The most potent, permanent and elusive figure in British politics | Andy Beckett

His enemies call him the ‘PM’s puppet-master’. Blair, Brown and Cameron all found him invaluable. He’s been at the heart of the most controversial political episodes of recent times. Just who is Jeremy Heywood?

It is easy to miss the Cabinet Office on Whitehall in central London. To the uninitiated, it is just another bone-coloured, net-curtained facade in the unreadable heartland of British government. Seemingly the only noteworthy thing about the building is that its Victorian bulk stands directly between 10 Downing Street and the outside world. Most visitors to the prime minister have to get past the Cabinet Office first.

Since 2012, the head of this department, the cabinet secretary, has been Sir Jeremy Heywood. In the historian Peter Hennessy’s book Whitehall, one of few successful attempts to explain Britain’s labyrinthine and unusually dominant central government, the Cabinet Office, set up exactly a hundred years ago, is described as the “coordinating brain for the whole system”.

Jeremy’s like a drug. People get addicted to him quite quickly

He’d get stopped at airports because he looked like a druggy. [Cameron] thought he was … the cleverest guy he’d ever met

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