It is tempting to say that the failures of the past 14 years, which have reduced Britain to a divided, cynical and aggrieved country, have been an aberration. But these failures have their roots in problems not contained to the Conservative Party. Poor-quality politicians, exposed to 24-hour news, manipulated by advisers and cut off from a demoralised civil service, now manage a greatly expanded state on behalf of voters who blame them for its every failing. Unless that changes, Labour – despite its massive mandate – may find itself unable to govern properly.
The credibility of government plummeted under Conservative-led rule. Many Conservatives never trusted David Cameron – some did not actually consider him a Conservative – but his six years in office have an air of plausibility when compared to what followed. Cameron’s greatest miscalculation was to provide Britain with the means to leave the European Union, after which he resigned immediately, ushering in eight years of governance that began as indecisive, deteriorated to the shambolic, staggered to the chaotic, and culminated in the simply incapable.
I remember asking, before Cameron’s referendum, if we as a nation had become so used to being governed and directed by an external authority that, outside the EU, we might struggle to take those decisions for ourselves. For decades, much of the apparatus of government in Britain had been dedicated to implementing the decisions of others. We had a Department of Trade, but Britain did not negotiate bilateral trade deals with other countries. We had a Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food constrained by the Common Agricultural Policy. Our foreign and defence policies chimed almost exactly with those of our partners. And although we never joined the euro, the Treasury built an orthodoxy that kept our domestic finances in tune with those of the main European economies.
Ministers lost the need to decide and officials lost the need to advise. Directives, literally and metaphorically, were issued instead. The sheer inexperience this created was amply illustrated in the utter failure of the Johnson and Sunak administrations to find the much-advertised Brexit opportunities. Liz Truss, who came between them, had only 49 days in which to do anything, and did only enough to become the shortest-serving prime minister. Her failure was indicative of another characteristic of contemporary politicians: the ability to attain high public office without demonstrating any successful executive experience inside or outside politics.
For 14 years the competent in government were greatly outnumbered by the incompetent. Yet this was not unique to the Conservative Party or to Westminster. During the coalition the Liberal Democrats provided ample evidence of their inadequacy. One of the worst scandals of recent years – the Post Office falsely accusing hundreds of sub-postmasters of criminality between 1999 and 2015 – was allowed to go unchecked because of negligence. In the Scottish government, the SNP’s Humza Yousaf lasted just 13 months as first minister, his regime disintegrating while his predecessors faced a criminal investigation for alleged mismanagement of party funds. In the Welsh government, Labour’s Vaughan Gething lost a no-confidence motion soon after becoming first minister. Each fortnight, Private Eye’s “Rotten Boroughs” column is littered with examples of peculation, corruption, incompetence and failure among those who run local government. At every level there is evidence that the British are increasingly incapable of governing themselves.
Britain was once governed by a single class – the aristocracy – with mixed results. At one extreme there was Lord North, who lost the British Empire in America, and at the other the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, who led the country at the peak of its imperial power in the last years of the 19th century.
In the Victorian era, it was politicians from the newly enriched mercantile class – notably Peel and Gladstone – that were most successful as leaders, bringing intellect, experience and vision to government. The crucial political decisions of the 19th century, such as the repeal of the corn laws and the grant of Irish Home Rule, were achieved through their leadership. The state was smaller then, and political leadership perhaps less complicated, but the calibre of those in public life, and their sense of what was necessary as well as possible, was far superior to what we are used to.
Voters then viewed their leaders with deference, an attitude that was largely swept aside by the First World War. In the century since, any respect that might be accorded to politicians has been replaced by knee-jerk contempt, some of it richly merited.
Perhaps this is because today’s politicians lack the life experience that equipped their forebears to lead. The landowners and former Army officers who once peopled the Conservative benches are mostly gone, as are the manual workers who once led Labour. Over the last 50 years, the path from student union to research assistant to political research department to special adviser to MP to minister has become the standard route into office.
The inexperience of a minister would have once been compensated for by the influence of civil servants, but these days, civil servants may have but a walk-on part. Decisions are heavily influenced by special advisers, none of whom are electorally accountable and many of whom are barely out of university.
The nature of the much-studied relationship between ministers and mandarins is explored, with considerable expertise, by Alun Evans in his new book The Intimacy of Power, which its subtitle describes as “an insight into Private Office, Whitehall’s most sensitive network”. Evans, a former chief executive of the British Academy, was a civil servant for more than 30 years, principal private secretary to three cabinet ministers, and worked in Tony Blair’s Downing Street. He tells the history of this essential part of Britain’s governance, and how the civil service has developed from being an aide to ministers who knew their minds and led policy, to working with ministers who sometimes seem to have no minds at all, and no sense of standards or propriety either.
Yet according to his analysis it is worse. As the state and the expectations placed upon it have grown, even civil servants, who have been (supposedly) carefully selected on merit since the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of the mid-19th century, are struggling to do what was constitutionally expected of them. His book covers Partygate – the revelling of Downing Street staff, including Boris Johnson, at drinks parties during a pandemic when socialising outside the domestic unit was banned – in which Martin Reynolds, Johnson’s principal private secretary and a former ambassador to Libya, encouraged members of staff to “join us from 6pm and bring your own booze”.
When New Labour moved into Downing Street in 1997 the nature of the civil service at this very high level began to change. John Major recruited between 34 and 38 special advisers at any one time, while Blair’s had up to 84, yet there was no notable improvement in the quality of governance. Some in the private office felt distrusted by New Labour, when all they sought to do was serve with impartiality. Evans remarks on “the failure of the civil service in early 1997 to prepare itself for the New Labour style of operation”. But such preparation would have required accepting some degree of politicisation, and the erosion of impartiality. When the traditional practices of the civil service failed to live up to the new regime’s expectations, it prompted the formation of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit.
For Evans, Whitehall from 2010-22 was “an institution in decline”; he quotes Gavin Barwell, a Tory MP and former junior minister who became Theresa May’s chief of staff: “There has been an explosion in the number of political advisers. They are the people ministers now spend most of their time with, and that’s a mistake.” Under Johnson, matters became disastrous: “The system of private office, certainly as it operated in No 10, simply broke down,” Evans writes. “The principles of integrity and good governance at the heart of the prime minister’s office failed. The principal cause of that failure was Johnson himself, although others, including some senior civil servants, were complicit.”
Keir Starmer’s worst enemies would not equate his qualities with those of Johnson or Truss. He seems more decisive than May, and is patently more political than Sunak, who for all his faults as a politician, displayed decency and intelligence in office. But hardly anyone in Starmer’s administration has held office before. They will be, notionally, in the hands of civil servants, whose morale has imploded in the past 25 years, and especially in the last five, and Starmer must decide how much power to afford the cadre of special adviser.
One hears vox pops on the radio and television in which participants rail against the political class, talk about its untrustworthiness, and maintain there is little point in voting as “they are all the same”. Yet many such people just voted; they have, by a considerable margin, installed a new government and they do, whatever some may say, have expectations.
We were repeatedly told throughout the campaign of the grave challenges facing the next administration: the NHS; social care; migration; the economy; crime. This is on top of having successful international relations with a Europe that is shifting markedly to the right and an America that looks likely to elect Donald Trump, all set against the backdrop of a potentially lethal war, into which we could yet be dragged, raging a few hundred miles across the continent. The scope for achievement, and failure, is considerable.
One does not doubt that Starmer will address this with all the seriousness and attention to detail that he applied to his role as director of public prosecutions. But recent history should tell him he must keep the closest watch on inexperienced colleagues, and on even more inexperienced and less exposed political advisers. One of the best policies he could introduce would be to reduce the influence of the latter, and to train up and rely far more upon the sort of impartial, reliable, dedicated civil service upon which this country prided itself in the 19th and 20th centuries. The alternative is that one failed government will continue to follow another, and this once most orderly of countries will become simply ungovernable.
[See also: Keir Starmer beyond the wall]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024