Charles Moore warns that the Downing Street machine isn't working

Austin Barry

God, this Kremlinology is tedious.

John Montague

@Austin Barry

lol!

Nicholas

When the words "former management consultants" are invoked, watch out. There is very little idealism in these types, mainly on a gravy train and with a tendency to just re-formulate and re-play back what the people working for their customers tell them.

In Britain there has been a general drive away from using in-house expertise and experience, instead calling in costly and "independent" consultancy. Most of this "triangulation" founders on the viral internal politics and brings disastrous consequences, as we have seen throughout British corporate life. The modern breed of senior managers seems incapable of listening to and trusting those who work for them and instead view them with suspicion and as potential redundancy fodder. This is a generalisation but Britain's corporate and political world has been subsumed by theory and the "change" imperative. We have become highly skilled at throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Getting politicians to "lead" the process won't necessarily work and the nature of the public sector makes it difficult to root out resistant or subversive (New Labour politicised) management tiers.

alexsandr

talking to people I find the one thing HMG have failed to get over to the great unwashed is that failin to get the defecit under control would have led to a lowering o our credit rating and the inevitable increase in interest rates, both for the government and also personal, and the consequenses thereof.

They also have to counter calls from interest groups for funding with the simple question, if we fund your pet project, what would you cut to pay for it?

Hexhamgeezer

Who put these people in the policy unit? Was it Labour, or perhaps the Commission? Is dave not allowed to sack them or move them on? Does he not know what they are up to? Why has CM been given the go-ahead to cloud the issue by blaming the pointy heads and box-tickers?

Rhoda Klapp

I had a long comment in mind, but I see Austin nailed it.

Woody

The No 10 machine hasn't been working from day one.

Verity

Nicholas: "When the words "former management consultants" are invoked, watch out" ... especially when coupled with "former head of PR for a TV company".

PuppetMaster

This shouldn't be a problem, Cameron doesn't believe in anything, other than promoting Cameron.

Verity

Woody - Actually, you're right. There has been an eerie lack of direction since Day One. It's all been about the self-regard of David Cameron. Photo ops - his new kid photographed on the steps of Downing St as though the birth was of national consequence.

Photos of a bunch of professional, monied men in their shirt-sleeves, like middle managers, sitting around various meeting tables.

The tattooed Samantha in various dresses.

Various venues featuring "Dave" and Samantha, including a curiously otherwise empty departure lounge of a budget airline. (Normally those places are heaving, although perhaps the budget passengers clocked the Camerons and ran to the loos, to heave.)

There is no governance, except that which comes from Brussels. Which is why Dave enough time on his hands to look through yards of film and give his approval to photos of himself.

Michael

Which reminds me, my Daily Telegraph subscription reminder came today with it's useless side dishes of silly offers. £306.80 a year.
So they've got rid of Simon Heffer and replaced him with a long past his sell-by date Clive James doing TV.
Moore and his cronies appear to continually move the newspaper further to the left of centre.
Where is a proper Conservative to go? I don't like the Times because of its silly little format, and the other supposedly centre papers are celeb-rubbish filled rags. Maybe it's time to stop buying newspapers altogether.
Anyone agree? Alternative suggestions?

AAE

" . . . . . . the Downing Street machine isn't working"

Well, that rather depends on what you think it's trying to do.
Look how many thought Gordo was a failure. Yet he made the UK a much more socialist state than in 1997, which was always his intention, and so must be regarded in that respect at least as a success. Dave throws the odd dissembling bone to the wishful thinkers, but despite all the acclaim his Munich speech on immigration received, we see he's done nothing even to staunch the ever increasing influx, he seems happy to take the flak on the cuts, but spending is ever increasing and borrowing up 5% a month on Gordo's binge, and on and on and on. The incremental steps to totalitarianism continue unimpeded and unremarked upon by the press - watch out what you say if you stub your toe in Barnsley, an expletive will land you an on-the-spot fine.
The real purpose of the Downing Street machine is not to do with either politics or policy. It's to make Dave popular, and in a country where vacuous, narcissistic prats can indeed become so, I don't think their job is actually that difficult.

Verity

I lost my regard for Charles Moore when, as editor, he feared to run any of the Motoons.

A big newspaper in Mexico ran one. The Danes, as we know, ran all of them. A newspaper in Sweden ran one, and an Arab country (I think it may have been Jordan, but I am not sure) ran one.

But the staunch British, Conservative Telegraph, cowered away. That was the end of my regard for Charles Moore and The Telegraph.

daniel maris

Austin Barry called it right!

If a party knows what it wants to do, and has a clear plan, then this sort of speculation is irrelevant. The Labour Party of 1945 just went in there and created the agencies that they want to deliver the programme they wanted to see delivered.

Of course this is a coalition and so, to that extent, there has to be horse-trading. But I think the problem here is much more that the ideology is not clear. The "Big Society" is vague and vacuuous. How can one "implement" something so nebulous?
Privatisation, just like nationalisation before it was something concrete and realisable.

I think the Government's problem is that it doesn't really have an good workable, concrete plans. It has "radical" poses it has adopted on for instance the NHS but which have looked ridiculous once subject to scrutiny.

Private sector management consultants are a really bad idea in the public sector. They don't understand the public sector ethic and what constitutes good governance, since they are always looking at the bottom line.

It might have been better if the government had just stuck to a narrow mandate of delivering the country from the financial crisis in a workmanlike coalition, rather than frantically seeking to re-invent as many wheels as possible.

prziloczek

On June 1st our Proposal (about three months' work by a lot of unpaid people) went into the DfE for consideration. It will be extremely interesting to see what the DfE make of it.
Here we have some 250 voters families in strong support and it is only a rural area. Most of them are, actually, not very committed politically.......

Axstane

Verity

You really must make more of an effort to check your facts. Charles Moore resigned as editor of the Telegraph in 2003. The Danish Muhammad cartoons were published in September 2005.

The Telegraph was just one of the great number of British newpspapers that did not publish them. And the British newspapers were just a few amongst the vast number of newspapers world-wide that did not publish them,.

John Emsley

The big problem remains..... Nobody in Downing Street knows how to run a big organisation-and this has been true for at least twelve years. The "old" idea of government was that the Minister was a de facto Chairman controlling the long view of a Ministry and the Civil Service executed that long view. Then along came Blair and Brown and politicised the Civil Service-thereby b***ering up a workable system for their own shabby ends.That is the true "Blair Legacy".... Don't hear much about that lately, do we???

John Montague

Sure Axstane, but the fact is they were published in the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium and France but not in Britain, not even by Private Eye. It wasn't fear of the bombers, I don't think, it was terror of the wrath of the local newsagent.

daniel maris

John Montague -

The UK media were pusillanimous.

Verity

Axstane- I didn't know Moore wasn't editor at that time. Who was, so I can transfer my hate to that individual?

"The Telegraph was just one of the great number of British newpspapers that did not publish them."

How about ALL of them.

Not one member of self-styled "freest press in the world" published a Motoon.

Verity

John Montague, Mexico also published on of the cartoons. So did plucky little Jordan.

But not "the freest press in the world".

Ruby Duck

Agree 100% with Nicholas. Management has detached itself from reality and become a game of its own that has nothing to do with production. The obscenities that we see earning huge salaries in local government and the NHS are the most galling practitioners because they are playing the game against people who didn't know they were competing.

Verity and AAE are way off the mark re. Cameron's self-regard. I have reservations about the bloke, but vanity isn't the motivation. What do you do for a career if you're born at the top? His ambition is no more than that of the checkout operator who aspires to running a branch of the supermarket.

Fergus Pickering

The cartoons WERE published in Britain. They were published on the BNP website That's where I saw them. Very risible. Curious to think of the one-eyed fatman (no, the OTHER one) as our champion of free speech, but he was and all honour to him for it.

TGF UKIP

Dead right, James, Chuck certainly is one of you lot.

Verity

Ruby Duck - "What do you do for a career if you're born at the top?"

Join a 3rd rate TV company and fail in the position of head of PR?

Verity

I didn't know that,Fergus P. Yes indeed. Kudos.