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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Inside Starmer's feuding No. 10

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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Can Labour avoid the stench of scandal?

By Henry Newman

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.

I understand that when you’re doing the most important job of your life, feelings run high. You can have more impact in a day in Number 10 than in decades in most jobs. So much is at stake that sometimes you have to go to the mattresses to get what you need. So there will be arguments. There will be anger. There will be rivalries. In a high-functioning organisation, those tensions are the grit in the oyster that helps to get the job done. But today’s Downing Street is all grit and no oyster.

This matters, as if we needed reminding, because there is work to be done. We are in the midst of a global pandemic and staring recession and large scale unemployment in the face. We are on the brink of Brexit, the biggest structural disruption to our trading relationships in generations. The longest political union in the world’s history, between England and Scotland, is fracturing before our eyes. And those are just the small problems.

Climate change. Our ageing population. Building solidarity between increasingly diverse citizens. Technology firms that stretch our understanding of the relationship between state and corporation. Global power shifting eastward… Every moment spent bitching about colleagues is a moment wasted.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Downing Street should be a serious place. It should attract and retain serious people. I don’t care if the Prime Minister’s chief of staff once had a job as a chicken: everyone has to start their career somewhere. I care if he — or she — has a theory of change, an understanding of how they might make a difference in that job to the wall of policy problems we face. I expect them to be wise enough to understand what has been tried before, confident enough to try something new, but humble enough to learn from what others figured out first. All we get from the current crop is the arrogant assumption that their personal brilliance is enough to conquer all difficulties, an assumption made even more laughable by the fact that they can’t even get the person sitting at the next desk to like them.

Almost everyone in Number 10 at the moment is a campaigner at heart. There should always be campaigners in the Prime Minister’s office. People who are good at the game of politics. They are the people who keep the ship afloat. But they are not the people who choose the destination or the route. You also need a cadre of thinkers and deliverers, who will make the difference to what the government does, not just what the government says. Without them, politics is just a parlour game — and it is no wonder it descends into briefings, counter-briefings and subterfuge.

In her book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians, Isabel Hardman argues there are systemic problems with candidate selection, and the way people get promoted to high office. The system is set up to choose and elevate people with a set of skills that isn’t actually what a modern democracy needs. I agree with every word she says. And there are similar systemic problems that mean we get the Wrong Political Advisers too. Fiona Hill, who served as Theresa May’s joint chief of staff, gave evidence this week to Parliament’s Public Administration Committee in which she admitted it was nearly impossible to persuade anyone good to go and work for the Prime Minister’s office when she was there.

We assume that Boris is just too tribal to offer a job to anyone outside the Vote Leave camp. But it’s also possible that no one else would take the job, given the conditions on which it would be offered. As a friend who considered a senior cabinet office role put it to me: “They’ve made it clear they don’t want to be helped, so what’s the point in expending any personal political capital on them?”

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Has Boris had a sickbed conversion?

By Tom Holland

We live in challenging times. We are told that millennials are queuing up to find jobs with purpose. So public service ought to be an attractive option for talented people who want to make a difference. But what do you get for giving up a few years of your life to the Downing Street machine? Mediocre pay. Terrible working conditions. The knowledge your boss — the PM — might quit or be ousted any moment. The constant fear that colleagues will be briefing the press about your mistakes, or leaking secrets of your personal life to undermine you.

One of my colleagues in Number 10 put his name to a briefing which happened to note that the age of consent was lower in some other countries. It explicitly ruled out lowering the age of consent in the UK. Nevertheless, a Conservative colleague leaked the briefing and my friend was named in the Daily Mail as little better than an advocate for paedophilia. Who would want to work in a toxic environment like that, where you can trust no one?

The very virtuous might put up with it out of duty and purpose. You ought to get a positive feedback loop: as the government demonstrates its impact, more and more people want to be part of it. Boris’ majority government could have switched us into this mode. Unfortunately, we are still stuck in the negative feedback loop that started under Mrs May. The worse the government is, the fewer good people want to get involved. Sacrifice my comfortable life to end homelessness? Maybe. Sacrifice it to spanner about, accomplishing nothing? No thanks.

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Are special advisers just gossiping grifters?

By Polly Mackenzie

So we end up with the Wrong Political Advisers — the ones with few options, less experience, and limited social skills — working for the Wrong Politicians. It’s hardly a surprise that government has been such a basket case for so long.

The news that Dominic Cummings is off does give Boris Johnson the chance to press the reset button. A Prime Minister with an agenda, and a commitment to delivering on it, ought to be able to attract talented people who want to keep their heads below the parapet and do the job. He simply needs to make Downing Street a healthy place to work. Recruit doers, not ranters. Build a culture of trust and compassion between colleagues. Make sure people go home on time, and see their family. Give them confidence their jobs will last for years, not weeks. Stop fighting and start getting things done.

Is this a symbol of growing political corruption? The takeover of an independent civil service by a cadre of shadowy operatives, appointed through nepotistic networks and accountable to no-one? Is it a growing army of true democrats helping ministers assert authority over the unaccountable civil service and unresponsive deep state? Or is it simply a defence mechanism against 24/7 media and the growing demands of tribal politics? How should ministers access expertise and political advice in a modern democracy? Who should walk in the corridors of power? Who should speak for ministers, and under what veil of anonymity?

You might expect to find answers to some of these questions in a book entitled The Secret Life of Special Advisers, out today. But the latest offering from Peter Cardwell is not an attempt to expose misdeeds or solve constitutional dilemmas.

Instead, it is a delightful, charming, witty political memoir from a delightful, charming, witty man. Peter has seen the inside enough ministerial offices and cars to have a lifetime’s worth of dinner party anecdotes about who said what to whom, and when, and why. Conveniently, given that dinner parties are banned for the foreseeable, this book allows you to make Peter your virtual guest. Just read it with a glass of wine and a takeaway.

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Simplicity is at the root of policy failures

By Polly Mackenzie

The book has an endearing cast of affable characters, many of them household appliances: a mini-fridge, James Brokenshire’s four ovens, and the CCHQ toaster, which apparently couldn’t be used before 7.30am on pain of political excommunication. Peter’s good nature enables him to find nice things to say about almost everyone. Characters I worked with and despised for their Machiavellian ruthlessness are somehow sublimated into feisty, friendly chappies, just doing their bit for Queen and country. For example: it is hard to find anyone in Westminster with kind words to say about Fiona Hill, Theresa May’s erstwhile joint chief of staff. But Peter has kind words for her. It’s almost bizarre when, in a later chapter, he swerves off for a paragraph to be rude about Emily Thornberry. Was that his evil twin typing, I wondered?

Only on the final page does Peter permit himself a meta-level reflection about the purpose and value of spads. “I concluded the following,” he writes. “SpAds are something we need in UK politics. They help government function as it should.”

Well, I’m pretty certain I agree with that. But I was left craving more depth, more substance and more analysis.

Take Windrush, one of the greatest scandals of governance in my political lifetime. Special adviser-led policy on the “hostile environment”, to drive illegal immigrants out of supposedly comfortable obscurity, was the catalyst for gross injustice. The Wendy Williams review on lessons learned from the crisis shows that the mistakes were long-lived and deeply entrenched in a problematic culture within the Home Office.

So when I’m reading an insider account, I don’t really want to know that Amber Rudd told her team she was worried about Windrush via Whatsapp, or that one of Peter’s colleagues got told off for getting a haircut. I want someone who was inside — even briefly — to give me a sense of what he really thinks. How did it happen? What could have made it better? How should political accountability work, when a minister is hung out to dry for the policies of their predecessor? These pages will leave you none the wiser.

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Those who are suspicious of spads will be angered by this book. The secret life it depicts is one where jobs go to friends and friends of friends; where advisers eat avocado toast with their Minister and carry emergency chocolate bars; where Players Bar and the Corinthia Hotel are second and third homes; where political negotiations and stock market prices hang on a misjudged Whatsapp message or a hilariously mislaid ministerial box. It’s a light-hearted world full of people trying to do their best and then leaking the story because they had “too many shandies”.

Maybe this is just the raconteur’s art: spinning a yarn because it makes for an easy read and everyone likes a bit of gossip. Marie Le Conte wrote a book — Haven’t You Heard — based on that premise alone. If anecdotes are all the publishers will print then who can blame a lowly author for obliging? But my lingering fear is that politics — and spaddery in particular — really has become this threadbare.

We’ve expanded to more than 100 political appointees and ended up with less heft than we had with a dozen great minds in No10. David Willetts and Oliver Letwin, who served Thatcher, were then and have remained some of the great conservative minds of their generation. Michael Barber and Geoff Mulgan in the Blair years: profound strategic and operational thinkers who brought transforming zeal to the heart of Whitehall. I will believe Dominic Cummings and Munira Mirza are this generation’s equivalent when I see them accomplish something other than a campaign victory.

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How to honeypot a nerd

By Graeme Archer

Special advisers used to be special. But now there are more than a hundred, the word has been diluted to homeopathic levels. We should stop using it and reform the whole concept. We need to attract serious talent into our government, and these half-baked jobs no longer make sense. Too political for most experts. Too risky for anyone with domestic responsibilities: you can lose your job overnight and even have to pay tax on your redundancy settlement. It’s a job that only really works for people who love the game and the gossip of politics more than they love their family, their friends or their financial health.

Instead of spads, Ministers need to be able to recruit a wide range of experts into their department, to drive through the agenda in their manifestos. These need to be serious jobs for senior people, not kids treating politics like a virtual reality Game of Thrones. Dominic Cummings’s famed open recruitment process was the precise opposite of what we need: a focus on mavericks with no interests beyond work, and a paucity of social skills. Instead we need to offer stable jobs, with work life balance, decent pay and no requirement to eat avocado on toast unless you really want to.