Sajid Javid told Boris Johnson he was Dominic Cummings’ ‘puppet’
Sajid Javid told Boris Johnson he was a “puppet” of Dominic Cummings before he resigned as chancellor rather than accept a Cummings-led takeover of his Treasury, he has said in an interview about his experiences as a minister.Speaking to the Institute for Government (IfG), Javid also said that his other departure from Johnson’s government, shortly before it collapsed in 2022, was because he had lost confidence in the prime minister after being assured that allegations about lockdown-breaking parties in No 10 were “bullshit”.Asked to assess the three prime ministers he served under, Javid, who ran six different government departments in eight years, described Johnson as “the least well briefed”, compared with David Cameron and Theresa May.In his first resignation under Johnson, in February 2020, Javid quit after being told by Johnson that he would have to fire his team of Treasury special advisers, known as spads, and work with new advisers selected by Cummings, Johnson’s chief adviser.“I found that unacceptable – both firing my spads and then also how they would be replaced, because I thought I’d just be chancellor in name anyway,” Javid told the IfG as part of their ongoing series of discussions with former ministers.
“I just thought, I’m not going to be chancellor in name only,I’m not going to be a puppet,” Javid continued,“I did say to the prime minister at the time, ‘You realise you’re the actual puppet here, right? Dominic Cummings is running rings around you, and you can’t even see it,’ At the time, he couldn’t see it,He denied it and said ‘That’s not the case.
You don’t understand him,You’ve got him wrong,You guys should become friends and this and that’,”Javid returned as health secretary in 2021 after the resignation of Matt Hancock, but resigned again a year later, on the same day as Rishi Sunak, Johnson’s then-chancellor, as Johnson’s administration collapsed around him,“I just got to the point where I lost confidence in him as a prime minister, because there were so many other things going on,” Javid recalled.
“For example, I was told categorically by people – I won’t say who, but people very, very close to him – that there was no partygate, nothing happened, that this thing was bullshit,“But it all turned out to be true and I felt I was misled a lot,I thought, if the centre, broadly speaking led by one man, is so willing to mislead his cabinet ministers, then you can’t function,”Javid, who served as an MP from 2010 until stepping down last year, got his first ministerial job under Cameron, and also served in May’s cabinet,Of the three, Javid said, Cameron was “the most effective”, contrasting this with May, whom he called well-briefed but indecisive, saying: “She would let her ministers argue with each other and still not come to a decision.
Johnson was probably the least well briefed and probably of the three took the least interest in most things,”In wider reflections on the pressures of a ministerial job, Javid said he had to remind his staff to allow time in his day to travel between meetings, and to have the time to eat,“You would have a whole trip visiting hospitals or visiting police stations but there would be no provision at all,You actually need to eat,I don’t even mind if they got me a sandwich from a shop and gave it to me in the car when I’m driving to a meeting.
But the point was, no one had thought about that,” he said.Then suddenly I would say ‘Can I get something to eat?’ and they would say, ‘Oh, we haven’t got that on schedule’.A well-nourished minister is probably a better-performing minister.”
US is the best place for drug companies to invest, says boss of London-based GSK
The chief executive of GSK has declared that the US is the best place for pharmaceutical companies to invest.Emma Walmsley said the US led the world in launches of drugs and vaccines and, alongside China, was the best market for business development.She is the latest boss of a leading UK drugmaker to talk up business opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic, after AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot hailed the “vital importance of the US”.The UK government, which has been trying to strengthen the pharmaceutical sector, confirmed on Wednesday that the proportion of revenues from new medicine sales that companies need to pay back to the NHS would fall next year – from 22.5% to under 15%
Disney to invest $1bn in OpenAI, allowing characters in Sora video tool
Walt Disney has announced a $1bn equity investment in OpenAI, enabling the AI startup’s Sora video generation tool to use its characters.Users of Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that draw on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters as part of a three-year licensing agreement between OpenAI and the entertainment giant.The agreement – a landmark deal amid intense anxiety in Hollywood over the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of entertainment – will not cover talent likenesses or voices.Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, hailed a deal which paired his firm’s “iconic stories and characters” with OpenAI’s AI technology. It will place “imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans in ways we’ve never seen before”, he claimed
EU watchdogs raid Temu’s Dublin HQ in foreign subsidy investigation
Temu’s European headquarters in Dublin have been raided by EU regulators investigating a potential breach of foreign subsidy regulations.The Chinese online retailer, which is already in the European Commission’s spotlight over alleged failures to prevent illegal content being sold on its app and website, was raided last week without warning or any subsequent publicity.“We can confirm that the commission has carried out an unannounced inspection at the premises of a company active in the e-commerce sector in the EU, under the foreign subsidies regulation,” a commission spokesperson said on Thursday.Temu was approached for comment.Its headquarters are on St Stephen’s Green, one of Dublin’s most prestigious addresses
No guarantee tobacco tax cut would lure Australian smokers from illegal trade and raise more revenue, report says
Slashing the tobacco excise might not be enough to lure smokers back to legal cigarettes, and could even widen the multi-billion dollar hole blown in the budget by the booming illicit trade, new research shows.The analysis from the e61 Institute comes as Jim Chalmers revealed next week’s mid-year fiscal update will reveal an extra $12.7bn in unanticipated spending, including an additional $6.3bn in higher than expected disaster relief payments.The treasurer said “the biggest job … has been making room for unavoidable pressures and payments without a substantial deterioration in the bottom line”
Fed cuts interest rates by a quarter point amid apparent split over US economy
The US Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it was cutting interest rates by a quarter point for the third time this year, as the embattled central bank appeared split over how best to manage the US economy.The Fed chair, Jerome Powell, has emphasized unity within the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the board of Fed leaders that sets interest rates. But the nine-to-three vote to lower rates to a range of 3.5% to 3.75% was divisive among the committee that tends to vote in unanimity
Leon to cut jobs and close fast food restaurants
Fast food chain Leon is planning to close restaurants and cut jobs, less than two months after it was bought back from Asda by its co-founder John Vincent.The chain said on Wednesday that it had appointed administrators to lead a restructuring programme, and it was considering how many of its 54 restaurants would need to shut. It did not say how many roles could be affected.Vincent, who founded Leon in 2004 with Henry Dimbleby, who later became a government food tsar, and chef Allegra McEvedy, bought the business back in October, four years after he sold it to the billionaire Issa brothers’ EG Group petrol forecourts business in a £100m deal.The chain has now hired advisers from Quantuma after applying for an administration order, and aims to put the business into administration as soon as possible, a process which will help it to manage debt payments as it attempts to secure its long-term future
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