The saga over Sue Gray, the Prime Minister’s former Chief of Staff, is finally over. Forced out by rival Downing Street courtiers, Gray looks destined for well-deserved obscurity.
If the briefings are to be believed, this ruthless decision by Keir Starmer is evidence that he is going to ‘get a grip’. The chaos of the past few weeks will give way to competence.
Don’t believe a word of it.
Starmer’s administration has been enveloped by chaos for much the same reasons that Boris Johnson’s government was a shambles. The system of public administration in Britain is broken.
Sacking Boris’ Chief of Staff, Dominic Cummings, did not make Downing Street any more effective. Neither will removing Starmer’s. Nothing of substance has been reset.
Tempting though it might be to feel schadenfreude, we ought instead to ask why, despite having massive majorities in Parliament, Starmer, and Boris Johnson before him, both struggled to ‘get a grip’ on government in the first place?
During my twelve years in the House of Commons, I noticed a pattern with every new administration. Initial elation at being elected would give way to frustration at an inability to get a grip on government. The machinery of state was unwieldy and unresponsive at best, leading to dysfunction and disappointment.
On their first day in office, ministers believed that they ran their new departments. I saw it dawn on colleagues that since they could not hire or fire more than a handful of people in ‘their’ departments, they didn’t run the department, the department ran them.
New ministers soon sounded like the old.
The power of patronage which ministers thought they had existed mainly in theory. In practice, officials ensured that those who got appointed were to their liking.
When things went wrong, ministers soon discovered that there is something called a Civil Service code, which serves in the manner of Britain’s concealed constitution.
The Civil Service code, expanded by the Cabinet Secretary to give civil servants more power, makes them immune from any sanction when they ignore ministerial wishes. Worse, it allows them to sit in judgement of ministers. (Boris Johnson, warned about the importance of addressing the ministerial code on taking office, discovered the hard way why he should have listened to such advice when officials helped oust him after he attended a party in Downing Street. Karma.)
As my friend Daniel Hannan has put it, ministers found themselves left ‘stabbing at buttons that are disconnected, tugging at levers that have worked loose.’
When I quit the House of Commons after we won the Brexit referendum, I was so concerned that no incoming Conservative administration would ever be able to implement conservative policy, I set about creating a blueprint for change.
A paper, which I co-authored with Radomir Tylecote, proposed reforms to ensure that an incoming government establish specific priorities, with lines of accountability for delivering them. We proposed changes to enable ministers to assemble competent teams, not just someone to manage their social media posts.
At the heart of our proposal was the creation of a new Department at the centre of power to bring some sort of strategic coherence to government.
Much of the dysfunction in Whitehall is the inevitable result of the tripartite system, with oversight divided between Downing Street, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury. It creates chaos. We proposed creating a unified strategic core by merging Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, and some budget management functions in the Treasury into a single, new Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet (DMPC).
Some will say that this was a radical step. It needs to be. Every previous administration that has tried to get a grip of the machinery of the state has ultimately failed to do so, because it has failed to create strategic coherence at ‘the centre’.
The DPMC would be run day-to-day by the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, and they would oversee various units within the department.
A Civil Service Unit would ensure civil servants had the skills and capabilities needed, and allow ministers to hire and fire senior civil servants. A Public Expenditure & Performance Unit would allocate budgets across Whitehall, taking this over from the Treasury. Its role would be similar to Ireland’s Department of Public Expenditure, which is given a spending ceiling by the Treasury and mandated to deliver public services, reform them and evaluate delivery.
There would be an Appointments Unit, to ensure that the Prime Minister was able to exercise the power of patronage to meet his or her objectives, not those of the civil servants.
There would need to be a Legal Counsel Unit, able to give the Prime Minister the best legal counsel available, so that those we elect might occasionally cut through legalistic excuses for inertia that civil servants specialise in providing.
A Policy Unit would provide policy material. A Communications Unit would ensure a coherent approach to communications, and a Strategy Unit would give the Prime Minister longer-term perspectives on technological innovation and geopolitics.
We proposed Extended Ministerial Offices, to allow Cabinet ministers to bring together teams – including outsiders – capable of driving change. We also delved into details to change Civil Service working practices, and for rewriting the civil service code. Charter letters would set out what was expected of each newly appointed minister – and of their senior civil service team.
Sadly, when it came to implementing any of this, the urgent squeezed out the important. Team Boris, which had sounded so enthusiastic for reform before the election, seemed to lose interest immediately afterwards.
Perhaps like every other group of elated newcomers moving into Downing Street for the first time, Team Boris really imagined that they were in control. Then Covid came, and the system took control of them.
The moment for reform passed, and with it went Team Boris’ chance of delivering the change this country needs.
Britain has often voted Conservative during my lifetime, yet we seem to have had instead a succession of social democrat administrations. Without radical reform, this will never change. A future incoming Conservative government needs a blueprint to transform public administration. Conservatives need to prepare to deal with the mandarins in Whitehall the way Margaret Thatcher dealt with the National Union of Miners.
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