Policy and Briefing

The appointment of Will Dry as a Special Adviser to the Prime Minister should not surprise anyone. Without any sort of contest, Rishi Sunak was enthroned for a very specific purpose. When "Tories" are said to be angry or worried about any part of that, then they are very few in number, and utterly remote from power.

By contrast, beyond being a Spad, Dry has no specific area of responsibility. On at least £40,500 per annum, this boy of around 22 or 23, who is notable only for his attempts to prevent and reverse Brexit, and who was active in Sunak's Leadership campaign, is just there, in the Policy and Briefing Unit, at the very heart of government.

More broadly, the Prime Minister feels that he needs 28 Special Advisers. Twenty-eight. Few of them seem to have been alive that many years. If there are that many of them, then how Special can the Advice of any one of them possibly be? What in the world is a "Head of Grid, Union and Regional"? One Tim Raggett is listed only as "Video and Photography", which suggests a cameraman, these days presumably by means of a smartphone.

The most that a Spad may be paid is £145,000, and there is no maximum number of them. Even the Leaders of the House of Commons and of the House of Lords currently have one each, and the Chief Whip has two, despite their lack of an policy role. Advising them on what, exactly? 12 of the Prime Minister's are in the Policy and Briefing Unit, and two more are in Legislative Affairs, while his Private Office contains both a Deputy Chief of Staff (Policy) and a Deputy Chief of Staff (Political), two different people each of whom is doubtless getting by on a lot more than Young Master Dry's 40 grand a year.

Still, that does mean at least 14, and arguably 16, people who constitute a kind of think tank or faculty right there in 10 Downing Street. In a variation on the theme of imagining that you were the Prime Minister, imagine that you had those positions in your gift. You could have whoever you wanted. No one who was serious about contributing to public policy could turn you down. Even any loss of income would hardly leave anyone claiming Universal Credit. Whom would you ask? Yet look who gets these things. Look who has been getting them since the Blair years or earlier. And look at the results.

Sunak is doing what he was installed to do, leading Nigel Farage to speculate publicly that he may return to the electoral fray. He ought to be cautious in the extreme. If Jeremy Corbyn had lasted any longer, then he would have been taken out by "a Far Right lone wolf" whom it would have been "an Internet conspiracy theory" to have pointed out was suspiciously well-connected. If Farage looked set to cost the Conservatives any significant number of votes at what was otherwise set to be a very close General Election, then "an Islamist terrorist", or some such, would remove him. He will already know that. Some things are worth the risk, but he is going to have to judge it for himself.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.