Timed for maximum damage, the Saj & Rishi coup they claim is no such thing
If you believe that, you’ll believe anything!
THE marquee was erected, the tables set and the limousines were dropping one elegant guest after another at the door. It was Saturday, June 18, and the billionaire hedge-fund tycoon Sir Michael Hintze – dubbed the ‘godfather of Tory donors’ thanks to the £4million he has lavished on the Conservative Party over the years – had arranged a lavish dinner at his Gloucestershire estate.
The guest of honour was none other than pop princess Kylie Minogue, booked to warble a few tunes to 250 of Sir Michael’s closest friends.
Several senior Conservatives were in the audience – but none was more senior than Sajid Javid, then the Health Secretary.
Within weeks of this cultivated occasion, however, Javid had flounced out of the Government, delivering a self-aggrandising Commons statement and knifing his boss, Boris Johnson, in the front, back and sides.
We may never know what words passed between Sir Michael and ‘ The Saj’ that night. But if you were, say, plotting to dethrone a sitting prime minister and run for the party leadership yourself, you could do a lot worse than bend a friendly billionaire’s ear at such an event.
Rishi Sunak, who until Tuesday afternoon was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was not at the Cotswolds do.
But then again, he doesn’t need rich donors to fund his own inevitable upcoming leadership campaign: his heiress wife Akshata Murty (until recently a controversial ‘ non-dom’ for tax purposes) is worth hundreds of millions and can outspend any campaigner.
On Tuesday evening, of course, these men rocked the Government with their double resignations – and may yet capsize it altogether.
Their sudden exit from the Cabinet, just nine minutes apart, shattered Boris Johnson’s authority, with Javid’s blistering Commons speech yesterday pouring yet more petrol on to the blazing pyre of this administration.
Now many are asking: To what extent were these plotters colluding? On Tuesday night, as the resignations broke, ITV’s flamboyant political editor Robert Peston declared: ‘Treasury source tells me that first [ Sunak] knew that [Javid] was resigning was AFTER he put out his own resignation statement.
‘The claim is these resignations were not co- ordinated. Which makes them more damaging for the Prime Minister.’ Well, as the saying goes: If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
Yesterday, few among Boris’s allies were so credulous that the men had acted individually. One senior minister raged: ‘It is risible and insulting to the intelligence of the rest of the Cabinet that they are still claiming it was all a coincidence.’
So what do we know for sure? Certainly, the two men are very close. ‘They’re good friends and have a natural affinity,’ was how one senior source put it yesterday.
They speak regularly and are known to have similar politics, even if Javid is more instinctively Thatcherite than the former chancellor. Among friends, they have also made little secret recently of their fury over Downing Street’s botched handling of the Chris Pincher groping affair. Last weekend, amid the fallout from those tawdry allegations, Javid was openly talking about quitting – talk that Sunak may well have heard.
By Monday, keen-eyed observers noticed that upcoming appointments in Javid’s diary as health secretary had been cancelled.
ALSO on Monday, Sunak is known to have been discussing with his Treasury team the possibility of resigning from the Government.
The next morning the men’s minds were made up after Lord McDonald, formerly permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, released a devastating letter declaring: ‘No 10 keeps changing their story and are still not telling the truth.’ He twisted the knife further in an excoriating interview on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 later that morning.
Sunak and Javid both heard the interview. The Chancellor was enraged: The fresh claims of No 10 incompetence overshadowed the uplift in national insurance thresholds that launched yesterday, saving British households £6billion.
But with the prospect of a government falling, no one was talking about economics. Some hours later, when the Cabinet met, the Chancellor and Health Secretary sat stony-faced near the Prime Minister, in pictures that have become notorious. ‘It was as if they were playing to the cameras,’ said one source. ‘Their expressions were almost theatrical.’
As it stands, Javid and Sunak’s teams insist that the two men have had no contact since that Cabinet meeting.
This may be strictly true, but it is perhaps not the whole story.
Officials in both Sunak and Javid’s private offices are in regular contact, and the two ex-ministers do not need to communicate directly to make each other understood. Whatever the truth, Javid
went to see Boris that afternoon to tender his resignation. The meeting was short – but not very sweet. After quitting, he returned to his office to draft his resignation letter.
As for Sunak, relations between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor had been growing increasingly strained in recent weeks. The wording of a planned joint speech next week on the rising cost of living was causing headaches.
But unlike Javid, Sunak already had a draft resignation letter handy. He wrote this some weeks ago, after he was fined £50 for briefly attending last year’s socalled birthday party for Boris in Downing Street. In the end, Sunak
rang Boris’s team for a short and terse phone call on Tuesday evening, informing the team of his decision. Minutes later, he went public with his resignation letter.
As one minister claims: ‘They timed their statements for dramatic effect to hit the 6pm news, knowing that Boris’s fightback had begun with a prerecorded TV interview – which they deliberately crashed.’
The men might have realised that it would be most effective if Javid, as the more junior minister, resigned first. A chancellor quitting minutes later could well prove fatal.
This strategy, if it was the one they followed, proved horribly
effective. After the Sunak bombshell, the resignations flowed from Cabinet, leaving the Prime Minister on the brink.
What also reeks of co-ordination between the two men is that only Javid agreed to deliver a Commons resignation statement the following day.
He bragged in his speech yesterday: ‘ Despite how it might seem, I am not one of life’s quitters. I did not quit when was told that boys like me do not do maths [or] when old-school bankers said I didn’t have the right school ties.’ But Javid is a quitter: This is the second time he has marched out of the Cabinet in as many years. In February 2020, when Downing Street tried to impose a set of advisers on his Treasury operation, he abandoned his post as Chancellor.
One senior Whitehall source said: ‘Saj’s speech was over the top. It was treacherous and unpleasant, and will have done him real harm with Tory MPs, even those who thought it was time for Boris to go.’
And that is yet another reason to suspect collusion between the two ex- ministers: Rishi’s refusal to deliver a Commons statement, and his curious absence as Javid delivered his. Such histrionic speeches can alienate backbench colleagues.
By remaining aloof and watching Javid’s speech on TV, Sunak has better positioned himself for his future leadership bid.
He may also remember Javid’s willingness to stand up when he hands out jobs in a future administration.
The same Whitehall source says: ‘Rishi’s absence was yet another clunky way of trying to tell everyone the two were not working together, when everyone knows they were.’
Yet for now, the two camps are sticking to their surely implausible claim.