The danger is that Boris will govern by half measures

Boris Johnson’s is an exceptionally difficult government to assess. Many of the usual criteria by which commentators traditionally characterise an administration are irrelevant to this regime. The cabinet reshuffle and the significant decisions already taken since the general election are the only information so far available to help form a picture of what makes the Johnson administration tick and what it aspires to do during the next five years.

The reshuffle was overshadowed by the resignation of the Chancellor. On the face of it, in a conventional situation, Sajid Javid would have been right to insist on retaining his special advisers. The relationship between a minister, who should enjoy the right to select his special advisers, and those key aides is an important one and depends on mutual confidence if it is to work. The special adviser should have only one loyalty: to his minister. That minister should be totally confident his special adviser is not divided in his loyalties and serves only his interests.

The traditional role of the special adviser, therefore, is personal rather than collective. The Dominic Cummings notion of running the entire body of special advisers as a kind of national grid, with Number 10 supervising all ministers’ aides, is a complete contradiction of everything that post has stood for since its statutory implementation. It converts the special advisers into a bunch of civil servants, but under the command of Number 10 rather than the Cabinet Secretary.

That said, the Javid case was not a conventional situation. The Treasury, as Boris Johnson has recognised, has long been the ultimate bastion of Remain. Beyond that, long before Remain and Leave were the polar extremities of British politics, the Treasury was a law unto itself, a powerhouse challenging the supremacy of Downing Street, using its vast fiscal authority to dictate government policy. It was the Treasury rather than the Ministry of Defence that ran down our armed forces to their present derisory capacity.

If Britain is to enjoy the benefits of Brexit, then the bunker from which Project Fear has spewed out absurd “models” of post-Brexit economic disaster must be cleared out. Even Dominic Cummings could hardly exaggerate the extent to which the Treasury needs to be flushed out, if Boris Johnson is to turn his twin titles of Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury into a political reality. There are few places in Whitehall where the deep state is more stubbornly embedded and it will take massive and ruthless action to turn those masters into servants.

Boris has installed a yes man in Number 11; but there is nothing wrong with that, if Rishi Sunak, a strong Brexiteer, genuinely sees eye to eye with him on policy. The Cummings merger of Number 10 and Number 11 special advisers – objectionable in other departments – has a rationale and a justification in this instance. The challenges Britain faces over the next five years are too severe for the Treasury’s fiscal obstructionism to be tolerated a moment longer.

The most promising appointment in the reshuffle was that of Suella Braverman as Attorney General. She is acutely aware of the dangerous unbalancing of the constitution that has been caused by the ambitions of the courts to take over the running of the country from elected politicians. Both here and in North America judicial activism has become a huge threat to democracy. In Britain that process has been facilitated by Tony Blair’s fabrication of the Supreme Court, a completely un-British concept alien to our law, an excrescence on the constitution.

The Supreme Court is a political tribunal whose ambition is, by osmosis, to convert itself into a constitutional court on the Venezuelan model. The prorogation case exposed its true character: when did eleven judges ever deliver a unanimous verdict? A decision based on the traditional law and the constitution had previously been handed down by three judges, including the Lord Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls, but that well-founded verdict was overthrown by the parvenu Supreme Court for motives that were made very clear by Lady Hale’s “girly swots” triumphalism.

There is real urgency about ridding Britain of this travesty tribunal. Already Nicola Sturgeon is threatening to invoke its power to force a Scottish independence referendum. The fear is that this issue and others requiring drastic remedies will be addressed by the government with half measures. There is a danger of Boris Johnson trying to appear revolutionary while staying his hand from full execution of the necessary policy.

Already a pattern is developing. No harm in Huawei penetrating just a part of the 5G network; continue to throw billions of pounds into the bottomless pit of HS2, but only to travel part of the way – in both cases the worst of both worlds. The Supreme Court is likely to have its name changed and its wings clipped, but that is not enough. It must be abolished and the only clean way to do that is to revert to the status quo ante: return the appellate jurisdiction to the House of Lords and restore the historic office of lord chancellor to its former power and eminence. The public will more easily accept a familiar situation in place of a failed experiment.

Then there is the BBC. Why would we wait until its charter runs out on 31 December 2027 to abolish the licence fee? That reform should be a first-term government delivery objective. A second term should see the break-up of that clapped-out “woke” institution and the sale of its viable parts to private operators. If there is a problem with the charter, the solution is obvious: “revoke” is a term that was, until very recently, popular with the BBC.

There is so much that this government could do to free Britain, but the early signs are that Boris Johnson is implementing policy in a spirit of political schizophrenia: do something bold – but not too bold. Take a Cummings-style axe to the Treasury, to HS2, or whatever, then pull back at the last moment in response to traditional establishment inhibitions and leave the job half-done, but just as expensive.

The ultimate test of this Janus-faced approach will come at the end of this year when we discover how well Boris has delivered on his pledges of a clean Brexit trade deal. Barnier and the Brussels hoods will be watching British domestic politics very carefully and they will already have detected the two-steps-forward-one-step-back locomotion that characterises the Johnson government’s conduct. Yes, some good things are happening, but there are grounds for fearing they may be camouflaging an awful lot of business as usual.