Rishi Sunak has a band of loyal advisers who have stayed with him since his days as chancellor. But the power dynamic in No 10 has shifted with the arrival of some new strategists and the abrupt departure of his short-serving director of communications, Amber de Botton. These are the biggest names in Downing Street who will shape the prime minister’s approach to the next election. The chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith started as part of Boris Johnson’s team in No 10, having served as a former policy adviser during Johnson’s Foreign Office days. He was sent to Sunak’s Treasury as part of a newly formed “joint economic unit” within Downing Street, set up by Dominic Cummings so No 10 could keep a close eye on the chancellor. But Booth-Smith prospered under Sunak and moved with him into No 10 to become his chief of staff, reflecting the prime minister’s tendency to promote loyalists from within. He is regarded as a powerful force, with a number of allies within the team, and recently told any aides to resign if they do not think the Conservatives can win the next election. The election guru Isaac Levido, a former protege of Lynton Crosby, ran the Conservatives’ 2019 election campaign and has been spending an increasing amount of time working for Sunak, although he is not an official employee within No 10. He is co-founder of a private consultancy, Fleetwood Strategy, which is known for political campaign management and opinion research. Over the summer, he was heavily involved in the work around Sunak’s U-turn on net zero targets.
The political brain Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, is a full member of Sunak’s inner circle. As party chair, his resignation was one of the steps in the chain of events that finally led to Johnson’s departure from No 10. He helped run Sunak’s leadership campaign and is relentlessly focused on the political aspect of his boss’s premiership. A veteran of the Conservative party research department, and David Cameron’s No 10, Dowden is one of the few very long-serving old hands in Sunak’s operation. The policy wonks Eleanor Shawcross, Sunak’s head of policy, is a longstanding Conservative adviser who previously worked in George Osborne’s Treasury and subsequently took special adviser roles in a number of other departments. A donor of £20,000 to Sunak’s leadership campaign under her married name, Eleanor Wolfson, she is a calm and intellectual presence within the team. Her deputy is James Nation, a former civil servant who has been described as Sunak’s problem-solver. The deputies Will Tanner and Rupert Yorke are deputies for Booth-Smith, with Tanner on the policy side and Yorke on political duties. Tanner is a former thinktanker who helped found the centre-right operation Onward, which specialises in thinking and research about the “red wall”. Yorke was brought with Sunak from his days in the Treasury and at the time handled relations with MPs. The thinker James Forsyth – a former political editor of the Spectator and a close friend to Sunak who was best man at his wedding – is officially political secretary. One Tory insider described Forsyth as the prime minister’s “ballast”, anchoring him and acting as a sounding board. He also knows the Conservative party well.
The strategists Jamie Njoku-Goodwin and Adam Atashzai are tasked with sharpening Sunak’s political narrative. Njoku-Goodwin, a former housemate of Booth-Smith, is leaving his role as chief executive of UK Music to become director of strategy. Astashzai is a senior adviser working on strategic comms and is a veteran of Cameron’s Downing Street and the 2015 election campaign. The comms boss Nerissa Chesterfield, Sunak’s director of communications, was promoted to the job after the unexpected departure of De Botton after just six months in the role. Chesterfield is another Sunak loyalist, serving as his press adviser in the Treasury, helping him to navigate the difficult stories about his wife’s tax affairs and becoming his press secretary in No 10 last year. Prior to that, she had roles advising Vote Leave and worked for the Institute of Economic Affairs. Other key press advisers include the former Dowden adviser Lucy Noakes, the new press secretary, and Beatrice Timpson, the deputy press secretary. The digital guru Credited with Sunak’s slick graphics and videos, Cass Horowitz was introduced to the prime minister by his former press adviser Allegra Stratton, who is married to Forsyth. Horowitz and Stratton worked together on ITV’s Peston.