This article was first published in CapX. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s a few quid a month, such is the price genius is reduced to.
A year before the election, if you’d have asked Keir Starmer why government wasn’t working, he would doubtless have replied that it was because the Tories were running it.
But a year after the election, he can no longer take solace in such a glib answer; and his actions now suggest he recognises the problem is more than superficial, and there is, in the words of Henry Francis Lyte, ‘change and decay in all around I see’.
Last year, for instance, he gave a speech suggesting that civil servants were partly to blame for blocking reform in public services, and that ‘too many people in Whitehall [were] comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline’. In the face of stiff resistance – the head of the senior civil servants’ union wrote a letter to the Prime Minister condemning his ‘Trumpian’ comments, while one told Robert Peston that ‘there was a mood that we should pull the plug on him’ – he predictably, laughably, issued an apology.
But the dysfunction persists. To that end, Starmer is considering the creation of a ‘Department for Downing Street’ as part of a major organisational shake-up aimed at tackling governmental inertia. The plan would see a senior civil servant appointed as permanent secretary, with dozens of officials brought in to bolster the Prime Minister’s ability to drive reform.
The proposal is being shaped in part by work from the Future Governance Forum, a think tank founded by Nathan Yeowell, a close associate of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. A key project, led by former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara, has gathered insight from hundreds of former officials and is expected to recommend the establishment of a dedicated department for Downing Street. Allies of the Prime Minister say the idea enjoys broad support among those familiar with the workings of No 10, which many see as outdated and underpowered compared to equivalents like the US White House.
While the plan is under active consideration, critics have already accused Starmer of attempting a ‘presidential’ land grab. Comparisons are being drawn to Boris Johnson’s ill-fated attempt to establish an ‘Office of the Prime Minister’ in 2022. These criticisms are true, and all the more reason for welcoming the move.
The executive branch of the British political system is woefully understaffed. The Prime Minister’s Office in Britain employs less than 500 people and operates within a complex web of loosely connected ‘units’ that have been assembled piecemeal by successive prime ministers, resulting in blurred lines of responsibility and an often incoherent structure. Ministers below this have remarkably few staff – the vast majority of whom are civil servants.
What this results in is a system in which ministers find it increasingly difficult to make meaningful decisions, because institutional capacity places significant limitations on their decision space, both by bureaucratic inertia – the simple physics of turning around a huge ship with one hand at the wheel – and sometimes, an outrightly hostile Civil Service who you do not have enough hands on deck to take the fight to the mutineers.
If British politicians want to expand their decision space – which is the central dysfunction at the heart of Britain’s governance problems – an expansion of the executive function should be welcomed. But if Starmer simply adds more civil servants into the system, he will constrain his decision space even further.
The real solution lies in a radical expansion of the political layer of government: a vast increase in the number of special advisers, not just for the prime minister, but across the cabinet. Ministers should be equipped with teams of politically aligned staff capable of shaping, pushing, and delivering policy, rather than being wholly dependent on a civil service that often sees itself as the senior partner.
In his infamous blog ‘The Hollow Men’, Dominic Cummings recounts that; ‘For at least the period January 2011 – July 2012, it took a huge effort to think seriously about priorities other than after 10pm or at weekends’. Part of Britain’s problem is that ministers are being swamped by the lower levels of strategy. Ministers are being asked to deal with operational and tactical-level decisions, preventing them delivering on strategic-level thinking – all because of a lack of political staff to help shoulder the burden of command. Although the ministerial code stated that cabinet ministers may appoint ‘up to two’ Spads, the majority (in 2021) employed three, while three secretaries of state employed four or five. That’s simply not enough; a genuinely modernised executive would involve a Prime Minister’s Office staffed by several hundred special advisers, with senior cabinet ministers counting staff in their tens.
The reforms to the Prime Minister’s staff should not end there. We cannot run a modern nation from a Georgian townhouse, and it is without question that an office of hundreds of staff could not work there. At the most, No 10 should serve as an official residence, photo backdrop and ceremonial front-of-house. The Prime Minister, and all cabinet ministers, should be moved to County Hall, once the seat of London government, which stands just across the river from the Houses of Parliament. It is a more fitting building, both in terms of scale and style.
Sadly, I believe that change of this radical nature is both entirely necessary, and entirely beyond our current leadership.
Keir Starmer is a man for whom stability equals competence. In his apology to civil servants, he repudiated the idea of democratically elected governments responding to either political events or the shifting interests of the electorate by promising;
We will give you clear direction, take on the vested interests in Westminster and beyond, and put an end to the chopping and changing of political priorities.
Starmer has previously been described to me as ‘an institutionalist who governs with the default impulses of the institutions’; ultimately he is a creature of the Blob, who – like the Blob – thinks policy is best made in a protected sphere in which the policymaking process can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy. He recognises that Whitehall doesn’t work but, as the letter above shows, he believes this is a result of the demands of politics, rather than the institution itself. The dysfunction lies not in the system, but in the interruptions to it – the demands of voters, ministers and events.
As a result, rather than expanding the political capacity needed to govern effectively in the 21st century, he proposes to insulate the system further from democratic energy, reinforcing our paradox of ‘shallow sovereignty’, by which governments appear to rule, but cannot act.
Ruling Britannia requires transformation, not tinkering, and if we are to dramatically rebalance power back toward the people’s elected representatives, we must become comfortable with the idea of politicising government. But unless Starmer can do that, and fill his new department with people prepared to challenge the system rather than preserve it, he will have done little more than rearrange some deck chairs in the face of an iceberg.
Tony Blair lamented that on gaining office he found "the levers of power were not connected to anything". A couple of decades later it seems they are still unconnected
John Reid, in 2006, delcared the Home Office "not fit for purpose" - splitting off Justice just created two unfit departments - and a recent report says exactly the same thing but without adding the word 'still'. Within the Home Office it appears the levers are arranged in an interlocking mesh that successive Home Secretaries cannot grasp and pull. One can suspect other departments' levers are similarly arranged.
Expanding the poltical layer around the Prime Minister and Secretaries of State is unlikely to connect power to levers though it might, as this article suggests, improve thinking. The remarkable thing is that it is well known, and has been for some time, that the British State's wiring is out of date, but no-one seems to know how to re-wire it. Doing that may be difficult, disruptive and risky ,but someone needs to come up with a new, clear, complete rewiring diagram.