Margaret Thatcher was said to have once remarked that every prime minister needed a Willie. Given that humour was not her natural domain, perhaps she didn’t even intend it as a pun. The Willie she was referring to was, of course, the vastly experienced William Whitelaw who served as her effective deputy – and most famously as ‘minister for banana skins’ – for almost a decade despite being from the patrician and ‘wet’ side of the Tory party. Since Thatcher’s day, it has become fashionable for prime ministers to appoint an official deputy and that position is currently held by Oliver Dowden. But there’s a snag: Dowden is the wrong kind of Willie.

Aged just 45, Dowden is very far from being the wise old owl to Sunak that Whitelaw was to the Iron Lady. In fact, he is one of the Prime Minister’s closest political friends and contemporaries. It would be hard to place a cigarette paper between them on any major political issue.

For instance, back in June 2019 the pair, alongside a third musketeer, Robert Jenrick, jointly wrote an article in the Times under the headline: ‘The Tories are in deep peril. Only Boris Johnson can save us.’ And so it came to pass. When Dowden resigned as Johnson’s party chairman in late June 2022, his move was seen correctly as presaging an impending Sunak leadership coup. Sunak quit as chancellor less than a fortnight later.

A wise owl would surely have told the PM to cut down on the baffling AI love-in with Elon Musk

So it came as no surprise when, following Dominic Raab’s departure as Sunak’s deputy PM, the plum role went to Dowden. But when you make your closest ally your deputy there is a risk that your blind spots will go uncorrected, because they are his blind spots too.

And this is just what is happening. Last week, a wise owl would surely have told the PM to cut down on the baffling AI love-in with Elon Musk, replete with Zoolander-style bromance shots, and turn his attention to the issue which was really worrying voters: the rolling frenzy of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in UK cities in the run up to Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.

Yet not only was the PM’s response to that tardy and weak, but Dowden himself misfired when sent out to conduct the government’s broadcast media round on Sunday. While attempting to make the point that there should be zero tolerance of anti-Semitism, amazingly he chose to cite the Black Lives Matter movement as a role model.

‘If you look at the moral indignation and the clarity that we saw after the murder of George Floyd in the US with the Black Lives Matter movement, we haven’t seen…the same kind of moral clarity showing that Jewish lives matter,’ he said.

Yet anyone with any mature understanding of the views of Conservative-inclined voters would know that they identified the BLM upsurge of summer 2020, with its knee-taking and defacing of the Cenotaph and Winston Churchill’s statue, as one enormous grift. Those of a Conservative disposition are vastly more likely to support the view of the Government’s own Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, that Britain is one of the best countries in the world in which to grow up black. So why give the impression that the Government supports BLM and considers it some kind of gold standard for racial grievance?

The real issue is that, just like Sunak himself, Dowden lacks ‘bottom’, that quality of weightiness and seasoned judgment which only comes with long experience. In fact, the pair of them give off vibes more redolent of precocious prep school pupils than grounded leaders. If Sunak is the nerd who can recite every change to the recipe of Coca Cola, then Dowden is the tittering friend who would burst into a fit of the giggles were his aunt to exclaim that she adored raspberries.

Instead of deploying as his deputy someone so callow that he makes the Milky Bar Kid look like Lee Van Cleef, Sunak would do far better to seek out a genuinely wise head immersed in the world view of Tory voters well beyond the Home Counties blue wall.

The veteran Lincolnshire backwoodsman Sir John Hayes, steeped as he is in the ways of social conservatism, would be my recommendation. No voter-repellent nonsense about BLM would ever pass his lips, while any number of irrelevant nerd policy innovations would be shot down in flames before making it to the popular prints. But whoever it is to be, a floundering Sunak needs to find his Willie fast. And Oliver Dowden isn’t it.