So you want to be a minister…

Thursday, 20th November 2008

Gerald Kaufman, MP for Manchester Gorton and a former shadow foreign secretary, advises ambitious young MPs how to wriggle their way into power

Maybe you have the worthy aspiration of serving on the front bench as a government minister or opposition spokesman/woman. How to achieve this?

One method is to resolve to be ultra-loyal to the party line — even a creep or toady. Do not underestimate the potency of this course of action. Party leaders are not over-selective. A back-bencher who gets up at question time to praise lavishly, even subserviently, the PM or, indeed, any other minister or shadow is noted by those ubiquitous talent-spotters, the whips, who have no interest whatever in the substance of any issue, but who in government simply want to get the business, whatever it is, through, and in opposition wish to be as effectively obstructive as possible.

Does such a role sound demeaning? How about the occasional rebellion to mark oneself out as a person of principle? Be very careful. What is principle to you may seem to the whips like wilful troublemaking. A very occasional vote against the whip may indeed be overlooked, or even make a favourable impression. Principled rebellions on Iraq by John Denham and Chris Mullin did not prevent them from returning to ministerial office. But it’s chancey.

Do not dream of making a habit of it, as, say Frank Field and Kate Hoey have done. These two experienced ex-ministers seem to have made a careful calculation that, since they do not have a hope in hell of returning to the front bench, they might as well give their prolific consciences full rein.

What about plotting? That depends when, and against whom. MPs with quivering antennae can calculate exactly when their party leader is on the way out, and it is safe to conspire against him or her. On the Tory side, such calibrations led to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher and Iain Duncan Smith. On the Labour side, the curry house plot to force Tony Blair out of Downing Street sooner than he intended was astutely timed since, even if he had not decided to go quickly, he did not have in him one more reshuffle in which they would be overlooked. Instead, several of them made it to ministerial office when Gordon Brown took over.

Plotting against Gordon Brown before this autumn’s Labour party conference was, however, a self-destructive error. The conspiracy failed, and those involved in it had their cards so thoroughly marked that none of them dared to be candidates for last month’s election to the party’s parliamentary committee, while one former (and perhaps would-be-again) minister announced his surrender publicly at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

It’s a rum old world and no stratagem can be relied on, absolutely, to propel its architect to office. But some succeed. As was said of Sir Christopher Wren: ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.’

So yes, however you manage it, you become a minister. How to be a minister? Oh; a whole book could be written about that.

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David Bouvier

November 21st, 2008 12:19am Report this comment

Gerald's little book "How to be a Minister" which promoted the idea that the minister can effectively use his bully pulpit to determine outcomes in their domain regardless of actual powers and responsibilities could arguably be to blame for a lot of the idiocies of New Labour.

There is a world of a difference between good government and ministerial emoting and bullying.

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