Battered Boris now has to take back control

Behind all the tittle-tattle and flummery, as Number 10 has turned into a soap opera, serious issues are in play. They are important for the country’s prospects, and also for Boris’s. I suspect that the events of the past few days have done him a lot of damage with the voters. He has seemed weak and hapless. It was as if he had wandered into a Punch and Judy show, in which his fiancee and his chief adviser were cheerfully battering one another. They both then turned on him. He has an urgent need to re-assert the dignity of his office, so that he can make a statement without everyone asking who was pulling the puppet-strings. In a phrase, Boris has to take back control.

He does not have the luxury of determining the agenda. The Prime Minister will have to deal with Covid, Brexit, the economy, and education. On Covid, Tory MPs were immensely cheered up by the prospect of a vaccine. It does seem that one is on the way, although distinguished scientists are urging caution. We are likely to be talking months rather than weeks. But there is a short-term solution. When Boris talked about “moonshot”, his choice of language was not helpful. “Moonshine, you mean” was a widespread response. For once, this was unfair. Mass saliva testing could ensure that the economy stays open for business, and a determined effort would guarantee a lot of progress by Christmas. As has already been argued, the solution to Covid is Cohit: the “co” for common-sense, the “hi” for herd immunity and the “t” for testing.

Progress on testing should also help to mitigate the disruptive effects of Brexit. Will there be a deal, or not? That is an easy question to answer: yes. As to which, there is no answer beyond a guess, because nobody knows. A year ago, a lot of the Euro-nomenklatura seemed to be giving priority to punishing the Brits: make them understand that they were cutting off their nose to spite their face. When one pointed out that a hard Brexit could hurt everybody, the response was: “Yes, but there are twenty-seven of us and only one of you. You will feel far more pain.” I am not sure that anyone is talking like that now. Pestilence has been followed by economic weakness, with social unrest also heading for the battlefield. Three such apocalyptic horsemen do not encourage complacency. Almost everyone in Europe realises that this is no time to be cutting off even a little piece of nose. The exception may be Michel Barnier, who is a Gaullist and may not have forgiven Britain for its role on D-Day and the liberation of France. But most of the heads of government are more realistic.

In this very final phase of the negotiations, so that the Europeans were not tempted to feel that they could appeal over our PM’s head, it would help if he looked more secure in the saddle. That is a formidable challenge at a late stage. There is a risk of what George Bush might have termed “mis-underestimation.” If there is no deal, that will almost certainly be the result of miscalculation. Whatever the outcome, Boris will have to fight his way through and carry the country with him. This will require a much greater power of leadership than he has yet displayed.

Then there is the economy, where power of leadership has already been displayed, by Rishi Sunak. But we are on a journey into the unknown. By the time it is over, perhaps as much as a trillion pounds of quantitative easing will have been poured into the economy. QE is a euphemism for printing money. Thus far, it seems to be working. The economy is growing fast. Furlough wages have ensured social calm and as yet there is no sign of inflation. How long can this last? If the additional money is used to restore productive capacity, we may be all right. Even so, there must come a time when fiscal prudence will have to be reasserted, so that the annual budget deficit is below the rate of GDP growth. There must also come a moment when we return to a normal monetary policy, in which money has a price. How do we steer from here to there? The Prime Minister cannot be merely a passenger on that perilous voyage.

There is also education. How much damage has been suffered by how many children? The answers may be highly distressing. Public confidence will need to be restored, and that means a new Education Secretary. Gavin Williamson is not a bad man, merely a hopeless minister. He has to go.

Rumours abound that Boris has a plan to relaunch himself, on the environment. What might this involve? Does it mean plans that have been thought through and costed, which will create jobs and have a realistic prospect of working. Or does it mean that Boris is in search of a wizard wheeze, along the lines of Boris island or the Boris bridge: no costings, no thinking, no realism – in which case the Government might as well take £20 billion or so and fire that up in a moon-rocket. There have been reports that the Prime Minister’s partner Carrie Symonds is an uncritical environmentalist: Greta Thunberg’s representative in Downing Street. Let us hope not. If the Prime Minister is serious, he should consult Matt Ridley. If Lord Ridley gives it his imprimatur, the government is in business. If he thinks that it is nonsense, he and many others will tear it apart, and Boris with it.

Everything is poised, but Dominic Cumming’s departure will make life easier. So, was Cummings, in David Cameron’s words, a career psychopath? Or was he a force for creative destruction? Or was he merely a force for destruction? It is too early to make a final assessment, but like many other people, his calculations were wholly disrupted by Covid. At the beginning of the year, Cummings assumed that as the Government had at least four years until the next general election, it need not worry about short-term popularity. He could launch a smash-and-grab raid on the obstacles to change. He wrote that in a year’s time, he himself might not still be in post. That seemed wholly implausible – until it turned out to be true.

Those in favour of Dominic point to a number of successes. In 2004, he had played an important part in the campaign to block John Prescott’s regional assemblies in the North of England. He also helped Michael Gove to shake up the Department of Education. At the time, he was described as a bull who carried a china shop around with him. But in that Department, there was a lot of China which needed a good smashing. It appeared to believe in a state monopoly to enforce educational mediocrity. Michael Gove was having none of that and Dominic Cummings was a faithful adjutant.

The high point in his career was the Vote Leave campaign in 2016 and the slogan “Take Back Control,” one of the most influential phrases in British political history, which may indeed have changed the course of history. He is entitled to be regarded as a formidable campaigner. That did not qualify him for a role in Downing Street.

Government at that level is bound to stressful. In a confined space, highly able people are constantly overworked. Crises are frequent. Calm and self-control are at a premium: egotism and tantrums waste everyone’s time and nervous energy. There, Dominic was guilty. In Macbeth, King Duncan was wrong. He said: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” Look what happened to him a few hours later.

Cummings has a face like an angry goblin. One fears that the mind’s construction is all too visible. Actions followed on grimaces. A special adviser was marched out of Number 10 by an armed policeman; I cannot recall anything like that ever happening before. It was jarring, demeaning – and unaesthetic. Why on earth did the policeman agree? A dispute over special advisors also led to Sajid Javed’s resignation as Chancellor: a formidable scalp – which had an unintended consequence.  It enabled Rishi Sunak to establish himself as PM in-waiting. Dominic Cummings also had a role in forcing out Sir Mark Sedwill, the Head of the Civil Service. So Cummings had formidable gifts as an assassin, but what else did he achieve? His blogs are full of references to science, although he himself read history at Oxford. I do not know whether he understands science or is blinded by it. Does he?

There are problems in government where good science might help. Procurement has been a disaster: the NHS computer, personal protection equipment (PPE) earlier this year, a lot of defence contracts over the years. There, radical reform is needed. It has not happened.

One is tempted to conclude that Cummings deserves an alpha for campaigning, an alpha/gamma for airy theorising, and an undiluted gamma for office performance.

There is still an obvious question. None of this could have come as a surprise to Boris. So why did he hire him? There is an equally obvious explanation. Under the bluster and bumbledom, the Prime Minister is intellectually insecure. Dominic Cummings could never be accused of that: lack of self-knowledge, certainly; intellectual insecurity – not enough. So Boris may have chosen a man who seemed to know what he thought, because he himself did not know what he ought to think. In that case, the Prime Minister is now in a new world. We shall see what he makes of it.