2014 – 073 Gov run by unelected Cabinet Office

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By John Stevens for the Daily Mail

Published: 22:25, 20 November 2014 | Updated: 00:48, 21 November 2014
He was nicknamed Sir Cover-up after preventing the Iraq War inquiry from seeing letters and records of phone calls between Mr Blair and George W Bush in the run-up to the war

Sir Jeremy Heywood (pictured left) has David Cameron ‘by the balls’, claims a former aide of Michael Gove

‘Jeremy Heywood is more important than anyone in the Cabinet apart from Cameron or Osborne – and is arguably more important than Osborne.

‘He sits right next to the Prime Minister, has him completely by the balls and Cameron doesn’t do anything without Heywood’s permission.’ Sir Jeremy, Britain’s most senior civil servant, was Tony Blair’s principal private secretary from 1999 to 2003.

He was nicknamed Sir Cover-up after preventing the Iraq War inquiry from seeing letters and records of phone calls between Mr Blair and George W Bush in the run-up to the war.

Dominic Cummings pictured behind Michael Gove was a key aide when he was Education Secretary

His influence is such that Mr Cameron is said to have once joked: ‘Remind me, Jeremy, do you work for me or do I work for you?’

Mr Cummings was also highly critical of Mr Cameron’s closest aides, calling them ‘totally and utterly useless’.

Speaking at an event organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank, he said: ‘I don’t think in lots of ways it matters what happens in the election.

Whether it is Cameron or Miliband who gets in, neither of them know how to prioritise, neither can build a serious team, they’re both surrounded by these dysfunctional teams.

‘They don’t know how to get anything done, neither has had experience in any organisation watching someone who knows how to get things done in a real alpha organisation that’s well managed.’

Mr Cummings, who describes himself as now ‘very happily unemployed’, was Mr Gove’s special adviser but left in January after resigning.

He said Mr Cameron’s advisers at Number 10 ‘operate in a bubble in which it is at most ten days planning or more usually 48 hours or 72 hours’.

He added: ‘There is no long-term priority. There is no long-term plan. The central people operate in that kind of culture, they don’t think anything can change. They just think that is politics.

‘His most important advisers are [chief of staff] Ed Llewellyn and [director of communications] Craig Oliver – both of them are totally and utterly useless. It is not their fault. They are just in the wrong job. The fault lies in Cameron putting them there.

‘If you have a prime minister who has no sense of priorities and cannot manage his way out of a paper bag, and his two chief advisers who don’t know what they are doing… of course it’s going to be a farce.’

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