Guto Harri: The communications chief who needs to get a grip on Boris Johnson and Downing Street

Harri – who had an eventful first working week – is strong enough and knows Johnson well enough to tell him some home truths, writes Sean O’Grady. But will the prime minister listen?

Guto Harri outside Downing Street (Reuters)

The opening banter between Boris Johnson and his new press secretary, Guto Harri, was of such quality it might have been scripted by Armando Iannucci or Ricky Gervais. The exchanges could have easily passed between Alan Partridge and Sidekick Simon, or back and forth from David Brent to Gareth Keenan in The Office. Or indeed any pair of middle-aged blokes of a certain age and certain mien. Apparently, according an account given to the press by Harri, it went like this:

The prime minister’s new head of communications, Guto Harri: “Prime minister; Guto Harri reporting for duty.”

The prime minister (stands up behind desk and starts to give salute): “What am I doing? I should take the knee for you.”

Harri (half-jokingly): “Are you going to survive, Boris?”

PM (deep voice, slowly and with purpose, singing a little as he finishes the line…): “I will survive.”

Harri: “You’ve got all your life to live.”

PM: “I’ve got all my love to give…”

(Pair collapse in giggles).

The entertaining anecdote did rather undermine the message given to this MPs that the prime minister was “bringing in capable, grown-up people who will make sure the machine works better”.

A proud Welshman, Harri vouchsafed the details of his reunion with Johnson, who he’d worked for when the PM was mayor of London, exclusively to the Welsh news site – and it is big news in Wales – Golwg360. In Welsh of course. Perhaps he calculated no one outside the Welsh-speaking community would be able to understand it, or something, but it was an unprecedented move, putting himself out there. He is a bit of an extrovert, actually. He was even candid enough to admit that the prime minster “isn’t a total clown, but he’s a very likeable character… 90 per cent of our discussion was very serious but it shows that he’s a character and that there’s fun to be had. He isn’t a diabolical man in the way that some people mischaracterise him”.

Apart from anything else, you wonder how many people would ordinarily feel the need to casually volunteer the news that their boss isn’t the very essence of evil and possessed by the devil. When Harri’s interview made the transition to English, there was some pointless spin that Harri was the subject of a slight mistranslation. For the record, the original reads thus, as published: “Dydy e ddim yn glown i gyd, ond mae’n gymeriad sy’n hoffus iawn.”

Supposedly, what Harri really meant there was that the PM was more than a clown (presumably, like the Pink Panther, a groovy cat, a gentleman, a scholar and an acrobat). However, his fellow professional Welshman and erstwhile BBC colleague Huw Edwards confirmed that the original, embarrassing quote was accurate.

Harri’s gaffes had begun. His first day at the house of fun we used to call the nerve centre of the British state saw him turn up with a Tesco carrier bag labelled “Reuse Recycle”, a motto that could very well be used to describe his own second coming. He quipped to the press in a way that press secretaries aren’t supposed to quip, in public, that he was taking “healthy snacks and mineral water”, a perhaps too-knowing reference to the lockdown gatherings of “Downing It Street”. Not unlike Johnson, Harri seems to find it difficult to suppress the urge to wisecrack.

Harri’s eventful first working week was rounded off with the PM being sent a questionnaire by police and Harri retweeting someone endorsing John Major’s criticisms of his new boss, then unretweeted it and changed his Twitter profile to read “Not tweeting”. Maybe Boris and Guto’s next impromptu karaoke hit will be “The Only Way Is Up” by Yazz and the Plastic Population.

Onlookers, as they say, were puzzled. BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted: “It’s an interesting first move in the new No 10 Comms plan.” Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland took a typical stern view of the new double act – not “funny” but “offensive” at a time when people were struggling with Covid-19 and the cost-of-living crisis. Then again, Johnson appears to think of her as an annoying Wee Jimmy Krankie-like figure.

More disturbing was the reaction of Johnson, himself, cast for a change as the straight man of politics. One report claimed that the prime minister gave his old mucker “both barrels” and was “incandescent” to learn that his new aide had reassured the media that, even if he was a bit of an idiot, at least he wasn’t a practising diabolist. You’d like to suppose that Johnson couldn’t keep up the show of rage and was soon on the verge of singing “I should have changed that stupid lock, I should have made you leave your key, if I’d known for just one second you’d be back to bother me.” Johnson must be feeling buyer’s remorse again.

Maybe not, though. It’s clear that Johnson needs a spin doctor who’s on his level (in every way), who understands him, has a similar sense of gallows humour, and the prime minister often turns to members of various of his “old bands” to find people he can trust and who he knows can put up with him. Harri had worked for him through the whole of Johnson’s first term as mayor of London, (2008-12), and is a known quantity. They are in short supply.

BoJo and Guto are around the same age (Johnson is 57 going on 7, Harri more an adolescent masquerading as a 55-year-old). They both went to Oxford, and met on the rugby pitch and bumped into each other now and again when they went into journalism. But there weren’t especially close: Harri (Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Hugh’s) doesn’t seem to have moved in exactly the same social and Oxford Union circles as Johnson (Classics at Balliol).

Some Tory backbenchers have suggested Harri’s recent work for a PR firm with Huawei renders him a security risk, but Johnson is the last person to be bothered about that. Not so long ago Harri was poking about Whitehall trying to get some business on behalf of the Chinese telecoms giant, though apparently with little success. There were a few cursory text messages and video calls, revealed last week, with Harri asking around about which ministers could be “nudged”, but he’s been cleared by Downing Street, for what it’s worth. At least so far as national security is concerned, Harri isn’t a risk.

So what’s in it for Harri? Well, it’s fairly likely that even if his new job isn’t a short-term contract, as first reported, he can have his old role at Hawthorn Advisors back anytime he wants. It’ll undeniably be a torrid time, as Gloria Gaynor eerily foresaw, and quite an experience, so he might use that to burnish his credentials as a communications guru, if only as a case study in crisis management of “how not to do it” He’ll be able to dine out on the stories, and might be able to get a few articles or a book out of it. Even if he only lasts as long as Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci did with Donald Trump (10 days), it’ll help Harri if he wants to pop up some more on panel shows and rolling news as a pundit like Alastair Campbell does, and Harri himself has from time to time.

Not that all of his past contributions to public debate have always been that helpful to Johnson. As Dominic Cummings seized on gleefully after Harri’s appointment was announced, although personally well attuned to Johnson, he isn’t exactly a soulmate either: “Message from No10: ‘So our new boss is a pro-Remain lobbyist who’s said the PM is ‘sexually incontinent’, ‘hugely divisive’, ‘destructive’, ‘dragging the country down’, & picked ‘wrong side’ in referendum’ GREAT’ #RegimeChange.”

It’s only fair to point out out that Harri fired back at Cummings a link to Harri’s article in GQ from February 2020 that predicted the demise of Cummings. That unbuttoned article also contained a slightly unnerving comment attributed to Johnson: “Having spent four years as one of Boris Johnson’s top team at London’s City Hall, I know that staying out of the shot can be tricky. Journalists are understandably fascinated when they see a colourful character crossing the threshold of power. A creature such as Cummings is easy copy. But the deal we sign up for as aides is pretty damn obvious: ‘All glory,’ as Boris used to playfully put it, ‘goes to the fuhrer.’”

Not sure quite how “playful” a passing reference to Adolf Hitler can be, especially given Harri’s unprompted remarks about Johnson being not-the-devil, but it gives an early flavour of the decadent bunker mentality that is now, all too tragically, overwhelming the Johnson administration.

Like all new kids on the block, even the retreads, Harri’s old chums in the media gave him a bit of a roughing up; but he should be good at the job. He has a pretty comprehensive CV, having spent the earlier part of his career at the BBC as a political correspondent, foreign correspondent and presenter, until 2007. Since then, apart from his partnership with Johnson he’s worked in PR for various agencies and at News International as director of communications in the post-phone hacking era.

Your correspondent remembers Harri at the BBC as a personable, charming, clever and very shrewd political journalist, but unlike most of the BBC’s hacks, not inclined to be a lifer, and rather restless. He seemed like he was always looking for the next thing. His reputation was sufficiently strong that David Cameron, when leader of the opposition, tapped him up to be his director of communications, with a view to taking him to Downing Street (albeit a relatively remote prospect at that point). Cameron took Andy Coulson on instead, which needs no further comment. In a slightly parallel universe, Harri would have ended up spinning fairly vigorously against Johnson in the 2016 Brexit referendum. As it happens, Cameron, Johnson and now Harri have all got their crack at No 10, which may tell us something about how “the Establishment” works.

As is now public knowledge, and like Johnson, Harri doesn’t tend to take himself too seriously, which can be interpreted unkindly by the unimaginative. He is droll, and he enjoys a rich hinterland. There’s his passionate Welshness – he has presented on the Eisteddford – so much so that he fancied becoming boss of the Welsh language channel S4C. Born in Cardiff, Harri’s father, Harri Pritchard-Jones, was a psychiatrist and stood for Plaid Cymru in various local elections. Guto’s Twitter bio notes his public-spirited side as a volunteer vaccinator and RNLI seaman. Harri takes to the waves on the Thames in London, where he lives with his wife, Shireen, and three children. Shireen is an author and mindfulness teacher,

Maybe that same sense of public service, though long sublimated in the world of public relations, accounts for him rushing into the casualty ward/disco complex that is the new Office of the Prime Minister. Alternatively, it’s quite easy to see Harri as a primary school teacher reaching the end of his tether with his gifted but very troublesome charge, little Boris, who simply won’t behave himself, but always makes him smile. Maybe the feeling is not quite mutual, given Harri’s first week “helping” Johnson.

One key to whether the pair can make a success of their political “marriage” second time around is whether Harri can adapt to the “new” Johnson. By all accounts Harri was a committed Remainer. A friend told the London Evening Standard last week: “Last time I saw Guto and Shireen, his wife, it was at somebody’s party in the country and it was just after Brexit and Guto talked all weekend about the disaster of Brexit. He became completely obsessed with this [Brexit] thing... When he gets on his hobby horse about something, he doesn’t easily get off it.”

Mind you, on Brexit, Harri claims that Johnson regretted backing Leave in the referendum campaign, and told the The New European’s editor-in-chief Matt Kelly in 2018 that Johnson “knows he discoed up massively. Now he’s working out how to get himself out of the mess.”

It’s 10 years since Harri and Johnson shared an office, and in those days the PM was more obviously socially liberal, less nasty, funnier and certainly publicly friendlier to the EU and to refugees and migrants. The contrast with the snarling, nationalistic, anti-BBC, vindictive, stubborn, misguided and generally soured-up “Big Dog” we see today must be even more apparent to those who know Johnson as well as Harri does. Put bluntly, Harri is woke, and Johnson isn’t.

How long will Harri last? The assumption is that Harri will last as long as Johnson does, but that’s not necessarily going to be true. The last high profile role Harri took on was at GB News, which he left acrimoniously because, he explained later, he misunderstood the cranky, post-truth channel’s brand values and had the audacity to “take the knee” during the Black Lives Matter protests.

GB News superstar Nigel Farage, setting the tone, regarded the BLM protesters as, at best, a “Marxist mob”. Not Guto, though, he declared on air to the channel’s few startled viewers: “I think we should all take the knee. In fact, why not take the knee now and say it’s a gesture but it’s an important gesture. It’s not about me in the studio but for them to do that as footballers on the field makes sense … And those people that think that being English is OK with being anti-black people are completely misguided and they need to know there’s no space for them in normal, acceptable society.”

And down Harri went, and, shortly after, out of the GB News studios for good. Wisely he’d discussed it with the production team so the sort-of-spontaneous gesture wasn’t missed by the GB News cameras. Like the similarly disillusioned Andrew Neil, Harri chucked a grenade on the way out: “Rather than defending free speech and confronting cancel culture, it [GB News] has set out to replicate it on the far right.” (In response GB News then said: “We let both sides of the argument down by oversimplifying a very complex issue”, which is an eccentric line of defence.)

At any rate, Harri didn’t hang around somewhere he didn’t feel comfortable, and the same might well happen at No 10, where staff turnover has, let’s face it, become a bit of an issue. Unlike a younger person with something to prove, Harri isn’t that “hungry” that he’ll go along with everything Johnson wants.

You may also recall that Johnson and Priti Patel were rather less supportive of the England team and others taking the knee last year. It thus may or may not be an unhappy omen that Johnson chose to gently mock Harri’s gesture during their Gloria Gaynor-inspired job interview.

For what it’s worth, the Welsh name “Guto” means “strong chief”. He’ll certainly need to be. Not long ago, Harri told the BBC’s Newsnight that a “really grovelling apology” might mean Johnson could survive the “toxic” situation, but: “The problem at the moment is that nobody seems to be getting a grip.” It might be too late for that now anyway.

There’s no doubting that Harri is strong enough and knows Johnson well enough to tell him when he is and isn’t getting a grip on government. The problem, the constant in his whole political career, is that Johnson thinks he knows best and thinks he can get away with anything. Harri, nor anyone else, can do anything about that. With a boss like Johnson, Harri can at least be assured that even when he, Harri, breaks the cardinal rule of the press secretary and becomes “The Story”, it won’t stay like that for long.