“Who is gripping?” With these three words, the late Jeremy Heywood ruled Whitehall. The demand would stir his aides into action: calls would be made, emails sent, each carrying the imprimatur of the Cabinet Secretary and with it, the person he served: the Prime Minister. This was how the system worked. And yet, with Heywood’s passing, so too, it seems, has the grip on the system.
The old system was far from ideal, of course. Successive Prime Ministers came to depend on Heywood’s personal authority in a way that now seems unhealthy. He may have been a skilled courtier, but a perception has grown since his death that Heywood had built a machine that only he could manipulate.
As a result, Keir Starmer has inherited a system that is broken; the state can no longer corral the government machine into action. Everyone in Whitehall says the same thing: the authority of the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, is shot, and with it his department. And this matters. Without an organising authority, the state stands inert, propelled only by its own momentum.
In its place, No. 10 has become even more important — the last institution able to impose its authority on the patchwork of governmental principalities that make up the British state. And yet, No 10 itself is not fit for purpose either — a creaking Georgian terrace without institutional knowledge or technological wherewithal. As such, the Treasury dominates Britain’s remaining source of institutional power and strength.
Starmer’s first two months as Prime Minister are testament to this depressing reality. Devoid of any organising narrative, it has allowed itself to be defined instead by the ongoing winter fuel fiasco. And to peer behind the front door of No 10 is to glimpse a situation that is even worse than it might seem.
Since winning power, it has been striking how quickly a sense of factionalism and distrust seems to have taken hold of a team that, before the election, was defined by its sense of collective mission. Back then, everyone was pulling in the same direction. Today, briefings find their way into the press with an alarming regularity: tales of unhappiness, fall outs, power grabs and hierarchical squabbling. Far from being the experienced steady hand who would be able to grip the Whitehall machine with immediate effect, Starmer today looks more like an early Tony Blair who had never worked in government before becoming Prime Minister.
One reason for the briefing wars, according to those involved, is that there were simply not enough jobs in government to go around. As a result, noses have been put out of joint. This, though, is the most benign explanation. Those I spoke to said the briefings were not just from embittered former aides, but reflected a genuinely uneasy atmosphere in No. 10, with a clique forming around Sue Gray on the soft-Left wing of the party and another around “the boys” who have tended to push a more “blue Labour” agenda, focused on the priorities of the working class. Rumours of a division between Gray and Morgan McSweeney, however, are overdone, according to those I spoke with. At the heart of the briefings, therefore, lies a battle to shape the nature of the government — a battle which should have been settled long before the assumption of power.
In Jonathan Powell’s memoir of his time as Blair’s chief of staff, The New Machiavelli, he quotes the observation that new leaders must learn quickly on the job to “defend what Fortune has placed in their lap”. He warns that in modern democratic societies there is no choice but to move quickly and boldly in the first 100 days, for this will define much of the rest of their time in office. “A new leader,” he writes, “has to have prepared in Opposition for that sprint in government.”
As Leader of the Opposition, Starmer seemed to know what he was doing. He had hired Gray directly from the Cabinet Office so that he could hit the ground running. Gray knew Whitehall intimately, warts and all, and surely would have formulated a plan to deal with the gaping hole of authority now sitting at the centre of the British state. So why, two months in, has nothing changed? Long-talked-about plans to create a beefed-up “Department of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet” have — so far — failed to materialise.
Part of the reason for this is the hangover from the Truss catastrophe. Having seen what happened following her sudden removal of officials such as the Treasury’s Tom Scholar, Starmer and his team are determined to avoid any such mistakes. However, the danger is now one of overcorrection. Decisions must be made, the centre gripped and the government’s central purpose explained.
There was a widespread expectation across Whitehall that the current Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, would be summarily dispatched by Starmer. Boris Johnson had plucked Case from obscurity in the hope that he would become “his Jeremy Heywood” back when he anticipated serving a decade as Prime Minister. Yet Case remains: an eerie reminder of a disgraced former regime, shorn of the authority or respect necessary to do the job.
A new National Security Adviser was also expected to be appointed, the unlucky Tim Barrow having been ill-served by Rishi Sunak’s attempts to make him ambassador to the US just months before the election, to Labour’s fury who wanted to make the decision themselves. The Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Elizabeth Perelman, is also expected to move on, having moved over to No. 10 from the Treasury with Rishi Sunak.
Taken together, then, Starmer has not only inherited a dysfunctional system in desperate need of reform, but a set of lame duck individuals charged with managing that system. And it is these figures who Starmer is now relying upon to steer him through these crucial opening stages of his premiership. Over the next few weeks, Starmer must oversee his first address to the Labour party conference, and then his Government’s first budget on October 30 — two moments of high political drama that will shape the remainder of the Parliament.
While most of the great reforming governments, such as Blair’s and Thatcher’s, took years before they found their stride, they had a clear strategy right from the beginning. For Thatcher it was to make Britain great again by ending the post war economic consensus; for Blair it was to drag the country into modernity through constitutional reforms and European levels of public sector investment. Starmer’s government has no equivalent purpose. Any of his five “missions” could be adopted by the Conservative Party without any controversy: “Kickstarting economic growth,” “Making Britain a clean energy superpower; “Halving serious violent crime; “Breaking down barriers to opportunity”; and “building an NHS fit for the future.” Is anyone opposed to these ambitions? Are they even political?
Starmer has created “mission boards” which will bring together leading experts from outside government with the relevant ministers from across Whitehall in order to bring a collective focus to the task. The idea is a reasonable one, though real reform will require a functioning government machine that is able to put each board’s decisions into action.
“My experience is that there is no reform of the system that is going to deliver you big change,” Tony Blair has warned. What was needed, he concluded, was something more simple: grip. “Unless you’re driving from the top it won’t happen,” Blair warned. “It won’t happen because the system won’t have a clear enough direction if it doesn’t get it from the very top…. in the end, the authority, the leader, is the thing that makes things happen.”
So who is driving at the top? So far, Starmer has suffered the fate of almost all prime ministers, so buffeted by events that the banal acts of government must be left to someone else. First, there was the crisis in the prisons, then in the budget, and then on the streets themselves with the riots that broke out over the summer. That is before we consider the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which have already taken up much of Starmer’s time — including yesterday’s meeting with Joe Biden in the US.
With Starmer distracted by the realities of power, the most important man in the government that few have heard of outside Westminster is the man he has tasked with coordinating the central missions of his government: the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden. Freshly installed as a member of the “quad”, through which all decisions must go — along with the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor — it is McFadden’s job to reinvigorate the Cabinet Office; the man with armed with the authority of the Prime Minister to get things done. Without a Jeremy Heywood to corral the state, much of the burden will fall on McFadden. Yet, McFadden can only do so much.
Blair — the man McFadden once worked for — is clear what the overriding task of any prime minister must be: “Make the centre STRONG.” And yet, it was not strong when Blair left office — and it is in an even worse place today. As Powell himself put it in 2010 “the little secret of the British constitution is that the centre of government is not too powerful but too weak”. Britain is today an over centralised country with a weak centre.
The British state today is in desperate need of reform. The country is taxed more than ever, but receives less in return. The economy is stagnant, living standards only just emerging from their worst squeeze in living memory and the NHS no longer seemingly able to cope with the demands placed upon it. To succeed, however, Starmer must channel his inner Ferdinand Foch: “My centre is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. J’attaque!”
This lesson from history is not one currently being heeded by Keir Starmer. He needs to get his people in place, get a grip and get on the front foot — quickly. The system is broken, but it will be Starmer who is to blame if he cannot fix it.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/