Dan Rosenfield: Boris Johnson’s new right-hand man is a formidable asset

The former civil servant has been tasked with getting No 10 back in order. And, writes Sean O’Grady, he might just bring back the better side of the prime minister

‘Business and the City will be relieved to have someone who can count and who understands basic economics in No 10’ (World Jewish Relief/YouTube)

If I were Keir Starmer, I would be very worried about the appointment of Dan Rosenfield as chief of staff at No 10. That’s because Rosenfield represents a mortal threat to Boris Johnson’s reputation for mayhem and buffoonish incompetence, which has done so much to depress the prime minister’s approval ratings, and has made Starmer look even better than he is. If Johnson needed someone like Dominic Cummings to get him in to power with a decent majority, then he now needs someone to actually make his government work properly. After the year we’ve had, and the persistent mumbling about installing Rishi Sunak at some suitable early opportunity, Rosenfield might even manage to save Johnson’s premiership. He may be “Sir Dan” ere long.

Plainly, Rosenfield is part of the “reset” that dare not speak its name. The wholesale clearout of Cummings and the old freewheeling laddish Vote Leave gang was more than an just an unusually bloody palace coup. After a brief flirtation with the notion of making Sajid Javid Johnson’s chief of staff – not a great fit, to be fair – a completely conventional choice was made. It was a victory for the establishment over the soi-disant disrupters. The power of the career civil service and Treasury for which Cummings showed such contempt has been restored.  

Rosenfield is a fine example of that tradition at its best, with about 10 years at the Treasury straight from university, though since about 2011 he has worked in banking and consultancy. According to a “friend” who spoke to the Financial Times: “Dan’s been quite clear about his terms, the rule of law, constitutional proprieties, less of the quixotic attacks on institutions...” Rupert Harrison, a former political special adviser to then chancellor George Osborne when Rosenfield was Osborne’s principal private secretary, describes him as “v bright, tough and politically savvy with a small P”. David Gauke, a Treasury minister from the era says Rosenfield was “likeable and effective”. From that description and his background he sounds much like Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who concentrated on policy and decision-making and did so much to make Blair’s sometimes fractious administration work smoothly (as well as helping to build peace in Ireland). If so, then Rosenfield will represent a formidable asset to Johnson and his government.  

Another ex-colleague compliments Rosenfield on his more recent business background, as a manager at Hakluyt and Bank of America Merrill Lynch: “Business and the City will be relieved to have someone who can count and who understands basic economics in No 10.”  

Indeed so, but how will Rosenfield get on with the rest of the team? Given that he will probably stick to his day job and avoid trying to run the media and party side of things, perfectly fine. As Margaret Thatcher and even Winston Churchill showed, you can do revolutionary things and win a war broadly within the structures invented by the Victorians – with the right leadership. As someone once quipped, the British civil service can be a Rolls-Royce machine provided it has a driver. To extend the analogy, Rosenfield will need to be Johnson’s chauffeur and satnav. To do that he won’t waste his time trying to do other people’s jobs for them. The new cabinet secretary, Simon Case, at 42 about the same age as Rosenfield, Munira Mirza, head of policy, and Allegra Stratton, prime ministerial spokesperson, should make for a more harmonious team than the last attempt. There’s no reason to suppose Carrie Symonds will have it in for him. Even if he thinks she’s “Princess Nut Nut” he’ll keep it to himself.

The key relationship, of course, will be with Johnson, who is certainly unlike the two big beasts, the chancellors of the exchequer Rosenfield worked with at the Treasury. Imagine, say, applying Rosenfield’s warm words about Alistair Darling to Johnson: “Decent, smart, capable and straightforward man.” Or his tribute to Osborne: “I really enjoyed working with George. He is a really professional guy, and someone who cares deeply about making a difference. I enjoyed every minute.”

No doubt, Rosenfield’s own sense of professionalism will kick in if he thinks Johnson is pushing boundaries or not doing his homework, but it might be a bit of a strain. His own politics are not known, but there are clues, apart from the fact Johnson is prepared to have him in his circle. Rosenfield’s Judaism is, he’s said, “pretty central” to his being, and he has been chair of World Jewish Relief (WJR) since 2017. An outspoken passage in his speech to the charity’s annual fund-raising dinner in February, for example, suggests that, in a parallel universe where it was Jeremy Corbyn in No 10 looking for a chief of staff, Rosenfield would have made his excuses. Rosenfield warned: “We meet in challenging times. For us, for the United Kingdom, and for global Jewry. And we know that here in the UK we have faced, and arguably still face, the challenge of hard-left antisemitism, a doctrine built in my view on a cocktail, a toxic cocktail, of hostility to Israel, association of Jews with egregious capitalism and, importantly, a sense that we, British Jews, are no longer the victim, no longer vulnerable, and therefore this form of racism does not really count as racism at all. To that I say no; and we stand together to say no.”  

It doesn’t sound like he voted Labour. The humanitarian work of WJR, often for impoverished Jewish people in places such as Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, including some Holocaust survivors, is valuable and the stories of those affected are incredibly moving – and that goes too for those outside Jewish communities they have helped, such as Syrian refugees. Rosenfield made an appeal to “look out, not in”, to “welcome the stranger in our home” and warned about scapegoating “beyond our community”. In those sentiments Rosenfield sounds more like the old, more liberal Johnson when he was mayor of London, rather than a more respectable version of Nigel Farage. WJR also puts an emphasis on helping refugees in the UK look for work, which is consistent with Conservative principles if not current policy: “If we are working in refugee camps or post-disaster recovery, our focus is about helping people to generate their own livelihood and income.”  

Studying the few videos of Rosenfield online and his public utterances, you see what his fans like about him. His mild Mancunian accent and manner of speaking is quietly insistent, and his close-cropped hair gives him a bit of a no-nonsense vibe. But there’s a lyrical, romantic side there too: “I grew up in Manchester, an active member of a small Jewish community, in the north of town, but however small my community was, I knew that we were only one community in a global web of Jewish communities, each tied to the other. So when I first visited the Jewish community in Kharkov, in Ukraine, I felt that connection ... I remember growing up in Manchester, looking at the empty chair and the unused tallit that sat in our shul for years, the chair for the Russian refusenik.”  

That, by the way, was the Sha’are Shalom Reform Shul, and, like Manchester Grammar School and University College London (a degree in languages), all helped form the man with the job of saving Boris Johnson from himself. He is grounded in that sense of faith and community, and his marriage to Jemima (daughter of the distinguished Daily Mail journalist Alex Brummer) and his three children. He is another grown-up in the room – but can he save Boris?

Probably, if Johnson lets him do the job as he wishes to do it – the kind of authority sought by Cummings and Lee Cain, but wielded more responsibly, and gently. No doubt Rosenfield is already familiar with the wisdom of James Baker, who served in the job with Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush: “In ‘chief of staff’ the most important word is ‘staff’.”  

Rosenfield once sounded a bit annoyed at being painted as just a kind of intellectual valet to various prominent politicians: “Everyone talks about Darling and Osborne, but I was managing a team of 65 people, working with ministers to meet demands at short notice, and I learned as much doing that as I did from Al and George.” He is also proud of being the “mug” who had to make sense of London’s grossly undercooked budget for the 2012 Olympic Games. So he is certainly capable of taking hold of No 10, as well as trying to get Johnson match fit again. Even so, he has his work cut out for him, because Johnson is, at 56, unlikely to drop any of his bad habits. At some point Rosenfield may do what he once did for Alistair Darling, and invite the prime minister, Carrie and Wilfred over for Shabbat, and induct them into the ways of Ashkenazi cuisine. It might help.

Rosenfield became a dedicated Manchester United fan at the age of four, and his earliest memory is of them seeing off Everton in the 1985 FA Cup final (he was seven). Today (at the time of writing) Manchester United are sandwiched between those same Toffees and Aston Villa in the Premier League, rather than at the top where they must believe they belong. It hard to say which is the more difficult task, rebuilding Manchester United or the Conservative government of Boris Johnson, but Rosenfield would give either his best shot.