Boris orders Cabinet: Get back to off ice as an example to the nation
...and he’s got them a giant table so they can keep their social distance
BORIS Johnson has ordered his Cabinet to stop working from home as an example to the nation, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The Prime Minister has summoned his top team to Westminster next week for their first in-person meeting since March – erecting a special giant table for social distancing.
Mr Johnson hosted the first ever digital Cabinet meeting while self-isolating with Covid-19 symptoms and they have continued weekly since.
Ministers have patched in to meetings from across the country or from their desk in Whitehall using Zoom video conferencing, despite concerns about security.
Usually, Ministers are crammed around the famous coffin-shaped table in 10 Downing Street, but on Tuesday morning they will be two metres apart and allowed to wear masks if they wish.
The vast Locarno Suite of the Foreign Office will be converted into a temporary Cabinet Room after Ministers urged Britons to get back to the office.
Nicknamed the ‘drawing room of the nation’, the ornate gold-painted staterooms usually play host to visiting world leaders, but will house Mr Johnson’s 26- strong team until the Covid- 19 crisis is over.
On Friday, Mr Johnson urged workers to get back to the office as long as Covid-secure measures are adhered to, and said bosses ‘should be encouraging people to get back to work, where that is right for that employee’.
The Prime Minister told a Downing Street press conference: ‘It is not for the Government to decide how employers should run their companies and whether they want their workforces in the office or not – that is for companies.’
However, there was confusion, with Mr Johnson’s remarks coming just a day after the Government’s chief scientist Sir Patrick Vallance said there was ‘ absolutely no reason’ to change the advice about working from home.
But last night a No 10 source c o nf i r med t hat Mr J o hnson wanted to ‘send a message’ that his Government were ‘practising what they preached’.
At the end of last week’s Cabinet meeting, the PM told colleagues it would be the last one to be held virtually and it had been ‘too long’ since they had seen each other.
On Tuesday, he will convene both a formal Cabinet meeting as well as a ‘political Cabinet’ where plans to tackle Nicola Sturgeon, and the SNP will be put front and centre of the conversation.
Ministers will be briefed on new polling and strategy amid concerns over a surge in support for Scottish independence and tricky Scottish Parliament elections north of the border next May.
The party’s Scottish director Lord Mark McInnes will present data gathered by new No 10 polling guru James Kanagasooriam, who helped mastermind Scottish Tory success in 2016. Mr Kanagasooriam has been commissioned by the Government to do a huge amount of research about the future of the United Kingdom, as part of an effort to combat aggressive moves by Ms Sturgeon, alongside work on Covid-19. He runs the data operation for political consultancy Hanbury Strategy, which has been awarded contracts understood to be worth up to £1 million for the data research.
In advance of the meeting, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove has accused Scottish nationalists of ‘undermining the co-operation at the heart of our UK’, adding: ‘Rather than standing taller in our family of nations, they’d prefer an expensive divorce.’
Writing in today’s Scottish Mail on Sunday, he adds: ‘The coronavirus crisis requires us all to unite to put the care of the vulnerable and the security of people’s jobs first.
‘I hope wiser heads in the SNP will prevail, dial down the noise on the constitution, set aside this headlong drive for separation and work in the best Scottish, and UK, traditions of solidarity to strengthen both devolution and our economy.’