How Boris Johnson can move on from Dominic Cummings

The prime minister has appointed a more traditional chief of staff following the exit of his top adviser. Now Sean O’Grady looks at how No 10 can get back on track

Boris Johnson outside 10 Downing Street (AFP/Getty)

What was it that Mario Cuomo, probably the most successful politician to come out of New York, used to say? Ah, yes: “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”. Wise words, and they come readily to mind when assessing Boris Johnson’s first year after his famous election win last December. No 10 has been, at best, dysfunctional. To borrow another bit of wizened political wisdom, such internal feuds and ego-fights usually turn out to be even worse than they are portrayed in the press. “Princess Nut Nut” and a media team on non-speaking terms probably isn’t the half of it. If so, it is no great surprise the country is where it is today, and why the prime minister’s personal approval ratings have slumped. The arrival of the prime minister’s new chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, a former Treasury civil servant of a solid, professional disposition, marks a shift towards a more prosaic style of government, in the best sense of the term. No more moonshots, perhaps.

What both Mr Johnson and his now ex-chief adviser Dominic Cummings were brilliant at was campaigning, as witnessed in the European referendum and the last general election (as well as Mr Johnson’s unlikely run at the London mayoralty). They revelled in pithy poetic phrases, lurid rhetoric and soaring ambition. They seem to have been much less successful in the arts of government. Attempting to redesign the machinery of government in the middle of a pandemic and with Brexit to get done was probably a strategic error. It led to briefings against, and the departure of, permanent secretary Sir Mark Sedwill; as well as the departure of then-chancellor Sajid Javid, who tried to appoint his special advisers, part of a wider move to take control of the Treasury.  

Dominic Cummings might claim that putting real-time data flows and analysis at the heart of governmental decision making, in and around No 10, was in fact the best way to tackle any crisis. He might also be right that the Treasury is too powerful and narrowly focused, in some abstract sense. Perhaps his modernisation of British government was in the end stymied by vested interests in the NHS or HM Treasury, but in any case it mostly failed and mass testing remains undelivered and the economy, partly as a result, is a mess. Test and trace might be ready by the spring, about a year after the pandemic got going and when the vaccines should be coming through.  

Mr Rosenfield is not a replacement for Mr Cummings, nor wishes to be, but fills the vacant post still vacant after the departure of Lee Cain, who was lined up for the job of chief of staff. He was part of Mr Cummings’ group of trusted operators as director of communications, and wished to be a gate keeper for Mr Johnson. That in turn clashed with the desire of Allegra Stratton, newly hired spokesperson, to report directly to the prime minister. She was supported by Carrie Symonds, Mr Johnson’s fiancée. Hence the crudely drawn conflict between the “lads gang” veterans of Vote Leave and the alliance of Ms Stratton, Ms Symonds and Munira Mirza, the influential but low-profile head of policy. Another former Vote Leave campaigner, Cleo Watson, has now left Downing Street. The Cummings-Cain attempt at radical change has been defeated by the establishment, as usual, but also by the ineptitude of the would-be revolutionaries. Mr Cummings enjoyed a scrap, but he started too many at once. As Mr Javid said in his resignation speech, mutual respect and trust should be the way to get things done (or at least a semblance of it). Against some fierce competition, Mr Cummings proved to be his own worst enemy.  

What may happen now is that instead of being turned into a Nasa-style mission control room fit for the 21st century, No 10 will be dragged kicking and screaming into the 1990s. For Mr Rosenfield seems well suited to follow the example set by Tony Blair when he came to power in 1997. His chief of staff was Jonathan Powell, who was also a career public servant (though technically a special adviser), and who set the standard for a chief of staff – concentrating on policy and decision making, some auxiliary diplomatic/political tasks (such as Northern Ireland), and leaving delivery and “enforcement” and the media stuff to others (the “delivery unit” and Alastair Campbell in point of fact). He recently spoke to a select committee of the advantages of a small, nimble focused staff to support the prime minister (referencing his brother Charles, who was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher): “I must say that I was always pretty strongly against making too big a No 10. My brother, who worked for Mrs Thatcher, used to make fun of us for having too many people, and it has massively expanded into the Cameron era and now into the Boris Johnson era. I am very influenced by a member of the Kanzleramt, the German chancellery, who worked for us for a few weeks, who came to see us before he left and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t replicate what we have in Germany, a huge bureaucracy at the centre replicating every single division in the government. We have it because of coalition governments, but it is a mistake. Try to keep No 10 small and light.’ I personally think it is a mistake to make No 10 too large.”

The return to more traditional, or at least manageable, ways of doing things probably began with the appointment of Simon Case as permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office, and the arrival of Mr Rosenfield is another step towards normality. Mr Rosenfield will probably revert to traditional civil service values, stay out of party politics, avoid the media and never become the story. He most likely also has a more conventional way of getting his eyes tested than Mr Cummings did.