Brown The Mind of the Minister

Restoring trust between ministers and civil servants
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78590-940-5
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Britain's most important relationship, between civil servants and ministers, has reached breaking point. Drawing on interviews with former government ministers and Permanent Secretaries - including Vince Cable, Caroline Flint, Rory Stewart, Philip Rutnam, Simon McDonald and Una O'Brien - The Mind of the Minister provides expert guidance and recommendations for how this vital relationship can improve. Centuries of carefully built trust and mutual understanding have been undermined and strained in recent years, not least by mismanagement at the highest level, a scorched-earth approach to constitutional norms and the testing of civil service integrity. This relationship now needs urgent attention. Ministers, famously, begin the job with an hour's notice and often know little about the department they've landed in. They bring energy, drive and optimism for change, but over time, these ambitions can be drowned by reality, accountability and crises, as well as the distractions of promotion, demotion or a changing political landscape. Civil servants, on the other hand, serve the government of the day and remain in post while ministers come and go. They must be ready to adjust and impartially support a minister of any political persuasion or personality. How does this partnership really work in practice? How do both sides adjust to the different chapters in a ministerial lifespan? What happens if rule makers become rule breakers without repercussions? This compelling book lifts the curtain on the minister-civil servant partnership, highlighting that this crucial relationship must improve - for the sake of our democracy.

Tom Brown has worked with thousands of civil servants, officials and politicians to help improve policy-making and communications skills since 2010. He has assisted UN agencies, EU institutions and governments in more than forty countries. He currently spends a lot of time working across Westminster and Whitehall and the space in between them (metaphorically, not on Parliament Square).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brown, Tom

Leseproben

Introduction
On 29 February 2020, I awoke to the prospect of a birthday for the first time in four years. The discovery that I was born on a leap year evokes surprise and (to me, at least) strange reactions from other people; around the world, 29 February carries all sorts of mysterious connotations and superstitions. In Ireland, it has been considered the day that women may propose to men. Italian proverbs have warned that leap years make women erratic and they are urged not to make any big life decisions until the leap year has ended. Greek and Ukrainian folklore suggests that getting married during a leap year will ultimately end in divorce. It is a day that apparently both births and dooms relationships. The day of 29 February 2020 was also the day that Sir Philip Rutnam chose, very publicly, to resign as Permanent Secretary from the Home Office, following a high-profile clash with Home Secretary Priti Patel. The moment marked a nadir in relations between civil servants and ministers and sent seismic waves through Westminster (the world of politicians) and Whitehall (the world of civil servants). In the pouring rain (under an umbrella), Rutnam opened with this statement: I have this morning resigned as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office. I take this decision with great regret after a career of thirty-three years. I am making this statement now because I will be issuing a claim against the Home Office for constructive dismissal. In the last ten days, I have been the target of a vicious and orchestrated briefing campaign. It has been alleged that I have briefed the media against the Home Secretary. This – along with many other claims – is completely false. The Home Secretary categorically denied any involvement in this campaign to the Cabinet Office. I regret I do not believe her. She has not made the efforts I would expect to dissociate herself from the comments. Even despite this campaign, I was willing to effect a reconciliation with the Home Secretary, as requested by the Cabinet Secretary on behalf of the Prime Minister. But despite my efforts to engage with her, Priti Patel has made no effort to engage with me to discuss this.1 In normal language, this might sound like a strong statement. In the language of government, these were devastating words which shook the foundations of minister–civil servant relations. Long before the term ‘unprecedented’ became commonplace, former head of the civil service Lord Kerslake described the nature of Rutnam’s resignation as just that, stating that it would ‘send shockwaves through the civil service’.2 It was and it did. Superstition might suggest that the leap year had struck again, ending another relationship in divorce. More likely is that we were witnessing another drastic moment of decline in Britain’s most important relationship – that of ministers and civil servants. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it is not. Government exists to serve citizens, which it does through projects and services. These are underpinned by policy (a plan or course of action by the government), which is initiated by ministers and then developed and delivered by civil servants. When it comes to health, education, pensions, benefits, transport, police, national defence and security, protecting consumers, national energy supply and paying for all of those things, it is the most critical relationship for the country. And this was a drastic moment. There have been (few and far between) examples of senior civil servants being moved within Whitehall to get away from a minister who they were unable to get along with (including a couple of premature departures in the 1990s). But none at the level of Rutnam or in the manner in which he was forced out. Trouble had been brewing in the years leading up to this moment. In 2018, one (unnamed) Permanent Secretary said the relationship was at its ‘lowest ebb’: I think it was very low in the Francis Maude days [2010–14], but it’s pretty low now. I think a number of things are making it worse at the moment … The default is that [civil servants are] to blame for everything. We’re to blame for Brexit being difficult; if we say Brexit’s difficult, we’re blamed for being Remoaners.3 Things got worse. The Patel–Rutnam fall-out of 2020 marked a distinct low moment. Later that year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Department for Education faced a school exam grading controversy, where an algorithm designed to combat grade inflation ended up disproportionately benefiting private school students and penalising those from state schools. It was a major error and caused stress and anxiety for thousands of students. The Department for Education’s Permanent Secretary, Jonathan Slater, and the CEO of exams regulator Ofqual, Sally Collier, were forced to resign. The Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, who should have taken responsibility (under the principle of individual ministerial responsibility), refused to. Slater only discovered plans to replace him after he was contacted by a journalist from The Times for comment. His sacking was widely seen as a way to shield Williamson. In September 2020, the Permanent Secretary of the Government Legal Department, Jonathan Jones, resigned over the government’s plan to use the Internal Market Bill to back out of parts of its withdrawal agreement with the EU. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, had told MPs that the bill would break international law in a ‘very specific and limited way’ by giving UK ministers the power to override EU law in ‘tightly defined circumstances’ if border negotiations broke down. The government was asking civil servants to break the law. The year of 2020 also saw a clear-out of other Permanent Secretaries, on a scale not witnessed before. In a very public war on Whitehall, government sources leaked that Sir Simon McDonald, Sir Philip Rutnam and Sir Tom Scholar (Permanent Secretaries at the Foreign Office, Home Office and HM Treasury, respectively) were on a three-person hit list of those they wanted removed from post.4 Scholar managed to survive the 2020 cull of Permanent Secretaries but was later removed by Liz Truss during her short spell as Prime Minister in 2022. Following widespread press reports that he was to be sacked, Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill left in September 2020. The Telegraph said that Downing Street regarded Sedwill as ‘too much of a Europhile and establishment figure’ to be in post for its planned Whitehall reforms. Sir Richard Heaton left the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) at the end of his initial five-year appointment period, but he apparently only learned of his departure because it was tagged onto the end of a statement by No. 10 announcing the departure of Sedwill.5 Sir Simon McDonald had worked with Boris Johnson while he was Foreign Secretary and they appeared to have a tense relationship, including during Johnson’s exit from the role. As Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), McDonald had subsequently criticised Johnson’s handling of a row over leaked cables that led to the resignation of Sir Kim Darroch, the UK ambassador to the US, during the Tory leadership contest (which Johnson won). McDonald had expected to stay to oversee the merger of the FCO with the Department for International Development (DfID) in 2020 but was forced out early, in what some described as prime ministerial revenge. The Covid era also brought about many more examples of a deterioration in the health of the relationship between ministers and civil servants. In November 2022, Adam Tolley KC began a fivemonth investigation into the behaviour of Dominic Raab, following accusations of bullying. Tolley concluded Raab’s conduct ‘involved an abuse or misuse of power in a way that undermines or humiliates’ officials. Following publication of the inquiry findings, in April 2023, Raab resigned. Later that year, the Covid Inquiry produced damning findings, particularly Helen MacNamara’s testimony of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s refusal to address misogyny, lying and ‘nuclear levels’ of overconfidence. One senior civil servant, with over thirty years of experience, said of that time: ‘There is a poisonous, horrible atmosphere – a feeling that retribution could strike at any time for offering the wrong advice to the wrong person.’6 In December 2022, Jill Rutter wrote for the Institute for Government that ‘Brexit, Covid and Boris Johnson have made existing tensions in relations between civil servants and ministers unsustainable’.7 Following seismic events and crises (like Brexit and Covid), there is often much analysis attributing the extreme circumstances to extreme actions. There is no doubt that the relationship between civil servants and ministers, and particularly Permanent Secretaries (as the top civil servant in a department) and Secretaries of State (the minister in charge of that department), reached its worst point during the periods of Brexit and Covid. But the basis of how the two work together,...