On 11 May 2007, in a speech at the Imagination Gallery in the West End of London during which he announced his candidacy for the leadership of the Labour Party, Gordon Brown promised a “new politics” of openness, reform and change. He pledged to govern “in a different way”, with a fresh style and new personnel. “I will reach out to put national interest before sectional interest,” he said, “and I will form a government of all the talents, bringing people together to listen, to learn and solve problems, building on a broad sense of national purpose.”
Within 48 hours of entering Downing Street as Prime Minister, on 27 June, Brown announced that the former United Nations deputy secretary general Mark Malloch Brown, the former first sea lord Admiral Sir Alan West, the former secretary general of the Confederation of British Industry Sir Digby Jones and Ara Darzi, one of the country’s leading surgeons, would be ennobled and made ministers in government. Over the past two years, other non-politicians have joined Brown’s ministerial ranks, including his former chief of staff and ex-head of the television regulator Ofcom, Stephen Carter, and the former City fund manager and multimillionaire Paul Myners.
Today, the Prime Minister’s big tent is slowly being folded away, its frame dismantled, as one after another of the chief recruits to his “government of all the talents”, called “goats” by Whitehall insiders, slips the ministerial tethers to graze in pastures new. Of the original quartet, only Lord West remains in office.
Should we be surprised? The Prime Minister is by reputation both a party-political tribalist and a keen centraliser of power – his former permanent secretary Andrew Turnbull described him as “Stalinist” and his former cabinet colleague Charles Clarke called him a “control freak”. He always seemed an unlikely goatherd. Here was an opportunity for him to show the country his pluralist intentions and bipartisan credentials.
Tony Blair had been a strong advocate of big-tent politics: think of the late Roy Jenkins’s report on proportional representation and Chris Patten’s commission on policing in Ulster. Brown went beyond Blair, who deployed the great and the good from across the political spectrum only to advise, review and report, by bringing political outsiders directly into government.
Goats, however, are notoriously stubborn creatures, unpredictable and difficult to control. Malloch Brown became Lord Malloch-Brown of St Leonard’s Forest in the County of West Sussex and was appointed minister of state for Africa, Asia and the UN at the Foreign Office. Within a fortnight of taking office, he had announced, much to the annoyance of Washington, that Brown and George W Bush would not be “joined at the hip” in the manner of Bush and Blair, a remark that seemed to suggest the end of the “special relationship”.
When Malloch Brown resigned this month for “personal and family reasons”, he said he remained “completely loyal to the Prime Minister”. Yet reports since have suggested that the former international diplomat could no longer tolerate working in chaotic Whitehall, and had told colleagues that he had been party to better “strategic thinking” in Latin America and south-east Asia than in Downing Street. In a farewell salvo on Wednesday, Lord Malloch-Brown became the first senior minister to admit that British troops need more helicopters in Afghanistan – contradicting the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary – and he conceded that Brown’s future looked “bleak”. So much for loyalty.
His resignation was followed on 14 July by that of the Iraqi-born Ara Darzi – who, as Lord Darzi of Denham, was appointed by Brown as under-secretary of state at the Department for Health. Known as Robo-Doc for his pioneering work in the advancement of minimal invasive surgery and his use of surgical robots, Darzi fuelled speculation about an early election in October 2007 by publishing an unexpected interim report on his plans for NHS reform. He also angered campaigners, and Labour backbenchers, in a speech to the Lords in January 2008, by abandoning Labour’s historic commitment to eliminate mixed-sex wards from NHS hospitals.
Darzi said he was resigning to focus on his medical work and academic research, but one has to ask: is this the time for a health minister to quit, as the Department of Heath grapples with a swine flu epidemic? He leaves the government having failed to see through the “once-in-a-generation” reforms he announced the government would be making to the NHS. Perhaps his only memorable contribution to political life is the time he leapt across the red benches in the Lords to save the life of a fellow Labour peer, Lord Brennan, who had collapsed after a heart attack.
Arguably the most controversial resignation – and appointment – among the goats was that of Digby Jones. The corpulent, conservative recent head of the CBI took the title Digby, Lord Jones of Birmingham, and became minister for UK trade and investment in the (then) Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. He quit the government after just 18 months in the post following a series of disagreements with Brown over spending and taxation, rows with civil servants, and a stream of gaffes – including some embarrassing remarks at a forum of Middle Eastern entrepreneurs. “We don’t care what colour you are,” he said. “We don’t care if we can’t pronounce your names and we don’t care where your money comes from. We just want you to invest in our country.” Jones then said: “I’m a goat, not a professional politician.”
Since leaving government, Jones has spent his time criticising both Brown and civil servants, telling a Commons select committee in January this year that the job of junior minister was “one of the most dehumanising and depersonalising experiences a human being can have”.
So who is left? The sole remaining goat from the original herd is the former first sea lord, Admiral Sir Alan West, who became Lord West of Spithead and was appointed under-secretary of state for security and counterterrorism at the Home Office by the Prime Minister in June 2007. Home Office press officers have since described him as “gaffe-prone”, a “liability” and a “nightmare to manage”. In November 2007, he questioned the government’s plans to hold terror suspects for up to 42 days without charge, stating in a live BBC radio interview that he was not “totally convinced” of the case for change – only to perform a U-turn less than two hours later, after a hurried meeting with Brown.
His explanation: “Being a simple sailor, not a politician, maybe I didn’t choose my words well.” (The PM’s spokesman issued his own memorable clarification: “I think he thought it was necessary to make sure his position was properly understood. I’m not sure he has changed his mind. Lord West made his position quite clear. Lord West gave his views quite clearly in his second statement.”)
West is known for his bravery. In 1982, as the 34-year-old officer in command of the frigate HMS Ardent when it was sunk by Argentinian bombers during the Falklands conflict, he was the last to leave the sinking ship. His action earned him the Distinguished Service Cross. Nearly three decades on, the “simple sailor” remains the last man standing on the sinking ship of government. One source close to West says he has no plans to quit and that he is committed to his Home Office role – but adds “for the foreseeable future”.
Brown’s aides are curiously unwilling to lay any blows on the fleeing goats. One Downing Street aide told me each of them had “enrichgovernment” and that their contributions to public life “remain a genuinely positive story”. What about Digby Jones? “Digby is Digby,” I was told. “We knew he would be outspoken from the moment he was appointed.”
But is this a genuinely positive story? One could argue that it was foolhardy to tread down this path in the first place. Political outsiders are, almost by definition, either ignorant of political rules, regulations, conventions and customs, or unwilling to conform to them. This was an accident waiting to happen.
Then there is the issue of ideology. As James Purnell (who resigned from the cabinet in June) has been busy pointing out, ideas matter, and constructing big tents in politics, welcoming as they may be, risks losing sight of this. New Labour was built on the assumption that modern politics is no longer ideological, substantive or divisive, that what matters is what works, and that there are bureaucratic, technical and pragmatic fixes to every political problem. This has proved to be a fiction. Bringing in outsiders to add expertise and experience to government is not new: Clement Attlee succeeded with the trade union leader Ernest Bevin, and Margaret Thatcher with the businessman David Young. Brown’s mistake was to pretend that he could defy the laws of politics by appointing people who neither owed him party loyalty nor necessarily shared his political values. Jones, for example, is said to have discussed becoming a Conservative MP once with the then Tory leader, Michael Howard. As head of the CBI, he had long opposed a range of Labour economic and social policies, chief among them the minimum wage. Why make him a Labour minister?
But, above all else, this is a story of a government of all the talents that could not keep those talents for long. On the one hand, we had a prime minister who thought he wanted independent goats in his administration but really needed loyal sheep; on the other hand, we had non-politicians who thought they could adapt to politics simply by virtue of their experience or expertise.
The shortsightedness identified by Lord Malloch-Brown and the bureaucracy singled out by Lord Jones are now hallmarks of modern British governance. The end result is a group of outsiders who have returned to the outside world, disillusioned, disappointed and depressed. That Lord Myners has announced he is leaving the Treasury to become a student of theology speaks volumes about life as a minister today. Whether we like it or not, politics will continue to be dominated by professionals.
Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) of the New Statesman
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