Red Meat and Save Big Dog: what is Boris Johnson’s next move?

Boris Johnson’s senior Downing Street staff are facing the chop while a raft of populist announcements are set to be unveiled as part of a last-ditch effort to save the prime minister’s “tottering” premiership.

Despite his “humiliating” apology to MPs over Downing Street lockdown parties on Wednesday, the prime minister is reportedly “refusing to take responsibility for the crisis”. Rather he will allow senior aides to take the fall in a move likened to the infamous 1962 “Night of the Long Knives” when Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan sacked a third of his cabinet, reported Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times.

“Boris is preparing to lay down the lives of his staff to save his own. It will be the Night of the Long Scapegoats,” one MP told the paper.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Operation Save Big Dog

Senior staff are set to be ditched under a plan reported to be named Operation Save Big Dog – although Alex Wickham of Politico said he had been assured by No. 10 staff that it was “not a phrase anyone senior has ever used”. They are likely to include Martin Reynolds, Johnson’s principal private secretary, who sent out the ill-fated email inviting staff to “bring your own booze” to a No. 10 drinks party in May 2020. His deputy, Stuart Glassborow, is also expected to go.

And the prime minister’s chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, and “some members of the communications team” are also said to be “living on borrowed time”.

Boris Johnson’s plan to “scorch the earth of the supposedly culpable officials” is “shattering morale” in Whitehall, senior civil servants told ITV’s Robert Peston.

“It feels like utter s***,” one told the senior political journalist. “It would be seen as completely unfair if we took all the blame and the prime minister was let off the hook.”

Another warned that it could leave the civil service “seriously damaged” and lead to resignations and recruitment difficulties.

Operation Red Meat

The second strand of Johnson’s career-saving action plan is to announce a string of populist policy announcements designed to “woo” disillusioned MPs and voters – reportedly dubbed “Operation Red Meat”, said The Sunday Times.

The proposals include a plan from Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries to freeze the annual BBC licence fee at £159 for the next two years, meaning the broadcaster will be forced to find “savings of more than £2 billion over the next six years”, reported the Mail on Sunday. Under the plans, the fee would then rise with inflation until 2028, when it would be scrapped in favour of a new funding model.

In another policy announcement revealed over the weekend, the military is set to be put in charge of preventing small boats from crossing the Channel, reported Steven Swinford and Matt Dathan in The Times. Refugees could be sent to offshore locations for asylum processing in countries as far-flung as Ghana and Rwanda, reported the paper.

According to The Times, other proposals include:

• A No. 10 workplace “booze ban” in an effort to end the drinking culture in “Club Downing Street”.
• Promised new plans to tackle the backlog of operations in the NHS.
• Extra money for skills and job training for the 1.5 million people who are out of work and on universal credit.
• Remaining coronavirus restrictions to be lifted on 26 January.
• The publication of the long-awaited ‘Levelling Up’ white paper, which will seek to find ways to reduce regional inequalities.

Johnson under pressure

The number of letters of no confidence in Johnson that have been submitted to the 1922 Committee has reportedly risen to 35, leaving the PM “perilously close” to the 54 letters required to trigger a leadership contest, said The Sunday Times.

And “at least seven” of those letters are reported to have come from “red wall” Tory MPs, who fear they could be out of a job if the party doesn’t regain the trust of voters.

A minister told Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC that Conservative MPs were likely to have heard “a lot of discontent” from their local party associations over the weekend, while others report their email inboxes “filling up with party members and constituents seething about what’s been going on”.

And the prime minister’s future has even become “the subject of playground teasing”, continued Kuenssberg. One senior MP reported being asked by a group of nine-year-olds “whether or not the prime minister was going to resign” before later being “catcalled by teenage pupils” over Johnson’s behaviour during a school visit.

The prime minister and his cabinet have urged angry MPs to wait for the conclusions of Sue Gray’s report into the Downing Street party allegations, but there were plenty of angry words for the prime minister from MPs in the weekend papers.

Defence select committee chair Tobias Ellwood told the i news site that a “flurry of initiatives” and the “sacking No. 10 staff” will not be enough to “repair trust with both Parliament and the nation.

“His entire senior team requires overhauling, enabling responsible command, strategy and standards to significantly improve,” he added.

One senior Tory MP told The Sun that Johnson’s chances of surviving are at “60-40 against”.

“Forget about a Night of the Long Knives – we will need a week of the machetes to get rid of all the useless people in No.10,” he added. “The mood is really grim in the party. It feels like we have been machine-gunned but by our own generals rather than the enemy.”

Meanwhile, Tim Loughton, the MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, became the sixth Conservative MP to publicly call for Johnson’s resignation.