Lynton Crosby, the Australian campaign guru, will “be around” to give strategic advice to the prime minister without being given a formal job in No 10, according to Tory sources. Boris Johnson buoyed Tory MPs on Monday night by revealing he had rehired the strategist, who helped with the party’s election campaigns in 2015 and 2017. MPs and aides claim they already detect the hand of the “Wizard of Oz” in No 10’s fightback against the partygate scandal. However, Crosby, who is currently in Australia, will not be taking on an official job that could clash with his business interests and may not spend that much time “physically in the building”, according to sources. Instead, he will be on hand to give more guidance to the prime minister on the reshaping of his operation in No 10 and strategic priorities.
Those who know Crosby well say he has made clear that he is an expert on campaigns, not someone who can run a government, but one of his often repeated phrases about political leaders thinking ahead to an election is that you “can’t fatten a pig on market day”. Although many Tories believe Johnson will not still be leader at the next election, MPs say the prime minister himself has not accepted his ejection from office to be a likely option. “Lynton already speaks to him anyway. He has always been his unofficial sounding board. He’s the person he turns to and that conversation has been going on all along,” according to one person who has worked closely with Crosby. Relations between the two men cooled after Crosby helped with Johnson’s leadership campaign in 2019, partly fuelled by tensions over the role of the prime minister’s now-wife Carrie Johnson. But he has come back into the prime minister’s sphere of influence in the last year. One Tory strategist said there was also still hope among the right of the party that Johnson could give a formal chief of staff or parliamentary liaison job to one of Crosby’s strategists, David Canzini, who was involved in the hard Brexit campaigns of Theresa May’s premiership. However, this has been consistently denied by those in No 10. They also said the stream of coordinated announcements over the last few days bore the hallmarks of Crosby and his allies, particularly Johnson’s attempts to bind himself to his rivals for the leadership, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, with a joint op ed and planned trip to Ukraine respectively. As Sue Gray’s report into the partygate scandal dropped on Monday, Johnson had already lined up competing policy statements with his commitment to continuing with the national insurance rise on Sunday, a visit to Ukraine to showcase his international credentials on Tuesday and his long-awaited levelling up white paper on Wednesday. Downing Street sources claimed these were all in the offing for some time and any timing alongside the Gray report was coincidental. Crosby is also renowned for the “dead cat” strategy, where politicians try to change the national conversation from one scandal to another eye-catching talking point, however negative. Although the strategist is not expected to begin his work with No 10 for some weeks, Johnson appeared to have adopted such a distraction tactic in the Commons on Monday, as he made a false claim that Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, failed to prosecute paedophile Jimmy Savile while director of public prosecutions. This then took up air time on Tuesday, even though the prime minister was being heavily criticised from some on his own side over the comments.
Alongside Johnson’s effort to renew his focus on policy, he is expected to shake up his team in the days and weeks ahead. Following the Gray report he announced that he would create a new “office of the prime minister” to make No 10 more of an official government department with clearer oversight and accountability. But there are reservations among some of his critics and even some in cabinet that this could actually centralise power for the prime minister. There is also scepticism about his idea of creating backbench “policy boards” to allow Tory MPs to feel heard and that they are contributing. It is understood Graham Brady, the 1922 chair, has a role in putting forward names to chair these boards, but one Tory MP said it was a “tired idea” that many prime ministers reach for when trying to appease their backbenchers. Another senior Conservative MP who believes Johnson should go but has not yet put in a letter said changes to staffing and advice would not help when the prime minister himself is the problem. “What happens when more about the Jennifer Arcuri stuff comes out? What happens when more about the PPE scandal comes out? There will always be another problem.”