Change at the court of King Rishi
The prime minister has shuffled his team of Downing Street advisers and now has a team of trusted lieutenants: are they enough to storm to election victory?
You can take it as example of how personalised or trivial politics has become, or regard it has how much more sophisticated and on-the-ball we are now, but I think it’s fair to say that, 20 years ago, certainly 25 years ago, the shuffling of the prime minister’s inner circle of aides would not have been front-page news. In those days, everyone knew Alastair Campbell, the aggressive, clenched-fist former political editor of The Daily Mirror who had become Sir Tony Blair’s intermediary with the media and was latterly director of communications and strategy in Downing Street (2000-03). Campbell was a lightning rod, a hitman, a megaphone and a headline-whisperer rolled into one.
Particularly well-informed observers would also have been able to recognise the much more self-effacing figure of Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, a former diplomat and brother of Lady Thatcher’s long-time foreign affairs private secretary; he had created a new position for himself after 1997, a political appointee with the power to give instructions to civil servants (though he never did). Beyond that, you would have needed to have been a dedicated political observer to know Andrew Adonis, head of the Number 10 Policy Unit 2001-03, or Robert Hill, Blair’s political secretary 2001-02. Go back 20 years before that and the only recognisable figure would have been the prime minister’s bulldog-like press secretary, Bernard Ingham, a Yorkshireman who became utterly identified with Thatcher despite being nominally a civil servant.
This weekend, however, as Rishi Sunak conducted a very limited reshuffle of his ministerial team, there was a parallel changing of the guard in Downing Street’s political wing which streaked across the newspapers for a while. Stepping away from the front line is the director of communications, former ITV journalist Amber de Botton. She had only taken the job when Sunak became prime minister in October 2022, and she has been almost invisible in the post; the incumbent need not herself be front and centre, but it is hard to argue that presentation has been Downing Street’s strongest suit recently. Departing, she noted that it was a “demanding and high-pressure place to work”. One hopes this had not come as a surprise to her. In fairness, there are those in Westminster and Whitehall who will say that the job of director of communications is virtually impossible, overseeing both government information and political messaging, and being ultimately responsible for every aspect of the prime minister’s image.
Into the breach steps Nerissa Chesterfield, previously Downing Street press secretary and before that special adviser to Sunak at HM Treasury. Regarded as friendly and straightforward, she has a steady head in a crisis, which must count as an advantage as we enter election year, and is very close to the prime minister so can be expected to work hand-in-glove. She needs a disciplined few weeks before a well-presented party conference in October if she is going to be deemed to have made a difference.
A new arrival as director of strategy is Jamie Njoku-Goodwin. He has spent the past three years as chief executive of UK Music, the industry’s representative body, but his roots are in Conservative politics: he was special adviser to Matt Hancock first at Culture and then at Health (2018-20) and worked as a press officer for the Conservative Party (2013-16) after completing graduate studied at the University of Nottingham. He claims credit for having helped shepherd the music industry through the Covid-19 pandemic; he also features in the leak of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages from the period. When Dominic Cummings appeared before a pair of select committees to give his account of the government’s reaction to the pandemic, he texted former boss Hancock in outrage.
What a fucking piece of shit. You went out and backed him over Barnard castle, and he responds by briefing against you relentlessly, in private and now in public. He’s a psychotherapist.
He quickly corrected that last work to “psychopath”.
There is limited room for manoeuvre in strategy terms. The prime minister’s five key priorities have effectively set the agenda until the end of the year, at which point it will be a critical task to make it seem that they have been, to as great an extent as possible, achieved. After that, the direction will need to be set for the general election. Njoku-Goodwin is at ease with the media and knows the inhabitants of the Lobby well, but his role is now different. It should also be noted that he is a former flatmate of Liam Booth-Smith, the Downing Street chief of staff, forming another member of a Praetorian Guard around Sunak; he must also balance his new appointment with his search for a parliamentary candidacy, success in which would require him to step down from his new role.
Stepping in as a senior adviser in Number 10’s political office, significantly on a fixed-term contract, is Adam Atashzai, partner at strategic advisory firm Flint Global. Atashzai was a special adviser to David Cameron from 2012 to 2016, and helped him prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions, gaining the judgement of “sharp and clever” in the former prime minister’s memoirs; the high days of Cameron must seem like a gilded age now. He will need to work closely with the prime minister’s political secretary (and best man), James Forysth, formerly of The Spectator.
Does any of this really matter? Perhaps not; the prevailing wisdom is that the Conservatives are on their way out, exhausted and depleted, and that there is a tide in public opinion which no-one, and no set of advisers, can turn. Even if that is true, however, there is a difference between losing well and losing badly, and there are MPs whose presence in the next parliament will depend on how well the Tories perform. One thing is striking, however: the prime minister has surrounded himself with long-standing allies and advisers, many from his stint at the Treasury. Liam Booth-Smith, Nerissa Chesterfield, James Forsyth, Cass Horowitz; and another former special adviser, Claire Coutinho, was promoted to the cabinet as energy security and net zero secretary.
Sunak’s Downing Street operation has a near-obsessive preoccupation with loyalty. One hopes that with these trusted lieutenants around him, he is reassured and able to focus not only on the run-up to the general election but also the business of running the government. He faces a greater task than any Conservative leader since John Major: winning the election and with it a fifth term would be an extraordinary achievement, one which many in Westminster still privately concede is possible, though the path to such a success is narrowing daily. To do it, Downing Street will need to be at the top of its game every day, without fault, from now until July, or October, or whenever Sunak chooses to pull the trigger on the election process. It’s not immediately clear to me that this is the team to pull off such a coup, but they have a year to prove me, and everyone else, wrong.