Yoko Ono has taken charge of the band.
All right, the analogy doesn’t quite work. For one thing, Carrie Symonds – currently occupying the role of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s official girlfriend – hasn’t got nearly Yoko’s delicate charm, talent or lightness of touch. And for another, Boris Johnson’s administration definitely isn’t the Beatles: it’s Kajagoogoo, at a push; more plausibly, it’s Keith Harris and Orville or the St Winnifred’s School Choir.
But it does at least go some way towards capturing the bizarre outrageousness of the coup which has allegedly taken place within Johnson’s crumbling, chaotic regime. His fiancee Carrie, whom no one elected — nor would they because she’s about as left-wing as they come — appears to have taken charge of government appointments.
This, at least, is what Westminster insiders are saying about the sudden departure of one of Johnson’s key aides, Lee Cain.
According to the Mail:
A Downing Street civil war is raging in public today after Boris Johnson‘s director of communications dramatically quit after a brutal standoff with Carrie Symonds.
Longstanding Johnson aide Lee Cain, a Vote Leave veteran and Dominic Cummings loyalist, announced he was resigning despite being touted for promotion to No10 chief of staff just hours earlier.
The departure was the culmination of a bitter power struggle inside Mr Johnson’s top team, with rival factions battling for supremacy even as the government struggles to tackle the coronavirus crisis.
Mr Cummings had pushed for his ally to be appointed despite warnings from the PM’s fiancée Ms Symonds – herself a former Conservative Party head of media – that it would be ‘a mistake’ given how the campaign against the pandemic had gone so far. She is said to have complained the No10 operation was being run in an ‘uncollegiate’ way and the PM was not getting ‘good advice’.
No, I’d never heard of Lee Cain either, so I have no idea whether his departure is a good thing or a bad thing. What we do know is that Johnson’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings is aggrieved because Lee Cain was very much his man. Cummings is so cross that he is reportedly considering offering his resignation in protest. This would represent a major blow to Johnson: as the architect of the Brexit campaign and also Boris’s strategic brain, Cummings is arguably also the force most responsible for getting Johnson in power and keeping him there.
If you’d asked me at the beginning of the year whether the loss of a Cummings acolyte — or even Cummings himself — would have been undesirable I would have said ‘Yes! A disaster!’ Cummings, remember, was fearsomely committed to tackling the sclerotic, wasteful, irredeemably left-wing Civil Service — which is probably the main reason for Britain’s relentless leftwards slide.
But 2020 has been such a bizarre year and politics has evolved so rapidly that it’s much, much harder to assess which people in Johnson’s administration are a dangerous menace and which ones marginally less awful.
Cummings, it’s becoming increasingly apparent, belongs in the dangerous menace camp. With Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove and power-crazed Health Secretary Matt Hancock, it’s Cummings who has been pushing Johnson to take a harder line on Coronavirus (more lockdowns, etc) — in opposition to Cabinet members such as Chancellor Rishi Sunak who are more worried about getting the flatlining economy back into a semblance of normality.
Also, Cummings is a technocrat and a believer in Big Science. Cummings is a great admirer of America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the massively wasteful taxpayer-funded research group, which technocrats love to pretend created the internet. So he’s unlikely to put up much resistance to the technocracy-driven Great Reset currently being pushed hard on governments by the World Economic Forum. Another reason to be very wary of him.
Against that, though, you’d have to ask: is any candidate being pushed by deep-green activist Carrie Symonds likely to be any better, let alone any more conservative?
Carrie Symonds is a hardcore greenie — an animal rights activist, PR for Bloomberg’s Vibrant Oceans programme, with a very close relationship with the shadowy eco-loon Lord [Zac] Goldsmith. If Jeremy Corbyn had won the last election and become Prime Minister, her loonie-left politics would have been a perfect fit with his.
But Jeremy Corbyn didn’t win the last election. Conservatives did, supposedly. Not that you’d know it to look at any of their policies so far…