Boris Johnson stands accused of relying on a narrow circle of advisers – but who are they?

John Rentoul on the tightly knit group who worked with the prime minister on the Vote Leave campaign – and now run No 10

The PM’s operation has been likened to a frat house (AFP/Getty)

Tim Montgomerie, the Conservative activist, caused a stir last week with an article in the New Statesman explaining why, having been half in and half out of the prime minister’s team, he had given up on Boris Johnson. The prime minister relied too much on a narrow circle, Montgomerie said, had stopped “listening to alternative voices”, and was distracted by the “turbulence in his private life”.

One of many striking lines in Montgomerie’s attack on Johnson’s No 10 operation was that it was like “Dom’s frat house, starring Caino, Roxstar, Sonic and other playground names”. Who are these people?

“Dom” is well known, and was the main object of Montgomerie’s criticism. Dominic Cummings is the prime minister’s chief adviser, although this isn’t a formal title. He became a minor celebrity when he was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in Brexit: The Uncivil War, a docudrama about the EU referendum campaign. Recently he became even better known when it was discovered that he had fled from London to Durham when the national lockdown was at its most stringent.

Johnson’s refusal to dispense with his services told us more than any Downing Street organogram about Cummings’s role in the prime minister’s office. Johnson clearly relies on him absolutely, and so Cummings continues to act with the prime minister’s full authority over the political side of No 10.

But who are Caino, Roxstar and Sonic? The first is Lee Cain, the prime minister’s director of communications, the modern title for what used to be known as the press secretary. He worked with Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign, and is famous mainly for having dressed up as a chicken when he was a journalist on the Daily Mirror (he was sent to follow David Cameron to try to embarrass him).

Roxstar is Rob Oxley, who was Downing Street press secretary, but now heads Dominic Raab’s political team at the Foreign Office. He also worked with Cummings at Vote Leave.

And Sonic is the nickname of Oliver Lewis, a policy adviser at No 10 whose Twitter account features a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog as its pinned tweet. He was research director of the Vote Leave campaign.

They are all special advisers, known as spads: political appointees entitled to promote party political objectives more explicitly than impartial civil servants.

When people complain, as Montgomerie has, that Cummings has “transplanted” the core team he built up at Vote Leave into 10 Downing Street, these are the people they mean. They won the referendum against the odds, and they won the general election that they could not be sure the opposition parties would allow them to fight, so they have brought to No 10 some of the campaigning attitudes that served them well.

Part of that, though, has been a contempt for much of the Conservative Party, which Cummings at least regards as hopelessly mired in the cowardice and confusion of the Cameron-May years. And there is an “us against the world” attitude to many journalists that has made life harder for the government than it need have been – a price that has been paid during the coronavirus crisis.

The prime minister has other advisers, and crucially he has a civil service machine, strengthened by the drafting of Simon Case to No 10 at the highest level, that of permanent secretary. Case was principal private secretary to prime ministers Cameron and May before he left to work for Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge.

But there is no doubting the influence of Cummings as Johnson’s main adviser, after he survived the firestorm of public disapproval of his Durham trip, which means that the political advisers who matter in No 10 are the ones who have been hand picked by him.