Oh dear. Guto Harri’s first week as Boris Johnson’s new press chief hasn’t got off to a great start. First, he took a pop on Twitter at Dominic Cummings. Then he gave an interview in which he offered faint praise to his boss – declaring him not to be a ‘complete clown’. Next he rocked up Downing Street wielding a Tesco shopping bag like a samurai sword, bantering with reporters in a somewhat awkward exchange.
And now, he appears to have indulged in another social media slip-up. For Harri this evening has retweeted his onetime fellow lobbyist Gavin Devine, after the latter attacked Tory critics of John Major. The former Prime Minister launched an excoriating attack on his successor today, claiming that Boris Johnson had ‘shredded’ the UK’s international reputation; comments which naturally did go down well with the current PM’s supporters within the party. Devine claimed that:
Johnson acolytes out in force dismissing what John Major has said because of who he is without even vaguely trying to pretend that anything he said is untrue. That’s the state of where we are now.
Harri’s apparent support for this statement is therefore somewhat bizarre. It’s a curious approach to amplify your boss’s critics but who knows: maybe such blue-skies thinking is just what No. 10 needs after two years of ‘hard rain’? Harri has of course previously suggested that Johnson’s Downing Street operation was too tribal: perhaps this is how he intends to bridge the great Tory divide.
Mr S just wonders whether Harri ever recalls David Cameron’s dictum about the dangers of tweeting too much…
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