Boris Johnson now has a perfect chance to reinvent himself – I told you not to write him off

Dominic Cummings’s departure is not the beginning of the end for the PM – it is the beginning of the next phase, writes John Rentoul

The real Boris Johnson can be remarkably difficult to get a firm hold of, as David Cameron ruefully observed when he compared him to a greased piglet (PA)

The prime minister now has a good chance to reinvent himself, and put right some of the errors that marred his first year of government with a parliamentary majority. 

The vaccine breakthrough offers the hope of finally – eight months after he first promised it – sending the virus packing. The departure of Dominic Cummings means he can sue for peace in the wars against journalists, civil servants, Conservative MPs, Remainers and “the establishment” that his brilliant adviser waged. 

He can reshuffle his ministers to promote on merit rather than Vote Leave ideology, and he will soon present a new face to the world, that of Allegra Stratton, his spokesperson who will hold daily televised media briefings.

I said at the time of Boris Johnson’s Tory party conference speech last month that his detractors should be wary of writing him off. Even then there was talk of his being “gone by Christmas”. But it turns out that it is Cummings who is gone and the prime minister who is still there, dodging “whatever the next cosmic spanner may be, hurtling towards us in the dark”. 

Tommy Vietor, one of Barack Obama’s aides, called him a “shapeshifting creep” the other day, on account of Johnson’s comment about the former president hating Britain because of his part-Kenyan ancestry. But Johnson still took the early call from President-elect Joe Biden, a politician who understands diplomacy better than the rest of us. 

He may be a creep, but it is the shapeshifting quality that could be the important part. The real Boris Johnson can be remarkably difficult to get a firm hold of, as David Cameron ruefully observed when he compared him to a greased piglet. Johnson allowed Cummings a large degree of authority, and yet, despite the rule that elected politicians are responsible for everything that their advisers do, the prime minister pretended that some of the excesses had nothing to do with him. 

Cummings’s departure – and the settlement with Sonia Khan, the special adviser to Sajid Javid whom he sacked – will be used as a way of further distancing the new collaborative Johnson from the confrontational model that has ruled until now. 

Some people say that the departure of a couple of No 10 advisers is a Westminster village story of little interest to the general public. I think that underestimates Cummings’s notoriety as a “one rule for the little people” hypocrite during the first lockdown, but it also fails to recognise the importance of having Stratton speak for Johnson at daily televised briefings. That will change the look and tenor of the government, quite apart from the effect it has on power relations in No 10. 

It seems that the decisive moment in the departures of Cummings and his ally Lee Cain was not Johnson’s change of mind about making Cain his Downing Street chief of staff, but his earlier decision to appoint Stratton. She insisted on being answerable directly to the prime minister, which cut across Cain’s authority as director of communications, but also infringed Cummings’s power as one of the few with open access to the inner sanctum. 

The thinking behind a White House-style televised briefing – ironically it was Cain’s idea – was that it would allow Johnson’s government to communicate directly with the people rather than having everything filtered through journalists. 

Assuming that the briefings do attract large audiences, they will change perceptions of the government, and allow Stratton to present post-coronavirus Johnson as a liberal, green One Nation Tory. The One Nation bit is supposed to be the new appeal to the working-class voters of the red wall in the north and Midlands, replacing Vote Leave with the vacuous slogan of “levelling up”. 

It won’t last, of course. Respites, resets and repentances never do. Stratton is likely to find that she has taken on an impossible job. She will have to answer for everything that happens in the news, or she will have to say “no comment” in 57 different ways, and she will become the focus of intense media attention. Good luck to her, but she will need it. 

Meanwhile, Tory MPs will grumble that, having got rid of one adviser, Cummings, who wants to shut down the economy to control coronavirus, Johnson is now in thrall to another, his fiancée, who wants to shut down the economy to control the climate. 

Even so, I think the shapeshifting creep still has several shapes to shift into. Cummings’s departure is not the beginning of the end for Johnson; it is the beginning of the next phase. It is still too early to write him off.