Today at the Covid Inquiry we saw Hugo Keith KC as relationship counsellor. The relationship about which he wished to counsel was that between Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson.
As so often, the relationship ended in tears, with Sunak getting his hands not just on Johnson’s title, Prime Minister, but on the sought-after town house at 10 Downing Street in which Johnson used night after night to throw his famous parties (though he himself insists these bacchanalia were nothing like as frequent or debauched as media reports have suggested).
Sunak admitted he and Johnson had once been close: “I saw the Prime Minister probably more than I saw my own wife in this period.”
In February 2020, when Johnson at what turned out to be the start of the pandemic crisis promoted Sunak to the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, they became neighbours: “I didn’t know the Prime Minister particularly well – obviously that relationship grew over time, both of us living in the same building, we might be sitting in the garden together at the weekend.”
By Sunak’s account this was “the practical reality of being neighbours and sharing a garden”. As he remarked a few minutes later, “you share a garden, you live together”.
Some of us reflected that it had been generous, possibly too generous, of Johnson to share his garden with Sunak. In 1902, when Arthur Balfour became Prime Minister, he was warned by Lord Rosebery, who had served as Prime Minister some years earlier: “Never forget, Arthur, the garden belongs to Number 10, and has nothing to do with Number 11.”
But here was Johnson generously sharing the garden with Sunak, little realising his job and his house would all too soon be captured by Sunak too.
Relationship counsellors seek to locate the source of later troubles in some childhood trauma about which the client is induced, during innumerable sessions and at vast expense, to open up.
The Covid Inquiry is duly holding innumerable sessions at vast expense, but Sunak was only there for a day, though it is possible he will be recalled later.
Keith sought therefore to shorten the therapeutic process. He suggested Sunak, during a political childhood spent as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had felt shut out by Johnson.
Sunak flatly rejected this: “I didn’t feel I’d been shut out.”
As so often happens when painful events in the past are dug up for therapeutic purposes, the patient was in denial. He claimed there had been no trouble between himself and Johnson.
Keith suggested Sunak had considered it “important not to leave a paper trail”. Again, Sunak denied this.
He had already admitted that during this period he changed his mobile phone “multiple times”, but insisted this did not mean the loss of valuable evidence, as “I’m not a prolific user of WhatsApp”.
In Sunak’s view, the Prime Minister had an “incredibly difficult task” during the pandemic, for he was “the ultimate sole decision maker”.
Here perhaps is the necessary foundation for later charges to be made against Johnson, but Sunak refused to go there.
When Keith put it to him that “until decisions were actually announced there was a risk they might not be adhered to”, i.e. that Johnson was unreliable, Sunak parried this by declaring that “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing” for decisions to be changed, for example in the light of new information.
Fascinating though the eventual breakdown of relations between Sunak and Johnson is, some of us could not help wondering, as these exchanges continued, whether a more immediate concern might be relations between Sunak and Keith.
Both men were educated at Winchester College, both live up to its motto, Manners makyth man, and both demonstrated a marvellous command of detail.
But only one of them could win this encounter, and each bent every sinew to be that victor. Often their hands betrayed them, fingers writhing and gripping, searching for some tiny hold which might deliver a decisive advantage.
After a time, they seemed to forget the presence of spectators who were not Wykehamists. Perhaps that is why the products of this great and ancient school so seldom become Prime Minister.
Sunak is only the second Wykehamist, after Henry Addington, Prime Minister from 1801-04, to reach the top of the greasy poll, and Addington was found deficient compared to his great predecessor, William Pitt, who also succeeded him.
It’s tough at the top. There are white hairs on Sunak’s temples which were not there when he became Prime Minister in October last year.
He referred in his evidence to fears in the Treasury at the start of the pandemic that “the gilts market might collapse”, and “the extreme stress we were operating under”.
That was part of the point of a traditional English education: to get its products used to operating under extreme stress, with the questions in the scholarship papers getting harder and harder, in order to reveal the most brilliant candidates.
Few modern-day ministers could have given answers as lucid, astute and well-informed as those supplied by Sunak today, but at times one felt one was watching a gifted administrator, not a politician.