‘Don’t rid Civil Service of its best people’
Replacing talented figures with political appointees will not address the real problems in Whitehall
In calling for our public servants to be more diverse, more expert and more open to experimentation Michael Gove was absolutely right.
But the rushed announcement of the departure of Sir Mark Sedwill as Cabinet Secretary was not a good example of how to lead the government machine towards positive change. The danger of politicising official appointments is that, if we want the most promising people, they have to come from varied points of view.
Michael Gove’s speech on Saturday on reforming the Civil Service was a vintage performance from one of the most effective ministers of recent years: passionate, well-informed and clear in its proposals. In calling for our public servants to be more diverse, more expert and more open to experimentation he was absolutely right, and both my own experience in government and observation of the current crisis bear that out.
Sadly, the rushed announcement a few hours later of the departure of Sir Mark Sedwill as Cabinet Secretary was not a good example of how to lead the government machine towards positive change. For one thing, it was preceded by a series of briefings to the media calculated to undermine him – a reprehensible habit of the current team in No10, to which the Prime Minister should put a stop. That is indeed a “self-defeating and corrosive” practice, as the head of the First Division Association of civil servants has said, for it will be a disincentive for talented people to take on jobs at the top – including people outside politics.
For another thing, Sir Mark has been a pretty good example of the risk-taking and expertise – on national security – that Michael Gove correctly wants to encourage. I first met him when he was ambassador to Afghanistan – not exactly a cushy number with a full-scale war going on and the embassy itself often under attack. When he returned I gave him a senior role in the Foreign Office, only for Theresa May to decide she had to have him help her sort out the Home Office. I said she could only take him if the prime minister himself, David Cameron, called me and insisted on it, which he duly did. Sir Mark was very highly regarded by a string of prime ministers, on which Boris Johnson has maintained he agrees.
A third danger highlighted by his departure is the politicisation of official appointments. If we want the most promising people to serve the country they have to come from varied points of view. All of us who have dealt with US administrations have witnessed the nightmare of changing long lists of officials when a new president comes in, leading to extended vacancies, loss of expertise and serious damage to diplomacy. The latest briefing, reported in this newspaper, that the new cabinet secretary has to be a “Brexiteer” is not the way to go about it. Of course, he or she will have to be good at delivering Brexit, but that’s a different requirement. Some civil servants are brilliant at executing policies they didn’t vote for themselves.
The final issue I would take with the weekend’s changes is that the appointment of David Frost as National Security Adviser – Mark Sedwill’s other position – sits uneasily with Michael Gove’s desire that top officials should be “as knowledgeable as a consultant surgeon” about their areas of responsibility. Mr Frost is clearly very capable and has impressed the Prime Minister – there should indeed be a senior role for him. But out there in our intelligence agencies there are a lot of “consultant surgeons” who have spent a lifetime performing difficult operations. You can’t pass them all over while calling for more expertise without eyebrows being raised, or indeed daggers sharpened.
The Gove speech followed by the Sedwill departure looks akin to a student handing in a brilliant theory paper and then getting rather muddled on the first practical test. It is a pity, because the theory is a good one, and whoever is the new cabinet secretary will need to be serious about pursuing it. That, indeed, should be the condition of their appointment, rather than how they voted in the referendum or any election.
In particular, Mr Gove was correct about the need for “appropriate skills, training and knowledge”. He kindly referred to the Diplomatic Academy we created in the Foreign Office in advocating “a properly-resourced campus for training those in government”. Such advancement of deep learning is sorely needed, as we still rely far too much on the gifted amateur, with general skills and disconnected experiences. One reform I never got round to myself was to insist that diplomats spend more of their career focused on a particular region or country, rather than applying for whatever job they want next. As things stand today, we can train a junior official to speak Urdu before a first posting in Pakistan, and then find they spend most of their later career in Brussels and Washington, while we still look for people steeped in knowledge of, yes, Pakistan.
Mr Gove’s speech was also spot-on with the observation that the Civil Service is “inescapably metropolitan”. He said its culture had to change to make space for more “urban leadership” and “allowing communities to take back control”. The truth of this has never been more forcibly demonstrated than during the Covid-19 crisis. All politicians and Whitehall officials find it difficult to break the habits of centralising control. Public Health England has been exposed in recent months as a slow-moving and unimaginative bureaucracy – failing to see how much testing could be done by mobilising small laboratories, or how useful local government could be if informed and empowered. The effort to create a Uk-only tracing app, with the alleged advantage of providing all data to a central point, predictably ended in collapse.
Ministers, as well as civil servants, will have to let go of instincts to run everything from the centre – and that means Cardiff and Edinburgh as well as London – if local communities are really going to take more control of their affairs. If they can do so, while providing support from more specialist and expert government departments, the reforms Mr Gove has called for could be a great success.
Yet that will only work if the Government appreciates and develops the people who already work for it. I recall speaking to British ambassadors barricaded in embassies as fighting raged outside, keeping their cool as rioters stormed their walls. We have more people with leadership and risk-taking skills than is recognised. It should not be difficult to make major reforms while employing the full talents of such individuals. But the Government will have to get better at practising the theory it rightly preaches.