Inside No10: is Theresa May’s operation still ‘scarred’ by Nick and Fi?

Every morning, Theresa May’s husband Philip carries her ministerial red box as they walk down from their flat at No11 Downing Street. At the bottom of the stairs, he hands it back and departs for work. The Prime Minister makes for her study.

By now, key members of her top team have already had their first meeting. That takes place at 8am in the Cabinet Room and is a chance for the PM’s political and press team to chart what’s coming up. Those attending include May’s official spokesman James Slack, his deputy Alison Donnelly, chief of staff Gavin Barwell, director of communications Robbie Gibb, press secretary Paul Harrison and director of legislative affairs Nikki da Costa. There is usually someone from CCHQ and the No10 press office there as well.

After the Mays have descended from their private quarters, the PM chairs the all-important 8.30 meeting. As well as Slack and Barwell, the cast list includes deputy chief of staff Joanna ‘Jojo’ Penn, Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, de facto deputy PM David Lidington and chief whip Julian Smith. Philip Hammond is sometimes there as well, but not always. It lasts anything between 30 and 45 minutes, after which the Prime Minister usually heads for the first of a steady stream of meetings.

“We go through the media and the PM’s day, and hammer out any issues or problems, and what’s coming up in parliament,” a source says. “It is incredibly similar to what it was like before the election.”

While some things remain the same behind Britain’s most famous black door, others had to change. A general election which was called to bolster May’s Brexit negotiating position saw her return humbled, her personal stock depleted, without a majority. Under pressure from her restive ministers, she was also forced to cut loose her fiercely loyal confidants Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.

The joint chiefs of staff, who had been with her since her time in the Home Office, alienated colleagues in their relentless defence of the PM and promotion of her agenda. They were the highest-profile casualties of a No10 regime that drew the ire of Tory MPs for its control freakery. Their demise was a prerequisite for the Conservative party to continue backing May as their leader.

But a year on from ‘Nick and Fi’s’ high-profile exit, is No10 running a more effective regime without them? Or do their ghosts still haunt a struggling administration that is on its last legs?

The House has spoken to current and former No10 staffers, past and present Cabinet ministers and Conservative MPs to find out.

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Several key decisions were taken in the restructuring of Downing Street after the election. The pivotal one was to appoint Barwell, who lost his Croydon Central seat to Labour, as chief of staff. This was a “stroke of genius”, one Conservative MP says.

The popular ex-minister is well versed with the ins and outs of the Tory benches and has taken it upon himself to keep abreast of them. He holds bi-weekly roundtable lunches or meetings with MPs to touch base with colleagues about their concerns.

Lidington, the Cabinet Office minister, says Barwell was a “very important appointment”. “I think you’d say with Gavin he was both respected and liked by most Conservative parliamentarians. That’s a good twin-asset to have. I think he’s been a great ally to the PM,” he says.

Access to Downing Street too has improved markedly since the election, backbenchers say. “If you say you want a meeting with the Prime Minister, then as far as humanly possible, given her diary, it is arranged,” says Nicky Morgan, whose tempestuous relationship with the former No10 administration culminated in a text message from Hill to another Tory MP warning: ‘Don’t bring that woman to No10 again’.

“So, it is immeasurably better,” Morgan continues. “The difficulty is that people are still very scarred by the first nine months.”

John Whittingdale, who served as Margaret Thatcher’s Political Secretary, is fresh from a lunch with Barwell. He credits the former MP as being central to improved relations.

“We all know him because he is a colleague. He’s also much more aware of the needs of colleagues and how the Commons works,” he says. “The link between No10 and the House of Commons, the parliamentary party, has strengthened hugely since 2017. Which is just as well.”

For all the concerted effort to improve transparency, some MPs believe the gestures are tokenistic. “You can have all the good contact in the world but the Prime Minister is still very much a person who plays her cards very close to her chest,” says one.

“There are much better mechanisms for listening, for paying attention to the backbenches and all the rest of it. But at the end of the day, the Prime Minister is enormously stubborn.”

Another says colleagues have put forward “quality ideas have been politely listened to – and then nothing happens”.

They add: “She is still very much a person who is impossible to read in meetings. There are times when having a poker face is very good. But in terms of dealing with backbenchers who need a bit of schmoozing, that’s where Gavin and to a certain extent the chief whip do a really good job of that.

“She’s still fundamentally the same person who takes an age to make a decision and who’s never going to sit back, kick off her shoes, and say, ‘tell me what’s really going on. Give me a bit of gossip’, which is what David Cameron would have done.”

Of course, backbenchers expressing frustrations about not being listened to is hardly unique to the current No10 regime. As a senior Tory recalls, Cameron would often hold drink parties and barbeques in his garden for MPs. “It’s very pleasant, if you’re not used to going to Downing Street, to go and have a glass of warm white wine there. But ultimately, you’d really prefer to have some effect on what’s happening,” they say.

Despite his many admirers, Barwell does have his critics in Tory ranks. One senior MP says he has become “very arrogant” and is not in the same mould as Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s former chief of staff.

“He doesn’t respond to MPs’ texts. He has all these events in Downing Street, but it’s just window dressing rather than anything meaningful. They’re just designed to make MPs feel good about themselves,” they say.

“Everything coming out of No10 is just Croydon metropolitan stuff about plastics, when Jeremy Corbyn is talking about building houses. It feels as if everything is seen through the prism of his election defeat – the whole world doesn’t revolve around Croydon.”

The MP adds: “Gavin Barwell being chief of staff is a reflection of the times we live in. He wouldn’t be there if we had a big majority.”

Other key appointments post the election include the appointment of Robbie Gibb, whose brother Nick is the schools minister, as director of communications. Soon after his arrival, May gave a rare, candid interview with Emma Barnett from BBC Radio 5 Live, in which she revealed that she shed a tear on the night of the election.

“Robbie Gibb is very good and clearly knows what he’s doing. He’s a nice person, but will shout when it’s required. He’s just very good at his job,” says a former minister. But others fear that No10 has moved towards “chasing headlines” since his appointment.

June 2017 also saw Seema Kennedy, a highly-thought-of MP in Conservative circles, join George Hollingbery as May’s Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS). Some believe the unusual move to have two PPSs was made to ensure that different generations of Tory MPs (Hollingbery is from the 2010 intake, Kennedy the 2015) have outriders in No10.

But one insider doubts whether “they have as much input as they need to if they’re going to be really effective”, adding that they are “rarely” in Downing Street.

Sir Desmond Swayne served first as Michael Howard’s PPS before continuing the role under Cameron for five years in opposition and two in government. He says he spent at least three hours a day with the former PM and (unlike Kennedy and Hollingbery) attended the 8am morning meeting. His role required him to not only be in communication with backbenchers, but also be present in No10 to ensure he could convey accurately what took place to colleagues should it be necessary.

“My job was out there in the parliamentary party. If you were with Cameron the whole time, then how could you do that job of taking the temperature, finding intelligence and all the rest of it? But equally, you do have to be there at critical times in order to fulfil that function of being able to say to colleagues, ‘look, I was there. I promise it wasn’t like that’,” he says.

“So, there are clearly two roles there. It might be that the PPSs divide those roles; that one is with the prime minister most of the time and the other’s out there gathering the intelligence.”

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The structure of the week in No10 “hasn’t changed markedly” since the election, despite the departures of Timothy and Hill, an insider says. Surprisingly, perhaps, given the blood-curdling stories which emanated during the pair’s reign, the atmosphere is the same as it was before they left.

PMQs prep takes up a progressively large chunk of May’s time in the early part of the week, starting on Monday and “getting more intense” up until Tuesday evening.

Alex Dawson from the Downing Street political unit, Kennedy and Hollingbery, Paul Harrison and Barwell are tasked with the job of getting her ready to do battle with Jeremy Corbyn.

“Weeks are very front-loaded but start to calm down a little bit after PMQs is out of the way,” says a source. “The building starts to exhale a little bit as the weekend approaches.”

May’s approach to the job is different from her predecessor’s fondness for Blair-like sofa government.

“There’s a much more business-like approach than under DC,” says one official. “You need to have incredible stamina to do the job. And no matter how rough the circumstance, she just keeps going and that rubs off on the rest of us.”

The PM’s drive to limit the number of special advisers in Downing Street is proving to have its own costs. There are concerns that the team is being overworked as the government undertakes the not inconsiderable task of Brexit, viewed as the most significant foreign policy decision since the Second World War.

A senior Conservative says that while it is “very praiseworthy” to have a small operation, you are “shooting yourself in the foot” by doing so during “complicated times”.

“Nick and Fi were very effective at what they did. Certainly, they were a very big presence. They dominated people’s relationships with Downing Street. It’s different now, I’d say it’s more open,” they continue.

“I guess the plus side is that it is now easier to go and see the Prime Minister than it was. But I don’t think anybody at that point 18 months ago was saying, ‘oh, No10 hasn’t got the capacity to action the things that need doing’.”

Lidington too recognises that the No10 team is up against it, but insists that that is by no means an anomaly. “Like every No10 outfit I’ve ever come across in my time in politics, they are always overworked. But that’s no different from under David Cameron or Gordon Brown or Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher,” he says.

“There’s always that intense pressure, because all the time people are coming into No10 from all parts of Whitehall, from outside organisations, from foreign governments saying, ‘we want a bit of your time and attention’.

“Having trusted people as your gatekeepers, as your private office and key political advisers is important. I think she’s got a good team there now.”

But another senior Conservative with intimate knowledge of how No10 operates demurs, insisting that, in many ways, it is just as dysfunctional as it was before the general election.

“It’s hard to say things have dramatically improved, but they are certainly different,” they said. “The complaints I hear are from people saying they don’t get face time with the people who matter. Special advisers say they don’t get to see Robbie Gibb, for example.

“There’s no fear and control like there was under Nick and Fi, which is obviously a good thing. But the people in there are operating in silos more than ever and that’s why people are still able to go out and say their own thing without clearing it with No10 first.

“Businesses say it’s like Groundhog Day. They come in for meetings, tell No10 about their concerns and then go away. They then come back six months later, nothing’s been done and they have the same conversation all over again. It’s woeful. That is not a government that is planning for the long term.”

Despite that grim assessment, forward planning does go on all the time, with head of strategic communications Ben Mascall a key figure. No10 works on a quarterly planning cycle, with Whitehall departments expected to let Downing Street know what they’ve got coming up.

Once a month, Lidington, May’s effective deputy, writes a letter to the PM outlining progress made on the domestic agenda. His department, the Cabinet Office, also carries out “deep dives” across Whitehall to assess any blockages holding back the implementation of policy.

On top of that, each department sends a representative to No10 once a week to lay out what they are doing. From this, the all-important grid is drawn up setting out the news agenda for the next seven days.

May, like Cameron before her, likes to start the week with an eye-catching speech or announcement on an important issue. In her case, that often means health and social care, school standards, the environment or housing.

“There’s criticism of our domestic programme,” says one insider. “But that’s just because Brexit means that the threshold for every other announcement is so much higher. If you look at the last few weeks, we’ve made big announcements on counter-terror, Heathrow and FOBTs but Brexit continues to dominate everything.”

May is determined that her government is “not defined by Brexit alone”, a Cabinet minister says. But they concede that parliamentary time is dominated by the issue due to the time constraints of Article 50 and the need to pass key legislation.

As the Withdrawal Bill goes through parliament, “a lot more dialogue and engagement” has taken place since the government’s first defeat on the legislation over a meaningful vote in December. Chief Whip Julian Smith has played a key role in trying to placate would-be Tory rebels.

“Christmas was important,” says one of those who rebelled. “I think before December they thought that we cared about this stuff but were too nice to defeat them. Now they know that’s not true. And so, they’ve got to engage. There are sufficient of us to create problems with the bill. It’s true that we’d much rather not.

“But I think what we’re seeing with Brexit at the moment is that lack ultimately of a real person at the top driving it forward. It’s beginning to tell. Then you leave a vacuum. That’s when the backbench frustration fills it.”

A re-wiring of the No10 machine was demanded after the general election. Without her long-standing aides and close political ally Damian Green beside her, May lacks the insulation and support she once had.

In their place is an administration continually under the cosh, comprised of talented individuals trying to keep on top of things.

As a leading Tory figure says: “While in normal times it’s very praiseworthy to say we’re going to have a small operation and not have endless numbers of Spads and whatever else, in complicated times, when there’s a lot to be done and complicated parliamentary management relations with the DUP, all of those things thrown into the mix, you probably need more capacity.”  

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