The Lee Cain debacle is a key moment in Boris’s leadership

Lee Cain’s departure raises an important question: what is the point of Boris Johnson’s legion of Spads? The government has never been so stuffed with advisors, and yet it has also rarely been so chaotic. 

We live in an era in which the special advisor has more control over events than ever before; no Spad in Downing Street has ever had the power of Dominic Cummings. The Barnard Castle debacle – which surely would have resulted in the dismissal of anyone else – showed this all too clearly. But this rival power base has hindered, rather than helped, Boris Johnson.

There is, of course, nothing new about the Downing Street advisor. Thatcher had Oliver Letwin and David Willets in her policy unit. Blair had Geoff Mulgan, Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell, all of them brilliant in their own way. The Cameron premiership seems like a halcyon era of special advisor intellectual clout in retrospect; Paul Kirby and James O’Shaughnessy were both impressive and vital to the Cameron project.