Hubris and centralisation threaten the effective running of government

Sharing power with trusted allies is the surest way for a reforming PM to achieve his ambitions

Rarely in recent decades has a politician possessed such command of the political scene as Boris Johnson does today. His electoral achievement was stunning, and a vast relief to all of us who feared a collapse into permanent paralysis or a lurch to the radical Left. The Labour Party is in confusion, the Liberal Democrats irrelevant and the Brexit Party rendered superfluous.

Just as encouragingly, the early policy decisions of the Government have been on the right lines. Negotiations with the EU are being approached with a refreshing clarity and unity. The new immigration policy of opening up to needed skills while clamping down elsewhere is right in principle, even if it might need some amendment when workers become scarcer. The painful nettle of HS2 has been grasped. Announcements about support for science and mathematics are excellent. This administration has every chance of being a very good one.

Boris is a historian, so he knows that moments of supreme authority do not last. It is understandable, therefore, that he is in a hurry to get the whole Whitehall machine to perform as he wishes: ministers have been fired in large numbers, advisers dismissed wholesale, and now senior civil servants are reportedly lined up for the chop. Institutions seen as resisting the new thrust of government policy, from the BBC to the judiciary, are threatened with attack. The call has gone out from Dominic Cummings for “weirdos and misfits” – not that any of us with long experience of politics have ever found such people to be in short supply.

It is easy to sympathise with much of this. Is the BBC bloated, however good its programmes? I think so. Is judicial review employed too widely? Absolutely. Should badly performing ministers or officials be dropped? Of course. Yet there is a danger of placing too much faith in the centralisation of power and policy-making; of a little bit of hubris creeping in; and of dismissing out of hand people who could otherwise be willingly coopted to the Government’s objectives.

There is more than a hint of this in the departure of some capable senior ministers, of whom Sajid Javid is the most recent example. I yield to no one as an enthusiastic fan of the new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who will do an outstanding job. But the net result of both Jeremy Hunt departing the Cabinet and now Javid is that two major contenders for the party leadership are outside the Government, along with many of the less successful ones.

Almost all prime ministers have kept defeated rivals close to them – think of Margaret Thatcher with Willie Whitelaw, or Harold Wilson with George Brown. There are reasons for that. While removing such figures would have enhanced the power of Downing Street, it would also have reduced the quality of the Cabinet, and in the long term have been dangerous.

It is in the interests of a prime minister to have some senior colleagues who are not afraid of him, or her, and know they can speak frankly in private without risk of dismissal. Furthermore, it is very much in his interests to have ministers who are strong in their departments, with a reasonable expectation of having enough time in the job to master it, able to rely on the loyalty of their own advisers, provide alternative ideas, and nevertheless work so closely with him that they are prepared to fight to their political death with him rather than stab him in the back.

By contrast, there are several reasons why the centralisation of decision-making does not work well in government. One is that the centre, in the form of No 10 and the Cabinet Office, cannot possibly keep on top of what is happening across a couple of dozen departments trying to govern a complex, modern society.

Revealingly, British military doctrine states that a commander in battle cannot cope with more than five subordinate units at one time, and only then with a high degree of mutual trust. Our generals have worked out something easily forgotten: too much centralisation can lead to many areas being neglected.

Another reason is that most problems faced by governments don’t have obvious answers. There is no perfect way to improve social care, develop the NHS, build more houses, save the environment, reduce knife crime or create a more prosperous North. No ideology will produce all the solutions, and no one human being can master all these subjects. Coming up with the best policies requires some creative tension, with different people inside and outside Whitehall feeling they are welcome to offer alternative points of view. This does indeed require the novel thinking of “misfits” but also listening to hardearned experience as well.

To a politician’s eye there is a further issue: if you are in charge of everything when it’s going well, you are going to get the blame when some things inevitably go wrong. The protection and longevity of a prime minister is not only enhanced by the success of subordinates who feel empowered, it is strengthened by them taking the blame for failure. This is not to say that a reforming government can succeed without a sustained drive from the centre. The point is that strong allies are more useful than control freaks.

More widely, it will be worth guarding against an excess of control. The recent incident in which some journalists were lined up for a briefing in No 10 and others put in a line for exclusion was a parody of counter-productive handling of the media. Strong, independent institutions are a principal feature of British democracy. Let’s reform the BBC for the Netflix age, but still leave it with the reach, resources and independence to be respected across the world. Let’s change laws so that judicial rulings on political matters are less necessary, but without ever impinging on the independence of our courts.

I have little doubt that such balanced reforms are indeed Boris’s intention. And in the recent reshuffle he brought back some previously sacked ministers in junior posts. His administration is doing well and deserves support. But there is around him just a tendency towards centralisation, a hint of seeking vengeance, and a whiff of brooking no dissent, that it would be wise to snuff out in the days ahead.