BERNARD INGHAM: HAS PRIME MINISTER BEEN LET DOWN BY ADVISERS?
Who has Boris Johnson got around him? Dominic Cummings may be a brilliant campaigner and sloganiser but he is steadily proving he could not run a whelk stall.
FORTY YEARS ago, I used to work in the Department of Energy with an old soldier, Wally Pryke, an officer and a gentleman, who was wont to say:
“If Ministers get it wrong it is our (i.e. officials’) fault.”
He was a generous soul.
Some of us sometimes felt that errant Ministers deserved the “drunken sailor treatment” – put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him”.
If you subscribe to the Pryke principle, you know who to blame for the Government’s dire performance over the first eight months of this Parliament.
Officialdom has certainly a lot to answer for with the BTEC awards mess following the A-level and GCSE chaos.
But, as one who is professionally fascinated by the Government repeatedly making a pig’s ear of it, I do not believe it should take all the blame or even the lion’s part of it.
My conclusion is that there is something seriously wrong with the system.
I suspect it can be explained by Aneurin Bevan’s cruel dismissal of his leader, Harold Wilson – “all brains and no bloody judgment”.
Eggheads are two a penny in government, bursting with ideas, but making them work is another matter.
Take, for example, Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax.
It was immaculately conceived by Oxford dons but was the very devil to sell.
I still think it would have curbed the excesses of local authorities, which always blame the government for their penury, but for Nigel Lawson’s losing control of inflation and interest rates by surreptitiously shadowing the D-mark – another case of brains overriding judgment.
At this point I should make it clear that my old Civil Service colleagues are as one in thanking the Lord they are not called upon to handle the coronavirus crisis. Mistakes were bound to be made.
But our major reason is Boris Johnson’s laidback approach and centralisation.
No one can deny Boris is intellectually very bright.
Nor do I think his Ministers are brainless.
But who has he got round him? “Every PM needs a Willie”, as Mrs Thatcher once innocently pronounced.
But where is the 2020 version of Willie Whitelaw, sniffing out nonsense and keeping the ship steady?
And where is there a man of the calibre of former Chief Whip, John Wakeham, to provide wise counsel and keep the troops in order?
Nowhere. Instead, Boris’s guide and mentor is a weirdo named Dominic Cummings.
He may be a brilliant campaigner and sloganiser but he is steadily proving he could not run a whelk stall.
He does not seem to have heard of Mario Cuomo, a former governor of New York, who explained: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
Worse still, it seems that Michael Gove, who might have devilled for Johnson like Lord Whitelaw did for Mrs Thatcher, has swallowed Cummings’ destabilising reformist ideas hook, line and sinker.
The result is a certain detachment
– an other-worldliness – that allowed Boris to disappear during the floods and then to his holiday tent in Scotland, and Cummings to flee to Durham during the lockdown.
On top of all this, the Government has been inundated with advice by a host of brainy professionals with impressive titles – scientists, medics, analysts, statisticians, etc – all reading the runes and feeding dodgy data into their computers and algorithms.
Judging from the stupendous output from seats of learning, they seem unabashed by their never getting it quite right and sometimes badly wrong.
I have had a healthy distrust of experts since 364 economists wrote to The Times in the early 1980s arguing we were doomed if Mrs Thatcher stuck to her housewifely economics.
How wrong can you get?
She revived the economy.
In short, I would advise Boris and his chum to recognise four things:
1 – They have made a very poor start, even allowing for the complexities of the pandemic;
2 – However much they distrust the “Europhile” Civil Service, they cannot do without its expertise – administration – and collective experience;
3 – The need to return to collegiate Cabinet government with collective responsibility; and
4 – Over-centralisation on No 10 does not work – except to lay all the blame on the centralisers.
That should improve matters. It’s a nobrainer, really.