In the weeks before coronavirus forced Dominic Cummings to hold No 10’s weekly special adviser meetings by Zoom, the “spads” described an atmosphere of forced jollity akin to the mockumentary The Office. Amid reports of a cabinet reshuffle that would force many of them to lose their jobs, those close to the prime minister’s chief of staff would be referred to by their nicknames – while others waited to be reprimanded for a perceived failure. Cummings, himself a former spad, referred to “Gazza”, the prime minister’s political secretary, Ben Gascoigne; “Caino”, Lee Cain, No 10’s director of communications; and “Roxstar”, the former Vote Leave press officer turned foreign office special adviser, Rob Oxley. “It was awful, macho and silly. And you could see that they were completely unaware – or did not care – about how they were coming across,” said one former adviser. “It was a show of power and obvious who was running the special advisers now.” In a matter of months since Johnson was elected the leader of the Conservative party, Cummings had helped transform the system governing ministers’ closest advisers so that he now had the power to control staff and move them from department to department with Johnson’s say-so – and, crucially, without needing a green light from ministers. Cummings had fulfilled his ambition of combining the Treasury and No 10 media operations, losing Sajid Javid in the process – the chancellor and former home secretary had refused to accept that his five special advisers would be sacked and replaced by Downing Street’s chosen spads. Cummings had also overseen the removal by a police officer of Javid’s former spad, Sonia Khan, from Downing Street for allegedly speaking to another former adviser. She is taking a sex discrimination case against Cummings and the government to an employment tribunal. Advisers who had shown dissent, such as the former defence spad Lynn Davidson, were also eased out. At one weekly meeting in February, she told Cummings he was “out of order” for publicly criticising young special advisers. A month later, she was offered what was considered to be an effective demotion to become an adviser in education or health, although Tory sources denied that Cummings was involved in the dispute. According to one former close confidant of Johnson and Cummings, they want to force spads to stop interdepartmental frictions and instil greater discipline, ensuring that Johnson does not have to spend time rebutting claims put out by the staff of ambitious ministers. “The PM wants to get on with the job and not waste his time dealing with claims that cabinet ministers always try and distance themselves from. It can be a huge waste of resources,” the source said. Senior Conservatives, however, have grown increasingly concerned by the move. In a pointed comment piece for the Observer this week, Sir Bernard Jenkin, the liaison committee chair and former ally of Johnson, wrote: “Frustrations make No 10 advisers hyperactive, ever more directive, controlling, even bullying. The effect is always the same. It leads to cabinet ministers feeling sidelined and hectored and senior officials becoming disengaged, resigned, even resentful.”
Spads are a specific type of adviser, first introduced in 1964 and turned into anti-heroes by The Thick of It, the Armando Iannucci comedy about the dark arts of politics. A kind of temporary civil servant, they can be either policy experts brought in for their specialism in a certain department or media advisers who act as go-betweens with journalists and plan how to communicate with the public. They have traditionally been recruited by ministers although their job is then signed off by the prime minister. The career of a spad is a perilous one, as their fortunes rise and fall along with their ministers, and they frequently lose their post when their political master is sacked.
Spad numbers have risen in the last three decades, with 84 under Tony Blair, 74 under Gordon Brown, and more than 100 in the coalition. As of December 2019, there were 109 special advisers in government.Cummings set out his many criticisms, plus an agenda for greater centralisation of Whitehall, in a talk for the IPPR thinktank in 2014 called “The Hollow Men: what’s wrong with Westminster and Whitehall, and what to do about it.” He railed against the inability to get rid of failing staff during the years when he advised Michael Gove as education secretary under David Cameron. “Almost no one is ever fired,” he said. “Time after time after time, I would be in the [education] department and on a TV screen it would say, ‘Latest Gove disaster, Gove botches X’, and I would look through the glass screen and you would see the official responsible for it at the lift, pottering home at 3.30 in the afternoon, doesn’t care. Why not? Because failure is normal, it is not something to be avoided.” In the days after playing a key role in winning the EU referendum in 2016, Cummings reportedly sent a memo to Johnson and Gove, while they were still potential running mates in a Tory leadership battle, outlining his plans for Whitehall centralisation.
“Change the No 10 and 11 system so it’s essentially one team, not two rival power centres,” he wrote, according to the book All Out War by the Sunday Times’s political editor, Tim Shipman. There would, Cummings concluded, “be huge resistance from officials. One of the crucial jobs is to figure this out before getting in, so you can smash through changes fast”. Insiders say the plan has been to develop a central pool of special advisers on the heels of Cummings’ advert for “misfits and weirdos” to join the policy arm of the civil service – a process that courted significant criticism for hiring Andrew Sabisky, a temporary contractor who was forced to resign over comments about eugenics and race. Instead, the Conservative party has started a new process for the hiring of media and digital staff specifically – kickstarted with the launch of the website www.spadjobs.uk – which states that the government is also considering applicants from a corporate background and that a background in journalism is not needed. Usually, such positions are not openly advertised and are filled by those known to the party, with ministers typically having a large input. In a significant break with past practices, the strategic advisory firm Hanbury Strategy will do the initial recruitment. Paul Stephenson, a founding partner of the firm and an ally of Cummings, was director of communications for the Vote Leave campaign. Interviews of potential Spads were supposed to take place in March. The Conservative party did not respond to a request for a comment. Friends of Cummings have insisted that far from centralising power in Whitehall, he wishes to hand it back to departments, and have indicated that the government will fight claims of discrimination by Khan. In comments reported on Twitter by Paul Goodman, the editor of ConservativeHome, Cummings told a meeting of spads on Monday – thought to be his first since the furore over his travels to and around Durham during lockdown – that he will aim for a smaller centre of government. “Anybody who has read what I’ve said about management over the years will know it’s ludicrous to suggest the solution to Whitehall’s problems is a bigger centre and more centralisation … it’s already far too big, incoherent and adds to the problems with departments,” he reportedly said.