What the commentators said
Cummings’s departure marks “the end of a radically successful experiment to turn the Tories into the party of the provincial English working classes”, said James Frayne in The Daily Telegraph. You can walk into a ropey pub in an estate in Derby today and meet people who openly admit to having voted Conservative, but it’s hard to see the Tories retaining such support now that the Government is shifting back to prioritising the so-called softer issues, such as the environment, that preoccupy metropolitan England. The Tories are returning to being “a party of the posh, for the posh”. It doesn’t look like much of a winning strategy, agreed Martin Fletcher in the New Statesman. The new “red wall” Tories don’t necessarily want a more inclusive and liberal Johnson. And many of the traditional One Nation Tories at whom these policies are aimed will never forgive him for Brexit.
The idea that Johnson is turning his back on voters in Northern and Midlands constituencies by promoting a green agenda is both “patronising” and wrong, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. These voters care about the future of the planet too. And green policies are perfectly compatible with the PM’s “levelling-up” agenda. They can spread wealth around the country through “investment in hydrogen production in Teesside or offshore wind farms near Grimsby”.
Replacing “the hyper-belligerent ‘war with everyone on all fronts all the time’ doctrine of the Cummings era” with a more collegiate style should make No. 10 run rather more smoothly, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. But a fundamental problem remains, which is that Johnson is, by nature, undisciplined and indecisive. He is a “procrastinator”, guided by fleeting enthusiasms rather than firm convictions. No change of style or personnel can really fix that. “Left to his own devices,” remarks a senior Tory, “Boris will wander off from decisions and read Pliny or Pericles or eat or shag.” Cummings and Cain became so influential partly because they were among the few people with the ability to wrestle decisions out of the “habitually dithery” PM. The question now is who, if anyone, can fulfil that role in their absence.