Boris’s marks out of ten for Ministers before Valentine’s Day Cabinet purge

Showboaters put on PM’s hit list... and aides throw a tantrum over leaks crackdown

BORIS JOHNSON will give his Cabinet Ministers ‘marks out of ten’ for their performance over the next month as he decides who to fire in a reshufffle – with those who showboat on TV top of his hit list.

The move is part of plans to re-energise his Government following criticism of his failure to set out a blueprint for power and accusations that he is dithering over big decisions.

And he has told No10 officials to scale back his foreign travel plans so he can ‘personally drive delivery’ of his Election manifesto promises, which he will set out after Brexit Day on January 31.

It comes after Mr Johnson faced censure for failing to break his Caribbean holiday to deal with the Iran crisis and for being slow to make decisions on major issues such as the future of the HS2 line and whether Chinese telecoms company Huawei should be allowed to build the UK’s 5G network.

One Minister has privately likened Mr Johnson to Labour’s Gordon Brown, on the grounds that ‘both spent their entire careers hungering for power, but didn’t know what to do with it when they got it’.

But the drive to crank up No10’s operation led to a week of tears and tantrums in Whitehall as Downing Street moved to clamp down on leaks. Ministerial advisers suspected of passing information to the media were called in to No10 and told that they were ‘being watched’ – one was said to have ‘looked tearful’ when told they were on a ‘final warning’.

After details appeared in newspapers of Mr Johnson’s announcement to Cabinet last week that he wanted to restore the Conservatives’ reputation as the party of law and order by setting up a crossWhitehall taskforce, enraged No10 officials wrote formally to Ministers’ private offices to warn them that they faced being interviewed over the leak.

And after a story appeared about multi-millionaire Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick being at loggerheads with his blue-collar deputy Esther McVey over which voters should be helped on to the housing ladder, the adviser blamed for the story was ordered to apologise to Mr Jenrick in person.

Mr Johnson’s team are also planning to restructure the system of advisers to give them more control over media briefings – inviting comparisons with the draconian news management methods introduced by Tony Blair’s administration, under the aegis of Alastair Campbell, after he won a landslide victory in the 1997 Election.

The Prime Minister is preparing to make a major set-piece speech in early February to set out his plans for life after Brexit.

He will then reshuffle his Cabinet – the most likely dates being either February 7 or 14, Valentine’s Day – having assessed which members of his top team would be able to address the PM’s policy priorities, such as health, law and order and ‘levelling up’ prosperity and opportunity across the country.

A No10 source said that the Ministers would get ‘effectively marks out of ten’ based on their ‘ability to deliver the PM’s agenda’ – and would lose marks if they were perceived to be more concerned with building up their own ‘personal brand’ by making appearances in broadcast studios.

The source said: ‘The post-Brexit reshuffle will focus on rewarding competence. Delivery will be shown to matter more than profile raising.’ The remarks show that Mr Johnson is keen to end the cult of ‘celebrity politicians’ such as Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg. He was a familiar fixture in the TV studios and on radio phone-ins until his remark, early in the Election campaign, which appeared to blame victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster for obeying the instructions of the fire services not to leave the building. Mr Rees-Mogg has since vanished from sight and is tipped to be moved in the reshuffle.

Mr Johnson is understood to have cooled on the idea of a ‘Valentines Day massacre’ of Ministers and radical reorganisation of Whitehall – as advocated by his adviser Dominic Cummings – on the grounds that it could be too destabilising.

As part of the new drive, Munira Mirza, head of the No 10 policy unit, is writing to each Secretary of State to outline the key policy priorities they are expected to deliver – and the criteria they will be judged by. A No10 source said: ‘The Prime Minister has been clear that this Government will reward competence and hard work.

‘We’ve been impressed by Cabinet members and junior Ministers who have quietly got on with driving real change within their departments and delivering on the PM’s priority to level up our country.’