I knew he came into No10... who he saw and what he did was a mystery
DoeS he cast a shadow? When Dougie Smith passes a mirror in No10, can anyone see his reflection? The honest answer is I don’t know – and I spent most of 2022 in Downing Street. A security trawl at the time told us he had been in the building but hadn’t seen the Prime Minister, chief of staff, head of policy or me, the chief of communications.
Whom he saw, what he did and why he was there remained a mystery. But what little evidence emerged of his interventions portrayed a dubious and destructive influence.
Dougie Smith enjoys cultivating the myth that he’s some dark presence in the ultimate corridors of power.
But that makes sense because – like Dominic Cummings in his ludicrous press conference about driving his family to Barnard Castle to test his eyes – subjecting Dougie Smith to sunlight would destroy the myth around him, exposing his mediocrity, lack of charisma and rather pathetic powers of expression.
The Conservative Party has toppled three leaders in the past five years and is dangerously close to destroying the current Prime Minister. Yet miraculously the Smith show has never stopped. It seems you can have any adviser as long as one of them is Dougie.
His name came up, along with a string of expletives, when oliver Dowden – now Deputy Prime Minister in case you hadn’t quite clocked it – resigned as Conservative Party chairman in an attempt to bring down Boris Johnson, after a punishing set of local and by-elections dominated by the issue of ‘Partygate’.
‘It was my decision alone’, said Dowden. Boris,
in Kigali for a Commonwealth summit, was far from convinced: ‘You can tell he has a gun to his head.’
Boris was equally clear that the finger on the trigger was Dougie’s, and for a couple of hours he seemed willing to cut him loose. I was authorised to ask an official to withdraw his pass, which would have ended his surreptitious comings-and-goings at No10, and I prepared to execute the order with enthusiasm.
Tragically, Boris changed his mind, deciding it was better not to ‘provoke’ him.
Boris has since revealed that this unelected and strangely unaccountable aide had threatened him back in 2021. ‘You are poison,’ Dougie said in a phone call to the PM’s flat, ‘like Nixon. If you don’t go I’m going to take you down. I’ll finish you off’.
WHY Rishi Sunak would want someone like that anywhere near him is baffling. The average figure- skater projects more Mafia- esque menace than our Rishi, but he’s been led to believe, too many times, that the dark arts of Dougie were instrumental in getting him to the top without winning an election.
And now, they are – by all accounts – being deployed against him. So my advice is simple. Get a grip. Cancel his pass. Call in the party chairman and ask what he’s paying Smith for, and how much money, raised from busy volunteers and generous donors, has been spent on him over the past decade.
Loyal members would be outraged and I can’t see a long queue of people waiting to fight his corner.
Like me, most of them will have never attended the sex parties Smith organised back in the 1990s and will have no fear of Jeffrey Epstein- style photographs that may have caught them in compromising positions. If you think I’m making this up, Google ‘Dougie Smith sex parties’ and you’ll know why there’s been a working assumption for far too long that he has enough ‘dirt’ on enough people in power to be left alone, to shift his allegiance from one disruptor to another, and to enjoy power with no sense of either purpose or responsibility.
If Rishi Sunak wants to survive the next few weeks, he’d be wise to cast him aside immediately, and make sure everyone sees he has at last taken charge.