Johnson’s Thomas Cromwell takes aim at core UK institutions

Twenty years have passed since Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, first grabbed the CBI by the lapels and pinned Britain’s voice of business to the wall.

Mr Cummings, then working for the Business for Sterling campaign against joining the euro, had just taken part in a fiery radio debate with Colin Perry, a businessman and CBI representative, who accused the then 27-year-old of actually wanting to leave the EU.

After angrily denouncing the “lie” on air, Mr Cummings pursued Mr Perry to some stairs and pushed him from behind. “He then seized me by the collar and tie, slammed me against the wall and raised his fist as if to hit my face,” Mr Perry told the FT.

At the time Mr Cummings said the two men merely “stumbled into each other”. When asked to comment on the altercation on Friday, Mr Cummings declined to comment.

Despite some complaints, he avoided the sack. “I thought that would be the last we would hear of him,” said Mr Perry.

But far from disappearing, Mr Cummings has spent two decades taking on the CBI — and the rest of Britain’s establishment — with ever more potent effect, notably masterminding the campaign for Brexit.

Now at the heart of Boris Johnson’s administration, Mr Cummings and his allies appear to have their sights set on the Britain’s core institutions: Whitehall, the BBC, the judiciary, the military top brass, and even the Westminster lobby, the world’s oldest political journalism club.

And if there is a dry run it is what Mr Cummings described as his “very, very aggressive” campaigns against the CBI, a blue-chip vehicle for business influence he has arguably hobbled more successfully than any individual since its foundation in 1965.

The latest shot in the long war against the CBI came this week when Mr Johnson gave his first post-Brexit speech on trade. The audience was packed with captains of industry but while the lobby group’s president John Allan was invited, it was not in his capacity as head of the CBI but as chairman of supermarket chain Tesco.

During the 2016 EU referendum the CBI was repeatedly name-checked for its stance against Brexit, and its calls for a deal with the EU that would allow many businesses to operate as if the UK were still part of the bloc. After the UK formally left the EU on January 31, Mr Johnson said that people had backed Brexit “despite everything they were told by the CBI and BBC”.

The snub to the CBI this week was characteristic of a move from the Cummings playbook that the Downing Street team appear to be applying with some energy to other centres of power in Britain, most notably the media and in particular the BBC.

In a sign of the unease in some quarters over Mr Cummings’ approach, the “sinister” incident even prompted a caustic editorial from the Daily Mail, a natural conservative ally of Mr Johnson

Since the election Downing Street has banned ministers from appearing on its flagship Radio 4 news show Today. One senior BBC programme editor described Mr Cumming’s boycott “as the tip of the spear for his war with the BBC”.

A second tactic used against the CBI was to sow division and discredit its claim to be representative of the 190,000 companies the lobby group says it speaks for. Under Mr Cummings, Business for Sterling ran a concerted campaign against the trade bodies surveys, insisting CBI “eurodopes” had rigged them to disregard the real views of British business.

Years later in 2015, one of the first stunts orchestrated by Mr Cummings’ Vote Leave campaign involved sneaking two anti-EU students into a CBI conference as businessmen. During the planned speech by David Cameron, then prime minister, they unfurled a banner casting the CBI as the “voice of Brussels”.

Such divide and rule tactics were deployed again this week against Britain’s political journalists. Under instruction from Lee Cain, the prime minister’s spokesperson and a Vote Leave veteran, correspondents waiting in Number 10 for a briefing were separated, with only one side allowed to attend. All the journalists left in protest.

In a sign of the unease in some quarters over Mr Cummings’ approach, the “sinister” incident even prompted a caustic editorial from the Daily Mail, a natural conservative ally of Mr Johnson. “Mr Cummings should be put firmly in his place,” the Daily Mail wrote in a leader column.

A third ploy used against the CBI and other pro-EU bodies was to attack the nature of their funding — a potentially powerful weapon against the licence fee funded BBC in years to come.

Mr Johnson’s team have sought to question a compulsory system that provides the BBC with £3.7bn of its £4.8bn annual budget. This week Nicky Morgan, the culture secretary, put the BBC’s licence fee funding model on notice, saying the government was “open minded” about how it is paid for after its Royal Charter runs out in 2027.

Ministers have also revived the debate about criminal sanctions that underpin its collection of the universal licence fee — the second such consultation in less than five years.

As well as the financial hit that may come from decriminalisation, BBC executives fear the exercise is a way to erode trust in a broadcaster Mr Johnson has dubbed “the Brexit Bashing Corporation”.

Mr Cummings’ iconoclastic aims, central control and rumoured “network of spies” scattered around Westminster restaurants have prompted comparisons with Thomas Cromwell, an all-powerful adviser to Henry VIII who helped him break from Rome but eventually lost his head.

“My main advice to public servants, whether political or official, is to avoid self promotion and believing your own myth,” tweeted Nick Macpherson, the former head of the Treasury. “Otherwise, it tends to end badly. #thomascromwell.”