Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a former senior civil servant and a senior fellow at the Institute for Government think-tank
This month the new cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo published her objectives in what seemed a welcome sign of reinvigorated leadership for UK government officials. The prime minister agreed she was responsible for “leading an impartial, curious and engaged Civil Service, with a culture of pride that comes from high performance”. She would do that by — among other things — advocating “to strengthen confidence in and public perception of the Civil Service, and build trust in the state and its capability”. Romeo would also “build and foster a stellar top leadership team of permanent secretaries”.
Instead she finds her goals already undermined by a fierce stand-off between two men, Keir Starmer and Olly Robbins, both convinced they are completely in the right over their view of a process that was unable to cope with an ambassadorial appointment like no other.
This is not just a personal row, however destructive for both prime minister and the sacked former Foreign Office chief: it is yet another episode in the continuing breakdown of ministerial relations with the civil service.
The row over Peter Mandelson’s vetting as ambassador to the US is more damaging than the sacking of Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar by Kwasi Kwarteng before he even got the chance to work with him as chancellor, or of the multiple victims of Dominic Cummings’ “hard rain”. Starmer’s decision to dispense with the services of Chris Wormald, his own appointment as cabinet secretary, and after less than 14 months, barely registers on the scale.
But there are three reasons to believe this is a new low in this ongoing saga.
Recommended
First, the real fault in this latest twist of the Mandelson drama was not with the vetting. It was with Starmer’s original decision to appoint him and what Jonathan Powell, the PM’s national security adviser, described as the “weirdly rushed” process. This very political decision was made before Robbins was even back in the civil service. Once in post, he may have been maddeningly bullheaded down the line in protecting confidentiality; or surprisingly incurious about the vetting itself. But it was not Robbins who went public with great fanfare on the political masterstroke of sending Mandelson to Washington. The prime minister had already trampled over a field of due diligence red flags to get his man. As many have said, Robbins has been sacked for helping the PM get his way.
Second, Robbins himself came back into government after a spell in the private sector to be confronted in his first week with an incredibly difficult decision — one which he took rapidly and for which he has taken accountability. He has since made a lot of enemies inside the FCDO by driving through the cuts the government wants as part of its efficiency programmes. Starmer himself previously heaped praise on him.
Ministers say they want civil servants to take more risks and more accountability. If so, they need to accept the consequences.
They also need to show that they are people worth working with. If Starmer is unable to cut someone like Robbins any slack over what seems to be a different understanding of ministers’ role in vetting, and if the cabinet secretary cannot even ensure a robust and fair process before a sacking at that level, it will become even harder to attract and retain “stellar” people in the civil service.
There is a side point too. We do not yet know what an ongoing review of security vetting will conclude. But last week, as an immediate reaction, the minister who works most closely with Starmer, Darren Jones, suspended departments’ ability to “override” UK Security Vetting recommendations. If that means ministers now make the final call, it may make people less trustful of the process. If it makes it impossible to accommodate what Robbins called people with “interesting” lives, the civil service will be less able to attract talent, whether political or not.
Third, the big lesson civil servants will take from all this is to bury every decision in a heap of what Number 10 calls “sludge” and duck personal accountability. At the foreign affairs committee, the chair seemed to expect every phone call between private offices to have been minuted. That is a recipe for bureaucratic meltdown.
More importantly, civil servants will look at what has happened and conclude that they need to dip ministerial hands in the blood of every decision; the processes of government will accordingly become even more laborious and risk averse.
Bringing in people like Robbins was supposed to dynamise a civil service that Starmer had accused of wallowing in “a tepid bath of managed decline”. His peremptory dismissal is drowning it in an ice-cold shower.
Source:
www.ft.com