After a year in government, most ministers look ten years older. Not Francis Maude. He bounds into the anteroom of his ministerial suite to greet me, wearing his customary open-necked shirt with a red check that matches the colour in his cheeks. In a confident voice, he says, ‘I just need to get some things decided and then we’ll be right with you.’ It is more like meeting a businessman at the height of a boom than a politician in the age of austerity.
In Maude’s office overlooking Horse Guards Parade, the businesslike atmosphere becomes even stronger. Phrases like ‘saving money off the overhead’ and ‘drive prices down in procurement’ tumble from his lips. But unlike many of the politicians who use management speak, this one can claim experience of management. Maude, who is 57 and served Lady Thatcher as a minister, was managing director of Morgan Stanley from 1993 to 1997, and sat on the boards of Asda and Salomon Brothers while the Tories were in opposition. Now, as Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office, he runs the ‘efficiency and reform group’, with the task of saving billions of pounds.
Maude believes that what he learned in the private sector is crucial in his current role. ‘I’m much more comfortable with this kind of territory. It’s not intimidating.’ And he says happily that the coalition has given him a whole committee of people with such knowledge. ‘There are a load of ministers, both Lib Dem and Conservative, who have serious business experience.’ Labour, he adds, had ‘no one’ with a business background — and therefore no great interest in driving down costs.
Maude worries that ‘puritanism’ about MPs having outside interests will deny future governments this expertise. But asked whether, under the current regime governing second jobs, he would have come back as an MP after losing his seat in 1992, he stiffens. Sensing a pitfall ahead, he stresses that the rules are ‘completely fine’. The new puritans have clearly scared even this cavalier.
All this time, Maude has been rolling a £10 note in his hands; it has become so tightly wound that I worry it soon won’t be legal tender, and so I change the subject to his ministerial responsibilities. Maude is minister for the ‘Big Society’, a grand project that the Conservatives have notoriously struggled to explain. ‘People keep wanting there to be a definition,’ he says, somewhat wearily. ‘I sometimes think that you can describe it but you can’t define it.’
Warming to his theme, Maude ticks off what he believes constitutes the Big Society: opening public services to non-state providers, shifting power from government to local communities and people, and social action. To his mind, all three of these ideas come together in public-service mutuals — social enterprises owned and run by their staff.
As he discusses these mutuals, Maude’s voice takes on an upbeat tone and he starts to unwind his concertinaed banknote. To him, this is the remedy to the spendthrift, workshy culture of the public sector. With real enthusiasm, he tells me about his recent visit to one mutual, Sandwell Community Caring Trust. Handing it over to its staff, he says, has brought the average number of sick days down from 22 per employee per year to less than one; management and administration costs have gone from 22 per cent of turnover to 6 per cent. ‘Sickness absence in the public sector is way higher than in the private sector but in mutuals it is way lower than the private sector. So public sector, private sector, then the mutuals is the hierarchy.’ He delivers that last sentence so emphatically that it sounds almost like a moral judgment. The general impression is that he has seen the Big Society — and it works.
Maude is also minister for the civil service. So the Prime Minister’s speech to the Conservative spring conference, which labelled civil servants ‘enemies of enterprise’, put him in a difficult position. Cameron’s soundbite infuriated the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, and poisoned the well of Whitehall. Maude’s gloss on the phrase is that he ‘didn’t interpret it as being about civil servants’. (The Cameron camp explicitly told journalists that it was.) Instead, he tries to suggest that everyone is guilty: ‘ministers, Westminster, local government, quangos’.
He is willing to talk, however, about the civil service’s failings. ‘The idea that it was always a Rolls-Royce is absurd.’ He wants to see ‘more interchange between the public sector and the private sector’. He also thinks that ‘there is still too much of a class system in the civil service’, with policy-making being valued above practical administration.
In many ways, this is Maude’s government. In opposition, he was the arch moderniser, John the Baptist to Cameron’s modernising messiah. He took off his tie long before the rest of the party did. He was Cameron’s first party chairman and the man who ran his preparations for government.
Being in coalition appears to suit him perfectly. Like him, he says, the government is ‘economically liberal, fairly socially liberal and fiscally conservative’. ‘Lib Dem v. Conservative arguments are very rare,’ he maintains. He even goes out of his way to praise the Business Secretary: ‘Vince Cable is very much from the classic Liberal tradition rather than the statist tradition so it works, it’s very good.’ Cable’s recent row with Cameron might suggest that he himself isn’t quite so convinced of this.
Asked what mark he’d give the government so far, Maude scores it at ‘eight out of ten’. ‘We have proved we are able to deal with unexpected things like Libya remarkably well.’
As people start to knock on the door for the next meeting, I try to persuade him to compare the three Tory prime ministers he has served under: Thatcher, Major and Cameron. He refuses, remarking, with the sensitivity of someone who has been frequently been judged against his father — the late Angus Maude, who also held the office of paymaster general — that ‘comparisons are not useful’.
This gets us on to the issue of Tory modernisation, a subject that clearly still excites this veteran of the Tory wars. Maude is emphatic that his side won. But he warns that the moderniser’s work is never done. ‘You cannot be in a party that has existed for 300 years without constantly renewing yourself, constantly making yourself a contemporary party.’ And with that, the £10 note goes back in his pocket and the interview ends.
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