Was Carrie Symonds behind the Night of the Long Stilettos?
Carrie Symonds (PA Images)
It is dispiriting, if unsurprising, that at a moment when the world seems poised to take a turn for the better, the denizens of Downing Street should be fighting like cats in a sack. One might have hoped that, with clouds of uncertainty lifting at last after the US election and the Covid-19 vaccine breakthrough, our Prime Minister and his staff would be pulling together as a team, not acting like characters in a television drama about the court of Henry VIII. Is Machiavelli’s The Prince a better guide to our system of government than Bagehot or Dicey?
Amid the rumours and recriminations, one factoid has emerged. Boris Johnson tried to promote his fratricidal communications director, appropriately named Lee Cain, to chief of staff, only to find him forced out a day later by a feminine alliance of his new press spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton, his senior adviser Munira Mirza and his fiancée, Carrie Symonds. Cain is to be replaced by James Slack, a career civil servant. The Prime Minister’s hitherto indispensable eminence grise, Dominic Cummings, is said to be sulking in his tent. Other prominent loyalists, such as Lord Udny-Lister and the chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost, are also said to be preparing to jump ship.
Does any of this matter? Probably not very much: the general public is less enthralled by the perennial preoccupation of the Westminster village — “who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out”, as King Lear puts it. Of course, the impression of chaos at the top does not encourage the country to adhere to the strict discipline of lockdown. The PM is said to have “wined and dined” Cain last week to placate his disgruntled consigliere, who threatened to resign. Now the former Mirror journalist — whose assignment it was to dress up as a chicken and follow David Cameron around during the 2010 election campaign — has gone anyway. Cain can console himself with the thought that disgraced courtiers are no longer sent to the Tower, but permitted to ply their trade in the shrinking market for serialised memoirs.
The most striking result of this mini-coup is the fact, if it is a fact, that Carrie Symonds has come out of it on top. As the mother of Wilfred, the youngest of the PM’s many children, Ms Symonds has softened her image as a tough Tory party apparatchik. At the tender age of 32, however, she remains one of the most politically astute and experienced prime ministerial consorts ever to inhabit No 10. If the hatchet-faced men who vie for Boris’s ear ever underestimated her before, they will now know better.
Like Boris himself, Carrie hails from the world of newspapers. Her father, Matthew Symonds, worked for the Telegraph before becoming one of the founders of the Independent. She has already carved out a niche for herself in public life as a powerful advocate for animal welfare. The priority given to the treatment of livestock by HMG has already proved to be a stumbling block in negotiations for a trade deal with the US. Would this have happened without what we must learn to call the Symonds Effect? It seems unlikely.
It may have been fortuitous that Carrie Symonds found two other women in Downing Street with whom to make common cause in blocking their rival’s ambitions. But Allegra Stratton’s star in particular is clearly in the ascendant. As the Prime Minister’s popularity has waned, so he has become more dependent on effective communicators to make his case. The Downing Street machine has lately seemed less Apple or Microsoft than Heath Robinson. Lee Cain is said by his chums to have worked wonders while the PM was laid low by coronavirus. If so, he has done the state some service. But elevating the man responsible for so many public relations disasters to run the whole show at No 10 would have been perverse. As TheArticle’s esteemed contributor Alastair Campbell would be the first to acknowledge, it would never have occurred to Tony Blair to ask his head of communications to take over from Jonathan Powell as chief of staff. The two jobs require very different skills.
Will the triumph of the triumvirate of Symonds, Stratton and Mirza provoke a backlash from the unreconstructed male chauvinists who still wield influence in the Conservative Party? And might the role of the First Partner in particular lead to muttering about petticoat government? Only time will tell.
In order to banish such unedifying speculation, it would be a good start if the elected Cabinet were to reassert itself over the unelected cabal in No 10. A concerted effort to open a new chapter in politics would not come amiss, either. This Government has not yet been in office for a year. By the time it celebrates its first birthday on December 12, the country should have hit the ground running as we emerge from lockdown. Boris Johnson won’t thank her for it, but Carrie Symonds may be correct in her intuition that her fiancé must get this relaunch right if he is to survive the next four years. She had no choice but to unleash the Night of the Long Stilettos.
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