Last weekend Boris Johnson made clear that he wanted to take the “maximalist” approach to saving Owen Paterson.
The prime minister decided that his government would try to simultaneously block the former cabinet minister’s suspension for breaching lobbying rules and overhaul parliament’s standards system.
“His view was f*** this, let’s rip the plaster off,” one source familiar with his thinking said. “It was very clear it was what he wanted. It turns out that there was a gaping wound underneath that plaster.” It ended in disaster. By the end of the week Johnson had suffered a serious Tory rebellion, been accused of flirting with corruption by the head of the standards committee and been forced to execute a damaging U-turn.
With Tory MPs on all sides of the debate fulminating, a blame game was playing out yesterday in Downing Street and Westminster. How had the prime minister and his top team managed to get it so wrong? The past week has brought to the fore long-standing concerns in both the Conservative Party and in Downing Street about the prime minister’s central team. Johnson, critics argue, has over-compensated after his experience with Dominic Cummings, his once all-powerful adviser.
“The prime minister needs someone to stand up to him and say no,” a senior Conservative has said. “At the moment he’s surrounded by people who are happy to be in No 10 and are simply yes men. He himself has built that team. You can’t blame those individuals. They have been shown the best way to survive in that team is to be sycophantic yes men.”
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Critics of the prime minister believe that the events of this week are part of a wider pattern. “The prime minister reverse ferrets not only in the building but in his own mind,” one government source said.
“He says, ‘We’ve got to get this done.’ He’s very gung-ho and then he convinces himself it was never his position in the first place and seems to think it was someone else’s fault.” Within No 10, few are prepared to stand up to the prime minister and insecurity is rife. “No 10 is full of people that nod along because they’re worried about their own positions,” one staffer said.
“There is a culture of fear. Big decisions are being made on the basis of some quite casual conversations and then being enacted. It’s dysfunctional.” Dan Rosenfield, the prime minister’s chief of staff, is accused of being out of touch with the concerns of MPs, and Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, is compared to a loyal courtier. There is, critics say, a vacuum of authority.
• The Times view on the Owen Paterson fallout: Johnson’s Shame
“Simon is very effective but he’s not there to stand up to the prime minister, he’s there to make things happen,” one senior Tory MP said. “He’s a courtier, completely unlike Mark Sedwill [his predecessor]. All No 10s are a court, but this one much more than most.”
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A former cabinet minister said: “No 10 lacks grey hair. It lacks a Willie Whitelaw. Frankly, Boris’s habit of not liking big guns around him is his fatal flaw. He doesn’t have any cabinet ministers who will call him up and say, ‘This is a f***ing stupid idea’.” Others say this criticism is unfair. “There is challenge there every day, with people putting across both sides of the argument,” a government source said. “There’s nothing casual about it.” The original plan to save Paterson was even more robust than the amendment.
At one point the Tories were intending to directly vote down the suspension of Paterson, an option which was abandoned after Mark Spencer, the chief whip, said that it was doomed to fail.
A compromise — an amendment to stay his suspension and set up a new select committee to overhaul disciplinary standards — was drawn up by Spencer and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons.
Senior figures in Downing Street and the whips office were aware of the risks of the plan: that Labour could simply boycott the committee and that Tory MPs would rebel in huge numbers, but few were willing to make a stand against the prime minister.
On Wednesday morning, Johnson signed off the plans at a meeting with Spencer and the chief whip and agreed to subject Tory MPs to a three-line whip.
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Rosenfield is said to have warned the prime minister about the pitfalls of the approach especially if Labour and other opposition parties failed to back the new committee. Johnson, however, did not appear to be listening.
In the end the refusal of Labour and other parties to back his new committee forced him to abandon the plans. Paterson quit as an MP, hitting out at the “cruel world of politics” as he did so.
There are suggestions that Johnson, distracted by Cop26 in Glasgow, had failed to realise how controversial the plan to save Paterson was.
When he returned to London on Tuesday night the prime minister did not go back to Downing Street but was driven from Stansted to a dinner at the Garrick Club organised by Lord Moore of Etchingham, his former editor at The Daily Telegraph. He did not return to Downing Street until after 10pm.
One source said that in the chaotic aftermath of events the prime minister asked aides how he had been allowed to get into this mess. Others deny this account and say that Johnson told Spencer that “these things happen”.
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For Johnson, the fallout from this week is also fraught with personal risk. Cummings claimed that the move by Johnson was part of a pre-emptive strike against Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary standards commissioner. She is reportedly considering opening a new investigation into “wallpapergate” after the prime minister admitted receiving £53,000 from a Tory donor for the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat.
While Lord Geidt, the prime minister’s independent adviser on ministerial interests, has cleared him of wrongdoing the Electoral Commission is investigating and there are suggestions that Stone is also keen to re-examine the issue.
The swift u-turn and Paterson’s resignation are likely to stem some of the accusations of Tory sleaze for the time being. But the future management of the party is only going to become more challenging. Tory MPs who were elected in 2019 are incensed and bewildered that the prime minister has spent so much political capital on trying to save Paterson, a Brexit spartan who they view as part of the old guard. One of them, Christian Wakeford, was so incensed that he called Paterson a c*** to his face in the division lobby.
“Those has-beens are a minority, yet the prime minister always ends up listening to them because they are so utterly convinced they’re always right,” one usually loyal Tory complained. “I’ve got news for the prime minister. They’re not.” Another Tory MP from the 2019 intake put it more succinctly. “We tell them it’s a bad idea, they don’t listen to us, they go ahead and do it anyway,” they said. “A clusterf***. No other word for it.” MPs from the new intake, who are already more rebellious than many of their predecessors, said that in future they would be even less inclined to follow the whip.
Among Tory MPs, much of the ire is being directed at the chief whip. “He’s lost all respect,” one said. “Who’s going to listen to the normal strong-arming on difficult votes when we know that u-turns are so common, and there is now a precedent for getting your job back? The worst week in the job so far.” Another MP who rebelled over the vote put it more bluntly. “He’s a spent force, he’s got to go,” they said. “He’s managed to piss everyone off. He needs to get back to his combine harvester and be done with it [Spencer is a farmer]. This is unsustainable.” Cabinet ministers are also briefing against Spencer. “The problem is that Mark has lost credibility,” one said. “The perception is that he hasn’t given the right information to the centre. That is going to create problems with the management of the party going forward.”
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However Nikki da Costa, until recently director of legislative affairs at No 10, said that the criticism of Spencer was unfair. “Chief whips are praetorian guard for a prime minister/leader,” she said. “They’re last minister standing when everyone has deserted. With one recent exception they don’t talk to the press even off-record. They don’t fight back. If briefing against the chief came from within No 10 it says more about them than him.” Yesterday Johnson gave his full support to both Spencer and Rees-Mogg in the face of growing Tory anger. One government source said that he had no choice, given that he was ultimate the architect of the failure.
“Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” they said.
Next week Johnson will try to refocus his government and begin building bridges with MPs. On Thursday he will host a cabinet awayday at Chequers to discuss levelling-up. There will be presentations from Andy Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England, and Michael Gove, the levelling up minister.
Five secretaries of state have been asked to give five-minute presentations showing their department’s plans for levelling up and how they will be implemented by 2024, the planned date for the next election. Not everyone, however, is keen to go. “It’s completely pointless,” one minister said. The Treasury has made clear that there will be no extra money beyond the spending review. Why are we doing this during recess”.
At the beginning of January the prime minister will host the first awayday for Tory MPs for five years. The entire parliamentary party will be invited for a weekend at a hotel for events hosted by the cabinet and the prime minister. “How harmonious it will be by then remains to be seen,” a whip said. “But it’s worth a try.” Reflecting on the week’s events with Spencer, Johnson is said to have told him jokingly that “none of us are great world champion chess players. We didn’t anticipate enough moves ahead.”
