What are we to make of the latest briefings from inside government over the fate of cabinet secretary Chris Wormald.
As ever, anonymous briefings are designed to create heat not light, so it’s difficult to unpack. Unattributable, they allow a minister or prime minister to distance themselves from the briefing whilst being secretly pleased that it’s out there. To use a football analogy, it is often the equivalent of the chairman – and it’s almost always a man – giving a public vote of confidence in the manager. Generally, a clear signal that the manager is about to get the sack.
Is that where we are? Are the briefings to test the water, soften the ground for a difficult decision? The advantage for the chairman, or prime minister in this context, is that the briefings are designed to be vague and difficult to challenge. In Wormald’s case it is essentially the “Sir Humphrey” parody played out, based on his career and background with little evidence to substantiate an/y actual criticism. Create a stereotype and justify it with an anecdote. It’s a tried and tested method used relentlessly by Dominic Cummings to undermine the leadership of the civil service. Interesting that some in No.10 now appear to favour him as their role model.
For any Cummings admirers in No.10 reading this piece, publicly undermining senior officials has a chilling effect throughout the civil service, from the leadership group down. Civil servants can’t publicly defend themselves. When political leaders allow briefing against them, civil servants often have to get permission to push back from the same advisers who orchestrated the campaign against them. Everyone knows this, yet civil servants are forced to go through the charade of everyone tutting, being disappointed in the briefing whilst expressing fake concern and bewilderment at the source. Then there’s the promise to work the phones to ensure all those hacks know the minister has the utmost confidence in them.
The tactic impacts upon morale across the service, it undermines trust in political leadership and essentially trashes the brand. To invoke the football analogy again, which good manager wants to work for a chairman who constantly sacks his managers and publicly blames them for results, when the actual reason the club isn’t doing well may be a little more nuanced and to do the with transfer strategy from the chairman.
As I’ve said many times in these pages, everyone knows governing is tough. Everyone knows the civil service can be brilliant and at the same time dysfunctional. We can trade examples of both until the cows come mooing back to the barn, but understanding why things don’t work, rather than simply pointing them out or blaming an individual, is a different matter.
Many civil servants I have spoken to over the years would agree with some of the analysis of what’s wrong from the likes of Cummings. Anyone can break a system down, putting it back together is a different skill. Doing that whilst maintaining the high levels of public service that taxpayers rightly demand is an even bigger challenge. It’s also one that every civil servant I know is up for. It’s why they joined the service in the first place.
The civil service works best when there is a clear political strategy and good evidence-based policy. That applies equally to the running of the service as it does to the policies departments are tasked with implementing. When Starmer made his infamous “tepid bath of managed decline” comments, one of my challenges to him was to set out exactly the major reform agenda ministers had for the civil service that he said they were so reluctant to implement. It wasn’t there then and I would humbly suggest it’s not there now.
That’s fine, I’m not a big fan of mega reform projects in the civil service as usually they fail to appreciate the complexities of the service and huge differences there are between the hundreds of organisations that make it up. But failing to set out a clear strategy then publicly undermining officials for a failure to deliver it is not fine.
For those admirers of the Cummings era, I would offer two take-aways. Firstly, he had a strategy for undermining and removing civil servants. He was at least successful in that, but he had no strategy for what came next. Every permanent secretary that was removed – by whatever means – was essentially replaced by another of a similar background and experience. He could break but he couldn’t fix.
And the second lesson is that all of those shenanigans were ultimately at the behest of the prime minister who’s reputation was damaged by the evident impact and tacit acceptance of that chaotic management.
The prime minister could – and should – put an end to this briefing now. It’s counter productive, unfair to individuals and damages the trust that is essential to good government. That’s the lesson the Cummings admirers should learn.