It would be extraordinary if a row about a pair of trousers had continued into a second week – if the row were just about a pair of trousers. As I wrote last week (when I thought the fight over Nicky Morgan’s comments about Theresa May owning a pair of £995 leather trousers was starting to fade), it was a curious intervention for a female politician to make about one of her sisters, especially when Morgan is an MP on a salary three times the national average anyway.
But what this row is really about, as well as an ill-judged act of personal revenge from Morgan for being dispatched from the Cabinet by May, is about the way Number 10 and the Conservative Party is now being run. Morgan is a well-known Cameroon, someone who was very comfortable with the previous Prime Minister’s political instincts and priorities. Theresa May made it quite clear when she took over that her political instincts and priorities were different. So Morgan was trying to undermine the authenticity and sincerity of May’s aim to run a government for those people who are just managing.
On top of this, Theresa May’s advisers are well-known to be fiercely protective of their boss. Morgan can’t have paid much attention to the way Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy worked in the Home Office if she was surprised by any of the angry texts between her and Hill, and from Hill to other colleagues that the Mail on Sunday revealed. The Home Office under May was a ministry where control was essential to stop utter chaos, either in the department or its vast agencies, and where ministers who were deemed in some way unhelpful, whether they be the obviously unhelpful Norman Baker, or just slightly less competent Tory colleagues, were shut out of meetings and decisions. Hill’s line to Alistair Burt, ‘don’t bring that woman to No. 10 again’, is hardly surprising in that context: many Home Office ministers, including those who continued to admire May, were aware that their attendance at or indeed awareness of a meeting was not guaranteed.
The question is whether this approach from Hill and Timothy which gave May a relatively untroubled tenure as Home Secretary can really be sustained in Number 10. Ministers are grumpy at the paranoia over leaks, political editors are grumpy at the lack of information from the centre, and sacked backbenchers are annoyed that they’re not welcome at meetings. But these are grumbles, not signs of a system going wrong. The first big test will not be over someone making an ill-judged attack on the Prime Minister’s trousers, but a policy that goes wrong, a Government defeat – or perhaps an ongoing row with the Foreign Secretary about his views on his job.
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