The weekly tradition of the cross government meeting of Special Advisers (lamely known in the village as ‘SpAd school’) has somehow survived through multiple Tory administrations. The meeting tends to leak when things are going badly. As the Sunak regime winds up, it’s fair to say it’s leaking like a sieve…
Guido is told by several SpAds present at the meetings that Downing Street Chief of Staff Liam Booth-Smith has finally resurfaced to head up the increasingly thinly attended gathering. The chatter is that he had avoided them for six weeks, leaving it up to Deputy Chief of Staff Will Tanner to try and rally the despondent troops…
Guido’s moles complained that both Booth-Smith and Tanner would arrive, list trivial successes of the week like “women in sports announcement from DCMS,” meanwhile ignoring news leading stories such as Lee Anderson defecting to Reform, and thereby “ignore the elephant in the room“. Many in Downing Street and Whitehall are simply going through the motions, having missed the boat on the private sector milk round. Meanwhile, insiders say open tensions between key personalities at the top of the building continue. The shine has come off spadding…
The vast majority of talented SpAds have already left Sunak’s sinking ship and shifted to the private sector. SW1 staple the British Venture Capital Association generously invited twenty SpAds and other advisers to a boozy four-hour final schmooze-session last night at All Bar One on Villiers Street. In attendance were Downing Street’s Callum Tucker, David Goss, and Mary Burns, along with Sunak’s favourite private equity giant Blackstone. They’re not taking Labour advisers to budget All Bar One, that’s for sure…
Teams from media monitoring and policy in CCHQ also showed up along with dark arts Conservative Research Department staff. Corporate attendees were told: “Members may want to consider whether there are businesses in their portfolio that would be suitable for a ministerial visit, in case you have the opportunity to discuss that with the relevant adviser.” Better squeeze in those visits pretty quickly…
A senior Westminster source tells Guido: “Sunak can stop telling everyone else to concentrate on fighting Labour when he’s given half his team post-election jobs in the private sector and the other half are off down the job-fair. They’ve given up.” The pre-election Tory SpAd job round wrapped up about a year ago…
Guido was the first to report former Our Future, Our Choice campaigner Will Dry’s ascension to No 10 in 2022. Dry was best known in SW1 for parading around with Femi during the Brexit years attempting to reverse the referendum result. It has now emerged he left his polling role in Downing Street in November and has been working with the Conservative Britain Alliance, best known for commissioning the YouGov mega poll predicting a 1997-style wipeout for the Tories under Sunak. Dry says defeat is on the way:
“Everyone in this country can see just how colossal the challenges we face are. Sadly, it became clear to me we weren’t providing the bold, decisive action required to overcome those challenges. You cannot dent them without internalising just how fundamentally broken our political system is.
I further concluded, again sorrowfully, that the Conservatives are heading for the most almighty of defeats. Be in no doubt: we are on course for at least a decade of Labour rule. And if Farage comes back, the Conservative Party essentially won’t exist by Christmas“.
Dry headed up research and polling at No 10 and is now working to bring down Sunak. Was he ever a wise hire for a government that was supposed to get Brexit done?
Guido has made a big 2024 methodical update to the canonical SpAd List lots of sideways moves and just six names added to the roster. These are the latest updates:
If you need to know who’s who, you know where to go…
Guido was out and about in Westminster last night chatting to SpAds about their job searches. One near despondent SpAd was beginning to panic that they would not secure a move across to the private sector before the value of their government contacts expired worthless. An anecdote from a recent Thursday night SpAd school is illustrative of the state of morale within the SpAd class;
Last month the PM’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Will Tanner, tried to boost morale at the increasingly thinly attended weekly SpAd school session –
“I’m here to tell you that the polls are wrong. They were wrong about Brexit, they were wrong when it came to the independence referendum and they’re wrong again now. You shouldn’t pay any attention to them. We’ve got this. Look at Labour – they don’t have any long term plan on AI but we do.”
This message was delivered to stunned silence on the part of the SpAds – nobody had any questions when prompted by Tanner to ask. Everyone just quietly left and shuffled off to the pub. It was a jaw-dropping moment when finally most of the room realised some in Number 10 had “lost their marbles”.
“From 10 months ago when Liam Booth-Smith told SpAd school we needed to be 10 points behind by the autumn to this – a steady 20-point deficit and a plan to just ignore the polls. In the pub Will was dubbed Comical Willy after Saddam’s Comical Ali”
The atmosphere this week at drinks parties is one where Labour confidence is verging on smug and Tories have a resigned gallows humour. Many in Downing Street and Whitehall are just going through the motions…
A couple more SpAd movements for Guido to tell you about following last week’s changes. Guido can reveal that the former Director of Communications at the Conservative party Caroline Preston has joined as a ‘temporary’ SpAd to Lord Cameron until the Foreign Office find a more permanent media SpAd. She knows m’Lord well, having been his head of Broadcasting in his second term in office. She’s known as a robust force in SW1…
Long-term Cameroon Laurence Mann has followed David to the Foreign Office. Mann has been advising Cameron since he was Prime Minister in 2010, and then followed him to be his office’s Chief of Staff for the last seven years. Cameron has also brought in a fellow Lords member, Baroness Liz Sugg, to bring in Foreign Office experience – her last stint at the FCDO ended in 2020, when she resigned after Sunak cut the foreign aid budget. Good luck…
Let Guido know any more moves…
