Government at the centre: do less, better and empower the Cabinet

There are various propositions for strengthening the centre of government and making it more effective; but what if we move, if anything, in the opposite direction?

To give you all fair warning, I may be writing extensively about Whitehall and the machinery of government over the next days and weeks. It has always fascinated me, since I came into possession at no doubt far too young an age of a copy of the sainted Peter Hennessy’s 1989 blockbuster Whitehall, then sought out its forerunner, Cabinet (1986). That this was a peculiarly deep-seated and resilient obsession was demonstrated by the fact that, by my mid-teens at the very latest, my bookshelves also bore Sir Ivor Jennings’s Cabinet Government (1965) and even The British Constitution (1938) by H.R.G. Greaves. I also bought on release British Political Facts 1900-1994 by David and Gareth Butler, never imagining that nearly 20 years later I would be sitting in Speaker’s House as a parliamentary official, listening to Sir David Butler, as he had by then become, recount his early experiences meeting Winston Churchill.

I cannot fully account for my interest in institutions and systems, except to say that it is in my nature, and some of it, I am sure, is both a cause and a product of my instinctive Toryism (Enoch Powell: “a Tory is a person who regards authority as immanent in institutions”). I am conscious that it is an instinct which can distort: in politics, and in other spheres, it is possible to fall prey to the idea that systems are all-important, that if an organisation can be set out in the ideal way, then all of the problems previously encountered in its functioning will be resolved. Observers of Westminster and Whitehall suffer from this sometimes, especially in terms of the machinery of government, pursuing a “perfect” division of responsibilities and powers that will unlock the door to the consummate effective bureaucracy. It is not so.

A crisis at the centre

One of the challenges to our constitutional arrangements which has occupied practitioners, political and official, and theorists for many years is the office of Prime Minister, and, if you will, the inadequacy of the Office of the Prime Minister; that is, the relative lack of power and support afforded to the head of the government. The Prime Minister does not have his own department in the sense that his cabinet colleagues do, and, while Number 10 Downing Street adjoins and is connected to the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall, and the Cabinet Secretary is the Prime Minister’s chief official adviser whom he sees daily, the Cabinet Office according to constitutional theory exists, as its title suggests, to support the Cabinet as a whole rather than simply the Prime Minister (though I think you could make a strong case that it is a prime minister’s department under a nom de guerre to a very great extent).

In recent history, Sir Tony Blair was the first premier to complain about and reflect on the absence of adequate machinery in Downing Street to allow him to conduct his premiership as vigorously as he would have liked. It may be significant that Blair was the first Prime Minister since Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 never to have held executive office before (and only the fourth ever, after MacDonald, Henry Addington in 1801 and the Marquess of Rockingham in 1765). This undoubtedly shaped his expectations of the role, as did his youth—at 43, he was the youngest Prime Minister since the Earl of Liverpool in 1812—and his arrival at the head of a landslide general election victory and a majority in the House of Commons of 179. Having ousted a Conservative government which had held office for 18 years, the longest period of single-party rule for more than 150 years, Blair was ambitious and impatient.

Attempts to create levers of power

I will not dwell here on Blair’s various innovations and reforms to try to put more control in his hands as head of the government, including the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and Strategy Unit. Since his tenure, however, the machinery immediately at the Prime Minister’s disposal has been a constant issue of debate. David Cameron scrapped both the Delivery Unit and the Strategy Unit, then established a Policy and Implementation Unit in the Cabinet Office; this was a much less party political organisation, reflecting the fact that the government was a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He also appointed a Downing Street Permanent Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to act as a kind of bridge between the Downing Street Chief of Staff, a political appointee, and the Cabinet Secretary. (The post lapsed in January 2012 when Heywood himself became Cabinet Secretary).

After the end of the coalition and the re-election of a purely Conservative government, Cameron attempted to take more direct control by setting up a number of Implementation Taskforces to monitor progress on policy areas which straddled departmental boundaries.

In May 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Boris Johnson revived the post of Downing Street Permanent Secretary for Simon Case, then on secondment from the civil service as Private Secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. It was intended that Case would focus on the government’s response to the pandemic, but within a few months of his arrival, Johnson decided to remove the Cabinet Secretary he had inherited from Theresa May, Sir Mark Sedwill, and appoint Case in his stead. When the transfer of power took place in September, the post of Downing Street Permanent Secretary lapsed again.

In January 2021, in the wake of the pandemic, Johnson commissioned Sir Michael Barber, who had founded and headed the Delivery Unit under Blair, to review the government’s machinery for delivering policy, following which, in April, the Delivery Unit was revived to replace the Policy and Implementation Unit. In February 2022, Samantha Jones was appointed interim Permanent Secretary and Chief Operating Officer in Downing Street, responsible for planning a new Office of the Prime Minister to give Johnson more direct authority, but the process had not been completed before he announced his intention to resign the premiership in July.

Liz Truss planned to replace the Delivery Unit with an Economic Unit which, she hoped, would strengthen her hand against that of HM Treasury, the influence of which she disapproved, but she made no progress before her 49-day premiership was over.

This short account reflects various different attempts to strengthen and streamline the executive powers available to the Prime Minister. They have often been minor or incomplete because the operational tempo of the premiership is now such that reforming the machinery of government is akin to changing the tyres on a moving car. Outside observers and academics, with more time to analyse and reflect, have proposed more thorough and wide-ranging changes.

Systematic reform of the centre of Whitehall: weighing the options

In July 2019, as Theresa May handed over power to Boris Johnson, the Project for Modern Democracy’s GovernUp initiative set out 10 proposals for reform for the incoming premier. These included transforming Number 10 Downing Street into a Department of the Prime Minister to set the direction of the government, handle major cross-departmental issues like Brexit and unify “core messaging and strategy development”; setting up a powerful central department with “responsibility for the professionalism, effectiveness, and spending decisions of government”, assuming these roles from HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office; and stronger cabinet committees, more use of cross-cutting teams of civil servants and the implementation of interdepartmental working groups including expertise from outside government.

In December 2019, Policy Exchange published a report by Iain Mansfield and Warwick Lightfoot entitled Whitehall Reimagined: A strengthened Civil Service for a post-Brexit Britain. Its authors proposed greater capacity in Number 10 Downing Street “to develop and direct policy change through Whitehall”, the streamlining of policy-making and the “reform of civil service recruitment and progression to enhance expertise, accountability and institutional memory”.

In July 2021, the Commission for Smarter Government issued a policy paper entitled Strategic, Capable, Innovative, Accountable: Four steps to smarter government. This proposed a Prime Minister’s Department to give stronger support to the Prime Minister and the government on the co-ordination and strategy of policy, and a Treasury Board within the department, chaired by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, with oversight of financial planning across government. It also recommended the abolition of most cabinet committees in favour of Ministerial Boards in charge of individual policy goals, very similar to the original conception of Labour’s mission delivery boards.

In March 2022, when Boris Johnson announced the establishment of the Office of the Prime Minister, the Constitution Society examined this proposal and its implication of a Department of the Prime Minister and identified some of the potential challenges and unintended consequences. It noted that the idea was far from new and had been mooted previously under various premiers (I looked at the same issue in November 2023).

The Institute for Government has examined this issue at some length. In January 2021, it published The heart of the problem: A weak centre is undermining the UK government by Alex Thomas, which argued for strengthening the Cabinet Office’s role in overseeing an agreed policy programme and a strong central delivery unit. In March 2023, it established an impressively eminent Commission on the Centre of Government chaired by the institute’s Director, Dr Hannah White, with the explicit purpose:

To produce concrete recommendations for a confident, proactive, coherently-structured centre of government equipped to meet the challenges and take the opportunities of the 21st century and deliver for the people of the UK.

In March, it produced its final report. It called for the restructuring of Number 10 Downing Street and the Cabinet Office into two new entities, a Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and a Department for the Civil Service, the appointment of a First Secretary of State responsible for “driving the government’s priorities” and with ministerial oversight of the civil service, and the creation of a small Executive Cabinet Committee of key ministers to take major strategic decisions.

This is not an exhaustive literature review but it provides a flavour and indicates, I think, a relative unity of thought: a larger, more powerful department under the Prime Minister’s direct control to allow greater oversight and more direct involvement in policy from development to delivery, a streamlining of the decision-making process at the centre of government and, often, a concomitant—but necessary, and perhaps desirable—diminution of the power and influence of the Treasury. Even if the Whitehall community of practitioners and theorists differ on individual details, there is a broad conceptual consensus.

There have been dissenting voices. Patrick Dunleavy, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the London School of Economics, responded to the Commission on the Centre of Government’s report with a painstaking critique and counter-proposals, Restructuring UK government at the centre—Why the IFG Commission’s naive plan will not work. He criticised its “rather hackneyed rationalist case for more planned government at the centre”, and intriguingly but persuasively compared the report’s model of an Executive Cabinet Committee overseeing a long-term strategic plan with the operation of the 2010-15 coalition government’s so-called “Quad”.

This core group consisted of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, the Deputy Prime Minister (and Lord President of the Council), Nick Clegg, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander. Usefully sketched by The Spectator’s James Forsyth, the Quad determined major matters of policy, inviting other ministers if necessary, and was initially both cordial and confidential. Its membership was significant from a number of perspectives: it was evenly balanced between the coalition partners, despite the Conservatives winning 306 seats to the Liberal Democrats’ 57; it comprised the two party leaders and their closest electoral and political strategists; and half of it consisted of ministers from HM Treasury, magnifying the department’s already outsized influence.

Dunleavy argued that the 2010-15 coalition was not necessarily a model of governance which should be emulated. As he notes, the government was founded on a coalition agreement drafted and approved over a matter of days, if not hours.

The deal and the Quad’s enforcement of it against accumulating evidence of the harm done wrecked the economy and economic growth, avoidably shattered public spending for decades, hollowed out local and NHS governance, and (as elsewhere) austerity created the essential foundations for a subsequent populist backlash—the 2016 Brexit wrecking referendum.

To suppose that a potential incoming Labour government would want to emulate that arrangement or would benefit from doing so was evidence of what Dunleavy called “stunning political naivety”.

His other major objection was the absence of substantive criticism of the Treasury. “Its only faults apparently are that it is perhaps good and so ends up inadvertently dominating government,” he notes, adding “its operations are never cited as problematic in any way and it is spoken of only in hushed, respectful terms”. It is certainly true that the size, scope, powers and influence of the Treasury represent a hardy perennial of academic and political debate; at the end of 2022 I wrote a pair of essays on historical attempts to reform the Treasury and tentative proposals for change.

Dunleavy, as many others have done, favours taking powers from the Cabinet Office and the Treasury to form a department which has control of public spending, leaving the Treasury focused on “its macro-economic role and its much-neglected supervision of HMRC and its previously sloppy and erratic tax policy-making”. He would add in those responsibilities the Commission for the Centre of Government assigned to a Department for the Civil Service (“weak and hopeless”) to form a “genuinely substantial counterweight to the Treasury”, namely a Department for Finance, Procurement and Productivity.

It should be noted that Dunleavy’s approach is critical to the point of splenetic, reflecting a dislike not just of the Institute for Government’s recent direction of travel but of the world of think tanks in general. He may be an outlier but he has enormous experience and learning, and at the very least should serve as a useful challenge, the grit in the oyster.

Have we got the right diagnosis but the wrong treatment?

There is a common thread in most recent thinking about the centre of government to which, I am beginning to realise, I have not paid enough attention and which I have not internally challenged sufficiently fully. As a ranging shot in this area, because I will certainly come back to it and have much more thinking and reading to do, I want to set out briefly the problem and whether there are solutions other than those in common currency at the moment.

It is yawningly uncontestable to observe that the premiership has accrued to itself more and more power over the decades. You can pick your own starting point, and the context of the evolution of the extent and responsibility of the state must always be borne in mind, but there is still an agreed trend of two interwoven developments, the growth of a presidential model of leadership and the decline of collective Cabinet government. The chief characters in this story are, of course, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, the former because of her implacable determination in the face of any and all obstacles, the latter, characteristically, for his more nuanced and subtle circumvention of the Cabinet in favour of informal relationships with trusted advisers, so-called “sofa government”. There are elements in both cases which do not quite fit the accepted narrative but the broad brushstrokes are fair.

I will deal with this in more depth another time, but these anxieties are very far from new, and such criticisms were already being made of Sir Robert Walpole in the 1730s. He is the first politician to be recognised as a British “prime minister” and the beginning of his tenure is conventionally held to be his appointment as First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons on 3 April 1721. This followed the resignation of the Earl of Sunderland in the wake of the South Sea Bubble, by which he was damaged because of his involvement in granting the South Sea Company’s monopoly over British trade with South America in 1720. Sunderland, in partnership with the Earl Stanhope, latterly Secretary of State for the Northern Department, had been the chief ministers of George I from 1717 to 1718 and again from 1718 to 1721, but Stanhope died suddenly of a stroke in February 1721 just before Sunderland was brought down.

It is worth noting in connection with excessive authority being assumed and wielded by the Prime Minister that the office came to be recognised for that very reason, and was in Walpole’s time meant generally as an insult. The head of the government is formally the First Lord of the Treasury¹, and the office of “Prime Minister” only gained statutory recognition in the Chequers Estate Act 1917, though it first appeared in the Official Report (commonly known as Hansard) in 1885, was used in the minutes of the inaugural meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1902 and gained an explicit place in the order of precedence in December 1905. But in the 18th century, it carried the implication or sometimes the explicit accusation of overweening and excessive power concentrated in the hands of one individual.

It charged, essentially, that one of many advisers to the Crown had sought to elevate himself above the others, which was clearly improper; when the Earl of Oxford, Robert Harley, was impeached in 1715 after serving as Lord High Treasurer and effective leader of the government from 1711 to 1714, one of the accusations levelled at him was that he had been a “prime minister”. Walpole disputed the description, and in 1741 told the House of Commons, “I unequivocally deny that I am sole and prime minister”.

So the drift towards power being centralised in the hands of the Prime Minister has been happening, or at least been believed to be happening, for centuries. Occasionally there will be a reaction against it. John Major began his first Cabinet meeting in November 1990 by joking “Well, who’d have thought it?” and writes in his autobiography that he deliberately encouraged discussion among ministers before summing up the arguments and announcing his own conclusion. Thatcher, by contrast, had begun meetings with a firm declaration of her own position, almost daring others to dissent (they did, more frequently than people often remember).

Equally, David Cameron arrived in Downing Street believing that the Blair and Brown premierships had been hallmarked by excessive centralisation and micromanagement. Consequently, as mentioned above, he disbanded the Delivery Unit and the Strategy Unit and, for a short while, the number of special advisers in Downing Street was reduced, from 25 to 22. (It rose to 25 again in 2011 and by the end of the coalition in 2015 was 32.)

These have, however, been anomalies in an otherwise steady centralisation. What intrigues me is that recent proposals for the reform of Whitehall almost universally accept that development and seek to accommodate it: essentially they are all attempts to give the Prime Minister executive institutional powers and authority to match his or her position as the dominant head of government, both entitled and required to supervise the activities of individual Cabinet ministers. The Delivery Unit, the Strategy Unit and the Implementation Unit have all been attempts to furnish the Prime Minister with mechanisms to measure departmental progress and encourage or compel departments and ministers to do more or act more quickly.

This is justified by the huge increase in responsibilities, scrutiny and exposure which the premiership has seen over time. In part this is true not just of the premiership but of government in general. Consider this. In 1900, after being confirmed in office with a huge majority at the “Khaki Election” of September/October, the Marquess of Salisbury reconstructed his Cabinet. The resulting body had 19 members, of whom five dealt with foreign affairs and defence, three were more or less ministers without portfolio and two were responsible for Ireland.

One minister, the President of the Local Government Board, was responsible for local authorities and such state provision of healthcare and welfare as existed. Whitehall’s limited responsibility for education, including grants for elementary schools, provision for school inspections and the registration of teachers was exercised by the new Board of Education, which was (until 1902) chaired by the Lord President of the Council. The President of the Board of Trade (a body which never met) was responsible for (among other things) trade and commerce including imports and exports and tariffs, industry, the regulation of railways and merchant shipping, industrial relations and trades unions, patents, copyright and trademarks, fisheries, bankruptcy and insurance. The Home Office, as well as its modern responsibility for law and order, public safety, policing and counter-terrorism, also covered prisons, mental health provision, health and safety, factory inspections, workers’ compensation, registration of births, marriages and deaths, nationality, infant and child care and adoption.

There were eight cabinet ministers responsible for what we would recognise as domestic policy in Great Britain (excluding Ireland). In today’s Cabinet of 22, there are 15. The scope and reach of government is unimaginably greater and more demanding. In 1900, the civil service consisted of around 50,000 people, while today’s figure is 513,000, a tenfold increase.

The Prime Minister’s role and responsibilities have expanded hugely. There are metrics available to us. In 1947, a young Treasury civil servant, William Armstrong (later head of the civil service 1968-74 and Lord Armstrong of Sanderstead), prepared a private note on the functions of the Prime Minister, which was discovered in the National Archives by Peter Hennessy. He drew on it for his 2001 study The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 and it is an invaluable snapshot of the Attlee government.

Armstrong consulted colleagues not only in the civil service but in the Royal Household, and after much consideration he compiled a list of 12 principal functions of the head of government. (I reproduce them from a lecture Hennessy gave at the British Academy in 2014.)

1. Managing the relationship between the Monarch and the government as a whole.

2. Hiring and firing ministers.

3. Chairing the Cabinet and its most important committees.

4. Arranging other ‘cabinet business’, i.e. the chairmanships of other committees, their memberships and agendas.

5. Overall control of the civil service as First Lord of the Treasury.

6. The allocation of functions between departments, their creation and abolition.

7. Relationships with other heads of government.

8. An especially close involvement in foreign policy and defence matters.

9. Top civil service appointments.

10. Top appointments to many institutions of ‘a national character’.

11. Certain scholastic and ecclesiastical appointments.

12. The handling of ‘precedent and procedure’.

It is immediately apparent that a lot of these functions verge on formalities, such as scholastic and ecclesiastical appointments and the handling of ‘precedent and procedure’. The core of the job in a mainstream political sense is encapsulated in points 2, 3, 4, 7 and 8, essentially chairing Cabinet and its committees, and supervising foreign affairs and defence particularly closely. The role is analogous to an executive chairman, perhaps, with extensive powers many of which are used only rarely, and very little sense of day-to-day management of departmental policy, no “driving delivery”.

Hennessy related in his lecture that in 1995 he attempted the same task as Armstrong had faced in 1947, and found 33 functions to add to Armstrong’s dozen. Then in 2011, working with Andrew Blick, he repeated the exercise and produced a list totalling 47. One addition entirely absent from Attlee’s list, he notes is counter-terrorism; in 1995 that meant principally violence relating to Northern Ireland, whereas today the most significant threat is from Islamic extremists. Another factor is the growth of overseas travel. It is easy to forget that when Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich in September 1938 to negotiate directly with Adolf Hitler over the crisis between Germany and Czechoslovakia, it caught the public’s imagination partly because it was such an unusual thing to do. Politicians and diplomats still habitually travelled to international engagements by train or boat. Chamberlain was nearing 70 at that point, and, save for a short flight at an industrial fair years before, he had never flown.

Contrast that with the current Prime Minister. Sir Keir Starmer has been in office for five months, and is already on his 15th overseas visit: Washington DC, Berlin, Paris, Berlin and Paris, Dublin, Washington DC, Rome, New York, Brussels, Berlin, Samoa, Budapest, Paris and Baku, Rio de Janeiro and now Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. It is a schedule which Chamberlain could not begin to compute.

The UK’s membership of the European Economic Community then the European Union from 1973 to 2020 also introduced another layer of prime ministerial activity. The Common Market came with its own schedule of regular meetings between heads of government, added a new source of legislation, regulations and directives, and, for Conservative Prime Ministers, inserted an eventually toxic theme of debate and disagreement into the regular political agenda. From around the time of Margaret Thatcher’s speech to the College of Europe in Bruges in September 1988, Britain’s involvement in the European Community/Union would always be somewhere on the agenda of internal discussion. Labour Prime Ministers were not subject to the same wrangling within their own ranks, as the strength of Labour MPs opposed to the EEC dwindled towards the end of the 1980s, but Blair and Brown still had to devote a substantial amount of their time and attention to European affairs. This included especially the birth and growth of the single currency after 1999, of which Blair was generally if weakly in favour while Brown was opposed, and the Treaties of Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2007) as well as the abortive European constitution in 2005.

The other factor which has transformed the premiership is the media. In 1947, when Armstrong compiled his list of functions, a ticker-tape machine had only just been installed in Downing Street for rapid receipt of the news, and Attlee reputedly only used it to find out the cricket scores. He did appoint an Adviser on Public Relations, former editor of The Daily Herald Francis Williams, whose role was a forerunner of the Downing Street Press Secretary and, eventually, elevated titles like Director of Communications. However, the post was regarded as an irregular one, and when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister for the second time in October 1951, he did not immediately appoint anyone to fill it.

In reactive terms, and absent the feedback loop of modern politics whereby a leader responds to a media story, his response becomes a story and that story is the next episode for him to deal with, Prime Ministers in the 1940s and 1950s had more time and events moved at a slower pace. They may not have been any less serious or complex; after all, the 1950s saw Britain fight the Korean War, develop its own nuclear weapons, experience the Prime Minister incapacitated for much of the summer and autumn of 1953 by a severe stroke, decolonise large parts of the Empire despite substantial insurgencies in Malaya and Kenya, engage in and lose military action in Egypt over the Suez Canal and react to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. But there was not the same pressure for instant response to which the Prime Minister is subject today.

Every development in the media has increased the pressure on the Prime Minster: the launch of commercial television in 1955, the introduction of live sound broadcasting of Parliament in 1978 and the televising of the House of Lords in 1985 and the House of Commons in 1989, the spread of satellite television after 1990, the development of rolling news and a culture of 24-hour coverage and the advent of social media. The head of government has to dedicate a great deal of time and energy to the presentation of government policy, responding to media inquiries, giving interviews, dealing with crises and remaining actively engaged in the whole ecosystem of the media. Some allow themselves to exhibit too much sensitivity to criticism, as notably John Major did in the 1990s. And some of the burden is self-imposed: Prime Ministers feel obliged to express an opinion on almost any subject on the news agenda, however trivial or outside the responsibility of government. This trend was only encouraged when in 1998 Tony Blair, always with an eye for a populist headline, involved himself in an entirely fictional miscarriage of justice in Coronation Street.

Alternative therapy for the premiership

The theory I want to propose, and which I will try to map out at a later stage, is a relatively straightforward one. It is accepted that the Prime Minister has too many responsibilities for the institutional powers and systems available to him. Instead of exploring ways to strengthen the machinery to fit his responsibilities, what if we focused instead on reducing the burden on the Prime Minister and spreading it across other parts of the top of government as well as identifying areas in which responsibility could be devolved to a lower level?

This does not rule out institutional reform in addition, but it would make it a second-order problem. When Kemi Badenoch formally launched her leadership campaign in September this year, she identified as one of her key principles personal responsibility and reducing the intrusion of the state: “Government should do fewer things but better. And what it does, it should do with brilliance.” That instinctively appeals to me, which is another subject, but I think it is a principle which we could look to apply to the premiership.

This would be the prospectus: the Prime Minister should focus on strategy and vision, as well as whole-nation issues which draw on policy responsibilities across government or are of the highest importance and priority. This would include the highest level of bilateral and multilateral relations, the foundations of major international agreements, national security including the independent nuclear deterrent, relations between government and the monarchy, and the overall direction of foreign and domestic policy. It would also, of course, include chairing Cabinet meetings and those of some committees, and having overall responsibility for machinery of government and the civil service.

Stripping the Prime Minister’s agenda back to principles and strategy would require a reversal of the accumulation of power at the centre and its devolution back to individual government departments. This is not a disadvantage but a positive benefit: giving Cabinet ministers more control by imposing less from the centre would apply the generally sensible principle of subsidiarity, enhance the credibility and status of secretaries of state as autonomous and influential actors, and would ideally be combined with devolution within departments so that junior ministers felt more empowered in their own policy areas, again with individual secretaries of state assuming a role of strategic oversight and coordination.

To make this feasible, it would be necessary to restore Cabinet to its status as a proper, functioning forum of discussion and debate. Dominic Cummings, Chief Adviser to Boris Johnson in Downing Street in 2019-20, is a controversial figure but his detailed, indeed exhaustive critique of the machinery of government in his evidence to the public inquiry into Whitehall’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is worth reading and absorbing, and often rings horribly true. He was dismissive of Cabinet as a constitutional feature.

Cabinet was largely irrelevant to policy or execution in 2020. The combination of its size, the PM’s inability to chair it, and its constant leaks meant it was seen by everyone in No10 as not a place for serious discussion. Its main function was political and as part of the ‘government theatre’ of Westminster, whereby the media and MPs treat the Cabinet as central but those working in No10 see it as another problem to manage while real discussions happen elsewhere… If I think of critical moments… I don’t think of the Cabinet or Cabinet committees.

I have argued before that Cabinet is too large for meaningful, in-depth discussion. When I speculated before the election on how Sir Keir Starmer might run his government, I set out the explosion in the size of Cabinet and the growing (and harmful) award of the dubious status of “also attending” Cabinet meetings. Here is not the place to rehearse the arguments, but it is worth pointing to the number of ministers attending Cabinet meetings, both full members and those “also attending”:

1992: 22

1997: 25 (23+2)

2007: 27 (22+5)

2010: 28 (23+5)

2015: 30 (22+8)

2016: 27 (22+5)

2019: 34 (24+10)

2022: 31 (22+9)

2024: 27 (22+5)

The heavy reliance on ministers “also attending” has lifted the constraints on Prime Ministers imposed by the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975 and allowed them to use places at the Cabinet table like passes to a VIP lounge, for political and patronage purposes. If that diminishes the role and authority of Cabinet as a forum for discussion, that is not a development likely to dismay many Prime Ministers. Cummings wrote in his inquiry evidence “I advised the PM that if he wanted Cabinet to become serious again he would have to cut its size radically”, but it will surprise few people that this was not an option to which Boris Johnson was particularly attracted.

Edward Heath, who spent much of his first period as Leader of the Opposition (1965-70) thinking about government in managerial and institutional terms, did make some headway in this regard. The Conservative Party’s manifesto for the 1970 general election observed that “there has been too much government: there will be less. We will reduce the number of Ministers.” Heath started at the top, and appointed a Cabinet of 18, replacing that of Harold Wilson which had numbered 22. He believed strongly in the professionalism of governance and saw the Cabinet as a board of directors, and with 18 members it was just about possible to have proper policy and strategy discussions (though this did not mean that the Heath government often did so). But that seems to me at the upper end of the scale.

So the aim would be to create a Cabinet of about 18, whether by merging departments or being more selective about who was given membership, which, as a body and in its committees, under the chairing and guidance of the Prime Minister, would support the policy development and allow its coordination and delivery. In practical terms, accepting the status quo and creating mechanisms to “drive” and “benchmark” progress from Downing Street seems to me a defeatist exercise in buying a dog and barking yourself, in constitutional terms it strikes a blow at the idea of the Prime Minister as primus inter pares and in managerial terms it is disheartening and demotivating for Cabinet ministers to feel that Downing Street is always looking over their shoulder and marking their work.

I am aware that one response to this will be a wearily cynical “Yes, but that’s not how it works in practice”, and indeed it isn’t. It could be. It does, I freely concede, depend on highly competent, dedicated, collegiate ministers cooperating with a Prime Minister who does not always seek to micromanage or obsessively seek control, and it is certainly true that many politicians, especially recently, have fallen short of those qualities. But if you design a system around the very worst possible outcomes and characteristics of its operators, it is a sad game which diminishes all those who participate. Of course our politicians could and should be better, but the answer is surely to find ways to improve the input, rather than designing the machine for the existing low-grade. If we can get better people in, they will do a better and more efficient job.

Of course this direction of travel, rather than the creation of support mechanisms for an already-powerful head of government, would be vulnerable to the behaviour of individuals. It would not be easy; but it is possible for a Prime Minister to say, for example, to a question about a news item over which he or she has no control, “I’m afraid that’s not a matter for government, so I don’t intend to comment”. The pioneer of this attitude would find the going hard, no doubt, but little by little would ease the way for subsequent premiers.

Conclusion (for now)

This is about finding a way for the Prime Minister to cut through the noise of daily life. Rather than passively watching the development of a role which consumes and can destroy its occupants through its crushing weight and breadth of responsibilities, we should try to concentrate on the functions that the Prime Minister must carry out, those he should carry out and those which is most suited to carry out. Everything else can be cleared away and reallocated.

That is the fundamental principle. Do less, but do it well. Continuously define and redefine the role of the premier to maintain that focus on essentials. Appoint able colleagues and give them broad responsibility, then coordinate their work and integrate it into an overall strategy and narrative in a forum which is capable of providing that capacity. Instead of growing ever fatter and buying new clothes to fit, the centre of government should try to control its weight and keep it at a healthier level, making it more energetic and agile. I will come back to this, and set out more clearly and specifically how the task might be achieved. But I think it’s an important counter-narrative to the management of rampant expansion and overreach. No-one seriously argues our government currently works well, so we should at least consider more radical ways to make it better.

1. With a two exceptions: William Pitt the Elder, the Earl of Chatham, was Lord Privy Seal 1766-68, and the Marquess of Salisbury was Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Lords 1885-86, 1887-92 and 1895-1900 then Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords 1900-02.