Digest: SpAds, a French by-election and the Irish presidency

Some brief observations on stories which have struggled for oxygen this week but are worth at least marking before they are forgotten

What began as a potentially sedate week, in relative terms, exploded on Tuesday when Defence Secretary John Healey gave a statement to the House of Commons about that vast loss of data by the Ministry of Defence. It has been the gift that keeps on giving, in terms of the news agenda, with Sir Ben Wallace, who, in his last days as Defence Secretary in August 2023, made the initial application to the High Court for an injunction (not a super-injunction), standing by his decision and taking responsibility; the Prime Minister, I think unwisely, trying to use the debacle as a party political weapon; former Minister for Veterans’ Affairs Johnny Mercer using the opportunity to attack the culture of the Ministry of Defence in The Daily Telegraph; and a further revelation that the leaked data had also included details of UK intelligence and Special Forces officers.

One interesting strand of the developing story has been freedom of speech, especially in Parliament. I wrote in The Spectator that using a super-injunction to prevent parliamentary scrutiny was unacceptable; later in the week argued in The Daily Telegraph that, contrary to apparent arguments by Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, no MP who had disclosed the existence of the super-injunction or any details of the episode in the House of Commons would have been liable for prosecution. They would have been protected by parliamentary privilege, as I reiterated on GB News (and set out in more exhaustive detail in an essay on this blog).

As ever, though, the rest of the news does not stop while one big story takes centre-stage, so, once again, I’ve swept up a few stories I think are worth noting before they disappear down our collective memory hole.

Free advice is worth what you pay for it

I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that the government was on the look-out, Jo Moore-style, for a good day to bury bad news, but on Thursday the Cabinet Office published the Annual Report on Special Advisers 2025, listing the government’s full complement of SpAds and their pay grades (though not their precise salaries). Those of you who can bear to remember 10 months into the past may recall that shortly before the defenestration of Sue Gray (now Baroness Gray of Tottenham) as Downing Street Chief of Staff, there were intertwined furores over her salary—at £170,000 she was paid more than the Prime Minister—and a controversial regrading of special advisers and a new pay scale.

Now everything is clear for all to see, and, in fact, it is perhaps less interesting that one might have expected. The highest salary band now in use is £155,000-£159,999, in which there is only one special adviser, Morgan McSweeney, the Downing Street Chief of Staff; the next highest band is £145,000-£149,999 containing nine advisers (though one, Professor John Van Reenan, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is only part-time and that salary is pro rata).

The other eight in that second-highest band are all employed in Number 10 Downing Street: Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson, Deputy Chiefs of Staff; Jonathan Powell, National Security Adviser; Stephanie Driver, Director of Communications; James Lyons, Director of Strategic Communications; Dr Stuart Ingham, Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit; Liz Lloyd, Director of Policy, Delivery and Innovation; and Varun Chandra, Special Adviser on Business and Investment.

I would make only two observations on that top tier. The first is that Powell’s appointment as National Security Adviser with the status of a SpAd has caused a number of administrative difficulties and a reshaping of the role of National Security Adviser, and I think Downing Street has yet to account properly for why the decision was made to change the post. I explored some of the problems here.

The second point is that it was decided in April, after the departure of former Director of Communications Matthew Doyle, to divide his responsibilities into strategy and delivery, the former being entrusted to James Lyons while Steph Driver took charge of the latter. Having spent some time in the broad world of communications, and knowing people who have much more experience and are extremely able in the field, I was sceptical of this division of labour. Strategy and delivery must go hand-in-hand, and I wondered if the line between them had been drawn too emphatically. I will leave readers to judge, though it is worth asking yourself whether you think the government’s communications function over the past three or four months has been good or bad. I know what I think.

What else to say? The sheer weight of SpAd numbers in Downing Street remains high, with 42 in total. When the Ministerial Code was updated last November, the theoretical limit of two special advisers per cabinet minister was removed, not least because it had for a long time been systematically flouted. We should perhaps applaud the Northern Ireland Secretary, Hilary Benn, the Scotland Secretary, Ian Murray, the Wales Secretary, Jo Stevens, and the Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, for being the only four full members of the Cabinet with only two SpAds, but it is fair to say they may not have the most exacting portfolios in Whitehall.

There are one or two names on the list worth highlighting. Damian McBride, the legendarily bare-knuckled Head of Communications at HM Treasury then Special Adviser and Press Secretary to Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, has completed his rehabilitation as is a SpAd to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. Darren Murphy, special adviser to Peter Kyle at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, is another old New Labour hand, having previously worked as a SpAd for Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott (1997-99) and Health Secretary Alan Milburn (1999-2003) before advising Sir Tony Blair on political communications in Number 10 Downing Street (2003-05).

John Stevens, SpAd to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden, was previously Political Editor of The Daily Mirror and Deputy Political Editor of The Daily Mail. Another scribe in SpAd-land is Ben Judah, special adviser to the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy; he has worked for the Associated Press, Thomson Reuters, VICE Media, Politico Europe, The American Interest and The Jewish Chronicle, and has written Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin, This Is London: Life and Death in the World City and This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now.

We’ll always have Paris

A looming special election to represent the second constituency of Paris in the National Assembly is a wonderful demonstration of how different French politics are from our own, in terms of the significance of offices, overlapping jurisdictions and a variety of career paths. The election is being held because the previous deputy, Jean Laussucq of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, was unseated by the Constitutional Council for electoral irregularities.

The district, which runs along the Left Bank of the River Seine from the Eiffel Tower to just beyond the Latin Quarter, is affluent and stylish, and has tended to be represented by one of the centre-right or Gaullist parties, with the exception of Pierre Dabezies of the Socialist Party briefly in 1981-82 and Gilles Le Gendre who was a deputy for La République En Marche! (2017-22) and its successor Renaissance. Laussucq, now a member of Renaissance, previously belonged to the centre-right Les Républicains.

All unremarkable, you might think, except for some of the contenders lining up to contest the seat in September. This week, Michel Barnier, most recently the Fifth Republic’s shortest-serving Prime Minister, lasting 99 days, announced that he will contest the seat, presumably hoping to be the candidate of Les Républicains. As I wrote recently, Barnier is one of a number of—to be polite—well-kent faces eyeing up a bid for the presidency of the Republic in April/May 2027, so would be well-served by a seat in the National Assembly. It is astonishing to think Barnier is 74 and was first appointed a minister of Édouard Balladur’s cabinet in 1993; he was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2004 to 2005, a counterpart of Jack Straw, who has long since left the field of British politics; he was a European Commissioner twice (1999-2004 and 2010-14) and then appointed the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator, leading Task Force 50 (2016-19) and the UK Task Force (2019-21). And still he dreams of the Élysée Palace…

To make the special election even more loaded with significance, another senior figure from Les Républicains may now take part. Rachida Dati, a stripling of 60, is currently Minister of Culture, having been appointed to the cabinet of Gabriel Attal in January 2024; for the past 17 years, she has also been Mayor of the 7th Arrondissement of Paris, which substantially overlaps with the second constituency of the National Assembly. Dati goes a long way back too: in 2002, she became an adviser on addressing delinquency to Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, who became her mentor; she acted as his spokesperson during the presidential election in April and May 2007 and was rewarded with appointment as Minister of Justice, the first person born to North African immigrant parents to run a government ministry. Dati often accompanied President Sarkozy on official overseas visits after his marriage began to break up later that year. She left government in 2009, having been elected the previous year as Mayor of the 7th Arrondissement and a Councillor of Paris for the same district, and sat as a Member of the European Parliament for Île-de-France from 2009 to 2019.

Dati publicly considered running for Mayor of Paris in 2014, deciding against it, then stood unsuccessfully against incumbent Anne Hidalgo of the Socialist Party in 2020. In January last year, she announced that she will stand for the mayoralty again in 2026. She is now considering standing in the special election for the National Assembly, however, to spike Michel Barnier’s guns, seeing him as a rival who is moving on to her political turf. So Paris’s second constituency faces a bitter internal party struggle between a former Prime Minister and European Commissioner, and a serving cabinet minister who already represents most of the district on the Council of Paris and is its Mayor. To top it all off, neither is especially interested in being a deputy on its own terms, but for each of them it would assist their next big electoral campaign—Dati’s to be Mayor of Paris in 2026, Barnier’s to be President of the Republic in 2027—and each also wants to deny the prize to the other.

We can also throw in a wild card. Clara Chappaz, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies under Barnier and now serving under his successor as Prime Minister, François Bayrou, is also reportedly considering a bid for the place in the National Assembly. She is only 36, with a background in fashion retail before she was appointed Director of French Tech, the state tech start-up support body and incubator, in 2021. She has no strong party ties and a much more forward-looking and modern image: will she be a factor? It will all add to the gaiety of public life.

Wherever the green is worn

By 11 November at the latest, Ireland must choose a new President to succeed Michael D. Higgins, the diminutive poet-politician who has held the office for the past 14 years and is prevented from standing again by Article 12.3 of the Constitution of Ireland.

The presidency of Ireland is an almost pathologically ceremonial and symbolic one, but symbols have often had outsized importance in Irish history and the election will no doubt be hotly contested. The President, in a faint echo of the English conception of Parliament, is formally a constituent part of Oireachtas Éireann, the Irish parliament, along with the lower house, Dáil Éireann, and the upper house, Seanad Éireann; but he or she has no executive power, not even nominally, and the conduct of the affairs of state is vested in the government, headed by the Taoiseach. The government is required to keep the President informed of major events domestically and internationally, but his or her main constitutional functions are wholly circumscribed by the Constitution itself or by binding “advice” from the government. These include appointing the Taoiseach and other ministers and accepting their resignations; appointing the judiciary; convening and dissolving the Dáil; signing bills into law; representing Ireland internationally; acting as Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces; and exercising the power of clemency.

There are a very few reserve powers which the President may exercise “in his absolute discretion”, according to the Constitution. (The equivalent Irish phrase is as a chomhairle féin, which roughly translates as “under his own counsel”; some legal scholars have suggested that these terms are not precisely synonymous, but in the event of uncertainty, the Irish version of the Constitution always takes precedence.)

These powers are refusing a dissolution of the Dáil, for example if the request comes from a Taoiseach who has lost the confidence of the Dáil, but this has never been exercised, and appointing up to seven members of the Council of State, the body which advises the President on the exercise of other reserve powers. In exercising thes other powers, while the President is obliged by the Constitution to consult the Council of State, he is in no way and to no extent bound to accept its advice in whole or in part.

These consultative reserve powers are referring bills to the Supreme Court to test their adherence to the Constitution; referring bills to a popular referendum if he receives a petition against the measure signed by half the members of the Seanad and one-third of the members of the Dáil (this has never happened); imposing a time limit on the Seanad’s consideration of a bill; addressing one or both houses of the Oireachtas; addressing the nation; and convening extraordinary meetings of one or both houses.

As you can see, the discretion available to the President is minimal and generally restricted to rather technical constitutional or procedural matters. In the main, the President has come to be both a symbol of the nation and an ambassador-at-large, which is hardly a de minimis role given the size and extent of the Irish diaspora. Certainly for the past 50 years or so, the office has tended to go to someone regarded as relatively independent in political terms, or else from one of the smaller political parties, with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael tending to take a step back; Mary McAleese, President from 1997 to 2011, was nominated by Fianna Fáil for her first term, and had been a parliamentary candidate for the party, but her eminence was as a legal scholar at Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast. Higgins had been a senator, a Teachta Dála and a government minister, but for the Labour Party which has only once finished better than third in a general election and has been the junior partner when it as been in a coalition government.

Six of the 14 presidential elections since the office was established in 1938 have been unopposed, but this year there are already several candidates circling. The current Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin, will be 65 in August, and, although he has made firm denials, there remains a suspicion he might seek to finish his long public career—he has been a full-time politician since 1985, when he was elected to Cork Corporation—with the presidency. He might also be motivated to offer himself as a candidate to frustrate another possible runner, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald. Although she is only 56 and already Leader of the Opposition in the Dáil, the symbolism of the presidency has a powerful hold over Sinn Féin, with Martin McGuinness standing as a candidate in 2011 (he came third, with only 13.7 per cent of the vote). The party’s candidate in 2018 was the lower profile Liadh Ní Riada, an MEP and Irish language activist. Having failed to make the breakthrough some had predicted in last November’s general election, Sinn Féin may look for a consolation prize.

Mairead McGuinness, a former MEP and European Commissioner, will be Fine Gael’s candidate for the election. She has a respectable public and political profile and is experienced, but Fine Gael has never won the presidency (though it did co-nominate the first President, Douglas Hyde). Catherine Connolly, an independent TD for Galway West, has also declared her candidacy; originally a member of the Labour Party, she left in 2007 after a dispute over candidate selection and has been an independent TD since 2016. Her politics are very much of the left and she has gained the backing of the Social Democrats, People Before Profit and 100% Redress, while her long-standing criticism of Israel, recent stance on the war in Gaza and references to “the war-mongering military industrial complex” may stand her in good stead given the Irish electorate’s apparent current mood.

Mixed martial artist and all-purpose thuggish misogynist and racist Conor McGregor is eager to stand for the role, and has attracted supportive noises from Donald Trump and Elon Musk. However, candidates must have the support of at least 20 TDs and/or senators or at least four of Ireland’s 31 local councils, and the chances of McGregor receiving that kind of backing look very slender. Peadar Tóibín, leader of populist, conservative and republican party Aontú, has said he wants to form a “selection block” or “nominating caucus” with other small parties and select a candidate, though it is hard to see what substantial constituency they would be appealing to.

There is still time for an unexpected entrant. The result of the election probably hinges, one way or another, on whether Fianna Fáil nominates its own candidate Micheál Martin having indicated the party would only do so if it found someone with broad support and a realistic prospect of victory. Might that someone be him? Martin and Fianna Fáil will certainly be very wary of sitting the election out if there is a possibility that Sinn Féin might triumph. But there are still several months to go: anything can happen.