Cabinet Secretary on Joint Chiefs
Talk to anyone around Whitehall and you hear talk of the unique power of the Joint Chiefs of Staff working under Theresa May: Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy.
At a discussion hosted by the Institute for Government and the British Academy this lunchtime, the current Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood was asked about the role of Chiefs of Staff and what it was like working with them.
Sir Jeremy said: “I think it really very much depends on the working relationship you’ve got with them” and it’s been “relatively straightforward” to work with Jonathan Powell under Tony Blair and the duo Chiefs of Staff under Theresa May. He said it was “perfectly legitimate” to have them there managing the special advisers in No. 10. (There have been others with the title but, as Jeremy Heywood suggests from a pretty good vantage point, only the current duo and Mr Powell have really tried to be what would be recognised as a real “Chief of Staff.”)
Sir Jeremy went on to say: “I think it would become a problem if it got in the way of the Cabinet Secretary and the civil servants in No. 10 having direct access to the Prime Minister and being able to put exactly the advice they want to put unto the Prime Minister. I think if you ever get in to a situation where the civil service is so cowed that it can’t put its own advice forward unadulterated then I think you’ve got a problem – that’s not been my experience. But you know, I think it’s very, very important that the political side of the No. 10 operation and the civil service operation work hand in hand in a cooperative way to the joint boss and that has been my experience, I’m happy to say … I don’t have a problem with the role, it’s obviously something you’d have to be careful about.”
Is this a warning shot from someone concerned about where things are heading 140 days into Theresa May’s premiership?
He clearly and more than once insists things aren’t going wrong on his watch. But he didn’t have to spell out the risks of chiefs of staff who may guard the PM to the exclusion of others and deny proper access to senior civil servants.
Sir Jeremy was chairing a discussion with five predecessors in the post of Cabinet Secretary. Some of them spoke disparagingly of the first real Downing Street Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, who worked under Tony Blair in the newly created post.
Lord Turnbull (Cabinet Secretary 2002-5) said thanks to Jonathan Powell his relationship with Tony Blair “never flourished” because Mr Powell wanted him when he could make use of him but generally tried to run things without the Cabinet Secretary. Lord Wilson (Cabinet Secretary 1998-2002) said he thought he’d got on rather well with Jonathan Powell until years later he read the Alistair Campbell diaries and Jonathan Powell’s subsequent books and discovered he didn’t. Lord Butler (Cabinet Secretary 1988-98) said: “I had the same experience.”
So maybe what we are seeing is the unique tension of grafting a US-style Political “Chief of Staff” role on to the civil service machinery.
The panel was asked if a Cabinet Secretary should over-ride a PM’s desire to have no planning when there’s a referendum on something like Brexit. Sir Jeremy Heywood said one of David Cameron’s main drivers in not wanting any officials to work on a Brexit plan was that he didn’t want civil servants during the purdah period contacting the Vote Leave crowd in the referendum in the way that they have contacts with opposition parties in the run up to a general election.
Sir Jeremy Heywood did acknowledge that while he kept it deniable that any “planning” for Brexit had happened he did use the time while the PM was on the campaign trail for the referendum to talk privately to trusted colleagues and do “some confidential thinking” which wasn’t discussed with the PM. He said he left quite a bit of space between what was explicitly authorised … and what was clearly off limits” and he did “exploit that space” and didn’t think the PM would’ve been annoyed about that. If we have a referendum like this again, he suggested, it’s worth thinking about the rules well in advance and whether this is the right approach.
In his closing remarks, Sir Jeremy Heywood said government had improved phenomenally in its project management. He said: “I now think we are amongst the best employers in the country on commercial, definitely on digital, project management – we’ve got nothing to learn from the private sector in my view now.”
It was a very feisty defence of his officials, some in the room thought it a mighty hostage to fortune.
One suggested Sir Jeremy might have been hitting back after Michael Gove’s column in last week’s “Times” in which he called defence procurement ” a tragi-comedy” and said there should be weekly justifications of public spending and the sacking of those who fail in the job. Mr Gove claimed the civil service was clueless in handling negotiations with private sector firms. He has a lot to read right now but you sense Sir Jeremy may have seen that and was biting back.
The Cabinet Secretaries were asked about their most memorable says in the job. Lord Wilson talked about the day of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. He said he heard about the second plane going into the Twin Towers on his way back to the office. His then junior, Sir Jeremy Heywood, rang to ask if No. 10 should be evacuated. Lord Wilson asked if there was anywhere they had planned to evacuate to? Sir Jeremy said there wasn’t so Lord Wilson said to stay put.
He discovered on returning to Downing Street that the Civil Contingencies Unit were away in the countryside in Easingwold at a bonding event. Likewise the Overseas Defence Secretariat was on its way to a bonding event in Herefordshire and had to be turned back. The switchboard newly installed in Downing Street the previous weekend collapsed. When they checked on whether they could get into tunnel connecting Downing Street to the Ministry of Defence it turned out the man who normally guarded it was on holiday and nobody knew where he’d left the key.
Lord Butler recalled Margaret Thatcher’s last Cabinet, the only occasion he said he could remember knowingly falsifying Cabinet records. At the end of the Cabinet the record shows that Mrs Thatcher says something like “I’m going but I rely on my colleagues to carry on the mission ….”
He said her actual words were very uncoded: “I’m going but please don’t appoint Michael Heseltine my successor.”
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