While there is an understandable instinct to downplay the accounts of Downing Street infighting over who gets paid what and who sits where, on this occasion, the reality is worse than the briefings. Inside No.10 the atmosphere is grim: factious, paranoid and — crucially — un-led. The briefings pouring out are not merely froth, but the scum on the surface caused by the panicked churn of an unprepared government underneath. The scale of the disharmony is unprecedented so soon.

Some of the unhappiness is residual from opposition, when a sense of distrust seeped into Labour HQ as Gray attempted to assert more control in preparation for government. The smallest hint of a negative briefing would throw the operation into panic: fingers would be pointed, information withheld and the circle around Starmer tightened. Loyal Labour aides suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of an invisible divide. They resented it — and the person they blamed for building it. Yet there was still a collective mission binding them together: victory.

Since entering government, the situation has deteriorated with extraordinary speed. And rather than dreaming big thoughts about how it will succeed where others failed, No.10 is already drifting acrimoniously into the kind of cynical weariness usually associated with a second term government.

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By Tom McTague

Part of the story is certainly political: Labour’s grim inheritance has forced it to face the kind of “difficult decisions” few in the party want to impose. And the smell of cronyism following the huge donations from the millionaire peer, Waheed Alli, has also been dispiriting. But speaking to those who have witnessed the disorder within No.10, even this account glosses over the scale of the problems affecting the Starmer operation.

Whether Sue Gray is paid a few thousand pounds more than the Prime Minister or a few thousand pounds less does not change the structural challenges facing Britain, which remain extraordinary in their scale and depth. Tackling these requires a government united behind a coherent strategy with capable individuals supported by a system that can deliver what is necessary. Little of that exists at the moment. Those I spoke to told me there was a startling lack of togetherness in the team around Starmer. Each of the main figures close to him — Sue Gray, Chief of Staff; Matthew Doyle, communications director; Morgan McSweeney, campaign director; and Vidhya Alakeson, political director — are impressive, but they are not a band of brothers who have each other’s back. Instead, they reflect a group of individuals, united by their personal loyalty to the Prime Minister more than the coherence of their politics.

In this respect, Starmer’s Downing Street operation has an uncanny resemblance to Boris Johnson’s, which operated more as a court, in which the inhabitants jostled for position in front of the king. It should be a political project with a burning mission. The nagging worry today is that there is a similarly gaping ideological hole in the centre of the Labour project as there was with Johnsons. 

True, the party was disciplined in opposition, pursuing its mission to move away from the Left with remarkable success. But such was the extent of this challenge, that it dominated the Starmer project. It was the Starmer project. To win power, the party had to show the electorate it had changed; to do so, it had to make the difficult decisions it made on spending, welfare, antisemitism and candidate selection. But did they ever come up with a coherent project for government itself? If so, it has not yet emerged.

“There’s more than an element of ‘catastrophic success’ about it all,” as one official put it to me, a reference to the calamitous consequences of America’s victory in the 2003 Iraq war. Before the invasion it was widely expected that the Iraqi Republican Guard would put up a dogged fight in defence of their leader. But when the battle came, much like the Tories at the last general election, they deserted the field. In the initial euphoria of the American advance, a corporal clambered upon the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in the middle of Baghdad and hung the Stars and Stripes. It was “mission accomplished”. The statue was toppled and with it, the old regime. But then came the looting, anarchy and, eventually, civil war as the country was sucked into a vacuum of authority that had been opened up by the invasion. The Americans had won, but did not know what to do.

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Similarly, Labour were not supposed to win this big, this quickly. But they did and now they have to figure out what they are in government to do, and who will do it.

“The problem is that you’ve got a whole lot of people without a leader,” one senior party figure told me. “No-one is in charge.” Stories are leaking out of meetings packed with the smartest brains in the operation but no decisions being taken because there is no leader. Morgan McSweeney, the man who masterminded Starmer’s rise to the premiership, is not as powerful inside the government as he was outside. There are now rival centres of power: Sue Gray, the gatekeeper of the system; the government machine itself; and, of course, the departments.

Much of the blame for the dysfunction in No.10 has, so far, focused on Gray. She has been compared by various people to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, dominating through proximity to power and her reputation as a Whitehall fixer. She is, one senior Labour figure told me, “the  last person to whisper in Keir’s ear”. Another said she was “the most political person I’ve ever met”. Among McSweeney’s supporters, there is a concern that he is losing a quiet battle for supremacy with Gray who is using her decades of experience at the heart of government to assert control. McSweeney in contrast is having to learn on the job.

Gray has certainly become the most important cog in the Downing Street machine: Starmer’s eyes and ears, translating his instructions to the system, and the system’s recommendations to him. With Simon Case sidelined, she is acting as more than simply a chief of staff. Many I spoke to said she simply cannot do everything she is trying to do. The system is buckling under her attempt to try. Yet those people also said it was too easy to blame Gray. “There are problems with Sue, of course,” one figure told me, “but the central problem is that people don’t really know what Keir wants.” 

And here is the real problem at the heart of the government chaos. A prime minister’s chief of staff is only as powerful as they are allowed to be. Starmer is unusual as a Prime Minister in his lack of political experience, and therefore has tended to rely and follow his advisers in a way Blair or Brown did not. In opposition, McSweeney was central to every major strategic decision. In government he must share this with Gray. Yet, it is far from clear that Gray shares McSweeney’s deepest instincts, which are far more attuned to the conservative feelings of the country on questions of migration, welfare, criminal justice and patriotism than any member of the Government — and, indeed, the Prime Minister.

The nagging worry from those sympathetic to McSweeney’s attempts to refashion Labour as a more provincial, national party of government — as opposed to the liberal wing of middle-class England — is that he is battling forces too powerful for him to overcome: the instincts of the parliamentary party, Whitehall and Starmer himself. So far, the Labour Party has authorised a mass release of prisoners, cut pensioner benefits and accepted the closure of Scotland’s last oil refinery. None of these evidence points suggests a strategic shift to a new, “blue” Labourism intent on ending decades of stale consensus. 

All of this makes this week’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool particularly important. No longer a great celebration of victory, as Tony Blair’s first conference as prime minister was seen in 1997, but a gathering to define the purpose of the government and with it, finally, impose some order and authority over the warring operation that is supposed to be in charge. 

There is a concerning warning for what happens when such briefing wars run out of control: Boris Johnson. When the briefings started against Dominic Cummings, it was long before they spread throughout the government. Labour has been warned.

This government is drifting and those inside the engine room know it. It is absurd that after two months we should be talking about a reset, but that is what is required. A government must pull in the same direction, bound together in the belief that the pain of the voyage will be worth it. Right now they just seem lost and mutinous.

One would have thought that Oliver Dowden was doing a fairly good job of pursuing the Government’s forever “war on woke”. But obviously not. The reshuffle saw Olive, as the former Statues (sorry, Culture) Secretary (now party co-Chairman) is known to his friends, summarily replaced by the preternaturally plain-speaking Nadine Dorries. She was known by her enemies as the woman who once suggested equal marriage was something which only “metro elite gay activists” aspired to and called Messrs Cameron and Osborne “two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk”.

Whether Ms Dorries, before accepting his commission, quizzed Mr Johnson on precisely how much he paid when he last popped out for a pint of semi-skimmed is, sadly, not recorded, although, if precedent is anything to go by, we will eventually find out. Indeed, many of the most delicious moments in contemporary histories of recent premierships are provided by their accounts of the often cack-handed attempts of their hapless heroes to inject fresh blood and get rid of dead wood.

Normally, it’s the sackings that afford the most entertainment: May’s “elder sister” slaying of George Osborne is an absolute classic of the genre — not least because it came back to bite her big time when the former Chancellor became editor of the Evening Standard, from which perch he took great delight in proving that revenge is indeed a dish best served cold (and, in his case, that meant very, very cold indeed).

This time around, however, it’s the appointments that are more intriguing. In part, that’s because the reshuffle’s two most obvious victims were (a) long-destined for the chop and (b) not particularly interesting or heavyweight politicians.

It would be hard, for instance, to find many people sad to see Gavin Williamson depart Education after what teachers, students and pupils (not to mention their parents) have been put through during the pandemic. And the now-former Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Robert Jenrick (cruelly dubbed “Robert Generic” by his detractors), was better known for bending lockdown rules, greenlighting a Tory donor’s questionable construction project, bunging big grants to towns with Tory MPs, and going on telly to defend the indefensible than he was for building more houses.

Their replacements, however, are rather more interesting. Nadhim Zahawi will, of course, be criticised for having no direct experience of state schooling, but may well be given the benefit of the doubt, at least initially, as a result of his impressive performance as Vaccines Minister and because he’s that most unusual of top Tories – someone with a BSc (Chemical Engineering, UCL) rather than an Oxford PPE.

Even more interesting, is Michael Gove’s move to MHCLG. This is not a ministry normally given to a big-hitter with a reputation (at least among civil servants) for competence as well as the ability to present a parliamentary and Cabinet case.

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His appointment suggests – encouragingly – that Johnson realises that he can’t merely give up fundamental planning reform as a bad job and hope the problem goes away. And, while it may be true (Gove’s many fans would even say tragic) that his neo-con worldview and concerns about his reliability (perhaps expressed most shockingly and openly a few years ago by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace) mean Gove is unlikely ever to be awarded one of the great offices of state (Chancellor, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary), his decision to accept the challenge — which apparently includes converting the PM’s “levelling up” rhetoric into reality – is nonetheless significant.

The test, of course, will be whether he can achieve anything without simultaneously losing friends and alienating people (including voters) – a test he clearly flunked when he was Cameron’s controversial Education Secretary.

But if Gove is something of an ideologue, he has nothing, at least on that score, on Liz Truss, the new Foreign Secretary — the first Conservative woman (and only the second woman ever) to occupy that post. And in some ways that (plus the fact that the Tory grassroots’ favourite free-market zealot was seen by those who get off on Global Britain as having done well in the International Trade brief) may be half the point.

At the FCDO, Truss has effectively been parked somewhere where her Britannia Unchained, Singapore-on-Thames shtick isn’t going to interfere too much with Boris Johnson’s rather more pragmatic, interventionist, and supposedly One Nation brand of Toryism. Meanwhile, her replacement at DIT, Brexity former International Development Minister, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, is seen as a reasonably safe pair of hands, although without Truss’s infamous flair for publicity. That said, anyone (can there still be anyone?) dreaming of a trade deal with China on her watch might be well advised invest their hopes elsewhere.

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Truss replaces Dominic Raab – surely the most high-profile casualty of this reshuffle, which may seem like an odd thing to say about the new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor after he was compensated with the formal title of Deputy Prime Minister. But let’s be honest: Franklin Roosevelt’s Veep, “Cactus Jack” Garner famously dismissed the vice presidency as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”; well, whatever is worth less than warm piss, that’s basically what the office of DPM is worth.

He knows it. Johnson knows it. We all know it. The fact that he was offered it at all is testimony only to the fact that, unlike some of the others who were demoted (Williamson, Jenrik, former Justice Secretary Robert Buckland and the Boris-uber-loyalist, former co-Chairman, Amanda Milling) No 10 couldn’t be entirely sure that Raab would go quietly – or, indeed, remain relatively quiet on the backbenches in the hope of a return to government (or, more likely, a seat in the Lords) in years to come.

Quite what Raab’s fellow lawyers will make of him, however, will be interesting to see. There would seem to be little chance of him going native – he was after all the first Tory during the 2019 leadership contest to promote proroguing parliament as a route out of what was then the Brexit impasse. If anything, they may want to buckle up for a bumpy ride: Raab’s combination of natural aggression and neoliberalism means he may be far more inclined than his predecessor to pick a fight with what he’ll no doubt see as the sector’s “producer groups”.

In the end, however, although we’re bound to be distracted by who’s up and who’s down, perhaps we should pay more attention to three politicians who have stuck around. Priti Patel clearly remains too totemic to shift from the Home Office: even if she can’t stop those migrants coming across the Channel in small boats she can bang on about them like no-one else, helping to ensure no space opens up on the Conservatives’ flank for a post-Farage populist right. David Frost is still what passes for the PM’s brain on Brexit. And Rishi Sunak is not just too popular to move; his reputation as a fiscal hawk (doubtless something he’ll burnish this autumn) also provides some much needed reassurance to the party’s bog-standard backbench Thatcherites that Johnson, for all his strengths as an election-winner, hasn’t led the Tories entirely off the small-state straight and narrow.