Just two months after the election Boris Johnson’s administration is in crisis.
The division within Boris Johnson’s Cabinet was hardly a secret.
But with Sajid Javid’s resignation the chaos of this government is out in the open.
Johnson’s advisor Dominic Cummings has won the battle to take absolute control of the Treasury and has installed his stooge, Rishi Sunak, as the Chancellor.
But Javid’s departure ultimately shows Boris Johnson’s weakness.
Javid has decided the best way he can “level up” is by leaving Johnson’s team.
Johnson is dependent on an unelected advisor, Cummings, with no experience of government.
Today a swathe of Cabinet ministers in key posts like transport and environment have walked away or been sacked.
He cannot even keep onside his Chancellor, meant to be his closest confidante.
We have four weeks until the first Budget of the 2020s.
And now we have as Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who Cummings thinks he can control.
Sunak, like Javid, is a banker who worked for a bank that caused the financial crisis.
With Javid it was Deutsche Bank. With Sunak it’s Goldman Sachs.
Sunak may have experience in investment banking and in a hedge fund but he doesn’t have the experience or the strength of character needed to reverse a decade of decline.
This Government has been speaking about wanting to open “a new chapter”.
The news today shows what this “new chapter” is going to look like.
A bumbling, blustering Prime Minister leading a fumbling, erratic administration.
A Tory leadership struggling to keep control of its own affairs while being too weak to tackle the real challenges like climate change and social care.
While the rest of us feel the pain of ten years of cuts the government is focused on in-fighting.
This is the start of a government falling apart.
