While most members of his government were winding down for the summer, Boris Johnson was getting decidedly wound up. At 9am on Monday, the prime minister met his senior Downing Street aides and was, according to those present, “apopleptic”, “raging” or “f***ing tonto”.
In a fit of frustrated impotence, Johnson openly suggested that he might sack his chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak.
The focus of Johnson’s rage was the report in this newspaper last week that Sunak had written to the prime minister calling for a significant easing of the coronavirus travel restrictions, warning that they were damaging the economy and leaving the UK at a disadvantage to its European Union rivals.
The problem was that the first Johnson knew of the letter was when details of it appeared in the media. Officials had failed to flag it for his attention, or to put it in his ministerial red box.
Johnson was furious at the leak and questioned the motives of the leaker. The letter seemed designed to undermine agreed policy and to make it look like the Treasury was trying to push him into action. As far as Johnson was concerned, he and Sunak were in agreement that a lot of the restrictions needed to go.
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Johnson’s aides were quick to blame officials at the Department for Transport, who had been copied in to the letter, but the prime minister was concerned about whether his ministers had been disloyal.
Sunak was not at the meeting. Johnson demanded to know: “Where’s Rishi? I need to speak to Rishi.” Then, in front of more than a dozen witnesses, he made a toxic suggestion that could electrify already tense relations between No 10 and No 11 Downing Street.
A senior source said: “He said: ‘I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe it’s time we looked at Rishi as the next secretary of state for health. He could potentially do a very good job there.’ In an open meeting, after ranting about Rishi, he then suggested the chancellor could be demoted in the next reshuffle.”
The prime minister is known for making off-the-cuff comments “half in jest” and few expect him to carry out the threat. But the fact that he even entertained it is significant. Several of those present were struck by his vehemence and his reckless openness at a time when growing scrutiny is falling on tensions between No 10 and the Treasury.
The letter affair was evidence not just of Johnson’s annoyance. The fact that he had not seen Sunak’s memo raised alarm bells that Downing Street dysfunction did not disappear with Dominic Cummings.
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This week Johnson and the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, will head off on staycation holidays facing the same problems and with similar questions echoing in their ears. Both have to plan a party conference speech to answer critics who say the narrative drive of their leadership is not clear. Both have experienced turbulence in their backroom team that has left them without the advisers they began with. And both are dealing with a formidable internal rival who is more popular with their party grassroots than they are.
Johnson’s mood on Monday would hardly have been improved by the monthly survey conducted by ConservativeHome, a website that measures the views of party members. After a month in which he was forced into a U-turn over isolating and presided over chaotic Covid travel rules, Johnson plummeted 36 points to a net positive rating of just 3 per cent. Only Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, Amanda Milling, the party chairman, and Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, are below him.
Sunak was second on plus 74 per cent, behind only Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, who has won plaudits with the Tory grassroots for getting on with post-Brexit trade deals. Asked who should be the next leader, 31 per cent of those polled named Sunak. Only Truss (12 per cent) and Penny Mordaunt (11 per cent) also made it into double figures.
A senior Tory said of Johnson: “His personal numbers are dropping like a stone. His unfavourables are going up and his favourables are going down. The critical concern for Boris is that he is prime minister because he is a winner. As soon as he is not, he has very few allies in and around the party.”
Johnson aides say there was no discussion of these numbers in Downing Street last week and that it is not Johnson’s way to complain about such things. When he was asked about the poll, he replied: “I am blessed in the relative popularity of my colleagues and I rejoice in it.”
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But Johnson’s popularity has also been declining in national polls — along with that of the Conservatives in some of their traditional southern seats — and others suggest that, for a politician who wants to be loved, this is distressing. Critics say Johnson has little interest in a cabinet of talented and ambitious rivals, preferring (in a phrase the prime minister has used himself in private) “tired old lions”. Sunak is all too clearly a “hungry young lion”.
Few expect a reshuffle before the new year but it is understood that Johnson has, in the past, considered Truss, a former chief secretary to the Treasury, as Britain’s first female chancellor, with Jacob Rees-Mogg as her deputy. “The PM keeps talking about Liz Truss,” a source said. “He’s always got on quite well with her. He thinks she’s controllable.”
The more immediate problem for the government is that the prime minister is under pressure to signal a clearer direction for his government. A speech on his “levelling up” agenda, hailed for months as a landmark moment, was a damp squib. The Cop26 climate summit, which had been billed as a moment Johnson could play the statesman, is mired in difficulties. A cabinet minister complained: “It is not clear what story we are trying to tell the country and ministers are not consulted.” A Tory thinker said: “Boris has 50 priorities, which means he has no priorities.”
Some at the centre hope the return to Britain of Sir Lynton Crosby, the Tory strategist who masterminded Johnson’s mayoral wins in London, will sharpen up his approach. It is understood the two men are in contact several times a week and had dinner recently.
Crosby was also spotted in Downing Street earlier this month, but that was to see Sunak. Intriguingly, it can be revealed that the meeting was set up by Johnson, who suggested they should meet — a corrective to the view that No 10 and No 11 are already engaged in all-out civil war. Relations between Liam Booth-Smith and Dan Rosenfield, the chiefs of staff to Sunak and Johnson, are good.
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“Lynton’s view is always that the important thing is not talking about what you’re going to do,” said a veteran conservative. “The important thing is to have a plan and get things done.”
In No 10 there are several plans. In the early autumn Johnson will outline a coronavirus winter plan, which will spell out how Britain will live with the virus in the long term and what would happen if a vaccine-resistant strain emerged.
There will also be a levelling-up plan, published in a government white paper around the time of the spending review, and a plan to tackle problems in social care. “That is still the core mission of this government,” said a senior aide. “The idea that we need a new slogan is nonsense.”
Some of this will feature in Johnson’s conference speech. Ross Kempsell, a senior figure at Tory party HQ, who helped put together Johnson’s last one, has been working on it for several weeks — though all Johnson speeches are more his own work than is true of most politicians.
The difficulty is that all of these plans will cost money the country does not have, exacerbating the central tension in government. “You can’t get away from the fact that Boris wants to spend lots of money and Rishi does not,” a Tory policy adviser observed.
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Johnson is sailing into treacherous waters without the Vote Leave Praetorian guard who put him there. Rosenfield won plaudits, initially, upon replacing Cummings as the most senior aide for bringing order to his office. But ministers and their aides complain that he is not political enough.
“When something happens he rings up officials in the department and says he wants to speak to the director responsible,” said one ministerial aide. “He doesn’t go to ministers or special advisers.” As one senior Tory put it: “We have replaced Cummings with an empty vase.”
However, an operation to prop up Rosenfield is under way. A close friend of Johnson revealed: “Boris is telling people that Dan is ‘just the person I need’.”
The one advantage that Johnson has over Starmer is that few question the prime minister’s own political instincts, only his ability to deliver on them.
Inside Labour, eyebrows have been raised that the leader recently had a session with Lord Falconer of Thoroton, Tony Blair’s former flatmate and one-time lord chancellor, and Ed Miliband, the former leader, about “how economics works”.
A source described it as a masterclass in economics and how Labour’s critique of the economy — in essence, the “Labour way” — traditionally differs from that of the Tories.
Starmer was said to be curious and conceptually adroit but the fact that he is still working out what he thinks about macroeconomics will dishearten many.
The question New Labour grandees ask each other, and which Starmer has not yet authoritatively answered, is: “Does the guy have politics? Does he ‘get it’ and understand what being a politician is? It’s unclear. He’s spent his life analysing things in a sober and detached and lawyerly way rather than putting himself into the question.”
Starmer, at least, faces no threat from Blair himself. The former prime minister has abandoned plans to return to parliament after members of his old team told him that the idea, spearheaded by the former cabinet minister Lord Adonis, was “bonkers”.
Blair was initially flattered by the suggestion that he could win the Labour leadership in the event of a challenge, or peel off MPs to join a new En Marche!-style operation like Emmanuel Macron’s in France. But he has since accepted that it is fraught with risk.
However, Starmer’s position looks less secure than at the start of the year. Over the past six weeks, Starmer has lost Ben Nunn, his communications director; Chris Ward, his deputy chief of staff; and Baroness Chapman, his political secretary. Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, has been moved to a strategic role preparing for the next election.
Starmer’s team is openly suspicious of Angela Rayner, the deputy leader, who they expect to “make a stink” at conference. Some confidants want Starmer to introduce party vice-chairmen who would undermine her authority. But in his last frontbench reshuffle in May, Starmer tried to demote Rayner and ended up having to give her a promotion instead.
Starmer is heading to Devon. Johnson’s destination is unknown. But if he was to pop in to see Starmer, and if they were to compare notes, the Labour leader might point out that trying to move Sunak might be similarly fraught with difficulty.