The heart of the problem: reviving the centre of UK government
After a series of missteps and a very public turf war inside No 10, new UK prime minister Keir Starmer’s reputation for quiet competence has taken a beating. Former Downing Street insiders gathered at the Institute for Government last week to diagnose the problem and offer some solutions.
After years of in-fighting and turbulence under a procession of short-lived Conservative administrations, in July UK voters turned with relief to Labour leader Keir Starmer: an unflashy, managerial pragmatist who’d promised to “stop the chaos”.
Starmer’s experience in the civil service as director of public prosecutions, and his recruitment of veteran Whitehall official Sue Gray as his chief of staff, had raised hopes that the new government might know how to operate the levers of power – getting departments moving on the PM’s much-touted five “missions” of economic growth, clean energy, public safety, better healthcare and broader opportunities.
That’s not how things have turned out. After a summer broken by anti-immigration rioting, the government first met determined resistance to the means-testing of a pensioners’ fuel subsidy, then ran into a storm of controversy over Labour leaders’ acceptance of gifts from party donors and businesses. With Downing Street factions briefing against each other, Starmer abruptly replaced Gray with his long-standing campaign manager Morgan McSweeney.
Read more: Sue Gray leaves role as UK prime minister’s chief of staff to avoid ‘becoming a distraction’
Distraction, not disaster
“It’s extraordinary that a prime minister who’s come in from opposition has had such a tumultuous first 100 days,” former Tory special adviser (spad) Henry Newman said on Wednesday at a timely Institute for Government event convened to explore how the new prime minister can get the centre of government working well. “It’s quite something to end up turning over your chief of staff and then, I think, trashing her publicly.”
“Calm down,” responded Theo Bertram, a former Labour No 10 spad who now runs thinktank the Social Market Foundation. “My advice to all political parties would be: don’t obsess about the day-to-day polls. We’ve got the most stable government, in the sense that it has a massive majority and there’s five years to go. I worked for Gordon Brown for four years: this is not a crisis!”
Tom Baldwin, a former Labour communications director and Starmer biographer, also called for a sense of proportion. “No policy has been changed; no public money’s involved; no corruption, no law-breaking, no rules broken,” he said. The failure, he hinted, is one of communications management: “I don’t know why some of these so-called ‘freebie’ stories haven’t been stamped out in one day.”
Unavoidable challenges
In part, Bertram suggested, the problem may lie in the new administration’s lack of experience: “There’s no continuity between when Labour was last in government and now,” he said, adding that the last decade has seen “the removal of an entire class of advisors and politicians, who fled from the Corbyn era”.
The government’s challenging inheritance provides another explanation. Every transition brings its tensions, Bertram commented: “Personal differences, difficulties in making a project work – all those things creak under the media scrutiny, the political pressure. But the economic circumstances that we’re in are a world away from 2010 or 1997. If we were going into a Budget where we knew [chancellor] Rachel Reeves was waiting to pull things out of the hat, this summer would not have been as difficult.”
What’s more, added Baldwin, Starmer’s government faces “a wall of right-wing newspapers” and a “media addicted to drama and hysterics”, while social media has created a much more poisonous and antagonistic national conversation. “We haven’t had a stable government since social media became a big thing, and the speed of politics is just getting faster and faster,” he said.
Unforced errors
These factors meant the new administration was bound to face headwinds in its first weeks in office but panellists at the IfG event also discussed issues that the government did have more power over.
For example, for many weeks, Starmer’s office lacked a principal private secretary (PPS), a key No 10 management position.
Cabinet secretary Simon Case has announced he will leave the role at the end of the year on health grounds, though there were reports he was under pressure to quit and increasingly lacked the authority and allies needed to lead the civil service.
“If the new administration had come in and decided to replace the cabinet secretary, they could have chosen to do that very quickly,” commented Newman.
While commentators have suggested that Gray’s long history in the civil service ultimately meant she lacked the instincts to compensate for Starmer’s relative political inexperience, Baldwin argued that Starmer’s somewhat apolitical bent has its advantages. In highly divisive issues such as Brexit, it’s “enabled him to operate in politics rather more effectively than other politicians”, he said.
Having replaced Gray with McSweeney, Baldwin said the question is whether Starmer can “impose his personality and his values on a hyper-political team. The danger is that he becomes a rather bad version of a standard, political prime minister, rather than the very interesting prime minister I think he could be.”
The structures question
Beyond these personnel issues, IfG director Hannah White argued that there are wider structural questions over the centre of government. “Every prime minister leaves office bemoaning the fact that No 10 didn’t have the power to effect change across government,” she said. Newman had a slightly different take: “Every No 10 is dysfunctional, and every No 10 is dysfunctional in its own ways.”
Opinions differed, however, over how to address that dysfunctionality. Newman held that “there’s a tendency to have too much happening in No 10”, but White argued that it should absorb functions from the Cabinet Office, taking on analytical and policy roles to become a beefed-up “Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet”.
White – who recently chaired a Commission on the Centre of Government – also championed major reforms to the spending review process. “If you want to deliver as a prime minister, you need the money to follow your priorities; you can’t have your priorities driven by the money,” she said. “The Treasury is very good at lots of things, but it can end up driving your strategy.” Reforms should include standardising the departmental submissions process, she said, and giving “No 10 more economic expertise, so that they can have their own view on the process”.
Pick your people
Ultimately though, White commented: “I don’t think structures can solve people – and therefore it’s really important to think about who you bring in and how you build those relationships.” Here, said Newman, “nothing is more intrinsic to driving change in Whitehall” than the choice of the next cabinet secretary. He suggested former Brexit negotiator Olly Robbins or communities department permanent secretary Sarah Healey for the job.
There was widespread agreement that the new government has made an error in restraining the number and pay of special advisors. “One of the many puzzlements I’ve got over the last three months is that they seemed to be trying to do something about shrinking the size of politics, having fewer spads,” commented Baldwin – but the government never sought credit for its self-denial. “If they were going to take all the pain of that, why was it never announced? It’s one of the great mysteries: you crucify yourself, but don’t tell anyone about it.”
There are currently relatively few spads in No 10, said Bertram, “and I think if you want the centre to work, you need politics at the centre driving things”. White agreed: “If you ride out one more story about how you’ve got 10 more spads than the last lot, then you can use those 10 spads to do government better,” she said. “We’ve got ourselves into a really bad place where we’re constantly doing the ‘hair shirt’.” In Newman’s view, “we need to look again at the powers that ministers have to bring people into government”. He said he’d like to see a formal process for politicising some civil service policy positions, for example.
Read more: ‘Deliverology’ pioneer Sir Michael Barber returns to advise UK prime minister on national missions
On a mission
Even if Starmer’s team regains its coherence, Baldwin suggested that more changes will be required to make his ‘mission boards’ work. “The idea of a transformative machine running right through Whitehall, dedicated to national renewal and bringing in people from outside – that’s not happening,” he commented. “I’m not sure why.” These boards are not cabinet committees, noted Newman: “The way they’ve been structured so far doesn’t lead me to believe that they’re going to deliver anything transformative.”
This system is now being further developed, said Baldwin, with a ‘priorities for change’ programme “looking to narrow the missions; to look at ways in which you get some staging posts”. Clear goals and deadlines are required, commented Bertram: “There should be a ten-year goal for each of these things, but I think you need to track it back to what needs to be happening now.”
“I think the ‘priorities for change’ document will come out before the Budget, so you can see the missions running through what the Budget is doing,” replied Baldwin. “I think you’ll see these one-year, two-year, three-year goals, which will be more comprehensible than the mission board stuff.”
The last 100 days has seen a succession of highly publicised communications failures, Baldwin acknowledged – but the broader and deeper challenge is that of catalysing change in Whitehall. Delivering for the public is “not just about messaging; it’s not about having some big, shiny new idea”, he said. “It’s grinding work, and I’m not sure that they’ve got all the people they need at the moment, and all the machinery they need to get that done.”
“But let’s get a sense of perspective,” he concluded. “One thing I do know about Keir Starmer is that the first iteration is never the last. He will build and build and build, finding things that work until – I think you will see, particularly with that stable majority – some real change coming down the track.”
About Matt Ross
Matt is Global Government Forum's Contributing Editor, providing direction and support on topics, products and audience interests across GGF’s editorial, events and research operations. He has been a journalist and editor since 1995, beginning in motoring and travel journalism – and combining the two in a 30-month, 30-country 4x4 expedition funded by magazine photo-journalism. Between 2002 and 2008 he was Features Editor of Haymarket news magazine Regeneration & Renewal, covering urban regeneration, economic growth and community development; and from 2008 to 2014 he was the Editor of UK magazine and website Civil Service World, then Editorial Director for Public Sector – both at political publishing house Dods. He has also worked as Director of Communications at think tank the Institute for Government.
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