Boris needs a minister for banana skins

Every prime minister needs a Willie, said Margaret Thatcher to a soundtrack of great national tittering.

She was of course referring to William Whitelaw, her massively experienced deputy upon whose advice she relied to moderate her zanier impulses and views.

Whitelaw fitted the bill as a non-ideological Conservative who had pledged his loyalty to her and genuinely had no further hankering for the top job himself, having been roundly defeated by Thatcher in the Tory leadership contest of 1975.

Just one of Whitelaw’s responsibilities was to act as ‘minister for banana skins’, using his man-of-the-world and resolutely non-intellectual outlook to spot impending problems and put forward practical solutions before they became full-blown crises.

Just how successful he was is difficult to judge because, let’s face it, history carries no reliable account of banana skins that were avoided, only those that were trodden on. But certainly Whitelaw’s peak years of influence coincided with the heyday of Thatcher. After he resigned following a stroke in late 1987 she seemed less able to navigate choppy water.

Alan Clark’s diaries contain a particularly telling anecdote about how one minister asked the convalescing Whitelaw what he thought of the poll tax (this was ‘early in the parliament and before its full horror was apparent’). Clark recounts his confidant telling him how: ‘The great man stopped in his tracks, and glared. His shoulders heaved, went into rigor, his face became empurpled and sweat poured down his foreheard, cheeks and the end of his nose. He wrestled with some deep impediment of speech; finally burst, spluttering out the single word – TROUBLE.’

The poll tax would seem to me to be a template for the too-clever-by-half political tradition of solving a second order problem (in that case perennial grumbles about the alleged unfairness of domestic rates) by imposing a solution that ushered in a first order problem.

Also read the policy of avoiding grade inflation among A-level students in a year when they were not going to be able to sit their exams by coming up with an ‘a very clever algorithm, minister’ that aimed to predict what they would really have achieved better than their typically over-optimistic teacher assessments.

TROUBLE, the non-intellectual Whitelaw would have said. But there was nobody with clout in Whitehall to sound that alarm and onwards they sailed towards the iceberg.

So Boris Johnson needs a Willie too (a sentence that I grant you makes more sense on the written page than when read aloud). There are numerous recent issues over which the PM would have benefited from the objective advice of an old hand who had not been part of his vanguard.

Resisting masks on public transport for so long when their introduction was inevitable, allowing Public Health England to talk him out of community testing or quarantining arrivals from abroad early in the pandemic, not being ready for the summer migrant crossings in the Channel and the Marcus Rashford school dinners fiasco all come to mind.

Still, the most disturbing footage from Johnson’s premiership is that of the first cabinet meeting after the December election victory when he got his ministers to recite scripted answers to questions about his key pledges in front of the cameras: ‘How many hospitals are we going to build?’ (‘40!’) ‘How many more nurses are we going to hire?’ (‘50,000!’). ‘How are we going to avoid banana skins if I have turned you all into submissive automatons?’ (‘We’re not!’).

OK, I made that last one up, but you get the general idea.

So this is where we are: Dominic Cummings is the reincarnation of Sir Keith Joseph – by turns absolutely brilliant and too clever by half. He is the government’s Mr Yin. The bad news is that there is no Mr Yang.

For a party that has been in government for a full unbroken decade that should be eminently fixable. With a meaningful Brexit now unstoppable, Johnson can afford to search beyond his vanguard and across his parliamentary party for a wise old head upon which to bestow an Indian summer of influence.

There are many very experienced former cabinet ministers from which to choose who are presently being underused on the backbenches. The name I keep coming back to is Damian Green. He’s not really from Johnson’s ‘wing’ – certainly not when it comes to Brexit. He has had his share of personal controversies, it is true, but he has massive experience across multiple Whitehall departments.

It would be a very good idea to appoint a slightly crumpled 64-year-old who understands the Whitehall plumbing and can chair various cabinet committees with a view to picking up the scent of ‘TROUBLE’ before it gushes in like a tidal wave.

It would reduce the chances of the banana skins that litter the pavement ever coming to public prominence. It is time to step around a few, Prime Minister.