A little thread on the Marcus Rashford / school meals u-turn and what it tells us about what’s in the minds of Number 10.

Even by their standards this was a bad one, so deserves a further look.

This thread is *not* about the rights and wrongs of the policy, or whether a footballer ought to do what Rashford did. Have those arguments elsewhere.

This is about why Johnson’s government reacted as it did.

That the government would u-turn on this is an anathema to how Cummings is supposed to think.

Over the years he’s repeatedly bemoaned the short termism of Whitehall, and MPs responding to the latest public whim.

And then this!

That’s not to say Cummings is unaware of the public mood. He’s intensely aware of it. And played the us vs. them / the elite on Brexit perfectly.

But the Coronavirus response is playing out differently. The 2016 tools don’t work.

Pre Corona an equivalent issue about support for poor families in the summer time would have been dispensed with easily.

They’re scroungers. We need to balance the books. Tough. Daily Mail onside. Done. No change.

Now the us-and-them is altered.

You have a Premier League footballer (supposedly evil - Hancock urged them to take pay cuts earlier in the crisis) siding with those hardest hit. And the public mood siding with Rashford, not the Government.

The food for poor families over the summer has been rumbling for weeks, prior to Rashford’s intervention.

A government with a good connection between PM and back benchers, or with decent cabinet ministers, would have detected this early.

Not this Johnson government.

Pressure steadily grows. Rashford feels he has to intervene. Then it lands with Cummings. And the machine says no (on Monday).

But that doesn’t stop it. Others weigh in on the side of Rashford. & have already solved this - it’s clear there’s another way.

Number 10 relents. Says it’ll do what Rashford demands (on Tuesday).

Idiot Johnson saying it’s the first he’s heard of it is the on the

At the back of their minds is surely what would have happened at PMQs - Starmer would have had a field day with this (on Wednesday).

The problem for the Government is they end up doing what they don’t want to do, and only after everyone has heard they were on the wrong side of this, *and* make a short term decision of the sort Cummings loathes.

It’s an impressive failure as far as the Government is concerned.

All of this strikes me as the Vote Leave Squad in Number 10 trying to play this like they did in the referendum. But then they were armed with outriders, and public opinion was with them - at least enough.

Now that playbook doesn’t work. The early warning signs either don’t reach them, or are ignored, and if you even can play a them-and-us who those groups are is not so clear.

The lesson here is pushing on narrow issues can force Number 10 to turn pretty easily. And similar issues will crop up over and over until Number 10’s approach changes.

Not only his behaviour in Durham makes Cummings a liability. Too narrowly sticking to the Vote Leave style does too.

/ends