.”
However, many ministers had concluded things had now gone too far for Johnson to ditch Cummings, “because it will all fall apart if he goes”, a senior Tory said. Priti Patel, the home secretary, was quickly in touch with the Metropolitan police commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, when a mob turned up outside Cummings’s north London home.
One of Cummings’s Vote Leave fraternity said: “We need him. We took three years to get the gang in there. We can’t throw that away now.” When one of his acolytes was asked what would happen if Cummings shot someone dead in the street, the reply came: “It would depend whether anyone saw him do it.”
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