Joining the dots: coordinating national security for the 21st century state
The concept of national security grows ever wider, so how does Whitehall make sure policy is joined-up?
The concept of “national security” is not a new one. The phrase was probably coined by Walter Lippmann, a writer and journalist who became an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted him in drafting his famous Fourteen Points: in 1943, Lippmann wrote a book called US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, a critique of both isolationism and idealistic universalism which urged US foreign policy makers to rediscover the art of realistic power politics. It was a best seller during the Second World War, and it defined national security in the following way: “A nation has security when it does not have to sacrifice its legitimate interests to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by war”.
The phrase caught on in US policy-making, and in July 1947 Congress enacted the National Security Act which carried out a major restructuring of the federal military and security institutions, creating the Department of Defense which absorbed the three cabinet departments for the individual armed services (the UK would not follow suit until 1964). The new arrangements encapsulated the lessons of the world wars in coordinating strategy and executive action, and as well as merging the three service departments it also created the National Security Council as an advisory body to the president and the Central Intelligence Agency as a clearing house for foreign intelligence and analysis.
The term “national security” was not much used in UK parlance until Gordon Brown’s government. Previous comprehensive documents had used phrases like “strategic defence”, “security” or “strategic defence and security”, as well as “intelligence and security” and “intelligence, security and resilience”. It was a well-meaning word salad which tried to be as inclusive as possible, capturing all of the aspects of policy which kept the UK safe without excluding some of the more tangential areas which nonetheless might be involved from time to time.
In March 2008, however, the Cabinet Office published The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom: Security in an interdependent world, the first “national security strategy” by a UK government. The NSS described “a diverse but interconnected set of threats and risks, which affect the United Kingdom directly and also have the potential to undermine wider international stability”, and described the purpose of the document as being:
to set out how we will address and manage this diverse though interconnected set of security challenges and underlying drivers, both immediately and in the longer term, to safeguard the nation, its citizens, our prosperity and our way of life.
This was a useful and necessary effort to widen and coordinate the policy conversation of threats, both human and natural, which the UK faced, drawing the boundary widely and encouraging cooperation across government. Brown was a prime minister with a genuine and earnest interest in the machinery of government, and he was advised by his security minister, Admiral Lord West, a former first sea lord whom he had appointed as one of his half-dozen outsiders given ministerial office in the “government of all the talents” (inevitably thereafter known as GOATs). West had presented an essay to the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1992 entitled 1919–1991: The Need for a United Kingdom Grand Strategy, so he was steeped in the ideas of wide-ranging, comprehensive strategic thinking.
The National Security Strategy was updated in June 2009, entitled Security for the next generation. In addition, to provide a degree of parliamentary oversight and scrutiny, both Houses were asked to help create a joint committee of the National Security Strategy. I was involved in this process in the very early stages so feel a very small bit of ownership, but it is worth saying that it was a relatively cooperative process between Westminster and Whitehall, with only minor boundary skirmishes which seem to have been resolved quickly. The committee consists of 22 members, 10 from the House of Lords and up to 12 from the House of Commons; it includes ex officio the chairs of seven Commons select committees—Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Defence, Foreign Affairs, Home Affairs, International Development, International Trade, and Justice—and will also generally include the chair of the intelligence and security committee.
The next major development in machinery of government came when David Cameron became prime minister of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. As part of the coalition agreement, Cameron fulfilled a Conservative manifesto promise and created the National Security Council, a ministerial committee to oversee security policy and, in the words of the Cabinet Office, to “provide the forum for collective discussion about the Government’s objectives and about how best to deliver them in the current financial climate”. This was an idea which had been developed for some years within the Conservative Party, and had crystallised in a policy paper in December 2006 written by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones. She had worked in the Diplomatic Service for 33 years and in the early 1990s she had been head of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the Cabinet Office and, briefly, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (though critics felt she overplayed this last role, holding it for a little over a month before moving on).
In July 2007, Dame Pauline was appointed a working peer in the House of Lords and appointed to the Conservative front bench as shadow security minister. Although she had experience in the world of intelligence and national security, and in her Foreign Office days had been widely respected and described as possessing “ruthless logic”, she was not at her best as a public-facing policy advocate. She was prickly, having resigned from the Diplomatic Service in 1996 accusing it of sexism after she had been passed over for ambassador to France, and regarded her own experience of her brief much more highly than anyone else’s views. One senior Tory remarked “It is hard to imagine a person less suited to being in the business of diplomacy. She is the least diplomatic person you could ever meet.”
Nonetheless, Neville-Jones’s appointment was sold to the media as significant. In many papers, she was described as a “former spy chief”, which was putting rather a great burden on a few weeks chairing the JIC, an “ex-Whitehall security chief”, which was misleading insofar as it meant anything at all, and, by The Evening Standard, simply a “spy”, which was not true. Appearances are important, however, and Neville-Jones gave weight and credibility to Cameron’s team. In January 2010, a further Conservative policy paper had refined the party’s plans somewhat: it continued to anticipate the appointment of a national security adviser, but made it clear that this post would go to an official, not a political appointee, who would act as head of the National Security Council’s secretariat. Nevertheless, there would be a designated “security minister” who would be a member of the NSC.
The National Security Council as established in May 2010 consisted of the prime minister in the chair, and seven other permanent members:
Deputy Prime Minister (Nick Clegg)
Chancellor of the Exchequer (George Osborne)
Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary (William Hague)
Home Secretary (Theresa May)
Defence Secretary (Liam Fox)
International Development Secretary (Andrew Mitchell)
Security Minister (Baroness Neville-Jones)
In addition to the permanent eight, other cabinet ministers were invited as necessary, the example cited by the Cabinet Office being the energy and climate change secretary (Ed Davey), perhaps reflecting the fashionable realisation that future threats to national security might well include natural threats like flooding, drought and famine as well as food supply. It was also noted that the chief of the defence staff, the heads of the intelligence agencies and other senior officials would attend when required.
With the decision that the national security adviser should be a civil servant, Neville-Jones had been diverted from that post, for which she had been slated, to minister of state for security and counter-terrorism. This was not so much a new role as a reconfigured one: it was based within the Home Office, and was most obviously a successor position to that held by Lord West of Spithead under Gordon Brown (although the admiral had only been an under-secretary of state). West had also had an additional role after 2009, which was as chair of the National Security Forum, a body within Downing Street designed to provide independent advice to the prime minister. When the NSF first met, a Home Office spokesman made clear—with a degree of asperity?—that West was not chairing the group because he was security minister but in his “separate capacity as someone with a close interest in security matters”.
The origins of this ministerial portfolio were older still. In May 2002, with the implications of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington still being assessed, Beverley Hughes (Lab, Stretford and Urmstom), a junior Home Office minister, had been promoted to minister of state and given responsibility for two separate policy areas, immigration and citizenship, and counter-terrorism. For matters falling under the latter, the permanent secretary, Sir John Gieve, reported directly to her. That counter-terrorism and security brief had then passed through the hands of four more ministers of state, in combination with other responsibilities, until it was given to West as a dedicated role.
With Neville-Jones becoming security minister, there remained the appointment of a national security adviser to act as the prime minister’s source of counsel on relevant matters and secretary of the NSC. The choice fell on the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Peter Ricketts, who was seconded to the role on a level transfer. In part, Ricketts was chosen because it was decided to appoint a serving permanent secretary in order to speed up the establishment of the NSC. He also assumed from the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, the position of principal accounting officer for the security and intelligence agencies.
Ricketts was not without experience in national security. He had chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee and served simultaneously as security and intelligence coordinator in the Cabinet Office immediately before 9/11; in this way he had, briefly, had a foretaste of the NSA’s role in taking on many of the Cabinet Office’s responsibilities in national security. He then spent two years as political director of the FCO, the effective deputy permanent secretary and top policy advisory role. However, more weight seems to have been given in choosing him to his status as a senior Whitehall warrior; he had run the Foreign Office for four years, and also had overseas experience in Brussels, Washington and Paris.
The creation of the NSC and the NSA was an attempt to streamline and systematise the provision of advice to the prime minister on national security and coordinate policy oversight towards the various government institutions. This reflected several impulses. One was a managerial instinct on the part of David Cameron and the Conservative opposition before 2010 to be thoroughly prepared for the business of government after 13 years of Labour rule and to bring a kind of brisk efficiency to running the country. This was perhaps most obviously demonstrated by the style and priorities of Francis Maude, appointed Cabinet Office minister in 2010 and drawing on private sector experience and management and organisational techniques to reshape and renew the centre of government. (Ironically, in this respect if in no other, Cameron resembled more than any of his predecessors Edward Heath, for whom proven competence and efficient management were watchwords in the late 1960s.)
Another, more negative, motivation was the perception that national security policy had been shaped in an unacceptably informal and secretive way under Tony Blair in particular. After the Labour victory of 1997, there was a conscious decision to move away from the stuffy, bureaucratic systems which typified Whitehall, with committees and submissions and leisurely consideration, to a more relaxed and informal approach to decision-making. As a vignette, it captured much of the spirit of New Labour, as well as allowing the prime minister to choose his interlocutors carefully, sometimes bypassing the official channels of communication. Meetings were not always minuted, papers not always fully circulated, decisions not always noted. While it may have suited Tony Blair, it proved a fragile framework when placed under strain.
This had come under particular criticism in July 2004 when Lord Butler of Brockwell, formerly cabinet secretary under Thatcher, Major and Blair, had produced his Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Among the more specific conclusions on WMDs and the role of intelligence, a more general thread ran through the review which was exactly the sort of laxity in procedure discussed above, which Butler memorably christened “sofa government”. The phrase stuck because it was such a good visual metaphor. And it was partly to address this issue that Cameron and Neville-Jones reshaped the national security apparatus within the Cabinet Office.
The creation of the NSC implied that the organisational and policy structures which it replaced had been inefficient, disorganised and complicated. There was some truth in this. If you look at the various roles and structures which existed over the two decades which encompassed Thatcher, Major , Blair and Brown, it becomes an intricate and exhausting wiring diagram, with responsibilities moved around, posts and committees renamed, ministers brought in or frozen out and a regular appearance of new ideas for how to do it all better. But if we examine the structure which existed immediately prior to 2010, it begins to look more like the NSC was a creation of evolution rather than revolution.
In July 2007, Gordon Brown established a Ministerial Committee on National Security, International Relations and Development (NSID), chaired by him. This produced a number of sub-committees—nine by the end of his tenure—of which Brown himself chaired five. In addition, the prime minister was supported across the national security field by three secretariats within the Cabinet Office, Europe and Global Issues, Foreign and Defence, and Intelligence and Security. The head of the second of these was also styled as foreign policy adviser to the prime minister, while the third was security adviser and head of security, intelligence and resilience. All were SCS3 grade (second permanent secretary/director-general).
It is easy, therefore, to see Cameron’s NSC and supporting secretariat as a kind of tidied-up version of the Brown-era structure. But Lord Hennessy, the doyen of Whitehall watchers, pointed to the enormous remit of Browns’s NSID, especially the emphasis on his special interest of international development, which meant that much of the work was pushed down to the sub-committees. Lord O’Donnell told the Iraq Inquiry that the difference was in approach and practice: “the National Security Council is chaired by the Prime Minister and meets every week and looks at Afghanistan, for example, every fortnight”. The importance, then, was in regularity of meeting and the focus of the prime minister’s attention and time.
In July 2021, the NSA, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, completed an internal review of national security systems and processes. He sought to introduce a “new operating model that is optimised for agility and integration”, strengthening ministerial oversight, creating consistency of policy and promoting effective delivery and implementation of policy. This review concluded that the NSC would meet at least once a month with the prime minister in the chair, but also created a National Security Ministers sub-committee (NSM) which would handle issues delegated by the prime minister. The NSM would have a rotating chair: the home secretary (on homeland security), the foreign secretary (on foreign policy), the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster (on resilience), the chancellor of the exchequer (on economic security), or the minister of state at the Cabinet Office on “Europe or trade related issues”. Approval of the agenda for both the NSC and NSM would remain with the prime minister, and both would receive support as usual from the National Security Secretariat.
In December, the chair of the joint committee on the National Security Strategy, Dame Margaret Beckett, wrote to the prime minister urging him to focus more attention on matters of national security. She said that the committee was “profoundly concerned about what appears to be a more relaxed approach to national security”, and pointed out that his attendance at NSC meetings had dropped by two-thirds, while the number of meetings itself had fallen by 30 per cent. To make good this situation, she asked that he chair meetings of the NSC every two weeks (as had been the practice when it was created), and “reinvigorate the NSC as the principal ministerial body for managing and assessing risks to the UK’s national security, by prioritising it as an agenda item”.
The post of national security adviser reflects the same momentum. As an Institute for Government report pointed out, before 2010 there had been between four and six official positions at the centre of government (“Intelligence Coordinator, Cabinet Secretary, JIC Chairman, Head of OD Secretariat, Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy Adviser and Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff”) but the appointment of the national security adviser had stripped the national security elements from each of these and fused them into the portfolio of a single official.
In its early months, the National Security Secretariat, headed by the NSA, had six directorates, numbering about 200 personnel in total: Foreign and Defence Policy; Strategy and Counter-Terrorism; Security and Intelligence; Office of Cyber Security; Civil Contingencies Secretariat; and a temporary team working on the Strategic Defence and Security Review. To support the NSA, there were two deputy national security advisers: Julian Miller (foreign and defence policy) and Olly Robbins (intelligence, security and resilience).
In the 12 years since the NSC was established, there have been six national security advisers, the incumbent, Sir Tim Barrow, taking office in September. Prima facie, trhat suggests an unhelpful and undesirably high turnover, though Ricketts was in post for only around 18 months (before becoming ambassador to France) and had only intended to serve for an interim period while the post was set up.
Sir Kim Darroch, the second NSA, has also (so far) been the longest-serving, at nearly three-and-a-half years. He was a mainstream diplomat with no real experience in national security, having served as head of the European Secretariat in the Cabinet Office and then UK permanent representative to the EU before succeeding Ricketts. He had a heavy burden of issues in his tenure, including the growth of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Russia’s incursions into Ukraine, the collapse of the government in Libya and the nuclear threat from Iran. But Darroch had inherited a system which had been made robust and well organised; while some felt that a weekly meeting of an hour or so was enough only to touch on the very broadest issues of national security, there is much that is valuable in that regularity too.
In September 2015, not long after the coalition government was replaced by a purely Conservative administration, Darroch went to Washington as ambassador to the US and the new national security adviser was Sir Mark Lyall Grant. He was much more of an Establishment figure than Darroch, having attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, before being called to the Bar and then, at 24, joining the Diplomatic Service. Like Darroch, however, he was a distinctly Foreign Office figure rather than one steeped in the more hard-edged or covert aspects of national security, and had been UK permanent representative to the United Nations for nearly six years before being appointed national security adviser. He was a key figure in briefing the opposition in December 2015 on the possibility of UK airstrikes against IS in Syria, helping to secure the consent of the House of Commons for military action.
Lyall Grant did not last long. He resigned in April 2017, allegedly as a result of a deteriorating relationship with the new prime minister, Theresa May, to whom, according to Whitehall sources, he “mansplained” and over whom he talked. His replacement was of a different stamp, the permanent secretary with whom she had worked at the Home Office, Sir Mark Sedwill. He was the first NSA to have managed a major domestic department, and his four-year tenure at the Home Office gave him a solid grounding in issues of counter-terrorism and domestic security. By background, he was one of that type which had emerged since 9/11, the securocrat: he had begun as a diplomat, working in the foreign secretary’s private office before the Iraq War and serving as deputy high commissioner to Pakistan, before moving to the UK Border Agency, under the aegis of the Home Office. In 2009, he had become ambassador to Afghanistan, taking on the additional role of NATO senior civilian representative in the country.
Sedwill’s CV was, therefore, almost perfect for advising on national security, as it encompassed domestic counter-terrorism, border security, overseas representation, conflict management and foreign policy. At 52, he was in the prime of his career, and the prime minister whom he was to advise had been his boss for three years in his last post, so there was already an established working relationship. One of his major priorities was linking strategy and implementation of security policy to capability, in order to achieve a hyper-realistic “fusion” of different strands of government work; this became known in the subsequent 2018 National Security Capability Review as the Fusion Doctrine. Sedwill was seen as a robust individual, approachable but forensic, who, it was suggested, sometimes parodied his securocrat background. One Whitehall source commented “He does this thing where he’s like this American big swinging dick security guy. He’s got a real swagger.”
In June 2018, the civil service was hit by an enormous blow. The cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, brilliant, meticulous, imaginative, capable, took leave of absence to be treated for lung cancer. He was dead by November. In his place, initially temporarily, then substantively, Theresa May appointed Sedwill, “her first and only choice”, according to rumours. However, he retained the post of national security adviser, as a reflection of May’s tight circle of trust and preference to work with people very familiar to her. The decision to double-hat Sedwill was controversial, centred on the obvious criticism that both cabinet secretary and national security adviser were full-time jobs. Initially, the arrangement was tolerated as an interim one, since Heywood’s illness had been unexpected, and there was a persistent suspicion that the national security adviser role was being kept warm for Olly Robbins, formerly deputy NSA and at that point chief negotiator for leaving the European Union.
When in October Sedwill was confirmed in both jobs, however, and then when the posts were formally combined the following year, any understanding was set aside. Lord Ricketts, the first holder of the post, was withering: “We need more not less capacity for strategic thinking in the years ahead.” Although Sedwill defended his dual role as an extension of the fusion doctrine, as so many important issues stretched across both of his positions, some pointed to his lack of experience in economic and domestic affairs, leaving him underpowered as cabinet secretary and head of the Home Civil Service.
In June 2020, with Sedwill having passed the three-year mark as NSA, the new prime minister Boris Johnson announced that Sedwill would retire in September. It was not utterly unreasonable that Johnson should want to begin building a new Downing Street team, but his initial instincts caused considerable concern when it was announced that the new national security adviser—the role being disaggregated to general relief—would be Lord Frost, a former diplomat who had been Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator then head of Task Force Europe. In addition to being nominated for NSA, he was also awarded a life peerage, and it was clear that his appointment was to be a political rather than an official one, as Cameron’s original 2006 plan had intended.
Frost’s nomination drew widespread criticism for two reasons. The first was that it was an example of politicising the civil service, by giving a partisan figure and a parliamentarian a senior role which had been held by a neutral, apolitical civil servant. For strict Sir Humphreys, this was a very worrying development, but there was at least an arguable case for it. For example, it has become accepted since 1997 that the Downing Street chief of staff is a political appointment, a special adviser who can give instructions to civil servants, and by analogy it would not, it seems to be, be outrageous to have the prime minister’s principal adviser on national security appointed on the same basis. (I will look in more detail at whether the NSA could or should be a political appointment in a forthcoming essay.)
The second, ad hominem but in some ways more serious criticism was that Frost was simply not up to the job. He had indeed been a diplomat, but had left the Foreign Office in 2013 after 16 years having been ambassador to Denmark, a fairly junior head of mission role, and a director-level civil servant at the FCO and at BIS. He had no specific national security experience, most of his time having been spent dealing with trade policy, and after the Foreign Office he had been CEO of the Scotch Whisky Association and then the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Theresa May asked in the House of Commons “Why is the new national security adviser a political appointee with no proven expertise in national security?”
There was a great deal of vagueness and evasion from the government. The Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, had responded to May that Frost would be neither a civil servant nor a special adviser but an “envoy”, and, no fool, must have realised he was overegging the pudding when he continued “David Frost is a distinguished diplomat in his own right and it is entirely appropriate that the prime minister of the day should choose an adviser appropriate to the needs of the hour.” May shook her head vigorously.
The appointment did not come to pass. The deputy NSA, David Quarrey, acted ad interim until March 2021, and Frost’s nomination was quietly forgotten. Instead, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Defence, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, was appointed to the role. This seemed to calm the mood in Whitehall. Lovegrove had run the MoD for five years, and had headed the Department for Energy and Climate Change before that, though he was not in fact a career civil servant: he had previously worked in the private sector at Deutsche Bank before being recruited to run the Shareholder Executive which manages the government’s interest in state-owned businesses.
Lovegrove handled the beginning of the Ukraine crisis capably, and was instrumental in persuading Boris Johnson to supply the Ukrainian armed forces with NLAW anti-tank weapons which have played such a major part in their resistance against the invading Russian army. In July 2022, he gave a frank but well received speech in Washington DC in which he warned that the international security situation was deteriorating and bringing greater uncertainty and instability. He pointed to the heightened risk of the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and argued that the world was less safe than during the Cold War.
When Liz Truss became prime minister in September 2022, she surprised the civil service establishment by dismissing the Treasury permanent secretary, Sir Tom Scholar, then, a few days later, she announced that Lovegrove would become her defence industrial adviser, a new position, while Sir Tim Barrow would succeed him as national security adviser. Barrow, like Darroch and Lyall Grant, is a career diplomat who had been second permanent secretary and political director of the FCO after being the UK’s permanent representative then ambassador to the EU and a key player in the Brexit negotiation team. Before that he had been ambassador to Ukraine and then to Russia, so he is familiar with the politics and dynamics of eastern Europe, and is a Russian speaker. He had, however, no specific background in national security.
The current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has given no indication that he wishes to replace Barrow, so it is to be hoped that the NSA will stay in place to provide steadiness and continuity. Another change which Truss made was to reshape the National Security Council as a more general foreign policy and security council as a dramatic pruning of cabinet committees, but the change did not outlast her very short premiership, and Sunak has restored the NSC. Let us hope that the revitalised structures are allowed to bed in again and become functional.
As an organisational innovation in 2010, the National Security Council was broadly welcomed. It systematised the meeting of the prime minister with his senior ministers and officials to consider national security, and created an important new post, national security adviser, and a consolidated staff, the National Security Secretariat. This tidied up some loose ends of the Brown era, gave the issue greater focus, and worked to mitigate the informalities of the Blair régime. However, after a good start under David Cameron, by 2015 it started to meet less frequently, dropping to only three meetings a year. This put great restrictions on how effective it could be and it began to look like a talking shop. Johnson promised that it would meet once a month, but that commitment was not met faithfully.
The Covid-19 pandemic raised previously untested questions about the nexus of national security and crisis management. The virus presented a very clear and very substantial threat to the UK’s security in several ways, but it could not be treated as a traditional opponent, nor were the usual resilience and crisis management structures like the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (COBR), designed as a short-term emergency response body, adequate or appropriate. The Cabinet Office told the joint committee on the NSS that the NSC or some other ministerial body would decide policy while COBR would oversee the immediate operational response, but, in the event of a prolonged emergency like the pandemic, there as an obvious lacuna between the two. Michael Gove, as Cabinet Office minister responsible for these structures, told the committee that “we had to adapt operationally as time went on in order to deal with the range of challenges that we faced”.
There is still a gap in capability which the pandemic exposed. A major outbreak of disease is clearly not the kind of traditional threat with which the NSC and its members are used to dealing, but one of the purposes of creating the council was to allow government policy to range across all areas and be prepared for threats of any kind. Yet Gove was very vague on whether that kind of emergency needed to be an NSC matter. Equally, it is easy to see the division between policy and implementation exemplified by the NSC and COBR, but the lesson of the pandemic is that that was too wide and the link between them was often too fragile. One of the terms of reference of the official Covid-19 Inquiry chaired by Baroness Hallett is to “highlight where lessons identified from preparedness and the response to the pandemic may be applicable to other civil emergencies”; it may be hoped, then, that this broad heading captures an analysis of how the national security machinery responded and what could have been done better.
The national security adviser has contributed some rigour and expertise to policy discussions in Downing Street. However, the incumbent must be experienced, either in national security directly or at a senior level in the civil service more generally. (This is assuming a decision is taken to maintain the post as an official one rather than a political appointment; as I say, I will return to this question in another essay.) Ricketts was an ideal debutant adviser and very quickly reshaped the Cabinet Office structure into a large (by historical standards), coherent and functioning apparatus to support the NSC, using his long experience, including running the Diplomatic Service, and his personal standing in Whitehall. Equally, Darroch dealt with a number of very serious issues in his time as adviser with deftness and skill, reflecting his long experience at home and abroad with the Diplomatic Service. In future, however, it would surely be wise to have a national security adviser who has spent at least some of his or her career dealing directly and specifically with national security matters.
Sedwill might have been the ideal choice, with his securocrat background, experience at the Home Office and close relationship with the prime minister. But he was fatally sidetracked a year into his tenure by being given the additional (and arguably senior) positions of cabinet secretary and head of the Home Civil Service. When it became clear this was not on a temporary basis, it should have become equally clear that it was a terrible mistake and an impossible burden for a single civil servant, however gifted, to carry in the long term. That was a direct failure by Theresa May in an attempt to keep the levers of power within the hands of a small circle of trusted officials.
Now, as Rishi Sunak settles into the job of prime minister, we have to wait and see how he conducts himself with regard to national security policy. It was encouraging that he immediately undid Truss’s unwise dilution of the NSC and restored it to more or less its factory settings; he had not attempted to remove Sir Tim Barrow as NSA either, so obviously intends to work with the situation he finds. Barrow is a senior and accomplished diplomat, and his service in Moscow and Kyiv will be valuable as the war in Ukraine continues to figure so largely in our foreign policy. Nevertheless, like Darroch, he has no specific national security experience, which is unfortunate.
I think I’ve said enough for now, and have hopefully illustrated how the government tries to pull together national security strategy at the centre. I will prepare some thoughts soon on whether the NSA should or must be an official, whether a political appointment would be unwise or disorderly, and what sort of abilities and experience the ideal candidate will have. But I realise my phraseology is taking on that stern, pompous, head-shaking disappointed-not-angry tone which so many select committee reports use for their recommendations, which indicates better than anything that it is time to stop, and live to blog another day.