Brilliant mandarin who served four prime ministers
As cabinet secretary until Lord
last month, Jeremy Heywood, Heywood
who has died aged 56, was an 1961-2018
essential figure at Downing Street, said The Times – a “fixer, enforcer, confidant, coordinator, crisis manager and keeper of secrets”. Britain’s most senior civil servant, he was the person who was always in the room during the prime minister’s meetings, always on the phone during conference calls. He was a behind-the-scenes player in major political events from Black Wednesday to the Brexit negotiations; and served as trusted adviser to four PMS. Calm, softly spoken, relentlessly hard-working and incredibly organised, he had a knack for making himself “indispensable”, said The Daily Telegraph. “Jeremy’s like a drug, people get addicted to him quickly,” remarked one of his colleagues. To some, however, this unelected official was too influential. His enemies referred to him as the PM’S “puppetmaster”; a minister joked: “There’s no point having a [Brexit] referendum because, whatever the result, Jeremy Heywood will still run Britain.”
Yet Heywood was not an old-school mandarin in the style of Sir Humphrey. An ardent moderniser, he did what he could to strip away the stuffiness of Whitehall, in the interests of getting things done, and deployed, in his precise tones, all the latest management jargon, said The Guardian: ministers were “customers for advice”, long-term planning was “horizon scanning” and official reports were “products”. Nor was his career without controversy. The Daily Mail dubbed him “Sir Cover-up” when it emerged that he had blocked the release to the Chilcot inquiry of messages between Tony Blair and George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq. He was accused of being too cosy with the Blair administration, but he was close to Gordon Brown and David Cameron too, said Peter Oborne in The Mail on Sunday. “He ran their lives; made things happen – and just as often, stopped them from happening.” To shield the PM was, he believed, part of his job, and Heywood, “a decent man”, who “mastered every detail of every brief he was ever given”, took his job extremely seriously.
Jeremy Heywood was born in Glossop in Derbyshire to a teacher and an archaeologist. Sent to the Quaker school in York at which his father taught, he became head boy and went on to Hertford College, Oxford. It was there that he became a Manchester United fan and a chain smoker; later, he seemed to live on a diet of cigarettes and coffee. Having passed the fast-track exams into the civil service, he joined the Health and Safety Executive in 1983, but quickly moved to the Treasury, “where he began to shine as one of the brightest minds in Whitehall”, said The Guardian. He was principal private secretary to Norman Lamont, and worked with Cameron, Lamont’s special adviser, who thought him the most clever person he’d ever met. When Blair became PM in 1997, he made Heywood economic and domestic secretary – which put him in the middle of the Blair-brown wars that raged on Downing Street. He managed to remain on good terms with both sides, and in 1999, he became the PM’S principal private secretary.
Having married, and wanting to spend more time with his family, he decided, in 2003, to take a break from Whitehall and went into banking. But he found making money less rewarding than helping to run the country and, in 2007, Brown lured him back – just in time for the financial crisis. After the 2010 election, he was a key broker in negotiations between the Tories and the Lib Dems; in 2012, Cameron made him cabinet secretary. Among other things, he was said to have “dispatched” Steve Hilton, after Cameron’s “blue-skies thinker” proposed sacking 90% of all civil servants. Heywood’s skills, in balancing warring factions to prevent the work of government being derailed, were tested again when Theresa May lost her majority in 2017. He was diagnosed with cancer last year, and took some time off for treatment, but only resigned last month, at which point he was given a peerage. He is survived by his wife, Suzanne, and their three children.