hat was it that Mario Cuomo, probably the most successful politician to come out of New York, used to say? Ah, yes: “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”. Wise words, and they come readily to mind when assessing Boris Johnson’s first year after his famous election win last December. No 10 has been, at best, dysfunctional. To borrow another bit of wizened political wisdom, such internal feuds and ego-fights usually turn out to be even worse than they are portrayed in the press. “Princess Nut Nut” and a media team on non-speaking terms probably isn’t the half of it. If so, it is no great surprise the country is where it is today, and why the prime minister’s personal approval ratings have slumped. The arrival of the prime minister’s new chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, a former Treasury civil servant of a solid, professional disposition, marks a shift towards a more prosaic style of government, in the best sense of the term. No more moonshots, perhaps.
What both Mr Johnson and his now ex-chief adviser Dominic Cummings were brilliant at was campaigning, as witnessed in the European referendum and the last general election (as well as Mr Johnson’s unlikely run at the London mayoralty). They revelled in pithy poetic phrases, lurid rhetoric and soaring ambition. They seem to have been much less successful in the arts of government. Attempting to redesign the machinery of government in the middle of a pandemic and with Brexit to get done was probably a strategic error. It led to briefings against, and the departure of, permanent secretary Sir Mark Sedwill; as well as the departure of then-chancellor Sajid Javid, who tried to appoint his special advisers, part of a wider move to take control of the Treasury.
Dominic Cummings might claim that putting real-time data flows and analysis at the heart of governmental decision making, in and around No 10, was in fact the best way to tackle any crisis. He might also be right that the Treasury is too powerful and narrowly focused, in some abstract sense. Perhaps his modernisation of British government was in the end stymied by vested interests in the NHS or HM Treasury, but in any case it mostly failed and mass testing remains undelivered and the economy, partly as a result, is a mess. Test and trace might be ready by the spring, about a year after the pandemic got going and when the vaccines should be coming through.
