We need this breath of fresh air to blow away the cobwebs
THE sitcom Yes Minister is widely regarded within Westminster as the most accurate fly-on-the-wall documentary ever made about the British system of government.
While the hapless Jim Hacker is nominally in charge, it is senior civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby and his acolytes who really run the show.
There have been many previous attempts to prise open Whitehall to “blue sky thinking” and different ways of doing things. All have ultimately run out of steam, with the system of big ministries situated in central London and staffed by a cadre of cautious officials largely drawn from similar establishment backgrounds remaining intact.
And down the years few characters have been so detested by Whitehall’s mandarin class as outsiders with the ear of the prime minister of the day. People such as Sir Alan Walters, who advised Margaret Thatcher to resist Treasury efforts to sign the UK up to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism but was forced out, or Steve Hilton, the T-shirt wearing big thinker of David Cameron who got bored of seeing his ideas bite the dust and relocated to America.
BUT in Dominic Cummings, “Chief Special Adviser to the PM”, Whitehall faces its most powerful internal challenge for a generation or more.
Cummings, who is masterminding for Boris Johnson a massive planned shake-up of Whitehall, has battle honours already to his name.
He worked as chief “attack dog” for Michael Gove when trying to break, with some success, the stranglehold of “The Blob” of Left-wing educationalists over our schools system.
And he was one of the big brains behind the Vote Leave campaign which secured a mandate for Brexit – an idea almost universally detested by the civil service elite.
Now he is advertising – via his own personal blog rather than normal official channels – for “super-talented weirdos” with fresh ideas to come and help him change the internal wiring of government, while scorning the “public school bluffers” and “Oxbridge humanities graduates” who traditionally run things.
Already known to be on the Cummings agenda are: relocating many ministries out of London; ending an internal career ladder that sees officials change departments every 18 months or so just as they have learned a brief; focusing on the desires of citizens rather than official “stakeholders”; training officials in new skills such as data science and forecasting.
This agenda has tremendous potential for improving how we are governed and how public services are delivered. But Mr Cummings may as well have painted a target on his back, for the Sir Humphrey brigade is bound to get him in the end.
They will work via Secretaries of State, leak against him to establishment media outlets and devise numerous procedural twists to frustrate his ideas and put irresistible pressure on Boris Johnson to get rid of him. And one day the PM will be forced to do just that.
I suspect Mr Cummings knows this full well – hence his reference to a two-year time frame in his recruitment advert.
In my view, he will be lucky to last that long. But the exciting thing is that, for now, he does have a window of opportunity to drive through big changes that will be difficult for opponents to unpick.
JOHNSON has just delivered the best Tory election result for more than 30 years with a commanding Commons majority of 80 and much of that was thanks to Cummings and his “Get Brexit Done” election message. It will take time for the mandarins and their pliable ministers to reduce his immense stock of political capital to the point that Johnson has to let him go.
From my own dealings with Cummings during the battle for Brexit, I can report that he is terrific at identifying key priorities and then pursuing them relentlessly, no matter how many feathers are ruffled in the process. He will understand that the bulk of what he is able to achieve must be got underway this year and that there is not a moment to be wasted.
Whatever ideas come forward – from new ways of booking GP appointments to new and better public procurement processes, from firing underperforming senior civil servants to scrapping the Department For International Development and the Ministry of Justice – speed is of the essence.
Mistakes will be made. There will be things he tries to change which really are best left intact.
But on balance his diagnosis of the shortcomings of Whitehall is on the money. Sir Humphrey will chase him out one day. But until then let him make hay while the sun shines.