David Cameron needs a Willie. So say the ministers who work most closely with No. 10. It is not a call for shock-and-awe radicalism, but for someone who can help the Prime Minister as the late Willie Whitelaw helped Margaret Thatcher — gliding around Whitehall, pushing forward the Cameron agenda, smoothing over difficulties and ensuring that Downing Street’s writ runs in every department.
Whitelaw did the job superbly for eight years; it is no coincidence that things started to go wrong for Lady Thatcher after a stroke forced him to give up his role. But Cameron doesn’t have a Willie. He has the opposite of a Willie: a Deputy Prime Minister who has his own interests to look after, his own policies to pursue and his own party to lead.
Coalition has made this arrangement a necessity. But it does make life that much more difficult for Cameron. As one minister observes, ‘It is a function of coalition government that the Prime Minister doesn’t have an enforcer as his deputy but someone with their own agenda.’
For ministers pushing policies close to Cameron’s heart, Nick Clegg’s office isn’t a source of support; they see it, they tell me, as just another hurdle to clear. Understandably, the Deputy Prime Minister’s concern is not that Cameron’s priorities are enacted, but that the Liberal Democrats extract as much as they can from any deal.
The problems of coalition are even more visible at the Treasury. Traditionally, the Chief Secretary acts as the axeman. He calls in ministers from spending departments and threatens to do the most terrible things to their budgets. But a spending review is under way at the moment — a particularly sensitive one, for 2015/16, which will make its effects felt just before the next general election — and this time the process has been inverted.
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