Borisland: Cummings, Carrie and the troubled creation of a new post-Thatcherite Conservatism

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In Tim Shipman’s long read in last weekend’s edition of the Sunday Times – on the PM’s “troubleshooting trio” – he referred to the “the three Cs” who are central to advising Boris Johnson and running the British government.

Ah, I thought. The “three Cs”. That means Carrie Symonds, the Prime Minister’s partner, is going to be included. The loudest whisper in Whitehall and Westminster right now, not yet put in print as far as I’ve seen, is that Carrie, a strong woman well-versed in Conservative party politics, is an increasingly dominant presence in setting the direction of this unorthodox administration.

But no, the focus was on those Cs with operational authority. That is Simon Case, the newly-appointed Cabinet Secretary; Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief advisor; and Lee Cain, the alleged communications supremo.

Perhaps in this context it is best to think of Carrie Symonds not as one of “the three Cs” but as the bigger boss, “C”, in the manner of the watchful head of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in the shadows, who in a different context makes critical judgments about people and plots abroad, telling the PM of the moment what it all means.

“Boris looks to Carrie more and more to adjudicate and sense check decisions. It is remarkable how dependent he has become,” says a former associate of Boris. “Carrie is very powerful in shaping his thinking,” says an ex-government adviser plugged into Whitehall.

Carrie Symonds is no political neophyte. She worked in Tory headquarters, CCHQ, as director communications and was forced out, leaving her with a keen sense of just how ruthless the Tory party and its assorted factions can be. It is unsurprising that she should regard watching the Prime Minister’s back and advising on who can be trusted – not many it seems – as part of her remit.

Although Symond’s primary policy interest is in the environment, her preoccupations go well beyond that. On criminal justice and women’s rights she campaigned, bravely, against the early release of John Worboys, the taxi driver who was convicted of sexually assaulting passengers. Symonds was one of his victims and waived her anonymity.

Her instincts seem to be those of a socially liberal moderniser. In this analysis, the appeal of Toryism need not be restricted to older voters, and men, if it takes the environment and social issues seriously. In Boris it has a leader who was of a sunny, optimistic and, yes, liberal disposition when he was Mayor of London and before Brexit took over. Might this “real” Boris be allowed to re-emerge post-Brexit trauma, carving out a reputation as a great figure in political history by remaking the British state in the “roaring Twenties” that might follow the pandemic and in the process winning re-election?

Not if he carries on like this for much longer.

This government is in such a mess right now that the question of Boris fighting the next general election is a hypothetical concept. Less than a year after winning a majority of 80, he is facing rebellion and deepening unhappiness on his backbenches.

Part of the problem is that amid all the chaotic chicanery it is difficult to define a purpose. What is all the stressful disruption actually for? Is it to disguise the lack of a purpose? While Margaret Thatcher’s early years in power were characterised by even more infighting than is the case today, her allies and enemies knew what she was about and what she was trying to achieve.

With Boris it is very hard to tell once you attempt to get beyond the election-winning “Get Brexit Done.”

Dominic Cummings, on the other hand, knows what he is trying to achieve through the medium of Boris.

The Tory parliamentary party’s unease will only grow as it realises the implications of being driven by someone – Dom – who really cannot stand the Tory party or institutions in general. Cummings is taking them in a domestic direction very different to anything attempted by the Tory party since the ill-starred Ted Heath spell in charge between 1970 and 1974. That featured industrial intervention, u-turns, a reckless attitude to the public finances and a brief, mad boom turning to a terrifying bust.

Cummings would not want a rerun of Heath, of course. In his blogging and his pronouncements – delivered in an intense style – he makes clear that most of us mere mortals have failed to grasp the enormity of what is coming down the track in terms of accelerated technological development, AI, defence disruption, bio-science, autonomous vehicles and thinking machinery, the development of a private space industry and a complete reorientation in media and culture. This is techno futurism on steroids and it demands we think differently, he says.

The coming change, the shock of the new, is why it is essential that Britain is not bound by the EU’s state aid rules that were designed for a different era, he says.

To cope, the new state, under new management, must have complete freedom to intervene in a race to ensure that China does not dominate in AI.  The new state will respond, runs the argument, in ways as yet unimagined that its advocates cannot tell you about with any precision because it – the future – is moving so fast that maximum freedom of manoeuvre and minimum scrutiny of those in power is required. Convenient, that, for those in power.

Even if some of Cummings’ criticisms of existing government structures are valid, I’m not alone in finding the Cummings vision slightly chilling when coupled with the ongoing assault on Britain’s institutions.

The American phrase “a government of laws not men” (John Adams) captures what is at stake well. We developed our institutions – parliament, the judiciary, a free media – to protect us from individuals, be they monarchs or advisers, behaving in an arbitrary fashion when they like power over others too much or think they can see what needs doing so clearly that they must not be impeded.

Cummings proposes a new economic model not bound by existing thinking or rules as the government sprays ever more of other people’s money around. He says in a leaked memo that he is looking at ways to create £1 trillion tech companies in Britain. How about, don’t get the government to organise it?

Some Tory MPs and Peers have started to wake up, it seems, although not in the way Cummings wants. The declaration by the Northern Ireland Secretary this week that the government is for breaking international law was akin to an alarm going off.

There is a Brexit dimension too. The most pro-Brexit Tory MPs tend to be broadly Thatcherite in their inclinations, seeing departure from the EU in terms of sovereignty and as a chance to set sail as a global, free-trading, open, market economy. The notion of an intensely interventionist, high-spending state creating companies on a hunch will not fit with a Thatcherite’s interpretation of Brexit.

Where is Boris on all this? If you ask him if he admires Margaret Thatcher he knows how to do the routine hymning her virtues. He’s a skilled former columnist for The Daily Telegraph, after all.

Really though, Boris is far more a Michael Heseltine in terms of instincts than he ever was like Margaret Thatcher. The Prime Minister even refers to himself as a “Brexity Hezza”, indicating that he celebrates state intervention, big spending and grand projects.

Still the misconception that this government is pursuing a form of Thatcherism remains widespread on the left and right, though. The must-read, left-wing historian David Edgerton wrote as much in The Guardian this week.

Edgerton’s latest book – The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A 20th Century History – is myth-busting British history at its best. You need not agree with all of its conclusions – I certainly did not – to find it refreshing. So much of what we think we know about 20th century Britain is wrong, says Edgerton. Far from the place sinking under the waves, a “warfare state” under both main parties modernised Britain to a much greater degree post-War than is usually acknowledged. It is true that the expansion of welfare and healthcare predated 1945, and in the 1950s and 1960s there were numerous advances in infrastructure and technology. In the 20th century Britain also moved from being a coal-dominated, soot-ridden economy to almost ditching the stuff that had once been thought to guarantee several hundred more years of cheap energy.

Edgerton says that Thatcherism’s opening up of Britain to international capital and foreign takeovers was a disaster. I disagree.

As Thatcher might put it, there was was no alternative, particularly after the devaluation experience of 1967  and the disasters of the 1970s. Out of Thatcherism the British car industry, and much else, was reborn. The British entertainment industry developed steadily more global clout. And the City became the capital of the Eurozone and a global financial giant again.

What did go wrong – spectacularly – was the creation of “left behind Britain” in those deindustrialised parts of the country where many people felt the brutal choice open to them was to leave or rot. Decades later such anti-Thatcher places voted for Brexit in 2016, and in a delicious irony many voted for Boris and the Tories last December. Funnelling state spending in their direction is a large part of what this government is about – post-Covid. “We mustn’t let them down,” Cummings like to say.

Incidentally, one great service Edgerton provides in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is to slay, brilliantly, C.P. Snow (“an intellectual nullity”) for his famous and disastrous “Two Cultures” lecture in 1959. Snow said the British elite was too obsessed with the humanities at the expense of science. This was widely believed but it was largely nonsense. If it were true then Britain’s current digital lead in Europe – in terms of digital retail and years of private investment in tech – would not exist. That has its roots in the successive upgradings of infrastructure undertaken initially by the state, as charted by Edgerton. Post-privatisation, Britain has become a hub for investment and digital innovation, certainly compared to much of the rest of Europe, Sweden and Berlin aside. There is still stuff to lament about British tech – the shortfall on broadband and the way in which our new inventions and firms are sold on too early. But we’re not some kind of anti-science laggard.

The Snow-inspired misleading meme – “we don’t make anything!” yes, we do – is still dominant, reflected in the Cummings worldview that we require some sort of seismic, never precisely defined, state-powered technological explosion to reset our national mindset.

This government is not Thatcherite. It is post-Thatcherite and in certain senses seeking to be actively anti-Thatcherite by directing state resources to specific industries and forgotten areas. Someone very senior in the government could not have been clearer when he told me this week: “This is not a Thatcherite government.”

What does that mean in practical terms? What will Borisland look like? Unless he changes tack or the Tory party stops his chief aide, I suspect this new Cummings Conservatism will manifest itself next year in ever larger and more audacious interventions in industry, much tighter rules on mergers and foreign acquisitions, targeted nationalisations “in the national technological interest” supported by opinion polling, a bail out for the best research universities if they’ll get with the Number 10 programme and ditch the “wokeism”, and the relocation on a hitherto unimagined scale of much of a reorganised government outside London. And much more techno-futurism they haven’t thought of yet. Hold tight.