Operation Castrate Big Dog
How Rishi Sunak is dealing with Boris Johnson
I’m going to make what you might consider to be a rash assumption. I’m going to assume that Rishi Sunak can read. This is at odds with almost all political commentary just now, so I feel a bit uncomfortable stating it so baldly, but let’s explore the idea.
If Rishi Sunak can read, he’ll be aware that things are not going well. His personal ratings are sliding down a banister, and he’s hurtling towards an acorn finial with accelerating speed. In tandem with this, the Conservatives’ poll ratings appear to be falling back from their submarine peak and are heading back towards levels best explored in a bathyscape.
This has provoked murmurations of Conservative MPs (every bit as complex as those of starlings and just as eerie, but they take place in the press and if they make you catch your breath, it’s not because of their beauty). The Mail and the Telegraph have found no shortage of MPs hankering for a return of Boris Johnson, though not so keenly that they are willing to go on the record to say so. Liz Truss has seen fit to break her silence to argue in not-very-coded terms for a return to her policy of exuberant tax cuts. With this background noise going on, the government is struggling to enforce message discipline for its preferred approach of steadying the markets with tax rises and public sector pay restraint.
A literate Rishi Sunak will be aware, as Churchill said, that the opposition occupies the benches in front of you but the enemy sits behind you. Curiously, however, no one seems to be asking what he’s doing about that.
For there seems to be an assumption that Rishi Sunak has no agency in this, that he’s a sitting duck waiting to be picked off by a sharp shooter. This assumption is untrue. Rishi Sunak is Prime Minister. He has his hands on the levers of power, he has agency and his entire life story shows that he’s a clever and capable man. We should start working on the basis that he’s going to be clever and capable.
He will identify the main danger as Boris Johnson. So presumably he will be targeting him. Obviously, however, he will not be doing so visibly, given that Boris Johnson is unaccountably still popular with the Tory rank and file. So we’ll need to look at what happens rather than at what Rishi Sunak says or is seen to do.
What I’d expect, if someone were manoeuvring secretly against Boris Johnson, would be to see as many damaging stories as possible make their way into the public domain. You might see embarrassing stories about Boris Johnson’s remarkable personal financial arrangements. You might see stories that suggest to an unfriendly eye that he’d behaved corruptly. Better still, you might get a story that covers both of these aspects. Or you might see stories that remind the public about Partygate. There certainly seem to have been a lot of such stories recently. Amazing, don’t you think?
Such stories have certainly made it harder for Boris Johnson to leave his disgraced departure from Number 10 in the past. Every time he tries to portray himself as a statesman over Ukraine or to set out a platform for tax-cutting, he has to spend time rebutting such stories. He must find this continued accountability for his past actions unfamiliar and irksome.
A ruthless Rishi Sunak, however, would not stop there. The quickest way to dissipate internal machinations against him would be to have the chief machinator removed. And he has an opportunity to do just that. Boris Johnson is going to be up before the Privileges Committee in the coming weeks. The evidence is going to be heard publicly and you can expect to hear a lot of pretty unedifying detail. We shall be painted a picture of Johnsonian Downing Street as a never-ending Bacchanalian orgy.
That’s helpful to Rishi Sunak so far as it goes towards further undermining Boris Johnson’s reinvention of himself. But there’s a bigger prize for Rishi Sunak here. The Privileges Committee has the power to recommend sanctions for Boris Johnson. Given that Boris Johnson has many enemies in the Parliamentary Conservative Party, if the Privileges Committee recommends a sanction for Boris Johnson, I expect it will pass in the House of Commons quite comfortably. Depending on the sanction imposed, he might end up facing a recall by-election which he would be unlikely to win given current polling. At a stroke, Rishi Sunak would be rid of his chief tormentor.
Better still from Rishi Sunak’s viewpoint, the decision would very visibly not be his. He could not be easily blamed by Boris backers for this outcome, which he could rightly say was a matter for the House of Commons, not him.
That said, in reality he has quite a bit of influence over the outcome. Rather than pressurising the more pliant committee members to help make it go away, he can discreetly hint to Conservative members of the Privileges Committee that he would expect them to do their duty without any special treatment for even the highest profile member, and that he would ardently support the independence of the process.
And he has a lot of influence in practice over potential witnesses in the case, many of whom will still be in or around Number 10. A smile or a frown from the Prime Minister, or even the understanding of what might make the Prime Minister smile or frown, will have a big impact on how forthcoming witnesses are.
A central point being missed by those who think this case will inevitably go away is that Boris Johnson losing would be politically extremely convenient for the current Prime Minister. Boris Johnson is on very shaky ground, but Rishi Sunak has no interest in stabilising it for him. The opposite, in fact.
Nevertheless, to outward appearances Rishi Sunak would have clean hands. The only way in which he could be publicly criticised by Boris backers would be for not intervening in the process. This would be unreasonable, given that the Owen Paterson fiasco showed that not even Boris Johnson could successfully interfere with the role of the Commons as a court, but reasonableness has not been a hallmark of Camp Johnson.
Given that possible line of criticism, you would expect Rishi Sunak to display as much commitment to due process as he possibly could. And what do we see? We see that he endured ten days of agonies while Nadhim Zahawi was subjected to an investigation of his behaviour under the code of ethics. We see that Dominic Raab has been left in office while a long trail of damning leaks about his bullying slither through newspaper pages, pending the completion of the investigation into him.
Rishi Sunak took a lot of personal reputational damage for his perceived slowness to act in these cases. Perhaps he is storing up these demonstrations of his commitment to due process for a much bigger case that could be coming soon.
What else might he do? Precisely because he is not in control of the Privileges Committee, he can’t rely on them coming up with what would be the most congenial answer for him. They might recommend a lesser sanction. They might decide that Boris Johnson was not guilty of this particular charge at all.
In those circumstances, Big Dog would still be prowling round the back benches. So Rishi Sunak needs to avoid making other enemies needlessly. So this week we see his spokesman politely say that Rishi Sunak would listen to Liz Truss. Her 4,000 word monograph may have been widely derided, but Rishi Sunak has no reason to push her into Boris Johnson’s camp. He will be confident now that she poses no threat to him by herself. A few kind words may make him look weak externally, but they are of use in his internal power battles.
Let’s go back to that Churchill quote. Rishi Sunak has found himself spending far too much time needing to deal with the enemy sitting behind him. Yet as a result he is having to make decisions that make him an easy target for the opposition in front of him. The next general election is coming up fast but the Prime Minister is having to focus his energies on internal party management to the direct detriment of his battle with the opposition, whose attack lines he is writing for them. Worse, he is likely to need to do so for quite some time to come. He’s fighting a war on two fronts. While he will probably win the battle taking place behind him, all the time it’s weakening him for the main battle ahead.