Despite select committee probing, Sedwill would not be drawn on Dominic Cummings’s departure or his own
Shortly after Mark Sedwill announced he would be stepping down as the cabinet secretary and the national security adviser in September, he gave a speech in which he described his life before government. “I’ve had a gun in my face from Saddam Hussein’s bodyguards,” he said. “A bomb under my seat at a polo match in the foothills of the Himalayas; I’ve been hosted by a man plotting to have me assassinated; I’ve been shot at, mortared and even had someone come after me with a suicide vest.” So, as you might expect, what could have been an awkward two-hour appearance before the public administration and constitutional affairs select committee scarcely registered on his heart-rate monitor.
Not that the committee didn’t do their best to winkle out the dysfunctionality at the heart of government and discover how and why Sedwill had been forced out. Just that Sedwill was clear from the start that everything was going to be conducted entirely on his terms and that any revelations he were to make would be completely deliberate. And he certainly wasn’t going to be drawn on last week’s meltdown in No 10 which ended with the departure of both his old enemies, Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain. Oh that, he shrugged. These things happened all the time. Advisers came and went. And he certainly wasn’t bothered by some gobshite whose only weapons were 20,000-word blogs and imaginary hand grenades. What goes around, comes around.
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