Officials ‘wanted Queen to raise concerns with Boris Johnson about his conduct’
Senior officials discussed asking the Queen to raise concerns with Boris Johnson around his behaviour as prime minister, according to a new BBC documentary.
The government figures, who have not been named, repeatedly Buckingham Palace about the issue, the report says.
The talks are said to have taken place around May 2020, near the start of the Covid pandemic.
The nature of the concerns have not been specified but it appears they were related to ‘significant tensions’ between Mr Johnson’s political team and civil servants at Downing Street.
They erupted into clashes between Dominic Cummings, who was Johnson’s first chief of staff, and Sir Mark Sedwill, who was leading the civil service at the time.
A source told the programme – an episode of the series Laura Kuenssberg: State of Chaos – that Mr Johnson ‘had to be reminded of the constitution’.
Another unnamed source said the atmosphere inside No 10 was ‘utterly grim, and totally crazy’.
The relations between political advisers and civil servants were described as ‘just toxic’.
Helen MacNamara, who was the deputy cabinet secretary from 2020 to 2021, declined to discuss the calls but said relations soured dramatically after the PM got back from his stint in hospital with Covid.
She said: ‘There were definitely times after the prime minister came back from his illness when the kind of the perception amongst the political team at No 10 about the failings of the system and the failings of the civil service and the failings of different institutions, it was just so extreme the way that they were articulating that, they were in absolutely kind of smash everything up, shut it all down, start again … we were systematically in real trouble.’
Royal officials are widely thought to have already been worried about Mr Johnson after he unlawfully suspended Parliament for five weeks in 2019.
The decision to ‘prorogue’ Parliament – which was technically carried out by the Queen on his advice – was criticised as a ploy to stop MPs scrutinising his Brexit plans.
The Supreme Court ruled that such a long suspension had broken the law, and that there could be no reason ‘let alone a good reason’ for it.
According to the BBC, sources familiar with the matter said this raised ‘acute concern’ at Buckingham Palace.
Buckingham Palace declined to discuss the claims with the BBC.
It has since been approached again for comment along with Downing Street.
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