Me and my shadow: Sunak's new deputy
With the resignation of Dominic Raab, Rishi Sunak needed a new number two, and turned to Oliver Dowden, less than a household name: how will he fare?
Rishi Sunak did not plan last week’s cabinet reshuffle. After all, machinery of government changes had led to a modest series of moves at the top table in early February; the Conservative Party chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, had been forced to resign at the end of January; and the prime minister himself had only been given the seals of office in October last year, at which point he had, naturally and inevitably, chosen his own cabinet from the remnants of his predecessor’s, warmed over with some new ingredients. Even though reshuffles can be annual events in modern politics, this had not been in the calendar.
That said, it was not wholly unexpected. The departure of Dominic Raab, man of many hats as secretary of state for justice, lord high chancellor of Great Britain and deputy prime minister, had become possible in November last year, when the prime minister appointed the eminent employment lawyer Adam Tolley KC to inquire into two formal complaints by civil servants about Raab’s conduct as a minister. In addition, Michelle Donelan, appointed to run the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in February, had announced before Christmas last year that she was pregnant and expected to take a short maternity leave beginning some time in April 2023.
(It is only very recently that there has been any provision for ministers to take maternity leave on full pay, have someone appointed temporarily in their stead and return to their positions at the end of their leave period. Yvette Cooper, then under-secretary of state for health, had taken maternity leave in 2001, and again in 2004 while minister for regeneration regional development at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, while Jo Swinson and Tracey Crouch had both given birth while ministers in the 2010s, but these instances had relied on informal arrangements and there was no mechanism for ministers on parental leave receiving any salary. In February 2021, with the attorney-general, Suella Braverman, expecting her second child, the government pledged to address the lacuna in support for new parents, and it rapidly passed the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act 2021. Members of the government may now be designated as “Ministers on Leave” for up to six months, on the same salary as their most recent post.)
Adam Tolley’s report on Raab was delivered to the prime minister on Thursday 20 April. The stakes were acknowledged to be high: the deputy prime minister had told Sophy Ridge on Sky News that if he was adjudged to be guilty of any of the charges levelled against him, he would resign. Tolley’s report, while it drew nuanced and moderate conclusions and dismissed a great many accusations, declared that on two charges Raab had indeed behaved unacceptably. Sunak considered the report overnight, while it remained confidential, and it was released the following day. Raab announced his resignation as he had promised, though his resignation letter, bristling and angry in tone, expressed a number of concerns with both the conclusions of Tolley’s investigation and with the wider context surrounding the complaints against him. I assessed the issue of The i Paper on Friday 21 April.
This left Rishi Sunak by Friday afternoon with, technically speaking, three gaps in his cabinet: Raab’s two roles as deputy prime minister on the one hand and running the Ministry of Justice on the other, and the job of standing in as science, innovation and technology secretary for Donelan. However, it is worth noting that the office of deputy prime minister is not a statutory one, and there is no other obligation, political or constitutional or habitual or procedural, to fill it. Before 1995, its use was very much the exception rather than the rule, and for many years there were scholars and theorists who fretted about its very enunciation, as it was felt that for a “deputy” prime minister to exist created an implication of a succession to the premiership; this, of course, would be a limitation on the sovereign’s freedom of action to appoint whomever he chose as head of his government, and so it was not uncommon to argue that appointing an explicit deputy prime minister was a challenge to the traditional prerogative, if not practical freedom, of the crown.
(I’ve always found this a slightly peculiar objection. The word “deputy” derives, as any fule kno, from the late Latin deputare, to appoint as a substitute or representative, and its past partciple deputatus. This explains the use of “deputy” in many countries for legislators, as they representatives of their constituents in the legislature. But I can see no etymological nuance which would suggest in the use of the word “deputy” a right of succession to a vacant office, which is the source of the objection. There are all kinds of usages in which the idea of being a substitute does not imply in any way a route to the substantive position: courts can appoint deputies to help people make legal decisions if they are in some way unable to do so themselves; in the United States, the regular officials of a sheriff’s office are deputy sheriffs or simply deputies; and in Canada a government department’s deputy minister is its senior civil servant, like a permanent under-secretary of state in the UK, with absolutely no sense of potential succession to the minister. So I cannot really see the basis for the anxiety. But, as so often, I digress.)
Although in theory the post of deputy prime minister need not exist, in practice every prime minister but two since Margaret Thatcher has, for some of all of their term in office, had a designated number two. The only exceptions were Gordon Brown and Theresa May, although Brown’s cabinet included Harriet Harman as deputy leader of the Labour Party, and May employed first Damian Green then David Lidington as minister for the Cabinet Office and effective deputy. Green was even given the title first secretary of state, created in 1962 for the Conservative R.A. Butler (ironically in order to avoid constitutional objections to a “deputy prime minister”) and carried by Heseltine and Prescott as deputy prime ministers and other senior politicians since.
Sometimes a deputy prime minister can be a valuable, even essential, cog in the Whitehall machine. William Whitelaw was Margaret Thatcher’s deputy from 1979 to 1988, first as home secretary and then as leader of the House of Lords, and was vital as a sounding board, moral support, channel of communication and strategic reserve, especially in the earlier years of her premiership, while Michael Heseltine, first secretary of state 1995-97, brought a last sputter of energy, dynamism and initiative to John Major’s government as its mechanism wound inexorably down.
On the other hand, it can be no more than an honorific, a badge of grandeur to soothe an eminent rival or potential enemy: when Sir Geoffrey Howe was winkled out of the Foreign Office by Thatcher in 1989, he was appointed lord president of the Council and leader of the House of Commons. He demanded the additional dignity of “deputy prime minister” as the price of his acquiescence, and it was granted, but it was a matter of hours before the prime minister’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, told lobby journalists at their regular briefing that the title was essentially meaningless and had no constitutional significance. Howe resigned within 16 months, and his resignation speech in the House of Commons led in a very direct way to Thatcher’s ejection from office.
Raab himself, in his first stint as deputy prime minister under Boris Johnson, from September 2021 to September 2022, cannot be said to have wielded much dramatic influence in public or private in connection with his title. As first secretary of state in 2020, he had carried out the basic functions of the prime minister while Johnson was in hospital with Covid-19, but once he had been appointed formally, he made no significant contribution to the direction of government. He had supported Johnson for the premiership in 2019 but only after competing for the position himself (what an extraordinary piece of chutzpah that seems now), though he was eliminated in the second round of voting when he attracted the support of only 30 of his colleagues.
However much or little weight it can carry, however, the post of deputy prime minister has become too irresistible a piece of patronage for most leaders to give up; in addition, of course, it can be very helpful to have a trusted consigliere at the heart of government. Liz Truss (remember her?) may have taken the idea of appointing a close ally a little far by giving the title to her long-time friend, campaign manager and “political soulmate” Dr Thérèse Coffey, as well as giving her the crushing brief of health and social care secretary, but it is impossible to say whether Coffey would have been a supportive long-term presence of Truss had survived in Downing Street. There seems to have been a universal expectation last September that Truss would pick someone to be deputy prime minister, even if a lot of subsequent headlines were variations on the theme of “Who is Thérèse Coffey?”
The likelihood of Sunak simply letting the post of deputy prime minister lapse was, therefore, low. The remaining question with regard to the role, therefore, was whether Sunak would appoint as justice secretary and lord chancellor a candidate whom he wished also to be his deputy. There is no reason to tie the posts, but it would have had the one, perhaps modest, advantage of limiting the changes required to the cabinet. However, by mid-afternoon on Friday 21 April, the prime minister had made his dispositions, and it was announced that Oliver Dowden would be the new deputy prime minister.
It was not necessarily the obvious choice. Dowden is concurrently chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (one of the cabinet’s traditional sinecure posts) and, as of February, holder of the new, puzzling and awkward-sounding title of secretary of state in the Cabinet Office (he has been the ministerial head of the department since last October), and he is not a well-known figure outside Westminster and Whitehall. While it would be unkind to suggest that his own facial recognition software struggles to place him, he has made little impact on the public consciousness. Nor is this really a criticism, as his has been an unusually inward-facing ministerial career. Apart from the period from February 2020 to June 2022, when he was first co-chair of the Conservative Party then digital, culture, media and sport secretary, he has spent the balance of his government service in the Cabinet Office. That is extremely rare.
The fact that Dowden has been a minister in the Cabinet Office for almost three years, albeit under different guises, can be seen as one key to his potential role as deputy prime minister. The Cabinet Office’s core function is to support the prime minister and the cabinet at the centre of government, originally in basic administrative functions like drafting and circulating agendas and keeping minutes. (Extraordinarily, before the Cabinet Office was established at the end of 1916, there was no formal mechanism for recording what had been discussed, let alone decided, in cabinet meetings.) It was set up by David Lloyd George when he became prime minister after H.H. Asquith’s resignation, and for the first 22 years of its existence it was run by the first cabinet secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey, one of the modern British state’s outstanding administrators and officials.
That basic, almost rudimentary, function remains: the cabinet secretary, now Simon Case, sits on the prime minister’s immediate right at cabinet meetings, and literally takes minutes, his staff having drafted and sent around the agenda and papers in advance. In addition, as has usually been the case since 1981, Case is head of the Home Civil Service, responsible for the management, training, maintenance and workforce planning of around half a million officials. But the Cabinet Office now performs a wide variety of tasks.
Until 1992, the Cabinet Office had no real ministerial presence, except, in theory, the prime minister, especially in the role of minister for the civil service which had been an additional responsibility of the premier since 1968. The department was essentially an administrative and coordinating one with no real policy areas to manage, so there was no need for the political direction which only a minister is really able to introduce. Over the past 30 years, however, the Cabinet Office has gradually assumed two distinct but interwoven functions which have transformed its role and its location in the Whitehall ecosystem.
The first, beginning under John Major but blossoming under Tony Blair, is as a tool for prime ministerial influence across government and as an instrument to monitor the progress of policy delivery and, where necessary, to engage actively in that delivery. It began in a small way; one of Major’s pet projects was improving and making more efficient and accountable public services, so that ordinary men and women could benefit from the kind of revitalisation that the privatised industries had seen for their often wealthier customers in the 1980s. Taken individually, these were small, workaday issues such as more detailed information for parents on school performance, greater rights and engagement for tenants in public housing and fundamental service standards for dealing with the public in government departments and agencies. To be responsible for this collection of areas, Major created within the Cabinet Office a new unit called the Office of Public Service and Science, which brought together the Prime Minister’s Efficiency Unit, projects like the Citizens’ Charter and the Next Steps programme to hive off executive functions from central departments, the Office for Science and Technology and some administrative responsibilities for the civil service.
This notion of the Cabinet Office as a kind of small, almost irregular force to work on ideas and policies for the prime minister, often with implications for many other departments, grew substantially under the New Labour government. Tony Blair, always as concerned with metrics as ideology, was perennially impatient with the speed of the civil service and frustrated by procedures and protocols, sometimes to his own detriment and that of good governance (see the idea of “sofa government”). Particularly galling was the delay, in his mind, between an idea forming in Downing Street and it actually coming into effect on the ground. Over his decade as prime minister, Blair tried several methods to grapple with this issue, including a Downing Street chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, appointed from outside the civil service (although he had been in the Diplomatic Service from 1979 to 1995); the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and a chief adviser on delivery (2001-10); and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (2002-10).
The second function which has developed in the Cabinet Office is as an administrative and organisational home for small and discrete units or policy areas which don’t easily sit elsewhere in Whitehall. This is eloquently demonstrated by a glance at the main responsibilities of the department in its current configuration. As well as “working with” 26 agencies and public bodies, ranging from the UK Statistics Authority to the Corporate Officers of the House of Commons, the Cabinet Office acts as an important coordinating body in the work of the intelligence and security services; it promotes efficiency and reform throughout government, for example in better project management and procurement; it is responsible for the publication of government data and work on transparency and intelligibility of those data; and political and constitutional reform across the piste. Only within the most generous parameters do these represent a coherent collection of governmental functions, but what they have in common is not being large enough to justify an independent government department (though Jim Hacker’s Ministry of Administrative Affairs would probably find quite a few of them within its ambit) and being of such a nature that they either wouldn’t fit as part of an existing department or might get lost within it.
Dowden is in some ways the perfect Cabinet Office man. I’ve been working for a while on a long, long essay on the department, its structures and responsibilities through the lens of its ministerial appointments (stop me if the excitement is clinical dangerous) so, as it happens, I’ve looked at Oliver Dowden in some depth. Before his election as MP for Hertsmere in 2015, his pedigree was as a Conservative Party insider: Conservative Research Department 2004-07, special adviser to David Cameron in opposition and government 2009-12, then Downing Street deputy chief of staff from 2012 to 2014. The gap between 2007 and 2009 was spent at the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton.
Dowden read law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, but after graduating he went to Japan to pursue a teaching opportunity. He completed his legal qualifications on his return and worked briefly in the City but took up his post in the Conservative Research Department at 26. Amusingly, when he was selected as candidate for Hertsmere, he defeated a 34-year-old Oxford-educated financier described by the website Conservative Home as a “businessman who co-founded a large multinational investment firm and now invests in small and fast growing British businesses”; this rival was also longlisted for the constituency of Richmond in North Yorkshire, for which he would be selected. His name was Rishi Sunak.
In his first stint at the Cabinet Office, from January 2018 to July 2019, he was minister for implementation, with responsibility for the Implementation Unit which had been created from the remains of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in 2012 as a recognition that implementation is the most challenging and critical part of government policy. Dowden was tasked by the chancellor of the duchy, David Lidington, with focusing the unit’s work very clearly on the government’s strategic priorities and making sure that its practical output ran in coordination with the intellectual labours of the Downing Street Policy Unit. He also worked on the long-term project of digital transformation which had begun in the early days of the coalition government.
When Boris Johnson became prime minister in July 2019, Dowden, who had supported his candidacy, was rewarded with vertiginous promotion to paymaster general (another sinecure) and minister for the Cabinet Office. While Michael Gove, as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, had overall responsibility for the department, his time was dominated by Brexit negotiations and the brief of constitutional affairs, and Dowden, “attending” cabinet but not a formal member, was effectively in charge, the Cabinet Office CEO to Gove’s chairman, perhaps. A significant item in his in-tray remained digital policy, and he began the process of recruiting a “Government Chief Digital Information Officer” at permanent secretary-level to take control of innovation, cyber security, data and digital policy across government. The story of the position became a miserable saga, including changes of title and function and an inability to find good candidates, and was still ongoing when Dowden left the Cabinet Office in February 2020.
Dowden spent his holiday away from the Cabinet Office first as digital, culture, media and sport secretary (2020-21) then co-chairman of the Conservative Party with the socially well-connected entrepreneur and fundraiser Ben Elliot (whose reputation was challenging; even a sympathetic Tatler called him “a social panther” and “Macavity”). He resigned from the latter post in June 2022 after disastrous by-election results, at last turning against the prime minister; in his resignation letter, he said “We cannot carry on with business as usual”, and, while he accepted personal responsibility as party chairman, any half-awake observer could look at the white spaces and see that he was sending a message to Johnson, by then increasingly embattled, too.
The frantic summer of last year saw Dowden on the backbenches, and he was not invited into the mayfly-like Truss government. When his friend and one-time selection rival Rishi Sunak became prime minister last October, Dowden was appointed chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and given overall responsibility for the Cabinet Office, as Gove had been back in 2019: Jeremy Quin, the Member for Horsham, took over as paymaster general and minister of the Cabinet Office as Dowden had been under Gove. Dowden was expected, due to his close relationship with Sunak, to act as a fixer behind the scenes of Whitehall. In February this year, when there was the minor reshuffle which changed the departmental structures, Dowden was given the additional title of “Secretary of State in the Cabinet Office”, with the understanding being that this entrenched his authority at the centre of government.
It is an interesting piece of Kremlinology. Dowden is the first secretary of state to be described as “in” a department; the terminology is generally “secretary of state for…” and the department’s title, such as secretary of state for defence, education, or work and pensions. But we should add a quick theological note here. The notion of our most senior ministers being secretaries of state, which sometimes leaves foreign observers struggling, goes back to the 16th century. Under the late mediaeval administrative system the Tudors inherited, the key official servicing the King’s Council (which became the Privy Council during that period) was the King’s Secretary. Originally responsible for correspondence, his remit expanded to cover advice on all sorts of issues as well as day-to-day control of the Privy Seal. After 1540, it became common for two officials to act as secretary, in theory with identical powers and authority. By the end of the reign of Elizabeth, these officials were more commonly known as secretaries of state.
This is not just idle historical reflection. The full title of a departmental head in Whitehall is His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for X, which hints at an odd legal fiction, that the office of secretary of state, while divided among many ministers, is in theory a single post, just as it was before 1540. So what? Well, legislation often confers powers on the “secretary of state”, the implication usually being clear that for Home Office legislation it refers to the home secretary, for health matters it is the health and social care secretary and so on. But this is a convenience rather than a rule: these powers can be exercised by any ‘manifestation’ (my term) of the office of secretary of state, so the title given to Dowden in February, distinct from the traditional “minister for the Cabinet Office”, admits him to the select ranks of secretaries of state. It is a matter of breach rather than observance, but Quintin Hogg, for example, previously and later Lord Hailsham, remembered in his memoirs being approached during his seven months as secretary of state for education and science to sign off on some kind of warrant from the Home Office, the home secretary being unavailable.
Then Dominic Raab resigned. Whom, if anyone, would Sunak pick to be his new sidekick? What kind of person and personality was he looking for? The media profiled various potential justice secretaries but either left it implied that they might also assume the deputy’s post or were silent on the matter, but the main candidates for the Ministry of Justice were not really the sort of politicians Sunak was likely to elevate so high: among those tipped, apart from eventual choice Alex Chalk, were Victoria Atkins (capable, warm, but not yet in cabinet), Victoria Prentis (a lawyer’s lawyer, sober and on top of her brief but politically an outlier), Sir Robert Buckland (an unlikely choice, previous justice secretary, clever but ideologically unreliable) and Lucy Frazer (newly appointed at DCMS, extremely sharp, had earned her silk by merit but had a lot to prove).
It was unlikely that Sunak would upset the delicate power balance at the heart of government by bestowing the additional prestige of deputy prime minister on any of the so-called Great Offices of State: Jeremy Hunt as chancellor of the Exchequer, James Cleverly as foreign secretary and Suella Braverman as home secretary. Under different circumstances, one possibility might have been the leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, a strong media performer, popular with the party membership and a paid-up member of the human race; but Sunak is, to use the language of the King James Bible, sore afraid of the woman who last year twice sought the job he now holds. Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, is the cabinet’s best intellect and punchiest debater, and would have been another equivalent of a bride choosing good-looking bridesmaids; in any event, if “levelling up” is to work at all, it will need Gove’s drive, energy and imagination to move the needle and being Sunak’s number two would be a distraction.
In the end the choice was obvious. I confess I overlooked it, though I was not alone in that. When Lord Randolph Churchill resigned from the Treasury in 1886, he did so to force his budget through cabinet, believing that the prime minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, would not contemplate losing him and would capitulate. He was wrong, and Salisbury replaced him with the clever financier and former Liberal Unionist MP George Goschen. Reflecting on his miscalculation, Churchill admitted “I forgot Goschen”. By the same token, I, and many other observers, forgot Dowden. But we oughtn’t to have done: he and Sunak had endorsed Boris Johnson for prime minister in a joint submission to The Times in 2019, and Dowden had been instrumental in Sunak’s leadership campaigns in June and October 2022. If the prime minister looked round the cabinet table, he would see no more reliable and loyal face than than of the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.
The dwindling band of die-hard Boris Johnson supporters were quick to allege that Dowden’s promotion was a reward for his part in ousting their man last summer, but that is no great disadvantage. That ragbag of the disgruntled, the disappointed and the deranged is looking more and more as credible and influential as those who gathered behind leadership challenger John Redwood in 1995 and were cruelly described by one wit as “ward eight of Broadmoor”. Suffice to say, if you look around your trench and see Nadine Dorries, Lord Cruddas, Brendan Clarke-Smith and Mark Jenkinson alongside you, it’s time to ask some questions about the choices you’ve made in life.
I can’t speak for others, but I overlooked Dowden because I miscalculated what sort of deputy Sunak was looking for. He was not trying to balance factions or play off potential rivals against each other, someone who would be a popular and polished media performer and, to use the late Mo Mowlam’s phrase, “minister for the Today programme”, ready to defend any policy at any hour on any platform. Instead, and this may prove to be to his credit, he clearly wanted someone who knew the geography and power distribution of Whitehall, who was experienced in dealing with what Peter Hennessy called the “hidden wiring” of government. If you reframe the search in those terms, suddenly Dowden is an obvious candidate.
Oliver Dowden has been deputy prime minister for a week now. What sort of person is he, and how can we expect him to perform? There are some interesting sketches and insights in the memoirs of Kate Fall, The Gatekeeper, who was her university friend David Cameron’s deputy chief of staff from 2010 to 2016 and worked with Dowden in Downing Street. She is very positive about the man nicknamed “Olive” after he received a letter with a glaring typographical error: she talks of his “sunny optimism and brilliant mind”, and, revealingly, described his style in staff meetings. He “defies the classic alpha male norm, mostly sitting quietly in the firm knowledge that the worst jobs are bound to come hurtling to him anyway”, which speaks of a calm ability to soak up panic and anxiety while exhibiting none himself. His catchphrase to soothe frantic colleagues was “Shit happens”. That is a good start for a man who needs to make things work in government.
He has obviously translated that skill into the higher reaches of government. The former chancellor, George Osborne, called him “the key fixer in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet”, and he certainly knows how the Cabinet Office operates, and how it supports the role of the prime minister. With Jeremy Quin in place to run the Cabinet Office on an operational basis, Dowden is free to think strategically at one end of his professional spectrum and focus on untangling individual knots as they arise at the other. His time as a Cameron functionary means he knows the value of discipline and planning, and will seek to grip the presentational grid of government media with a firm hand. And he is adept at “red-teaming”: he helped Michael Howard and David Cameron rehearse their performances at prime minister’s questions, and was a vital part of Cameron’s preparation for the leaders’ debates in the 2015 general election campaign, proving especially adept at playing the role of UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
Dowden is not a man without his own politics. He is believed to be robustly “anti-woke”: he once shared an office with Sir John Hayes, the Luca Brasi of the Tory right wing, who regarded him as a perfect adversary for the socially progressive movement, he is a fan of the former poet laureate John Betjeman, and replaced existing modern art in his Downing Street office with a portrait of Queen Victoria. Dougie Smith and Munira Mirza, two of the architects of the anti-woke movement, are close friends, and he talks warmly of the flying of flags and reflexive, unconscious patriotism.
In social terms, he is a walking advertisement for traditional Thatcherism. He attended a partially selective state school, Parminter’s, in Watford before reading law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, a small college with a tightly knit and friendly community which has a higher-than-average proportion of state-school students. He has also spoken approvingly of Thatcher’s personal narrative. “I really did relate to Margaret Thatcher’s life story and the story of working hard,” he has commented, and speaks fluently about “hard-working taxpayers”, identifying the potential wedge to be driven between ideological figures obsessing over the baleful symbolism of art and culture and the “ordinary” voter more focused on the cost of living and personal prosperity and success.
His views should, if he is to be the sort of deputy prime minister I think Sunak wants, be of secondary importance. He needs a readiness for hard work, which he has demonstrated in his previous behind-the-scenes roles, a nose for administrative strife, an ability to be emollient and problem-solving, and absolute loyalty to the prime minister, on which last score Sunak should not find him wanting. He has already presented himself to the media to reassure observers that the government is “working round the clock” to deal with the evacuation of UK nationals from Sudan, the sort of task in which his matter-of-fact manner, a stranger to hyperbole and pyrotechnics, is ideal. He wisely cancelled a trip to Glasgow, where the Cabinet Office and HM Revenue and Customs have nearly 3,000 staff at Atlantic Square in Broomielaw, thereby avoiding the potential presentational problems of a PCS picket line.
Perhaps the most promising judgement on Dowden was made by a colleague when he was part of David Cameron’s Downing Street operation: “He was brilliant, even though no one had heard of him”. That is the sort of figure which Sunak needs in the centre of government which has not really been run well, coherently or effectively since Cameron departed. We have perhaps 18 months until the general election. While a Conservative victory currently seems an unlikely prospect, the prime minister must act as if everything remains to play for. A sine qua non for an election win is a leadership team—what the business world would think of as a c-suite—which is in control, is cohesive and united, and which can react swiftly and effectively to deal with crises. Dominic Raab, while a loyal supporter of Sunak and a serious-minded minister, had his own troubled department to manage and, to put it mildly, is not a man who exudes calm.
To sum up Dowden’s task, we could do worse than recall the note pinned to the door between the Cabinet Office and the Number 10 private office when Harold Macmillan was prime minister, in Supermac’s distinctive, spidery hand: “Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot”. It is a line from The Gondoliers by Gilbert and Sullivan, and it was reinforced by a piece of graffito added underneath by Macmillan’s private secretary, John Wyndham: “And if it doesn’t, you’ll probably be shot!” It’s a working method which is worth remembering.
Very interesting piece, I always find machinations of Whitehall equally fascinating and repulsive. My general view of politics and politicians drops as the amount of power and influence they have increases, though I regard planning committe at local level as corrupt as the Weimar Republic. Dowden then is a bland grey man who soothes Sunaks pains before he knows he has them. Except for unseen events, Macmillan was absolutely correct on that one, don't we all know that now! Sunak and his chums are in an dire place, inflation is rampant, taxes are for the ordinary honest voter / worker high and the shadow of covid still lingers. I sense the whiff of change, people are tired of the same, though many including me don't see Starmer as the shining light of a new dawn. Sunak might yet sneak a second term, especially if the SNP implodes as it seem it might. Who knows? Tip to Sunak want an easy win, cut Vat on fuel, energy and food. Have a nice day.