For the past three months there has been an exchange of bureaucratic fire across the 600 yards that separate the Cabinet Office from parliament. Matt Western, the Labour MP who chairs the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS), is engaged in epistolary warfare with the dour-but-canny Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and minister in charge of the Cabinet Office. The casus belli is whether Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, should appear as a witness in front of the committee to discuss his role.
The post of national security adviser was created by David Cameron in 2010. The occupant is the principal source of advice to the prime minister and the cabinet on national security matters, and until last year was secretary of the National Security Council (NSC) and head of the National Security Secretariat (NSS) in the Cabinet Office.
I say ‘was’, because one aspect of Powell’s appointment was significant. He was announced as ‘the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser based in No. 10 Downing Street’ and engaged as a special adviser rather than a civil servant; Powell’s six predecessors had all come from within Whitehall, five of them from the Diplomatic Service.
This matters. As a special adviser, Powell has some freedom of action denied to civil servants, but serious limitations: he cannot manage the heads of the intelligence agencies – the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service and GCHQ – or the NSS and he cannot act as secretary of the NSC, though he can attend. Nor can he have any control over budgets or authorise the expenditure of public funds.
This status is why the Cabinet Office and the JCNSS are at loggerheads. McFadden has argued that special advisers do not generally give evidence to parliamentary committees; Western has countered that Powell is hardly an ‘ordinary’ special adviser and that it is convention rather than an immutable rule preventing his appearance.
(Indeed, the Osmotherly Rules that govern civil servants’ interaction with select committees state that: ‘When a Select Committee indicates that it wishes to take evidence from any particular named official, including special advisers, the presumption is that Ministers will seek to agree such a request’.)
The government is denying a joint committee of parliament the right to question one of the most important non-ministerial members of the government. The NSA is one of the prime minister’s most important advisers on sensitive and critical – literally life-and-death – matters of foreign, defence and security policy. He has a 24-hour secure telephone link to his United States counterpart, and his remit in policy if not executive terms is broader than any minister or official. Powell is also currently drafting the new National Security Strategy, due to be published before next month’s Nato summit.
It is easy to depict the national security adviser as a powerful, shadowy and unaccountable figure. In his latest Substack epic, Dominic Cummings claims that developments in recent years have ‘excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system’, and argues that ‘the oversight of NSS must change so it became visible and legible again to the PM’s office’.
This may not be primarily an institutional problem. Boris Johnson, one of the most chaotic and inattentive politicians to hold the office of prime minister, was never likely to take on the Whitehall bureaucracy. In 2020, he tried to install his Europe adviser, David Frost, as national security adviser; after widespread criticism that Frost was barely qualified for the role, Johnson beat a retreat and chose the Ministry of Defence permanent secretary, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, instead.
Johnson’s 49-day successor Liz Truss removed Lovegrove and appointed Sir Tim Barrow, a senior diplomat, while also scrapping the National Security Council. Rishi Sunak promptly restored it but, unusually among prime ministers, was uninterested in international affairs and it met less frequently than in its early days.
The post of national security adviser has been a positive innovation, with counterparts not only in the US but (for example) Germany, France, Canada, Japan and India. Properly constituted, the NSA has a wide remit and considerable influence, but he or she is an adviser, a servant of the prime minister and the NSC. There has also in the past been oversight by and direct accountability to the JCNSS.
The current situation sees a national security adviser who is vastly more experienced than ministers; who cannot pull any levers of power because of his status; and whom ministers will not allow to be scrutinised by parliament. This is not the model which Cameron carefully planned for and created in 2010.
Is there an accountability problem over national security, as Cummings alleges? Undoubtedly – but it may not be a hard-wired institutional one. The current impasse is the result of specific decisions taken by ministers. This means they could just as easily be reversed, but it also shows us clearly where the responsibility lies, and that is in Downing Street and the Cabinet Office.
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