Boris ‘decided to pick a fight’ with Marcus Rashford despite being told not to

Dominic Cummings laid into his former boss’ handling of the food poverty debate (Picture: Reuters/Getty)

Boris Johnson ignored repeated warnings not to ‘pick a fight’ with England football star Marcus Rashford over school meals, Dominic Cummings has claimed.

The Prime Minister’s former chief adviser pointed to last year’s row over extending free meal vouchers into the summer holidays as an example of rampant ‘bad decision-making’ at the heart of government.

Resistance to the Manchester United striker’s campaign amounted to a ‘stupid’ decision to take him on publicly, Mr Cummings added.

It led to a U-turn in June last year, followed by another in November after Mr Rashford joined calls to extend the policy to the Christmas holidays too.

Mr Cummings said the PM ignored two warnings from his then-director of communications, Lee Cain, who resigned the same month amid infighting at Downing Street.

Mr Cain later claimed Mr Johnson ‘understands the need for social mobility’ but suggested the privileged backgrounds of many Tory ministers blinded them to the dangers of waging a ‘PR war’ against the footballer.

Writing in the Spectator in April, he said he asked ministers at a cabinet meeting how many of them were eligible for free school meals and discovered he ‘was the only person in the room who had’.

He added: ‘Is that the reason the government got itself in such a terrible tangle over this emotive issue? No. But would it have helped if more senior politicians had had personal experience of food poverty? Undoubtedly.’

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Mr Cummings laid into several senior figures while appearing before a committee of MPs examining the handling of the pandemic.

He said ‘one of the great myths’ about the government’s response was that most of its problems were down to ‘bad communications’.

‘Fundamentally, the reason for all these problems was bad policy, bad decisions, bad planning, bad operational capability.

‘It doesn’t matter if you’ve got great people doing communications, if the Prime Minister changes his mind 10 times a day, and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy day after day after day, you’re going to have a communications disaster zone.

The government backed down twice to calls for the extension of free school meals (Picture: AFP)

Mr Cummings continued: ‘For example, the whole thing with Rashford, the director of communications said to the Prime Minister twice, ‘do not pick a fight with Rashford. Obviously, we should do this instead’.

‘The Prime Minister decided to pick a fight and then surrendered twice.

‘After that everyone says “oh, your communications is stupid”. No, what’s stupid was picking a fight with Rashford over school meals, and what should have happened is just getting the school meals policy right.

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