How will Dominic Cummings’ Nasa-style Whitehall command centre work?

Boris Johnson’s chief adviser has set up a new ‘mission control’ office next door to 10 Downing Street. Jack Brown, a historian of the building, looks at the pros and cons of the plan

Cummings arrives in Downing Street in June (Reuters)

No 10 Downing Street, official residence of the British prime minister for 285 years, was not built for its current purpose. It is a rambling, labyrinthine building, full of disorienting asymmetric networks of corridors with few practical meeting rooms of any size. In some ways, it is surprising that it has taken so long for someone to decide that a substantial chunk of the prime minister’s office should be moved elsewhere. Could this week’s exodus of Downing Street advisers and officials to 70 Whitehall mark the end of No 10 as we know it?

In January, it was reported that Dominic Cummings sought to persuade Boris Johnson to move from his small office in No 10 to a “Nasa-style mission control office” in No 12. Senior advisers and screens displaying real-time data would surround the prime minister, making for better decision-making. This plan was rejected at the time. However, rather than vanish, it appears to have mutated into something more substantial.

In late July, Cummings was spotted wandering around neighbouring 70 Whitehall with a floorplan. The building, connected internally to 10 Downing Street, has been home to the cabinet secretary and a portion of the Cabinet Office since the early 1960s. Having failed to convince the prime minister to leave No 10, Cummings now planned to shift a very substantial chunk of No 10’s operations into 70 Whitehall. As of Tuesday this week, a new era for the geography of power at the centre of government finally had lift-off.

Proximity to power has historically been a golden rule of influence in Downing Street. Those closest to the prime minister have had the best chance of having their voices heard, and therefore of shaping the direction of the government. Yet No 10 will continue as home and office to the prime minister.

Cummings has deliberately moved himself out of the Downing Street bubble and into a building some occupants have previously described as “political Siberia” – 70 Whitehall has been historically used as overflow to house those prime ministerial advisers and units deemed not quite essential enough to warrant one of No 10’s limited number of tiny, inconvenient rooms. A substantial chunk of No 10’s operation, of up to 20 officials and reportedly including policy unit head Munira Mirza, have moved with Cummings.

At first glance, this seems an unusual decision on the part of those seeking to influence the prime minister. It could be interpreted as any or all of the following: a sign of a rival power centre emerging next door to Downing Street; an attempt to better integrate the work of the Cabinet Office and No 10; and an ambitious expansion of the prime minister’s office into a “prime minister’s department”.

The internal door between 10 Downing Street and 70 Whitehall is reportedly to be removed. The door has played an important symbolic role of demarcation between the prime minister’s office in No 10, and the cabinet secretary’s domain in 70 Whitehall. Because the cabinet secretary theoretically serves the entire cabinet, this expansion of the prime minister’s office into Cabinet Office territory could be seen as an assertion of Boris Johnson’s authority over the rest of the cabinet.

The “Nasa-style” layout in 70 Whitehall has also attracted much comment. No 10’s rabbit warren does not lend itself to modern, open-plan working. Yet Gordon Brown is the only prime minister to have tried something similar to Cummings’ plan. Taking inspiration from a visit to New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s offices, Brown moved from his small office in No 10 to the larger ground-floor office in 12 Downing Street, down an internal corridor. Brown sat at the head of a horseshoe of desks, surrounded by his chief advisers and key officials. A TV screen by the wall played rolling news. But this could also lead to distraction and overload. The arrangement received mixed reviews from those who worked closely with the prime minister. None of Brown’s successors have tried to recreate it.

The difference with today’s arrangement is that the prime minister is not at the centre of the new layout. In fact, he does not even have a seat at the table. It is Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, who will sit at the head of the new “collaboration hub”, some distance from the prime minister next door. And it remains unclear which side of the now-removed door Simon Case, the new cabinet secretary, will sit on.

Cummings has previously negatively contrasted the cabinet room at No 10 with “seeing rooms” like Nasa mission control and the Large Hadron Collider. These arrangements display real-time data and progress on their singular mission on huge screens, allowing quick responses to emerging problems. But the centre of British government has many different, overlapping missions on the go at once. It will be fascinating to see what the screens display – although it seems that they were not quite ready for the first day in the office, with officials and advisers alike forced to use their own laptops.

As a historian of No 10, I know that Downing Street has thrived on its small size. No 10 was initially designed and constructed as a cheap townhouse, not an office. The comparatively small building has constrained the number of officials and advisers who make up the prime minister’s office, and led to an intimate, anti-bureaucratic working environment.

So many of its former occupants have found it inconvenient, but the small size of office and staff has led to a working environment of efficiency, immediacy and easy coordination. A larger prime minister’s department may prove harder to steer in one direction.

Whether the move leads to stronger central coordination, or a more disjointed, flabbier centre, probably depends on the personalities of the prime minister and his chief adviser as much as on geography.

Jack Brown is author of ‘No 10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street’, the updated paperback edition of which is published by Haus next month