ConservativeHome's Profiles

Andrew Gimson profiles Jo Johnson, Boris's younger brother and a key figure in Tory policymaking

By Andrew Gimson 
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Jo Johnson is an extraordinary politician. Except to the local press in his constituency of Orpington, in south-east London, he has never given an interview. Nor has he revealed himself in promiscuous detail even to the Orpington News.

In May this year, when Johnson was made head of the Downing Street policy unit, he assured the local press that he would be Orpington’s “eyes and ears” in Number Ten. The phrase was characteristic: he presented himself as someone who would be there on other people’s behalf.

Silence, it has been said, is the wisdom of fools. But Johnson is not a fool. A colleague who reports on banking used to text him for quotes. During his first two years in the Commons, from 2010-12, Johnson was a member of the Public Accounts Committee, and before that he edited the Lex column on the Financial Times, a job once done by Nigel Lawson. Johnson provided good answers to the colleague’s questions, along with the request, “don’t quote me”.

Karen Bradley and Nicky Morgan: Two whips who will help define Cameron's next reshuffle

By Andrew Gimson 
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Reshuffle speculation is almost always wrong. But one can already see with some clarity two of the tests by which David Cameron’s next rearrangement of his team will be judged. Oceans of ink will be devoted to the essentially tiresome question of how many women he has promoted, while more subtle observers will wish to see whether the Whips’ Office has regained its traditional role as a training ground for ministerial office.

It happens that two junior whips, Nicky Morgan and Karen Bradley, are among the women tipped for promotion. So watching what, if anything, happens to them, will be one way of gauging the character of the reshuffle.But before the two women, a word about the two tests. In April 2009, Mr Cameron allowed himself to say, with the expansiveness that comes so easily to a Leader of the Opposition: “If elected, by the end of our first Parliament I want a third of all my ministers to be female.” The time has surely come to announce that he has ditched this aspiration, and not just because of his unselfconsciously arrogant use of the word “my” to refer to what are actually the Queen’s ministers.

Andrew Gimson profiles Danny Alexander, the Coalition pillar who might yet succeed Nick Clegg

 

By Andrew Gimson 
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Danny Alexander has the gift of seeming entirely unthreatening. In the summer of 2010, when at the age of 38 he unexpectedly became Chief Secretary to the Treasury, it appeared he might also turn out to be entirely ineffectual.

His predecessor, David Laws, had the air of a brilliant young surgeon who was looking forward to making the deep cuts in public spending which were needed to save us from collapse. Mr Laws knew precisely how he was going to conduct the operation, but no sooner had he made the first stylish incisions with his scalpel than he was forced by a scandal to do with his own expenses to resign.

Mr Alexander was the emergency replacement. It was not clear he had ever held a scalpel, or knew anything about money. For while Mr Laws was a former investment banker, Mr Alexander was a former Head of Communications for the Cairngorms National Park Authority.

A model professional in No.10 – Andrew Gimson profiles Samantha Cameron

By Andrew Gimson
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Samantha Cameron is at first sight a difficult woman to profile. She has achieved what Andy Coulson, her husband’s former director of communications, calls the “near impossible” task of living in Number Ten for nearly three years while maintaining “a benign and broadly positive press”.

A Conservative peer observes how successfully Mrs Cameron plays what used to be a rather old-fashioned role:

“Samantha Cameron is the perfect modern Tory wife. Just think of the contrast between her and Lady Dorothy Macmillan. She has never been seen in a hat. She understands broken marriages—remaining in close, affectionate accord with both her father and step-father—while enjoying blissful happiness in her own marriage. She balances effortlessly all the competing calls on a modern Tory wife’s time which include substantial business interests of her own without the fuss that so many of her contemporaries make. She has tremendous classless style. While her husband endures brickbats she commands universal admiration and affection.”

Mrs Cameron is visible, but not too visible. She looks pleased to meet people, but not too pleased; self-possessed, without seeming too self-possessed; stylish, without being outré. One never gets the sense that she is determined to hog the limelight, or to throw her weight around. She manages to be open, yet unrevealing.

Which is why writing about her is an awkward task. She has perfected the art of being, in her public appearances, neither dull nor interesting. Her recent visit as an ambassador for Save the Children to Syrian refugees in Lebanon was covered by the release of a video, just over a minute long, in which she was seen talking to people and recounting a meeting with one of them: “It’s so shocking it’s difficult to take in. Her three-year-old son was shot by a sniper at a checkpoint, a sniper aiming at a car full of seven children, I mean it’s just, you know you just can’t imagine why that should happen.”