Signs indicate No 10 on election footing as PM plans meetings to come up with manifesto ideas

Boris Johnson’s No 10 operation is increasingly on an election footing, with leaked internal emails revealing he was due to meet the political strategist Sir Lynton Crosby.

As Conservative advisers come under intense pressure to produce manifesto ideas quickly, a well placed source said Johnson had a meeting set up in the next few days with Crosby, the election guru who worked on the campaigns of David Cameron in 2015 and Theresa May in 2017.

The meeting had been due to be attended by just Johnson and Sir Eddie Lister, his chief strategic adviser. However, in a sign of the jostling for power and preferment within No 10, some other advisers demanded to be present – including Danny Kruger, the prime minister’s new political secretary – and the meeting was taken out of the diary.

Johnson is a longtime friend of Crosby, who worked on his London mayoral campaigns, and the pair are understood to have talked informally on the phone regularly during his leadership campaign.

The Australian strategist and polling expert would very probably be a key figure in any general election campaign, despite the two having disagreed in recent months over the role of the prime minister’s partner, Carrie Symonds.

One Tory aide described numerous power struggles going on inside Downing Street. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s most senior aide, is in the ascendancy along with other former Vote Leave staffers, but there is another powerful faction around Symonds, and a third around Lister’s group of former City Hall advisers.

Johnson himself claims he does not want an election but it is understood there is increasing activity at No 10 aimed at laying the groundwork for a campaign, with voter-friendly announcements being brought forward to the first two weeks of September.

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A source familiar with No 10’s thinking said this was the fortnight regarded by Downing Street as the time of “maximum danger” to Johnson, when MPs could potentially force through legislation to prevent a no-deal Brexit on 31 October or move to a vote of no confidence in the prime minister that could bring the government down.

The announcements will be aimed partly at reminding Conservative MPs that their seats depend on Johnson’s performance in a general election, and a warning shot to Labour that the prime minister is prepared to fight at the polls on their traditional territory of public services, schools and the NHS.

At a meeting on Friday, Cummings told special advisers that they had a week to come up with ideas that could be used during an election campaign.

One aide at the meeting said they had been told to go back to their departments and fill a page with ideas, even though Conservative party headquarters is notionally in charge of policy formation for an election.

“The tone [on whether or not to go to the polls] was: this is not in our gift any more. Come back with some policy ideas that we can deploy in an election,” the adviser said.

No 10 is adamant that there must be no election before Brexit on 31 October, with Cummings insistent that Johnson could schedule a poll for after that date.

However, Cummings did acknowledge the likelihood that an election would be forced on Johnson by parliament before he might want one, and that the goal would be to “smash Jeremy Corbyn”.

Corbyn has said he will force a vote of no confidence on Johnson at the earliest opportunity when it is winnable, and has offered to form a caretaker government to prevent a no-deal Brexit before holding a general election.

This has been dismissed by the Liberal Democrats, and various independent MPs would rather there were a temporary caretaker government led by a figure such as Ken Clarke or Harriet Harman, who are not long-term contenders for the job of prime minister.

If opposition MPs and rebel Tories cannot agree on a strategy for legislating against no deal or toppling Johnson, he could attempt to bypass parliament and pursue a no-deal Brexit regardless, holding a general election some time after that.