Do ministers need to be subject experts?
Downing Street is about to announce a new artificial intelligence tsar; but there are reasons that subject experts don't control all the levers of power in Whitehall
Over the weekend, because it sometimes seems this is what weekends are for, news began to leak out that the prime minister would shortly announce the appoint of Ian Hogarth as chair of the Foundation Model Taskforce, a body being set up with £100 million to accelerate the UK’s development and skills at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. It should not be a controversial appointment: Hogarth is a successful entrepreneur who founded online music ticket platform Songkick, and he combines this financial acumen with a long-standing interest in AI.
These appointments are not rare. The government quite often approaches figures successful in their own fields to undertake tasks with circumscribed remits and provide a combination of proven commercial expertise and a degree of outside-Whitehall, no-nonsense, can-do spirit. Often the roles are highly technical or relatively minor
The most famous of these temporary bodies was, of course, the Vaccine Taskforce which Boris Johnson created in April 2020 to facilitate the development and distribution of a vaccine for the Covid-19 virus. It was chaired by Kate Bingham, a venture capitalist who specialised in medical technology (and was also daughter of former Lord Chief Justice Lord Bingham of Cornhill and married to Conservative MP Jesse Norman, at that point Financial Secretary to the Treasury). The first vaccine was delivered in December 2020, all adults had access to a dose of vaccine by June 2021 and the taskforce was wound up in autumn 2022 it had achieved one of the fastest rollouts in the world accompanied by one of the lowest rates of vaccine hesitancy. So these bodies can be extremely effective for focused, limited tasks.
In the UK, we went through a phase, beginning with Tony Blair’s premiership, of calling such appointments “tsars”. It was a usage of the old imperial Russian title—sometimes rendered “czar”—that had begun, inevitably in the United States, and surprisingly only a few months after the real tsar had been deposed and while he and his family were still alive: in January 1918, Bernard Baruch, a New York financier and investor, was appointed chairman of the War Industries Board, a body responsible for coordinating military purchasing, and, as his appointment had no precedent, he was quickly dubbed President Wilson’s “industry czar”.
So far as one can tell, the first UK government external appointment to be dubbed a “tsar” by contemporary media was Keith Hellawell, former Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police. He had risen through the ranks very rapidly, becoming the youngest sergeant in the police at 23 and the youngest inspector at 26, and by the age of 44 he was Deputy Chief Constable of Humberside Police. He was known for uncompromising and harsh attitudes towards serious crime, supporting the restoration of the death penalty for terrorism, child murders and murders of police officers, but, conversely, his approach to other crimes was often markedly progressive: although he never supported decriminalisation, he abandoned a West Yorkshire Police policy of automatically prosecuting those found in possession of cannabis and instead employed cautions and greater interpersonal engagement, and was acknowledged for a sensitive and pragmatic approach to the fever of child sexual abuse allegations which had raged in Cleveland in 1987 and the side-effects of which were still being felt during his tenure as chief constable.
In January 1998, the government appointed Hellawell as UK Anti-drugs Coordinator, responsible for managing the implementation of policy nationwide across 110 different teams. It was a dreary bureaucratic, too-hyphenated title, so the media quickly dubbed him the government’s “drugs tsar”; indeed, the shorthand was in use before his formal appointment. (Initially, The Guardian, alone of the major newspapers, used the old-fashioned spelling “czar”, but by the summer of 1998 had fallen in line with the other publications.) Obviously, “tsar” was snappy and ideally short for headlines. But it had an appropriate whiff of authority and dynamism too, which the New Labour government, always hyper-aware of presentation, must have enjoyed. The idea was that tsars were outside experts who would cut through the staid and sclerotic procedures of Whitehall and drive action where it was needed.
To say that tsars caught on would be an understatement. It was a label usually attached to a particular sort of outsider appointed to bring both expertise and a new burst of energy to a particular organisation or policy field. Although Hellawell resigned in July 2002 after falling out with the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, the idea of tsars persisted, surviving the demise of New Labour in 2010. By 2013, 15 years after Hellawell was named drugs tsar, almost 300 men and women had been given some kind of tsar role (though it would not be sued in official parlance until 2016, when the Cameron government, in its dying days, appointed TV star and billionaire Lord Sugar as “enterprise tsar”; he had left the Labour Party in 2015 and was a prominent Remain supporter in the Brexit referendum).
Some of the hundreds of tsars were effective and successful policy experts, catalysts or disruptors. Baroness Casey of Blackstock has become almost a professional tsar, and recently conducted a review for the government on the behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police, but she cut her teeth in the truth-to-power role when in April 1999 Tony Blair appointed her head of the Rough Sleepers’ Unit, a team within the Cabinet Office’s Social Exclusion Unit in charge of drafting a strategy for tackling homelessness and then reducing the problem by two-thirds within three years. Casey hit the target some months ahead of schedule. Other successful outsiders were Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank and Second Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury, who wrote a report on the economics of climate change in 2005-06, and Professor Sir John Vickers, Warden of All Souls’ College, Oxford, who chaired the Independent Commission on Banking in 2010-11.
There are, of course, problems inherent in the system of tsars. While their appointment and, ideally, ongoing work can revitalise an area of action, ministers have short memories, and it is easy for a politician to generate a great deal of hoopla and folderol around an appointment, especially of an eye-catching or famous candidate, but that person’s authority may rely on continued ministerial support. There is also an obvious lack of direct accountability. Tsars are not ministers, so may not be scrutinised through the usual parliamentary processes, yet they sometimes have wider and more sweeping executive powers than permanent civil servants, so it may not be entirely satisfactory to rely on the “ministers decide” doctrine. Alex Thomas of the Institute for Government has proposed that the relevant departmental select committee could be asked to scrutinise tsars on their remits—which would require these being specific and public, in itself no bad thing—and that is a modest enough but sensible reform.
I bring up this whole issue, prompted by the trailing of Hogarth’s likely appointment to the Foundation Model Taskforce, because we are in a period of unusually sharp self-examination in terms of our political institutions. This is partly because the Covid-19 pandemic was a huge stress test in which organisations reacted in very different ways, but there is also a more general sense of slightly depressed curiosity: why do we do things so badly, why do we have repeated systemic failures, why are we unable to fix problems even once they are very clearly identified? Ian Dunt, always pithy and shrewd, titled his current book on the failures of our legislative system How Westminster Works… and Why It Doesn’t, Sebastian Payne’s vivid exploration of areas which have stopped voting Labour in the automatic way they did is called Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England, and ‘broken Britain’ more generally is a common term for the condition in which we find ourselves.
One of the more frequent, but often less deeply considered, criticisms of our political system is that we have ‘amateurs’ as ministers: those appointed to positions of political leadership in government departments need not, and often do not, have any specialist knowledge or expertise in the subject for which they are responsible, and autobiographies abound with stories of being handed a new and unfamiliar job on a Thursday and having to answer your department’s allocation of parliamentary questions from the despatch box of the House of Commons on Monday. This, it is claimed, reflects the old-fashioned and elitist belief in the all-round abilities of “good chaps”, an assumption that someone with an Oxford PPE will have a mind so trained and agile that he or she will be able to master any subject. We are hopelessly impressed when a former banker like Rishi Sunak becomes chancellor of the exchequer, while David Cameron selected Chloe Smith for early promotion to economic secretary at HM Treasury in 2011 because he believed she was an accountant; she was not, she had been a management consultant, but the appointment went ahead anyway.
You might think that the appointment of tsars gives us an analogy, at least, from which we could work. It would bring us in line with some other countries: Barack Obama’s first energy secretary, for example, Professor Steven Chu, was a physics PhD from Berkeley who had been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which researched biofuels and solar energy; France’s minister of higher education and research is also a physicist, Dr Sylvie Retailleau, who was a professor at and then president of the University of Paris-Saclay; and the German health minister, Prof Dr Karl Lauterbach, is an accomplished epidemiologist and expert in public medicine who has taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. In Rishi Sunak’s cabinet, the minister in charge of energy policy was a publishing entrepreneur, the research and innovation minister, currently on maternity leave, worked in marketing for World Wrestling Entertainment, while the health and social care secretary was an insurance lawyer before moving into financial regulation.
That’s a harsh way of looking at it, and I set the comparison up deliberately starkly. The first thing we have to bear in mind is that countries operate different political systems in different ways, and it is easy to see any one as the logical approach if it has prevailed for decades or centuries. In the United States, the separation between the executive and the legislature has been a feature of the arrangements since the country was founded in 1776 and is enshrined in the 1789 Constitution. France also has a separation of powers: the Constitution of the Fifth Republic prohibits ministers from holding any other national office including membership of the parliament, though they are permitted to retain (and often do) elected office in regional local government. In Germany, there is a ‘mixed economy’: ministers, including the federal chancellor, may be members of the Bundestag, but it is not a requirement.
Clearly, if the person appointing the government can only choose from members of the legislature, that imposes a considerable limitation. But this does not automatically make the United Kingdom utterly illogical or an outlier: the development of the British Empire made the ‘Westminster model’ of parliamentary government a popular and potent export, and some variation on it is used by 36 other countries around the world (not all of them former imperial possessions). It was also used for a time by some former colonies like Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, before they adopted different systems.
There may be reasons why you don’t want someone attached to the “stakeholders” of a department to serve as a minister there. When the idea of “experts” is mooted, it is often done in a very rosy and rather nebulous way, but we have to consider this in a practical way. Think of the Department of Health and Social Care: clinicians often speak wistfully of what it would be like to have one of their own as secretary of state, but what do they mean? A health secretary who had worked in general practice might not be universally acclaimed as an “expert” by surgeons or hospital registrars or anaesthetists or nurses, or what about a dentist or an optometrist? And you can hear the fury of clinicians if a secretary of state with a distinguished background as an NHS manager was appointed, or someone who had held a senior position in private healthcare. A similar complex web of rivalries could be identified within the education establishment.
There might be even clearer reasons for “amateur” political leadership. Take the Ministry of Defence: many democracies, especially those who know it cannot be taken for granted, cherish the principle of civilian control of the military. The United States, although it has never been subject to a military coup, made a provision in the Truman-era National Security Act 1947 that no-one who had been a regular member of the armed forces could serve as secretary of defense until after a seven-year period; the current secretary, General Lloyd Austin, retired from the US Army in 2016 and was nominated as secretary of defense in 2020, so it was necessary for Congress to grant him a waiver for the appropriate section of the National Security Act. So the knee-jerk desire for an “expert” may not be appropriate for all departments; equally, would a senior MoD civil servant have the same kind of “expert” weight as someone who had worn uniform? Our unconscious biases are everywhere.
One final point I will make is that, at least in our political system, secretaries of state—indeed, all ministers—are not simply subject-focused technocrats. Certainly they are responsible for setting policy for their area, but it is the civil service which provides specialist advice. Ministers have a broader responsibility, to work in concert with their colleagues and together (in theory!) to consider the political and social context in which the government weaves together a legislative programme. Yes, I realise this is very much how things should work in an ideal world, and that ministers often fall beneath those lofty aspirations, but political institutions are designed on the basis of the ideal conditions.
One of the most annoying refrains of the pandemic, for me, was that minister should “follow the science”: that is, they should accept the public health recommendations of epidemiologists and other medical professionals. But that is in fact not just mistaken but diametrically wrong: it is the job of ministers to absorb and weigh up advice from across the spectrum, and by synthesising all these sources of information to produce a policy which takes everything into account.
To return to the example of the Department of Health and Social Care, a minister who was simply “following the science” would seek to ban at least alcohol and tobacco as they are proven to be extremely injurious to health; in 2010, Professor David Nutt, a distinguished neuropsychopharmacologist who served for some years on the government’s Advisory Council of the Misuse of Drugs, declared that in terms of overall harm to the individual and society, alcohol was more damaging than heroin or crack cocaine. Yet we do not prescribe alcohol or tobacco, though both are subject to stringent controls, because we understand that we have inherited a situation which is inconsistent but represents a hard-won compromise in terms of protection and personal freedom, while also acknowledging that the government received substantila sums of money in duty from the sale of both products. We do not “follow the science”. We forge a broadly acceptable compromise, and the details of that compromise are specified by ministers.
There are many more issues which I haven’t raised, as I don’t want this essay to sprawl out of control. But it is often the case that those who want to change the political system paint their idealised portrait with the broadest of strokes, and any concrete action would need to be based on much more specific and clearly defined proposals.
I have said again and again that I am a Tory, and I often fall back on Enoch Powell’s definition of that creed as applying to “someone who thinks institutions are wiser than those who operate them”. I never set my face like flint against reform, but I think it needs to prove its case, and I think those who bemoan the cult of the amateur need first to create a detailed and practical alternative, but also must recognise the factors which make the status quo beneficial. We want ministers to be everything, from tightly focused hyper-geeks to statesmen with a broad, horizon-scanning vision of how society should work. I doubt very much that there is one model which achieves that balance in full, but I am also not convinced that the Westminster model is peculiary or outstandingly deficient.
“Be careful what you wish for” is a warning which can be redolent of Private Frazer in its doom-laden implications.It can be moronic and a knee-jerk argument for doing nothing. But it is also, although we may not always want to admit it, a consideration that has to be borne in mind by reformers and conservatives alike. Although the United Kingdom, rightly in my view, has no special category of “constitutional law” which is protected from amendment or repeal, but it is true that constitutional change tends to be stubbornly enduring. When you want to alter how our government works, therefore, just pause long enough to wonder if the change you seek is the right one, whether it will work and whether it is, on its own, addressing the harm you have identified. The German language, inevitably, has a word, “Schlimmbesserung”, which translates roughly as making matters worse by trying to make them better. I have often thought that English would benefit from a direct equivalent when it comes to governmental reform.