Should ministers have so many special advisers? Should a party that promised to cut the number of these SpAds if it came to government admit that it got this wrong, having increased their number? The arguments in favour of more of these political staffers in government are well-rehearsed: if they’re good, they add expertise and political nouse to a department and they make it easier for ministers to communicate what they’re up to. Some are hopeless at both these things, but the best ones – and there are many excellent ones in both main parties at the moment – often keep the show on the road and ensure reforms actually happen.
Last week it emerged that the SpAd bill had risen from £8.4 million in 2013/14 to £9.2 million in 2014/15. There are now 96 SpAds, so clearly David Cameron and his colleagues agree with the above arguments. And no-one agrees more than George Osborne, who is surrounded by a regiment of advisers. The latest figures show he employs 10 such staffers. Perhaps this is a reflection of the Chancellor’s leadership ambitions, or perhaps it also reflects that long before that contest, Osborne is taking a detailed interest in more and more policy areas, from housing to the European renegotiation.
But what’s interesting about the reporting of these special adviser figures is not so much that most stories suggest the soaring bill and numbers of staff is somehow a bad thing, but that many of them have also focused on the 42 per cent pay rise that the Chancellor awarded Thea Rogers. ‘Female aide credited with George Osborne’s dramatic new look handed near £30k pay rise’, read one headline last week. Rogers is the adviser who told Osborne to go on a diet and cut his hair. But she’s now his chief of staff, a role formerly held by Rupert Harrison, who was earning £95,000 this time last year. As his replacement, Rogers is now on £98,000. She wasn’t handed extra money because she’d made her boss shed the pounds, but because she had a new job. But she has been written up as the makeup guru ‘female aide’, even though she does a heavyweight job.
Rogers is quite an intriguing character: those who’ve worked with her say that she doesn’t give any impression at all that she is a Tory, but she is one of the advisers who has helped George Osborne become an effective operator with big policies like the Northern Powerhouse and a commitment to increase housing supply to his name. The Chancellor clearly thinks she deserves to be paid around the same amount as her predecessor in the job, whether or not she is a ‘female aide’ – which is what seems to have caught attention here, given her ‘male aide’ predecessor was on a high salary too.
The bigger problem – and one the Osborne team has suffered from this term – is that no matter how many advisers you have, they’re not much use if they all have the same perspective as you. In The Blunders of Our Governments, Anthony King and Ivor Crewe write of ‘cultural disconnect’, which is when a group of politicians and their advisers ‘unthinkingly project onto others values, attitudes and whole ways of life that are not remotely like their own’. King and Crewe list the poll tax (almost no-one thought about how difficult it would be to collect in Brixton), Francis Maude’s comments about keeping fuel in jerry cans in garages (he assumed everyone had a garage), and Tony Blair announcing that the police should be able to march someone up to a cash point and demand an on-the-spot fine of £100 (he assumed everyone had at least £100 in their account). But they could also have written about Osborne’s plans to cut tax credits, which he reversed after those with less of a cultural disconnect pointed out that those affected were the very strivers the Tories wanted to appeal to.
Osborne survived that row, and it won’t make a great deal of difference to the leadership contest when it rolls around. But what will make a difference, both to his own chances and the efficacy of Tory policies more generally, is not the number of advisers he employs, but the mix of expertise and perspectives that make those aides worth their weight in gold.
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