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The most powerful couple in Downing Street
Gordon Rayner on Boris’s mysterious muses
By any stretch of the imagination, Munira Mirza and Dougie Smith make a curious couple. One is the straight-laced, brainiac daughter of British-pakistani parents who found her first political home in communism. The other is a Right-wing university dropout who plays poker with millionaires and ran ‘five-star’ sex parties for swingers.
Yet the two are devoted to each other and, after Boris and Carrie Johnson, they also happen to be the most powerful husband and wife in British politics.
If you’ve never heard of them (and you certainly won’t be alone) that’s because, unlike the Johnsons, they have never sought fame or public recognition, and actively try to avoid it. But you can guarantee that Mirza and Smith have affected how you are living your life right now.
Mirza, Boris Johnson’s policy chief and, some would say, his political muse, co-wrote the Conservative Party manifesto that delivered a landslide win for Johnson (also killing the Corbynite dream of a socialist Britain) and shapes the Government decisions that dictate everything from your liberties to your taxes.
Smith’s precise job is a mystery even to Cabinet ministers, but if you have a Tory MP, the chances are that the Scotsman will have had a say in putting them there, and when they make a mistake – such as being exposed in The Daily Telegraph’s MPS’ expenses investigation – it is Smith who will be called in to save their skin.
‘They are the most influential people you’ve never heard of,’ said one Whitehall insider. ‘They’re both in the room when a lot of key decisions are made.
‘The Prime Minister trusts them both and each is pretty much indispensable in their own way. It’s hard to imagine a No 10 without them.’
Johnson publicly anointed Mirza when he told a magazine last year that she was one of the five women who have influenced and inspired him the most, in a list that also included his grandmother and Boadicea. He described Mirza as ‘hip, cool, groovy and generally on-trend’.
When he needed a strategy to respond to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, it was to Mirza that he turned, putting her in charge of creating the new raceinequality commission.
Smith, though, operates entirely in the shadows, to the extent that ‘it’s almost a myth that he even exists’, according to one backbench MP. Only one photograph of him exists online. His value as a fixer is undeniable, however; David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all employed him, and there are plenty of party insiders who say Smith was more instrumental in the 2019 election win than Dominic Cummings (who proved, in contrast to Smith, dispensable).
As one Tory MP put it: ‘Every time there is a change of leader they go through the CCHQ [Conservative Campaign Headquarters] finances and ask why we are paying this person so much money when no one really understands what he does. After a couple of weeks those questions are no longer asked.’
What, then, does Smith do exactly? Ask anyone in Government, up to and including Cabinet ministers, what his job title is, and you will get a variation on, ‘No one knows,’ ‘Not sure,’ or, ‘I’ve never dared ask.’ Few even know whether he is officially based in No 10 or CCHQ, though he flits between the two at will.
‘The Prime Minister trusts them both and each is pretty much indispensable’
Sources say Smith has the air of a man who might at any moment headbutt you
What they do agree on is that almost no one gets selected as a Tory candidate, or gets a Government job, without Smith’s say-so. He will vet candidates for elections, using intelligence gathered over decades and an unrivalled knowledge of local Tory associations to root out any bad apples, and will do the same for ministers, bag-carriers and even non-elected special advisers.
As one former ministerial adviser said: ‘If you want a senior job in Government the first question is, “Is Dougie happy with you?” because if you don’t have his support you can forget it.’
He is also the party’s number-one troubleshooter. During the 2009 MPS’ expenses scandal, Smith was instrumental in deciding which MPS had gone beyond the pale, and how much they should repay. More recently, he is understood to have been deployed during the row over the Downing Street refurbishment, aka ‘wallpapergate’.
He has been likened to The Wolf in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a gangland fixer who is called upon to make problems go away. Disobeying Smith is seen as career suicide, but unlike Harvey Keitel’s Wolf, who uses his calm authority to ensure compliance, Smith uses another tactic: fear.
‘Dougie is menacing, there’s no two ways about it,’ said one MP. ‘His Scottish accent is part of it, and he is the sort of person who will say something slightly menacing and then smile.’
Others say he has the air of a man who might at any moment headbutt you, an opinion that might be coloured by his past exploits, which have included spending a night in a police cell after allegedly threatening to kill a fellow member of a Conservative youth group. All of which Smith refuses to comment on but appears happy to cultivate.
So how did Smith rise to his position as a modern-day Machiavelli, how did he and Mirza end up together, and how have they both avoided falling victim to the Downing Street churn that has spat Cummings and countless others out of the front door?
For Smith, the story began in the suburbs of Edinburgh, where his father Malcolm
(and Smith’s grandfather before him) ran a family business making life jackets and other maritime equipment. One of the many mysteries about Smith is his age; he never reveals it to colleagues, none of whom are sure of how old he is, but Scottish birth records show he will be 60 next May.
His education is also something of an enigma. He was privately educated, but while it has been reported in the past that he is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, the truth is that he studied at the University of Strathclyde but dropped out before his final year. Student politics, not academia, proved to be his passion.
Given his family’s background in business, it was unsurprising that he gravitated towards the Conservative Party, joining as a teenager and being elected vice-chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) in 1985, only for his election to be declared null and void by what is now CCHQ (his future employer) when it turned out he had wrongly claimed to be a student at Napier Technical College in Edinburgh.
It was around this time that he was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill FCS member Toby Baxendale, purportedly in a row over a girl. He was released after a night in the cells.
The highly factionalised FCS was increasingly being seen as a problem by Tory high command, wanting to push Thatcherism to unacceptable extremes, and Smith was one of the leading members of the libertarian faction, along with future Speaker John Bercow and future Downing Street communications director Sir Robbie Gibb. In the end, the FCS was disbanded in 1986 by the then party chairman Norman Tebbit, who decided it was too Right-wing even for him.
Nevertheless, Smith’s student activism had been fruitful in making contacts in the party, which were to prove useful for decades to come. He began his career at the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute, but his great driving force was Euroscepticism. He worked for the Committee for a Free Britain and Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, which pressed for a public vote on membership of the EU.
Smith got to know Goldsmith’s sons Zac (now Lord Goldsmith, an environment minister) and Ben (now an environmentalist and non-executive director at Defra), both of whom are now also close friends of fellow environmental campaigner Carrie Johnson, who worked with Smith at CCHQ when she was the Conservative Party’s communications chief. Smith also became part of the so-called Aspinalls poker set, visiting the private gambling club in Mayfair to play cards with the wealthy and influential. In another neat coincidence, the club’s founder, John Aspinall, also set up The Aspinall Foundation, the animalconservation charity that today employs Carrie Johnson (both
Ben and Zac Goldsmith have served as trustees).
By 2003, Smith was working as the coordinator of Conservatives for Change (C-change), a campaign group founded by Francis Maude which included Theresa May among its board members. Then in his 40s, he had often been called on by
Tory MPS to write their speeches. He also had another sideline. In keeping with his family’s entrepreneurial spirit
– and his own ultra-libertarian values – he had set up his own business, but it was sex parties, rather than life jackets, that he was selling to wealthy customers. Each of the under-40 couples and single women who attended were carefully vetted in a seedier precursor of his role weeding out unsuitable candidates for a rather different kind of party.
Fever Parties advertised exclusive orgies for swingers in upmarket London locations, and Smith unashamedly told his boss, Maude, that he himself was a swinger. He insisted at the time – after a newspaper got hold of the story – that his two roles did not ‘overlap’. Maude kept an open mind, and kept him on.
Smith was so unapologetic about his swinging that he told one newspaper at the time that his main motivation in setting up the business was his own pleasure, saying, ‘It’s more action than any man could dream of,’ and describing his clients as ‘the SAS of sex’. As fate would have it, his swinging days would soon come to an abrupt end, not because of scandal, but because he was falling in love.
Working in the same building as him in Storey’s Gate, 250 yards from Parliament, a few years later was Munira Mirza, development director of another modernising Tory body, Policy Exchange, founded by supporters of Michael
Portillo after he was beaten in the 2001 Tory leadership contest by Iain Duncan Smith.
Mirza was 16 years younger than Smith (she is now 43) and could not have followed a more different route to her career as a
Tory policy wonk. She was born in Oldham, the youngest of four children. Her father Saifuiddin was a machine tool operator at a car-parts factory, while her mother Zehra worked part-time as an Urdu teacher. Both had emigrated from Pakistan and were practising Muslims.
She experienced, and confronted, racism as a child and was a diligent student, excelling at her local comprehensive school, Breeze Hill, and at Oldham Sixth Form College. She went on to study English at Oxford, where she graduated with a first-class degree in 1999.
From there she went to the University of Kent to take a doctorate in sociology, where she was taught by the Hungarian-canadian professor Frank Furedi, founder of the by then disbanded Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP was notorious for having stated after the March 1993 Warrington bombing by the IRA – which killed two children – that it defended ‘the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures necessary in their struggle for freedom’, but Mirza had been attracted to it at Oxford nonetheless, later saying she was sympathetic to the ‘liberal-libertarian instincts’ of its former members, and contributed to its magazine, Living Marxism.
She spent her spare time visiting museums, and had spells working at Tate and the Royal Society for Arts, before landing the job with Policy Exchange. The closest she has come to an explanation of her rapid conversion from communism to small-c conservatism is that she is attracted to ideas, not parties.
She has insisted in the past that she is ‘not party-political’ and as recently as December 2018, months before entering Downing Street, told a podcast: ‘I call myself Left-wing but I find my arguments with people tend to be stronger with people on the Left.’ In the same interview she described herself as ‘a liberal’.
Friends say that Smith quickly became smitten with Mirza when they met, and in 2008 they married. A son, Robbie, followed in 2013.
In 2008 Mirza also took up a new job as cultural adviser to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Later, in 2012, she was appointed deputy mayor for education and culture. She said she loved working for Johnson because he was ‘always fizzing with good ideas’.
Johnson values Mirza because she is ‘a powerful nonsense detector’
For his part, Johnson has said he values Mirza because she is ‘a powerful nonsense detector’. Johnson would no doubt accept that some of the nonsense she has detected was coming from his own hyperactive brain.
One former colleague said: ‘People sometimes say Munira isn’t imaginative enough, but she’s exactly the right person for Boris because she is sensible and logical and can rein him in, telling him if something is a mad idea or a good one.’
She also shares Johnson’s love of classics, and sums up her open-minded political philosophy by quoting the Roman playwright Terence: ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’
Unbothered by her party politics (or lack of them), Johnson hired Mirza as director of the No 10 policy unit as soon as he became Prime Minister. Her husband was already part of the furniture around Downing Street.
When David Cameron became Tory party leader in 2005, Smith offered his skills as a speechwriter and earned both Cameron’s respect and his patronage. When Cameron was replaced by Theresa May in 2016, he attached himself to Michael Gove, acting as Gove’s go-between with No 10. May, of course, knew him from his days at C-change.
His key contact in Downing Street was his old Federation of Conservative Students colleague Robbie Gibb, May’s head of communications.
One colleague said: ‘Gove and Gibb both trusted him and Dominic Cummings trusted him. He was seen as pragmatic. He would approach things as, “What’s the best we can get May to do through Robbie?” rather than just wanting to get rid of May, like some other people did.’
When Johnson became Prime Minister in 2019 it was Smith who was given the job of vetting candidates for the general election that followed months later. As a veteran campaigner for what had become Brexit, he was the perfect person to select candidates who were in a suitable place on Europe. As ever, he made sure that he was the right man, in the right place, at the right time.
‘Dougie is a bit of a shapeshifter,’ said one former Cabinet minister. ‘He was properly Right-wing in the old days, like Bercow once was, and I found it very odd when he popped up in the Cameron court, but he knows how to adapt and make himself useful to whoever is in charge.’
While Mirza and Smith constantly bump into each other at work, they are so strict about keeping their home life and their professional life separate that many Downing Street staff take weeks to cotton on to the fact that they are married. There are stories of senior staff quietly confiding in Dougie that they have a problem with Munira, or vice versa, not realising until it’s too late that their confidant is the spouse of their victim.
‘They are not in each other’s pockets at all,’ said one source. ‘They would never sit next to each other at meetings or arrive together or anything like that. You never see them chatting in the corridor about domestic stuff.’
Nor do they look like a couple. While Mirza dresses in sober, smart business attire, usually black trouser suits, Smith is a scruffy presence in short-sleeved shirts, caring little about his appearance.
They have learnt that the key to survival is to avoid office politics, refusing to be sucked into any particular faction. When Dominic Cummings and his sidekick Lee Cain were ousted last year in a power struggle with Carrie Johnson and the then No 10 press secretary Allegra Stratton,
allies of the two women told journalists that Mirza was part of the ‘sisterhood’ that wanted rid of Cummings and Cain. Mirza, though, quietly briefed lobby reporters that she was not taking sides, ensuring that she would not go down with whoever lost the fight.
She has also learnt a little of the darker arts of politics from her husband. Colleagues say that when she has a policy she is keen to push on to the agenda, she will arrange for her team to write opinion pieces for newspapers, which are then fed to friendly and influential MPS to pass off as their own work. This ‘kite-flying’, to test the public response to ideas, would be done behind the back of the No 10 communications team down the corridor.
She does, however, have weaknesses.
‘Munira wrote a brilliant, election-winning manifesto but she struggles when it comes to running a team,’ said one ally. ‘During the election a lot of people would be saying, “Where the f—k is the policy on this?”’
It has led to tension with Dan Rosenfield, the No 10 chief of staff. He has tried to remove Mirza from meetings but, said one Downing Street insider, ‘Dougie went nuts and had a stand-up row with him. So although the policy team isn’t very good, no one will interfere with it because they are scared of Dougie.’
In March 2020 it was revealed that, according to internal documents, Smith’s role had been elevated when he was given a desk in the Downing Street political office, though he does not appear on the Government’s published list of special advisers. As ever, it is as though he does not exist.
One former Downing Street staffer said of Smith, ‘He seems to be able to attend any meeting he chooses to.
‘He is present at the daily 9am meetings, when there are maybe 15 people in the room, then that meeting goes down to a smaller circle and Dougie would stay on if the agenda involved MPS with personal issues.’
Far from just vetting people, the source added, ‘Dougie is a temperature check for the party. He knows what the members are thinking and he knows what the voters are thinking. He will know how various scenarios will play out, but he isn’t just a talker, he also makes sure those things happen.’
Like his wife, the Prime Minister is also inclined to use Smith as a ‘sounding board’ at times, ‘because he knows that nothing
Smith is a ‘shapeshifter’. He ‘knows how to adapt and make himself useful’
ever leaks from their discussions’, according to insiders.
During the pandemic, when the now departed Cummings was the dominant adviser in No 10, Johnson would often run decisions past Mirza as well to get the view of someone who was not bogged down by the day-to-day minutiae.
But it is the issue of race that is likely to define her time in Downing Street.
For much of her career, Mirza has been engaged with what we now describe as culture wars, and it is her own personal war on woke that has come closest to registering her name in the nation’s consciousness.
It was Mirza who defended Johnson over his comparison in a Daily Telegraph column of burka-wearing Muslim women to ‘letter boxes’: she described the reaction as ‘hysteria’ and pointed out that he had defended the right to wear the burka in the same article.
When she was asked by the Prime Minister to set up the new Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities a year ago, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, much was made in the Left-wing press of her previous comments about a ‘culture of grievance’ among anti-racism campaigners, and her denial of institutional racism. This prompted BLM activists to chant ‘Munira Mirza must go’ on the streets of London in June last year.
Johnson, however, was adamant that she was the right person to bring perspective to the race issue – to acknowledge problems that still exist, but also to emphasise the progress that has been made in recent decades and to shame those who believe they are justified in vandalising statues of Churchill by describing him as a ‘racist’.
When the resulting Sewell report was published in March, it was derided by anti-racism campaigners as a whitewash, but Mirza stood firm, and urged the Prime Minister to embrace the culture wars as a fight she remains convinced the Tories can win.
Her childhood experiences of racism – and her personal triumph over it – contributed to a belief that multiculturalism stokes divides. Shortly before she made the move to Downing Street, she argued that multiculturalism, which was ‘meant to be about equity and fairness and liberating people from oppression’, had instead become ‘a rigid and oppressive ideology… which has tended to box people into categories… [and] is holding people back’.
Speaking calmly in her soft northern accent, she also contended that there was an ‘almost corrupt tendency among some people to see a system in a negative light because it gives them something to have a grievance about. There is a currency to victim culture…’
Her argument is that while racism does exist, it is hugely exaggerated and there are far more complex societal and cultural reasons behind the fact that not every profession has exactly 13.8 per cent of employees from ethnic-minority backgrounds, reflecting society as a whole. Some wellpaid jobs, she points out, such as NHS doctors, have a disproportionately high percentage of black and Asian representation, and she argues that highlighting the negatives can simply reinforce for younger people the idea that they can’t succeed because ‘they’ve always got a white racist decision maker who’s holding them back’.
Mirza’s views are vital to the wider party, not only because of her influence on the Prime Minister but also because her ethnicity and background give white male Conservatives the confidence to advance the same arguments.
For Mirza, the culture wars are a philosophical issue, but for Smith they are a question of strategy. He believes every statue that is toppled is a vote-winner for the Tories, especially in the former red wall seats where the idea of erasing emblems of Britain’s history because of modern-day shame at the values of the past is a baffling concept to most.
‘Dougie regards woke as a Left-wing power play masquerading as compassion,’ said one Tory MP.
Yet not everyone in Downing Street agrees, and for a couple who have studiously avoided office politics, there is perhaps a whiff of danger about their antiwoke crusade.
Carrie Johnson believes the couple have been too aggressive on culture wars
Carrie Johnson and Henry Newman, the increasingly influential adviser brought in from the Cabinet Office, are among those who believe Mirza and Smith have been too aggressive on the culture wars, which backfired during Euro 2020 when Conservative MPS, most notably Home Secretary Priti Patel, suggested taking the knee was a fairly meaningless gesture and fans had every right to boo the England team when they did it.
National pride inspired by the team’s historic run to the final forced something of a retreat from the Government, and at a recent Cabinet meeting Johnson warned ministers to be careful with their choice of language on the anti-woke agenda as polling has suggested it is hurting the party in the south-east.
One source said: ‘There is a bit of a divide opening up between Munira/ Dougie and Carrie/henry. There’s no hostility, but in terms of conflicting advice and strategies on culture wars they are on opposite sides. Munira and Dougie want to step it up but Carrie and Henry are incredibly liberal.’
Others put it more strongly, saying that there have been ‘clashes’ between the two sides, and that the Prime Minister has become ‘frustrated’ with the policy team and believes they ‘focus way too much on woke stuff ’.
But as head of the No 10 policy unit Mirza’s brief extends far beyond culture wars, and as the country emerges from the pandemic, which has obliterated ‘normal’ politics for the past year and a half, her influence, and that of her husband, will only increase.