McSweeney's brave new world: Downing Street 2.0
The new chief of staff promises a reset and better grip on the machinery of government but the jury remains out on whether and how this will happen
Sue Gray has left the building. Sir Keir Starmer’s 94-day chief of staff has now, in a supreme stroke of irony, returned to the Cabinet Office where she was director general, propriety and ethics (2012-18) then second permanent secretary (2021-23), supervising the Union and Constitution Directorate. She is now the prime minister’s envoy for nations and regions: “nations” in this context means Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, while “regions” means England outside the capital, but particularly those areas with elected mayors. The details of her new position are unclear, as is—yes, I’m going to say it—her salary, but I have yet to encounter anyone with enough chutzpah to suggest this was a planned, welcome or desirable move.
Replacing her as Downing Street chief of staff is Morgan McSweeney, previously head of political strategy. He was Starmer’s first chief of staff in opposition, serving from April 2020 to June 2021, when he was moved to a “strategic role” after the Chesham and Amersham by-election in which the Labour candidate won 1.6 per cent of the vote, allegedly the party’s worst performance ever. In September 2021, he became Labour’s director of campaigns, and is regarded as having been a key influence on Starmer and an architect of the general election triumph. Now, the former hurling star from County Cork occupies the job which perhaps he should always have had, as the prime minister’s closest personal aide.
While the degree of emphasis may vary, there is a widespread consensus that something within the Downing Street machine is not working. I wrote in City A.M. recently that the brouhaha then surrounding Gray was indicative of poor media management at the centre, and in The Spectator I questioned what value Gray was bringing to the operation if it was falling down in her areas of expertise, administration and ethics. Juliet Samuel argued in The Times that Whitehall as a whole is dysfunctional, a view shared by my former colleague Dr Hannah White, now director of the Institute for Government, in The New Statesman. (Earlier this year, the IfG published a weighty report, Power without purpose, which deals extensively with the institutional landscape of the centre of government.)
McSweeney supposedly represents a “reset”, that obsession of the current government. His appointment was accompanied by several changes of personnel: joining him as deputy chiefs of staff are Jill Cuthbertson, previously director of government relations, and Vidhya Alakeson, the prime minister’s political director; Ninjeri Pandit, a civil servant, moves from the Number 10 Policy Unit to become Starmer’s principal private secretary; and former Sunday Times and Daily Mirror journalist James Lyons takes a new role as director of strategic communications, serving under, please note, the Downing Street director of communications Matthew Doyle.
The government has been working hard to present this new régime as a fresh start, though needing a fresh start after less than 100 days in office is somewhat embarrassing. Nevertheless, in politics, if not perhaps in all aspects of life, you should pay attention to what people say as well as what they do, so I thought it was worth looking at the image the McSweeney machine is now seeking to present, not least as a useful metric against which it can be measured in six months or a year. Unnamed sources had obviously been keen to share their thoughts with The Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar, so that is a good place to start. You will, I hope, forgive me if I go through the article in some close detail—is “fisking” still a thing, or has it gone the way of the dodo and Bobby Davro?—because the words and phrases briefed by these Downing Street sources will have been chosen with care.
First we are told that McSweeney is preparing to make “radical changes” to the Downing Street machine, and that “nothing is off the table”. It is not a bad rule of thumb that those who talk most adamantly about radicalism can be the most timid of fiddlers in the margins, a possibility supported when Crerar goes on to say:
This could include recasting different teams inside No 10, resolving the pay dispute with special advisers and further bolstering the political side of the operation with more appointments.
I would argue that resolving a pay dispute with special advisers is not so much radical and absolutely necessary and pressing while additional political appointments would hardly shake the foundations of the British state. If the limit of McSweeney’s radical urges is in fact “recasting different teams inside No 10”, then we should not expect epochal change in the way the centre of government works.
The creation of the post of chief of staff was in itself relatively radical. With the exception of the more limited role, part-time after 1982, played by Lord Wolfson of Sunningdale from 1979 to 1985, the prime minister’s chief aide in organisational terms had been a civil servant, the principal private secretary, occupants of which job had included heavyweight mandarins like Lord Armstrong of Ilminster (1970-75), Lord Butler of Brockwell (1982-85) and Lord Heywood of Whitehall (1999-2003). Sir Tony Balir, however, came from opposition in 1997 with a chief of staff already in place, former diplomat Jonathan Powell, and established the new Downing Street position for him as a politically appointed special adviser rather than a career civil servant. The chief of staff effectively supplanted the principal private secretary as the head of the prime minister’s office in organisational terms, but was also able to offer policy advice in a way previously done by the cabinet secretary.
Powell had a genuinely radical idea: he disliked the cramped and “extremely ill-suited” confines of 10 Downing Street and wanted to move the Prime Minister’s Office to more spacious accommodation at the nearby Queen Elizabeth II Centre on Broad Sanctuary. Undoubtedly it would have changed the atmosphere in which the prime minister worked, not least because the head of government would no longer have been living “above the shop” in one of the flats in Downing Street. In a similar vein, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser who performed some of the chief of staff functions, moved many of the prime minister’s staff into open-plan accommodation in Room 38 of the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall, which was dubbed “Mission Control”.
Pseudo-radicalism is not all that McSweeney is promising. Crerar was also briefing that the new chief of staff will “take a more data-led approach to decision-making”. This is the sort of sentiment which people often express when first appointed to a new role, and it is, of course, in the abstract quite meaningless. What data? How will it lead? What decisions? There is also the implied criticism, intentional or not, that a predecessor has been guided by something other than data, which, in the case of Sue Gray, seems peculiar. Given that she was a civil servant for more than 40 years, professionally non-partisan, had never held a party political job until she joined the Leader of the Opposition’s Office and was not even a member of the Labour Party until last year, it seems unlikely that she oversaw a régime of unthinking ideological judgements.
One scenario which is unlikely, the message seems to be from Downing Street, is an imminent ministerial reshuffle. One “friend” of McSweeney’s told The Times that “Morgan will want a reshuffle after the budget, or certainly by Christmas”. Setting aside the disastrous optics of declaring what the prime minister’s chief of staff will “want”, Downing Street is now indicating that there will be no early changes among ministers, and that McSweeney wants to “see what works first”. This is sensible, if basic politics: to move ministers after less than six months in post, without a compelling reason to do so, would be a hugely damaging move in terms of image, as it would suggest either that they had failed and failed so badly that it was obvious in a short space of time, or that the prime minister had been wrong to appoint them (or both).
It may be that there will be a reshuffle within a year of the general election: although Starmer is said to dislike excessive change in personnel, any leader moving from opposition to government will have been obliged to give jobs to some colleagues for political reasons, and some shadow ministers will not make a successful transition to real power. Sir Tony Blair carried out an extensive cabinet reshuffle in July 1998, 15 months after coming to power, while Margaret Thatcher made some changes in January 1981, 20 months into her premiership, and then a wider reconstruction in September 1981. By contrast, David Cameron, admittedly constrained by the niceties of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, waited until September 2012, more than two years after entering government, to make planned ministerial changes (though he lost David Laws, chief secretary to the Treasury, after a few weeks, Liam Fox, defence secretary, in October 2011 and Chris Huhne, energy and climate change secretary, in February 2012 to scandals of various kinds).
The overall message which has been aimed at Crerar and others attempts to make a difficult elision, reassuring critics that improvements have been made to the way the centre of government works without explicitly admitting that anything had theretofore been wrong. So the prime minister’s spokesman said he was now “completely focused” on delivery (was he not before Gray’s departure?), and issued this garbled and emetic word salad:
He’s made the right changes to ensure that we have strengthened the No 10 operation to deliver the change the country voted for… I think it’s right to reflect on the first weeks and months in office to ensure that you do have the right structures in place going forward to deliver change for the country.
That sails close to an admission that all was not well, without actually saying so. John Healey, the defence secretary and usually relatively free of nonsense, stretched the bounds of credibility by denying that there was any crisis but rather “I’d characterise this as a new government getting on with the job”.
It is worth for a moment coming back to Dominic Cummings, a polarising and self-consciously disruptive figure but not a man who can be accused of skimping on reading or thinking about the processes of government. In his written evidence to Baroness Hallett’s public inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, he emphasised at the beginning that he had not been Boris Johnson’s “chief of staff” but rather had chosen the title “adviser to the prime minister”, and thought chief of staff was “a bad job title for No 10”. He went on to explain:
It is modelled on the White House. In the White House the Chief of Staff is actually the chief of the staff. Staff report to him/her. There is not the Whitehall distinction between officials (civil servants) and special advisors (“spads”). In No 10 the Chief of Staff is not the chief of the staff. Not one official in No 10 or anywhere else in government reports to the ‘Chief of Staff’ who cannot hire or fire any official or even, formally, give any official any orders… most No 10 officials regard themselves as reporting to the PM’s PPS or, if there is a Permanent Secretary in No 10, to them.
He had, he went on argued for radical change.
I was urged by many to use the ‘chief of staff’ title but it is bad management on principle to use a job title that is literally false. When the PM suggested I adopt this job title in summer 2020 I replied “If you agree with the Cabinet Secretary that I am actually chief of the staff in No 10 then I’ll call myself Chief of Staff, otherwise not”. He did not want that. When it was reported later in 2020 he was looking for a ‘new chief of staff’ he meant it in the fake sense not the real sense.
This is “classic Dom”: pugilistic, absolute, provocatively blunt. But it is an interesting perspective on the role of chief of staff, and, objectively, it is hard to say that Cummings is wrong on any point of fact; whether his proposed solution was or is desirable is another matter.
(A point should be made about the authority of special advisers to give instructions to civil servants: when Blair came to power in 1997, the Civil Service (Amendment) Order in Council 1997 was passed which allowed up to three special advisers to give instructions in this fashion, and it was used in respect of Jonathan Powell, the chief of staff, and Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s press secretary. In fact, so far as I have been able to discover from those who were familiar with the situation, Powell never needed to invoke it. It was repealed by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010.)
Where does this leave Downing Street under Morgan McSweeney’s stewardship? There are two elements to the days ahead: the institutional shape of the centre of government, and the grip exerted on the existing levers of power. For all the talk of radicalism, there is little sign of substantial institutional change. Starmer’s much-vaunted “mission boards” have (so far) been very low-key affairs, he has (sensibly) rowed back on his pledge to chair them in person and it is hard to say that they are very different from cabinet committees. There were some of us who suspected this might happen, and perhaps too much store was set by their transformational role. There are many options for structural change, exemplified by but not limited to the Institute for Government’s recent report, and a great deal of thought has been put into how they would work. But that kind of change does not seem to be high on Starmer’s agenda.
In terms of using the existing levers of control, the jury must remain out. Tom Fletcher, formerly the prime minister’s private secretary for foreign affairs from 2007 to 2011, paid tribute to the late Jeremy Heywood in 2018 when he recalled of his time in Downing Street: “The five most terrifying words are Jeremy saying: ‘You need to grip this.’” That sense of seizing control of events, of being the driver rather than a passenger, is what McSweeney must now demonstrate. The weeks leading up to Gray’s departure and his appointment did, perhaps, constitute an object lesson in what not being in control looked like; and if the rumours of a less divided and divisive atmosphere in 10 Downing Street are true, however that has come about, then something has already been achieved. The most troublesome aspect may prove to be that the new administration has already burned through a great deal of goodwill and public patience, without using it to achieve anything of significance. For his own sake, and for Sir Keir Starmer’s, McSweeney cannot afford now to get this wrong.