Meet Team May – an inner circle of ‘doers’ not schmoozers
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Version 0 of 1. For Jamie Oliver, a man used to politicians beating a path to his door, it must have been a rude awakening. Not only did Theresa May’s new administration delete all the juiciest bits from the child obesity strategy he had championed, but when the celebrity chef protested, the door unceremoniously shut in his face. “Her people have locked down all communications,” Oliver plaintively told the Radio Times. If it is any consolation, much of Westminster knows the feeling. There are, says one regular visitor, “some seriously good people in there”, but the new No 10 operation is rolling down the shutters. The days of kitchen suppers, old-school ties and being godparents to each other’s children are over, with Downing Street briskly emptied of Cameron’s “chums”. But May is building an inner circle in some ways equally closed to those who don’t have the prime minister’s trust. It is just that, in May’s case, trust tends to be forged professionally, whereas, for Cameron, it often stemmed from friendships dating back to Eton or Oxford. That may have seemed normal to Cameron, having grown up in the kind of upper-middle-class English circle where everyone seemingly knows everyone, but it certainly isn’t to May’s people. The new tribe is more practical, more provincial – rooted in Birmingham and Bexley, not Notting Hill and Chipping Norton – and markedly less posh, bonding as beleaguered young party workers in the Tory wilderness years rather than at jolly country house weddings. (Even their salaries are said to have been capped at relatively frugal levels, and far from looking forward to OBEs, one insider jokes that the fuss over Cameron’s resignation honours list means they will probably be “lucky to get a cup of tea and a biscuit” when they leave.) The overall vibe is distinctively more “doers” than schmoozers. What is intriguing is how far their personal experiences overlap with May’s political agenda of focusing on what she calls the “just managing” – people who are working but not wealthy, who know how it feels to be on the outside of well-connected and comfortable elites, and are drawn to meritocratic ideas. Katie Perrior, Downing Street’s new director of communications, is a case in point. When she began working as May’s press officer in the early 00s, Tory offices were still filled with faintly Sloaney “girls in pearls”; with her south London accent and down-to-earth manner, Perrior stood out from the start. But though she may have orgnised raucous karaoke nights at party conferences, woe betide anyone who understimates her serious side. She served as a Tory councillor in suburban south London in her spare time, and nine years ago started up her own PR business with fellow Tory aide Jo Tanner. (Ignoring warnings from male rivals in a cut-throat industry that “you girls” would flounder, they promptly bagged a contract for Boris Johnson’s 2008 mayoral campaign, giving her a useful inside track to the now foreign secretary). Perrior’s appointment is a sign of May’s emphasis on proven practical skills but, crucially, also on loyalty, given that she is one of several longstanding allies who dropped everything at short notice in June to help with May’s leadership campaign. But it is the very devotion of the prime minister’s inner circle that makes some uneasy. Power in the new regime is centralised in the hands of May’s formidable joint chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, both famed for being, as one ex-colleague puts it, “hard as nails” in ensuring her writ runs across Whitehall. Everything is funnelled through them and directions then come back down from the top, a change from Cameron’s more open style, according to one former staffer: “He’d ask us for ideas. He’d say to the policy unit: ‘This is the problem. What are we going to do?’” The pair are also overseeing a systematic review of policy decisions across government, methodically stripping everything back to the bones. “What people in government are saying is that it’s almost like a change of government, having to go back to basics and take people through stuff,” says Jill Rutter, programme director at the thinktank Institute for Government. “Everything is being radically re-examined from first principles.” It is the way May has always operated – Timothy and Hill were meticulous in spotting potential elephant traps at the Home Office, where they both worked for her, along with their deputy Jo Penn and deputy head of the policy unit Will Tanner – and arguably closer to the way things worked under Thatcher and Major. But there are ripples of alarm about the power it places in Timothy’s hands particularly. Nicknamed “Rasputin”, the bearded steelworker’s son has been identified as the prime mover in decisions from pausing the Hinkley Point power plant deal to bringing back the 11-plus. (A grammar school boy from Birmingham, he joined the Tories as a teenager after realising Labour opposed selection.) Crucially, he was also for leave in the EU referendum and, along with press secretary Lizzie Loudon – a former special adviser to Iain Duncan Smith, who joined No 10 from the leave campaign – brings an understanding of outers to discussions about Brexit. Hill, a serious-minded and ferociously hardworking ex-Sky News producer who grew up in Scotland, attracts less controversy, but her fingerprints were also evident in May’s speech earlier this month on modern slavery; Hill encouraged May to take up the issue at the Home Office, and then produced her own report on the issue for thinktank Centre for Social Justice before coming into Downing Street. The word in Whitehall is that May won’t make decisions in front of officials but, instead, says one source, “goes away for an hour with Nick and Fiona and – boing! – a decision is made. Which is exactly like Gordon Brown. He’d go away, and we all assumed Ed [Balls] then told him what to do.” That may not be strictly fair, but the relationship between the three of them is certainly critical to everything May does. The other change that has set tongues wagging is the diminished influence of the Treasury. Only one key member of George Osborne’s camp, special adviser Neil O’Brien, made the leap to the new Downing Street team and, unlike Osborne, the chancellor, Philip Hammond, isn’t invited to the agenda-setting daily morning meeting in No 10. As Rutter, herself a former Downing Street civil servant, points out, that is arguably just a return to the historic norm after years of unusually equal partnership between Cameron and Osborne. But May’s preference for smaller, tighter, more formal circles of decision-making perhaps also reflects her personality. Cameron was a social animal, happy mixing personal with professional, and liked to chew both over with Osborne at the beginning and end of his working day. Tony Blair was relaxed enough to take briefings as he was changing between engagements, hopping around in his underpants while his aides reeled off bullet points. May, however, is reserved to the point of shyness, and likes to keep things businesslike. The nearest thing she has to an old chum in cabinet is the work and pensions secretary Damian Green, an Oxford contemporary whose wife Alicia was her student supervision partner, but even he had to earn his cabinet job on merit. Education secretary Justine Greening and home secretary Amber Rudd are both also personal allies, but that didn’t stop May putting Greening – a proud comprehensive schoolgirl, leading a Department for Education that has until now been highly resistant to selection – in a difficult position over grammar schools. There is a brisk professionalism to this regime that comes from the top. Crucially, it’s also a team forged in adversity. Hill, Timothy, Perrior and several other No 10 advisers earned their spurs as junior staffers under Duncan Smith at a time of civil war within the party; John Godfrey, the new director of the policy unit, was an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate in Scotland in the early 90s, hardly the easiest time or place to be a Tory. While many of Cameron’s staff came on board in sunnier times, this lot are battle-hardened and their interests tend towards the gritty. Timothy’s passion is industrial strategy, Godfrey specialises in pensions, housing and longterm care – while one of few survivors from the Cameron era, special adviser Sheridan Westlake, who famously persuaded Eric Pickles to focus on the unglamorous issues that suburban voters cared about, such as the Daily Mail obsession with wheelie bins. While the Cameroons’ house journal was the comfortably establishment Times, anxious Mail readers – more suburban than urban, less financially comfortable, more anxious and insecure about the future – are now setting the agenda. May gets on well personally with the paper’s editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, and often chooses the Mail on Sunday’s political editor, Simon Walters, for interviews; she took Liz Sanderson, a former Mail on Sunday features writer turned special adviser, into No 10 where her job is to promote the prime minister’s agenda via features pages and magazines not read by political junkies. That won’t, however, mean opening up her jealously guarded private life. Unlike Samantha Cameron, May’s financier husband, Philip, is still working full time, and will be a supportive but largely invisible background presence. There is little chance of cameras being allowed into their private Downing Street flat – as happened when Angela Merkel and Michelle Obama were photographed on Cameron’s mustard-yellow sofa – and the new regime is generally warier of the media. While Cameron counted journalists among his personal friends, May keeps them firmly at arm’s length and expects her intimates to do the same. Even the celebrity count at No 10 functions or dinners at Chequers is likely to be lower, with a beady eye on the cost to taxpayers. And if the new Downing Street doesn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs – well, as Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said when backing May for leader, these are serious times for serious people. Or to put it another way, the party’s over, and that big black door is once again slowly clanging shut. What has happened to the Cameroons? Every cloud has a silver lining, and for sacked male politicians, it is no longer having to shave for the cameras. But after a summer of rebelliously cultivating beards (yes, that means you, Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey) and licking their wounds, the defeated Cameroons are starting to get back down to business. For some, that simply means getting their side of the story out. First, and suspiciously fast, off the blocks was former No 10 spin doctor Craig Oliver, with a book accusing Theresa May of repeatedly finding so many excuses to get out of campaigning publicly for remain that in Downing Street she was known as “submarine May”. Cameroon fingerprints are also evident in Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman’s All Out War, in which unnamed sources accuse “lily-livered” May of having privately counselled against pushing for tougher curbs on EU immigration at the last minute, claims denied by her camp. Ken Clarke, who sparred memorably and sometimes publicly with May in cabinet, also has a potentially awkward memoir out shortly – while Cameron is still negotiating a deal for his. But it is in parliament, not publishing, that the real battle looms. May’s strategy of methodically reviewing almost every big decision made by Cameron, suggesting she plans a cleaner break with the past than expected, has galvanised his old set to defend what they see as his legacy. If nothing else, the referendum seems to have taught Cameroons of the importance of trying to build – or at least appear to build – popular grassroots movements behind them. Hence the thinktank George Osborne has just launched, devoted to galvanising public support for his “northern powerhouse”, a project viewed with some scepticism in the May camp. (Westminster is watching with interest the relationship between Downing Street special adviser Neil O’Brien – a former aide to Osborne who helped devise the initiative – and May’s chief of staff Nick Timothy, also keen to grow the economy beyond London but said to have doubts about focusing everything on the northwest). The former chancellor’s speech in Chicago last week, warning that Britain voted for Brexit but not for a “hard Brexit” – in other words, that there’s no mandate for leaving the single market – was another warning shot. Tory remainers are grimly determined not to let leavers sidle away too easily from campaign promises that Britain could have its cake and eat it, somehow enjoying the benefits of single-market membership while refusing freedom of movement. Former education secretaries Gove and Nicky Morgan will focus on fighting back against planned new grammar schools in parliament and the media. (The Times, to which Gove has returned as a columnist, delivered a notably helpful anti-grammar editorial earlier this month.) The supporters’ list for Parents and Teachers for Excellence, a new ginger group set up to defend academies and free schools, meanwhile, reads like a rollcall of the Cameron years – from Rachel Wolf, his special adviser on education, to former No 10 policy unit director James O’Shaughnessy and some of the old guard’s favourite high-profile headteachers. They may no longer wield power. But influence? The impeccably connected, frantically networking Cameroons were always good at that. |