All is rosy in the Downing Street garden

After Dominic Cummings’s explosive testimony on Wednesday, you might have thought special advisers in Downing Street would be spending the evening busily preparing their lines of rebuttal. Far from it.

Mandarins, spads and operatives piled into the Downing Street garden for a belated farewell drinks for James Slack, the longtime No. 10 director of communications, whose departure Steerpike first revealed in March.

The booze up came exactly a year and a day after Cummings appeared in the same rose garden to explain his Barnard Castle debacle – an irony that was not lost on some of those in attendance.

Mr S understands the occasion was an amicable one, with the highlight being Boris Johnson’s gift of a signed copy of the Brexit deal. Certainly Slack’s own withdrawal agreement came at the right time, given the briefing wars of the past month.

Let’s hope they all stuck to the current maximum of 30 people outside…