James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
There is one promise that David Cameron makes regularly that even the shadow Cabinet doesn’t believe he intends to keep: that he is going to end the era of ‘sofa government’ and bring back ‘Cabinet government’. Their experience over the past four years has taught them that real power in the Cameron Tory party rests not in the shadow Cabinet room but in the suite of offices that Cameron, George Osborne and their advisers inhabit. Rather than bringing back Cabinet government, Cameron intends to bring in a whole new style of government.
The Tory command chain has Mr Cameron at the top, and those who work within a ten-metre radius of him below. Shadow Cabinet meetings are where the various Tory spokesmen are briefed rather than consulted; the leadership talks of ‘giving’ shadow ministers policy. The closer the party gets to power, the less interest there seems to be in the opinions of the front bench. ‘If they don’t consult us in opposition, then why would they do it in government?’ one shadow Cabinet member said to me this week.
For years the Tories used to idealise the Whitehall system they left behind in May 1997. They blamed all of Whitehall’s problems on New Labour’s politicisation of the Civil Service, the proliferation of special advisers, and Tony Blair’s notorious meetings on the sofa where no minutes were kept. They imagined that when those with blue rosettes were again carrying the red boxes then there would be a return to order. But now that the Tories are faced with the prospect of actually running the country, they have come to accept that the current model is ill-suited to dealing with problems that cut across more than one department and that inter-departmental rivalries all too often obstruct good policy. So fierce are the turf wars between departments that Jack Straw and Ed Balls almost came to blows in a dispute over which department was in charge of what.
Mr Cameron’s Whitehall surgery would create three new groups, all designed to end turf wars. The first is the policy board, a seven-strong Dragons’ Den-style panel where new ideas are tested. Mr Cameron, George Osborne, Steve Hilton, William Hague, Francis Maude, Nick Boles and Oliver Letwin are the permanent members of this committee. Between them they represent the key parts of the Tory machine: Osborne the Treasury, Hilton strategy, Hague the party politics, Maude and Boles the implementation unit and Oliver Letwin — the black box of the Cameron project — tying it all together.
Strikingly, this structure will continue in government, effectively handing to this group of seven the policy-making powers traditionally vested in the Cabinet. The fact that this board, which met every day for a fortnight in the run-up to conference, will continue to operate in government is a sign of how the Tories want to carry on using the structures they have developed in opposition in government. This nimble style of policy-making has worked well for Project Cameron so far. But by carrying it on in government, Cameron is risking a dangerous distance building up between the Cabinet and the chosen few.
Departments do need to be made to work together, however, and Cameron’s broken society agenda is an example of why: it cannot be implemented by any existing department. So Iain Duncan Smith would chair a social council, overseeing the ministers responsible for the various policy areas (welfare, family, early years, drugs and the voluntary sector).
Next comes the US-style national security council to run foreign policy. The Prime Minister will chair it. But in his absence, the Foreign Secretary would take over. In practice, this means that most of the time William Hague will be in charge. This will restore the Foreign Office’s primacy over the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence.
Team Cameron is acutely aware of the limitations of the talent pool it is currently choosing from. The ennobling of David Freud and Debbie Scott so that they can be added to the welfare team is an example of how Cameron intends to follow Brown’s lead in bringing in outside help to shore up the weaker parts of his team. But there is talk in both Labour and Tory circles of dispensing with the ermine and appointing ministers who are not members of either House of Parliament. The idea was raised by John Major and Douglas Hurd recently.
The thinking goes that the current arrangements are not good for either the legislature or the executive: most legislators’ primary interest is in being in the executive not the legislature, and the executive is limited in who it can recruit. It is also felt that one of the reasons the GOAT experiment has failed is that as soon as someone is made a minister and a peer, they are charged with piloting a huge amount of departmental business through the Lords: a particularly tricky task given that no party has a majority in the upper house. The plan already has the support of Steve Hilton, meaning that it has an influential advocate in the heart of the Cameron operation. (Polling also shows it to be popular with the public.)
Any plan to reform government also needs to reform the Civil Service. The Tories are far less critical of the Civil Service than many ex-Labour ministers, but they are keen to find a way to dismiss permanent secretaries who are underperforming or cannot work with their secretary of state. They are planning to allow the new non-executive members of departmental boards to recommend to the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister that a permanent secretary be dismissed. The Tories will also make an ability to work across departments a condition of promotion for both ministers and senior civil servants.
Once they are in government, we can expect the Tories to enact these reforms early on. The party’s plan to start at a fast pace also includes an 18-month opening session of parliament, with vastly reduced summer holidays for MPs. The aim is to get as much done as possible before Labour selects its new leader, something that is expected to happen at its autumn conference. To tinker with Whitehall structures straight away may seem odd, given the scale of what Cameron will have to do. But unless the Tories can fix the broken government machine, they won’t be able to deal effectively with the broken economy, broken society — or the broken politics.
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