BORIS JOHNSON’S government was destabilised by revelations of No 10 parties during Covid lockdowns. 

To try to restabilise it, Johnson made Andrew Griffith the head of his policy unit. The PM has broken some conventions with the appointment, while also putting a man who got rich from Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda business and exploiting low-paid “gig” workers in charge of policy.

Griffith’s appointment is a very direct — almost too-on-the-nose — illustration of how power works in Britain.

Firstly, Griffith’s appointment breaks the “rules.” Or it would if we had any. Instead, we just have “conventions.”

The convention is that the No 10 head of policy is a paid official. They work more or less directly for the prime minister developing overall policy. 

Griffith is replacing Munira Mirza, a No 10 employee. Mirza resigned because she said Johnson went too far with his Jimmy Savile smear on Keir Starmer, but her resignation letter still praised Johnson as “a man of extraordinary abilities with a unique talent for connecting with people” who had “let [himself] down.”

You can tell from the tone that policy chiefs are normally behind-the-scenes thinkers and servants. But Griffith is, unusually, an MP.  

He won’t really be able to keep his independence as an MP while policy chief — bending our equally unwritten constitution. 

Although I also think there is an implication that, in order to be allowed to stay after Johnson’s “man-of-the-people” pose was exposed as an out-of-control “take-the-piss-out-of-the-people” approach, Johnson has had to appoint a head of policy who might be less servile. Because Griffith represents other corporate authorities beyond Johnson’s immediate circle.

Before he became an MP, Griffith had three significant roles.

Firstly, after a bit of work in banking, Griffith joined satellite broadcaster Sky, becoming a board member and chief financial officer in 2008: Griffith was money man for one of Murdoch’s key media outfits. 

He is plugged into our most enduring right-wing media power. Murdoch had to back out of his ownership of Sky and the firm was sold to Comcast in 2018. Because Griffith held Sky shares he left the firm with a whopping £17 million payoff.

Secondly, Griffith was “senior non-executive director” on the board of takeaway delivery firm Just Eat from 2014-19, including a 2019 stint as interim chair. For this part-time job, Griffith got £92,000 a year.

In its 2018 annual report, Just Eat reported a £779m turnover, but claimed to have just 467 staff in sales — because Just Eat didn’t admit the people who did the real work delivering food actually worked for them. 

As its annual report says: “Where external couriers are used, we never consider them to be employees.”

Instead, the firm said, “Our leading hybrid model enables us to optimise profitability by algorithmically managing the customer search experience to match demand with available courier capacity, driving greater courier utilisation and lower cost per order.”

The people buying food are considered “customers,” but the people delivering food are just “available courier capacity” that needs to be “utilised” and managed algorithmically.

The same annual report said that one of the “principal risks” to the firm was “society is placing increased pressures on businesses to take on greater responsibilities. 

“As a technology takeaway platform, several factors relating to workers’ rights and benefits, food, health and the environment represent important areas of focus for the public.” Concern over “workers’ rights” was seen as a “risk” to the firm.

This is “externalisation,” where the company takes all the money, but the risks and  responsibilities are “externalised” and pushed onto someone else.

Since Griffith left, Just Eat has tried to move to a model that treats at least some staff as “workers,” though many are still supposedly self-employed. 

In making the change, Just Eat complained it is difficult and expensive to find depots for its couriers. It used to be that businesses thought premises — offices, shops, warehouses — are just part of doing business, but thanks to the irresponsible “gig economy” approach, they are seen as novelties.

Thirdly, Griffith regularly appears as part of “Team Boris” — but explicitly as a rich, connected guy who will keep Johnson in line with business interests.

Griffith helped run Johnson’s 2019 Tory leadership campaign: the Boris-for-Leader campaign was actually run from Griffith’s upmarket £9.5m, central London home. Johnson has then twice appointed Griffith a “business adviser.”

In 2019, after Johnson won the Tory leadership and became PM, the Times declared: “Sky chief Andrew Griffith is lured to fix Boris Johnson’s bridges with business.”

Then in November 2020 it reported: “Boris Johnson woos business by rehiring envoy Andrew Griffith.”

Johnson has been able to win votes for the Tories, through his opportunist “populist” stances. But Tory business backers are worried he is a loose cannon. 

In 2020 the Times said Griffith was appointed “amid intense anxiety in the business community over the government’s handling of Covid-19 and Brexit.”

Now he has been made “policy chief,” Griffith wrote an article for Tory website ConservativeHome promising to “return rapidly to the point when we can cut taxes” and insisting: “Prosperity is created not by government but by the ‘fly wheel’ of enterprise and entrepreneurship creating jobs and providing the tax revenue to finance high-quality public services. 

“A competitively regulated, low-tax and high-skills economy trading globally has always been the right combination for economic success.”

Griffith said the Tories could be led by “an unconventional Conservative prime minister” who “built an unusually broad coalition of support” but still go for these Thatcherite aims.

Griffith is fairly overtly there to make sure Johnson sticks to low-tax, low-regulation, do-what-business-says Toryism, and doesn’t accidentally spin off into throwing around too much money or regulations or just generally spurting off in the wrong direction. 

Griffith’s background in being made a millionaire by Murdoch and running exploitative “gig economy” firm Just Eat shows what kind of corporations are reasserting influence over Johnson — though by removing Johnson’s room for manoeuvre there is an outside chance Griffith’s influence will hurt Johnson electorally.