It’s now or never – Boris must take on the Blob or be suffocated by it
If the PM is serious about tackling bureaucratic groupthink, he needs to start with HS2 and the BBC
Remember the Blob, that alien, monstrous amoeba of Hollywood lore, which feasts on everybody it encounters, growing ever greedier, stronger and larger in the process? It turns out that the nightmarish creature still exists, but no longer in small-town America: its new home is Whitehall, and it has developed a predilection for gobbling up Tory politicians and advisers.
It was first spotted by Michael Gove when he and Dominic Cummings were pushing a schools revolution: they faced ferocious opposition from Whitehall and the educational establishment, a duumvirate they identified, and always privately referred to, as the Blob in disguise. Officials would publicly welcome the changes Gove and Cummings would order, while devoting themselves to undermining them, out of a combination of arrogance, incompetence, ideological conviction and self-interest. Any victory would merely strengthen the bureaucrats’ insatiable appetite for power, and their almost deranged Panglossianism.
No wonder Cummings is so keen to inject some cognitive diversity into the government machinery, and to move away from Whitehall’s dysfunctional mish-mash of 19th-century Northcotetrevelyan civil servants, out of control quangocrats and Brownite command and control structures. From New Zealand to Singapore, plenty of countries operate far better, more responsive administrative states than we do, with government employees well aware that they work for the public and not the other way around.
After a few weeks of phoney war, the rematch is about to begin: it’s No 10 v the Blob, and only one side will be left standing. Will Johnson, Cummings, Gove and their hugely more powerful and better-prepared team slay the monster this time, or will they be forced into humiliating retreat? Will they pick their battles correctly, push through historic reforms to the structure of government, sequence their revolutionary programme and have the stamina to keep fighting, or will they be tripped-up and panicked into submission, like so many would-be reformers in their time?
Some of the early signs are good. Dealing with the quangocracy is just as important as reforming the Civil Service itself. In three encouraging developments, Tony Hall has stood down as director general of the BBC, Sir John Manzoni has retired as the Civil Service’s chief executive and the communications watchdog Ofcom has been sent back to the drawing board in its hunt for a new boss.
But who will be the next ambassador to the US? Is the job really only being advertised within the Civil Service? Perhaps that doesn’t matter; equally, the exact number of Cabinet ministers or the precise shape of government departments will prove to be far less significant than ensuring Downing Street becomes a superministry equipped to drive reform.
Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, will be replaced by Andrew Bailey. It wasn’t the most radical choice, but it wasn’t a victory for the Blob either, which desperately lobbied for a different candidate. The Government didn’t want another too-big-for-their boots governor, and tearing up Gordon Brown’s monetary orthodoxy isn’t number one on its list of priorities. Fair enough.
The first real test of whether the Blob or the Johnsonites are winning will be HS2: it must be scrapped or at least downgraded so drastically that it becomes something entirely different. HS2 embodies just about everything that has gone wrong in Britain, and is the perfect case study of establishment failure: its costs – at least £106billion and counting – are far greater than any conceivable benefit. It has been horrendously mismanaged, enriching contractors, lobbyists and developers at the expense of taxpayers. It is the answer to the wrong question, based on an obsolete Sixties approach to transport. It is the sort of daft project that pro-eu British politicians and officials in awe of France tend to pursue: they have the TGV so why can’t we? In truth, the money could be better spent on almost anything else.
HS2 is the most expensive act of virtue-signalling yet: it was George Osborne’s attempt at showing that he cared about the North, and that he had fixed the public finances so could now afford to spend. Yet it is a Londoner’s take on “helping” the rest of the country: high-speed rail shifts activity to larger metropolitan centres, with smaller towns serving as sources of labour and cheaper housing. It is a tool of centralisation, not devolution: it is not about “levelling-up”. Any local Tory politician who cannot see this should be ignored.
This is a key test of Johnson’s determination: does he really want to help the rest of the country, or is it just PR? If the former, as we all hope and believe, he should replace HS2 with a whole list of new infrastructure projects focused on the North and Midlands, including roads and rail connections between cities, and cancel the London to Birmingham link. If he bottles it, the message will be grim: the Blob will have won a psychological victory, and its appetite for Tory flesh will have been whetted.
The next big test will be the BBC: non-payment of the licence fee must be decriminalised this year, and genuine, longer-term change put into motion. Why hasn’t the Competition and Markets Authority started an investigation into the BBC’S abuse of its dominant, subsidised position, especially in online news and radio? How can the corporation possibly be announcing that it will be launching more podcasts, a move that can only crowd out private competitors? How can it operate a website that is effectively an online newspaper?
Yes, it is protected for now by its Royal Charter, but the CMA should start its own investigation into how it is distorting the market. As to Ofcom, it must also scrutinise the BBC much more closely as soon as its new management is in place. If neither of those agencies do anything, and Johnson doesn’t make his own move, the Blob, and its perverse obsession with maintaining the status quo, will have triumphed.
Real change takes time. But we shall soon find out whether Johnsonism stands a chance, or whether it will be gradually suffocated by a monolithic Left-liberal, anti-democratic Blob convinced that it is the real government of Britain.