Downing Street has announced that the 14th secretary to the cabinet and head of the civil service will be Sir Chris Wormald. He will succeed Simon Case when the latter stands down after four years on 16 December. Wormald, 56, has been permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care for eight and a half years, before which he was the top official at the Department for Education for four years – a true Whitehall veteran.
There is no doubt that Wormald is experienced. He is likeable and highly rated, though his department has hardly stood out for excellence over the past decade and he sometimes struggled under questioning at the Covid-19 inquiry. But Keir Starmer has spoken of the need for ‘the complete rewiring of the British state to deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform’. Is Wormald the man to help him deliver that?
Starmer mouths radical words but has done little
Case’s departure had been inevitable since before the government came to power in July. He was a surprise choice for cabinet secretary by Boris Johnson in 2020, only 41 years old and never having run a major department of state. Johnson had brought him into a chaotic Downing Street to lead the response to the pandemic, after having disposed of Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary he had inherited from Theresa May, several months into his premiership.
That sense of being a courtier to the prime minister would be fatal, as flecks of scandal from Johnson’s declining administration accumulated on Case. Initially appointed to lead the inquiry into ‘partygate’, he had to recuse himself because he had attended some of the gatherings. When he took leave of absence through illness in October 2023, many suspected he would not return to his post. Case reappeared a few months later, now using a stick, but the clock was ticking on his career.
With Keir Starmer’s arrival as prime minister it was a given that Case would retire in the near future, partly because he was irreparably tarnished and partly because the new prime minister was eager to make a fresh appointment. But Starmer’s determination to do things differently gave rise to sometimes outlandish speculation that the new head of the civil service would be an unconventional appointment, perhaps a figure from outside Whitehall to jolt the bureaucracy into change.
The favourite for a long time was Sir Olly Robbins, who had enjoyed a glittering career and was appointed by Theresa May as the first permanent secretary to the Department for Exiting the EU in 2016. He was then May’s chief adviser on Europe and the UK’s lead negotiator for Brexit. Robbins became such a bogeyman for Brexiteers that he left Whitehall when May stepped down and disappeared into investment banking with Goldman Sachs. Starmer was said to be keen to bring the departed mandarin back.
The idea of an outside candidate led to a smörgåsbord of names gaining traction in the media: former Whitehall regulars Dame Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, and Dame Sharon White, until recently chairman of the John Lewis Partnership; Tom Riordan, long-time chief executive of Leeds City Council; Baroness Shafik, an Egyptian-born economist who had run the Department for International Development, spent six years as vice chancellor of the LSE and then had survived 13 months as president of Columbia University in New York before resigning.
When the shortlist of four candidates emerged last month, the radicalism had gone. Robbins, nominally an outsider, was competing against three serving permanent secretaries: Dame Antonia Romeo (Justice), Tamara Finkelstein (Defra) and Sir Chris Wormald. In appointing the last, Starmer has chosen perhaps the safest, least radical option.
Wormald joined the civil service in 1991 following a degree in history from St John’s College, Oxford. After 15 years at Education, he moved to the Department for Communities and Local Government, then in 2009 became head of the powerful Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. A year later he also took on the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, coordinating policy work for Nick Clegg. Early in 2012 he returned to the Department for Education as permanent secretary.
After five months in office, Labour has introduced much less organisational change than expected. The ‘mission boards’ are damp squibs: despite his promise, Starmer is not chairing them, they have no executive or financial powers and are hard to distinguish from ordinary cabinet committees. Sue Gray, who arrived as Downing Street chief of staff with supposed wide-ranging plans for Whitehall, was forced out after three months. The only change to the machinery of government has been moving responsibility for EU relations from the Foreign Office to the Cabinet Office.
When Harold Wilson became prime minister in 1964, he created five new government departments and commissioned a national plan for the economy. Starmer mouths radical words but has done little. Now he has a new chief civil servant and official adviser, he has little time to waste if he is to succeed in ‘chang[ing] the way government serves this country’. The jury is still very much out.
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