Boris Johnson’s campaign team is chaotic and divided – exactly like the candidate they are supporting

Hunt branded his opponent a ‘coward’ who is trying to ‘slink into No 10 through the back door’. Boris responded like a guilty miscreant, sulkily presenting himself for public inspection – doing the right thing, but too late to gain credit for it

Boris Johnson’s campaign is going badly enough that splits in his team have become public. The Times reports today that some of Johnson’s longstanding allies “resent the influence of Gavin Williamson, his whip, and James Wharton, his campaign manager”.

Williamson, a former government chief whip sacked as defence secretary by Theresa May after she accused him of leaking National Security Council discussions, was credited with running the successful stage of the campaign among MPs. His operation built up a commanding lead in public declarations of support before the balloting began, and ended with Johnson securing the backing of more than half of Tory MPs.

But Williamson and Wharton, a former MP who lost his seat at the 2017 election, have annoyed longer-serving Johnson advisers by using their influence to persuade him to avoid public scrutiny. One friend is reported to have said: “There’s a tendency to infantilise Boris. Clearly there was a need to protect him, but it went too far.” Hence the sudden course-correction yesterday, when Johnson allowed himself to be interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, so that he could explain again why he wouldn’t answer questions about his private life.

Today, he was on LBC, not answering questions about how a photo of him and Carrie Symonds, his girlfriend, appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers. Later he will be out and about talking to the public and giving further interviews.

The change in tactics looks like an admission that the earlier approach of hiding Johnson away went too far. The trouble is that it now looks as if Johnson is being pushed around by his opponent, Jeremy Hunt, who has turned out to be a more aggressive campaigner than expected.

Hunt branded Johnson a “coward” at the weekend, and yesterday accused him of trying to “slink into No 10 through the back door”. Johnson seems to have responded to that like a guilty miscreant, sulkily presenting himself for public inspection.

Thus he has ended up partly doing the right thing, but too late to gain much credit for it. When Kuenssberg yesterday asked about his row with Symonds, he said he wouldn’t answer because it wouldn’t be fair to his family and his loved ones. If he had given that answer to Iain Dale at the Birmingham hustings on Saturday, many people would have accepted it and he would have looked as if he was in charge of events rather than responding to them.

And Johnson is still being kept on a short leash. He has refused to take part in TV debates until the ITV debate on 9 July, which will be after the ballot papers have gone out to Tory party members – and therefore after many of them have been filled in and returned.

Several sources have told The Guardian that Wharton objected to cameras being allowed in to hustings organised by the Conservative Party. A Johnson campaign spokesperson denied the story and in any case Brandon Lewis, the party chair, has insisted that all hustings will be livestreamed, but I understand that the tensions continue, both between the Johnson campaign and the party, and inside the campaign team itself.

This reflects Johnson’s own personality. Part of him wants to show off. William Hague, the Tory former leader, said today: “It is a mistake to keep a politician of this kind to a more limited schedule than others, particularly as he enjoys campaigning and creates a great stir wherever he goes.”

But Johnson also knows that he lacks the discipline to stay on-message. During this morning’s radio programme with Nick Ferrari, for example, he at first talked over questions about whether he had arranged the photo of him and Symonds, and then was drawn into a discussion about how recent it was on the basis of when he’d last had a haircut.

If Johnson’s campaign team is split, that only reflects his indecisive character.