Boris’s ‘ratty rat’ rage against Rishi Sunak could help bring the Tory government down

The prime minister is trying to avoid all-out war with his predecessor, writes John Rentoul

Johnson promoted Sunak and is said to have been furious when his protégé resigned as chancellor (PA)

Prime ministers tend to resent their successors, but Boris Johnson’s feud with Rishi Sunak is more poisonous than most. Johnson has not forgiven Sunak for resigning as chancellor and triggering the avalanche of ministerial resignations that swept him from office.

Relations were bad before then, although Sunak has never been explicit about what it was about their approaches to the economy that were “fundamentally too different”, which he said contributed to his resignation.

Since then, Sunak has tried to avoid open warfare, well aware that Johnson has strong support among the grassroots members of the Conservative Party. That attempt at de-escalation seemed to be working. Only one in five Tory members now say that Johnson should take over as prime minister again before the next election, according to a self-selected straw poll for Conservative Home.

And I thought that when Johnson’s supporters complained about his enemies, including “former officials”, they mostly meant Dominic Cummings. Cummings, who was Johnson’s chief adviser for most of 2020, made no secret of his hostility to his former boss after they fell out.

But it turns out that Johnson had others in mind when he raged last week against people in the party working to discredit him. His supporters said that Oliver Dowden, Sunak’s ally and deputy prime minister, was the “ratty rat” who leaked the news that Johnson had been referred to the police for further breaches of lockdown law.

You can guess that the hostility towards Dowden comes from Johnson himself, rather than from overenthusiastic lieutenants of his, because “ratty rat” is such a Johnsonian adaptation of the “chatty rat” who leaked news of the second lockdown in 2021.

Indeed, it turns out that Sunak’s hopes of a lessening of tensions with his predecessor have been dashed. A phone call this week, or even a meeting in person, to “clear the air” between Sunak and Johnson was suggested, leaked, denied by Johnson’s people, and is now off again. It was scuppered by Dowden, who was going to be on the call, again according to Johnson’s team. “Dowden cancelled the call because he was upset at being fingered as the source of the ratty rat leak of Boris’s referral to cops,” said “an ally of Johnson” to Gabriel Pogrund of The Sunday Times.

If Sunak was trying to protect his predecessor by refusing to hand over Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and his notebooks to the Covid inquiry, Johnson was sulkily ungrateful. In fact, I am not sure that Sunak was trying to spare Johnson’s blushes: the dispute between the Cabinet Office and Baroness Hallett, the chair of the Covid inquiry, has been simmering for two weeks.

It may be that this is a just a power struggle between two bureaucracies, each claiming the right to decide what might be relevant to the inquiry. It is further complicated by the government bureaucracy being demarcated between the lawyers of the Government Legal Profession and the civil servants of the Cabinet Office.

What is surprising is the vitriol of this dispute, in which Johnson is not a main player. Lady Hallett’s statement on Tuesday, agreeing to extend the deadline for the government to supply the material it has asked for, demands “a witness statement from a senior civil servant, verified by a statement of truth”. This sounds as if she thinks the Cabinet Office is being untruthful in claiming not to have Johnson’s WhatsApp messages.

The whole episode only supports my argument last week that one of the problems of public inquiries is that they absorb disproportionate amounts of senior people’s time and taxpayers’ money on processology of this sort.

But the political significance of this complicated dispute is that Johnson is the raging bull at the heart of it, willing to take on the government, the privileges committee, and the police if necessary, and reckless about the damage done to the Tory party china shop. Left unchecked, this could bring down the Tory government at the next election.

As the party falls victim to paranoia, Johnson’s destructiveness becomes more dangerous. Another Con Home survey finds that 92 per cent of members believe that the civil service is opposed to the party – that public servants are either plotting against ministers or resisting them passively.

The Tories increasingly sound not like a party of government, but like a party that is making excuses for defeat.