Dominic
Cummings heads in to No. 10 | Peter Summers/Getty Images
Boris Johnson versus the ‘blob’
The prime minister and his top adviser are seeking to
centralize power in No. 10.
By CHARLIE
COOPER 2/25/20, 10:33 PM CET Updated 2/26/20, 5:00 AM CET
Having won
a referendum and an election, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have turned
their attention to overhauling the machinery of government.
Their plan?
To centralize power in No. 10, improve efficiency and reduce the influence of a
civil service establishment that Cummings likes to call “the blob.”
Whitehall’s
top brass have been put — very publicly — on notice, with a briefing from
“senior Tories” to a Sunday newspaper that three heads of department are on a
No. 10 “hit list.” The Home Office has been rocked by briefings and
counter-briefings about boiling tensions between Home Secretary Priti Patel and
her top official Philip Rutnam.
Meanwhile,
the ranks of special advisers — who provide media and policy support to
ministers — have been purged of those not regarded as sufficiently loyal or
useful to No. 10. That brought even the powerful Treasury to heel as Chancellor
Sajid Javid opted to quit rather than see his team replaced.
Downing Street’s goal is as much about reforming the
machinery of government as it is about ideology.
But while
the approach is winning support among the Conservative party’s victorious
Brexiteer faction — who have long-regarded the civil service as a bastion of
pro-EU thinking — others warn of the danger of having perpetual campaigners at
the heart of government: they might prevent people actually governing.
“It's not
normal for three permanent secretaries to be described as being on a hit list
on the front of the Sunday Telegraph,” said Alex Thomas, a former senior
Whitehall official and now a program director at the Institute for Government
think tank. “[It] doesn’t feel like the way to win hearts and minds within the
system, and you’re then likely to get more resistance [from officials].”
According
to one former senior government official, Johnson and Cummings “are setting up
some problems for themselves.”
“The danger is that a culture emerges where everyone
is afraid to make their own decisions because they’re afraid to mess up and
incur the wrath of Dom,” the official said.
Brexiteers
vs. Mandarins
Downing
Street’s goal is as much about reforming the machinery of government as it is
about ideology.
Cummings
has long advocated a pared-back, more nimble civil service, more accessible to
talent from a more diverse range of disciplines. His view, as articulated on
his blog, is that there are "profound problems at the core of how the
British state makes decisions" and this will need to change in order to
make the most of the opportunities and challenges presented by Brexit.
And with
potentially five years until the next general election, the new occupants of
No. 10 have time and political capital to spend on a shakeup.
But today's
tensions also have their roots in a deep suspicion of the civil service that
permeated Brexiteer opinion during the Theresa May era, when powerful officials
like Olly Robbins were accused of wanting to keep the U.K. closely bound to EU
rules.
Now that
many of those same Brexiteers are in power, a clash was inevitable. One of the
senior officials on the "hit list" reported by the Sunday Telegraph
was chief civil servant at the Treasury, Tom Scholar, targeted, according to
the paper's source, for the crime of being “off-side” on Brexit.
“Senior
officials in Whitehall despise Brexit,” claimed one former Cabinet minister,
now on the Conservative back benches. "No. 10 has strong support among
Brexiteers in its efforts to cleanse Whitehall’s Augean stables."
While some
of the rhetoric has echoes of Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” mantra, battles
between U.K. politicians and their civil servants are nothing new. Tony Blair's
Labour government quietly saw to it that a number of permanent secretaries were
moved on, and reforming ministers rarely encounter an entirely pliant
department.
Mark
Sedwill, the Cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, on Monday sought
to draw a line under the tensions with an email to all civil servants.
Nevertheless,
many observers have been struck by the “revolutionary zeal” of recent briefings
against officials.
The
question is how effective the strategy will be. “Cummings is always looking for
an enemy," said another former government official, speaking on condition
of anonymity. "It was the EU in the Brexit campaign, in the last
parliament it was those blocking Brexit. He is desperately looking around for a
new enemy, but that doesn’t really work in government.”
'Keep them
on their toes'
The top
ranks of Johnson's team and the civil service both say they are now seeking a
truce.
Mark
Sedwill, the Cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, on Monday sought
to draw a line under the tensions with an email to all civil servants (but
clearly aimed at ministers too) warning that "unattributable briefings and
leaks to the media" harm the U.K.'s "hard-won reputation for good
governance" while adding pointedly that "the whole civil service is
committed to delivering the government's agenda."
After a
feverish few days, No. 10 officials also indicated a willingness to
de-escalate.
A Home
Office spokesperson issued a joint statement from Patel and Rutnam condemning
anonymous briefings (to the Sunday Times) that MI5 officials were withholding
information from the home secretary.
But some
observers believe the fault lines are here to stay. The former senior official
speculated whether Cummings might find the current tensions a useful way to
keep civil servants "on their toes."
"That
is definitely how he operates," the official said.
“There is
definitely a stronger approach, a very 'get things done' mentality," added
a former government special adviser. “The Cameron and the May administrations
were not massively different in the way they treated the civil service. This
one is very different. It’s adapt or die."
Annabelle
Dickson contributed reporting.
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