No-one's at the wheel: when the cabinet secretary is absent
Simons Case is currently absent on medical leave with no fixed return date; how long can ad hoc arrangements last and how might a vacancy be managed?
It almost defies belief that until the end of 1916 no-one kept a record of meetings of the British cabinet. There was no agenda, either, so the prime minister and his senior colleagues would meet, talk about the pressing issues of the day and then go about their business, with an unspoken hope that everyone shared the same recollection of what happened. This haphazard, ramshackle system saw Britain rise to the sunniest uplands of her imperial glory, carrying the Union Flag to the furthest reaches of Australia and New Zealand, Africa, Asia and across North America, and it was only the industrialised Tartarus of the First World War which exposed the weaknesses in the system and then forced substantial, but often improvisational, change.
When David Lloyd George kissed hands and became prime minister on 6 December 1916, one of his most pressing tasks was to reinvigorate the government, focus on the conduct of the war and chase away the sour, sorrowful torpor of Asquith’s failing leadership. He set up a five-man war cabinet of which only one member, the Unionist leader Andrew Bonar Law who was chancellor of the Exchequer, had any departmental responsibilities. When it met for the first time on 9 December 1916, a record of attendees was kept, and at the bottom of the page appeared “Lieutenant-Colonel Sir M.P.A Hankey” as “Secretary” and “Lieutenant-Colonel W. Dally Jones” as “Assistant Secretary”.
Maurice Hankey, the first cabinet secretary, was probably the most significant figure in 20th century British politics of whom most people have never heard. Far from the Balliol-hothoused Northcote-Trevelyan archetype of a Whitehall warrior, he had not attended university: he was a Royal Marines officer, a gunner, and quickly found himself in the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty. In 1908, he was appointed assistant secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, the advisory group which formulated military policy for the cabinet, and took over as secretary in 1912.
In 1916, he was only 39, recently knighted: fearsomely efficient and organised, he was vastly knowledgeable on defence matters, spoke fluent French, Italian, German and Greek and had a methodical approach to committee work which revolutionised the centre of government. While Asquith’s cabinet had met usually once a week, the war cabinet met almost daily—in 1917, it met 300 times—and Hankey prepared agendas, recorded minutes and pursued decisions, assisted by the new Cabinet Office. This revolution lasted, not least because Hankey stayed in post for more than 20 years, finally stepping down in 1938.
Simon Case, the current incumbent, is the 13th cabinet secretary, at 41 on his appointment the youngest since Hankey, and with relatively modest experience in Whitehall. He arrived in Whitehall in 2006 (a year after I became a clerk in the House of Commons), a Cambridge graduate who was just finishing a doctoral thesis entitled The Joint Intelligence Committee and the German Question 1947-61, supervised at Queen Mary University by Professor Peter Hennessy, doyen of Whitehall watchers. He went first to the Ministry of Defence as a policy adviser then to the Northern Ireland Office, developing a reputation for calmness and an affinity for the shadowy fringes of policy, security and intelligence.
In a decade, he held a carousel of senior and pivotal roles, but never for very long. In 2012, he was Head of the Olympics Secretariat, a small unit in the Cabinet Office’s National Security Secretariat which fed continuous policy advice to ministers during the year of the Games, before moving to Downing Street as one of the clutch of private secretaries to the prime minister. He became deputy principal private secretary to David Cameron before returning to the Cabinet Office in July 2014 as executive director of the Implementation Unit, a cross-departmental body charged with translating policy into practice. In March 2015, he became director of strategy at GCHQ, but, in the wake of the death of Sir Chris Martin, he was recalled to Number 10 as principal private secretary; he acted as UK sherpa for the G7 and G20 meetings and managed the transition from Cameron to Theresa May.
In March 2017, he was appointed director general for the UK-EU Partnership within the UK Permanent Representation in Brussels, then switched to the Department for Exiting the European Union in January 2018 as director general Northern Ireland and Ireland, where he developed the Irish backstop, which essentially guaranteed the provisions of the Belfast Agreement and the open land border within the negotiation of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
In July that year, however, he made an unexpected move to become private secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. Perhaps it was an escape from the Brussels pressure cooker, but some colleagues thought Case was also attracted by the opportunity to see and working within another, sometimes more obscure part of the British state. He developed a good relationship with the Duke of Cambridge, only a few years younger than him; but the evidence which splattered from the now-notorious Spare, the Duke of Sussex’s memoir-cum-emotional-spasm, suggested that the younger brother had no such warm feelings. Case is believed to be the official Harry dubbed “The Fly”, and for whom he showed a visceral distaste.
The Fly had spent much of his career adjacent to and, indeed drawn to, shit. The offal of government and media and wormy entrails, he loved it, grew fat on it, rubbed his hands in glee over it, though he pretended otherwise.
Of course, in the charged atmosphere of the Royal Family at the time, pleasing both brothers was perhaps impossible.
Yet it was not wholly inconsistent with opinions voiced by other civil service colleagues and political masters. One Conservative observed with balance, “I like Simon, but he’s a snake”, while an official with experience of several Whitehall departments raged, “I hate that man—he’s a worm”. Speaking to Politico, Alex Thomas, who worked with Case in the Cabinet Office, tried to frame a more constructive assessment.
He’s good at smoothing things over; spotting things that might go awry and making that little intervention that helps keep the show on the road. He’s a good fixer. He’s good at anticipating problems and seeing them off.
These are useful qualities, vital even, when navigating the waters of central government, but again and again there is a whiff, sometimes partially concealed, of duplicity, or at least ambiguity. Is this personality, or approach? Or perhaps it has been partially shaped by some of the areas in which Case has operated and which he finds most interesting. Ciaran Martin, for whom Case worked in the Cabinet Office and at GCHQ, outlined his esoteric interests.
He has a lot of expertise in quite niche areas of government that are important to prime ministers. It’s an eclectic mix of the monarchy, nuclear security, the Northern Ireland peace process and intelligence. Those tend to be non-partisan areas, but things prime ministers care about.
Indeed, Case’s PhD thesis has focused on the Joint Intelligence Committee, that invaluable junction box in the Cabinet Office which assesses and analyses intelligence from all the different agencies and brings potential crises to the attention of officials and ministers as appropriate.
It was a testament to Case’s reputation for thorough and even-tempered diligence, as well as interpersonal skills, when Boris Johnson approached him in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic to become Downing Street permanent secretary, a role which had existed sporadically in the past, with the specific task of “supporting the prime minister and Cabinet in developing and implementing the government’s coronavirus response”. The role was temporary, and Case was described as being on “secondment”, reporting to the cabinet secretary, Sir Mark Sedwill. Why the move happened in unclear: some believe Case was keen to return to Whitehall after nearly two years with the Cambridges, others that Sedwill sought his return to give himself a reliable ally (and perhaps to relieve some stress on himself arising from his double role as cabinet secretary and national security adviser).
A third theory was that Johnson’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, wanted Case to take the job. An official told Politico:
He was brought in by Dom, to do what Dom wanted. Dom wanted to shake things up, change the way [the civil service] worked. That’s what he was there to do.
Cummings himself confirmed this, albeit restrospectively, when he gave evidence to the House of Commons Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees in 2021.
I brought in Simon Case to be permanent secretary at Number 10 because I thought the prime minister is not listening to me on this whole subject.
It shouldn’t be underestimated that this was a step up in terms of rank and seniority, too. Case had been a director general, but was now moving to the top of the civil service ladder as a permanent secretary. Rumours suggested that senior mandarins who had been sizing Case up for a range of director general posts were annoyed to see him vault to the summit of the profession at so young an age.
It undoubtedly left the official landscape crowded. Sedwill was cabinet secretary and national security adviser, while Helen MacNamara was promoted at the same time from responsibility in the Cabinet Office for propriety and ethics to be deputy cabinet secretary and head of the Cabinet Secretariat. Sedwill also had no fewer than three deputy national security advisers: David Quarrey (international affairs), Alex Ellis (Integrated Review) and Beth Sizeland (national resilience and security). The prime ministers’s principal private secretary was Martin Reynolds, a former ambassador to Libya, while Cummings was billed as “chief adviser” and Sir Edward Lister, an old Johnson ally from his mayoral days, was the prime minister’s “chief strategy adviser”. There was no formalised Downing Street chief of staff, a symptom, I’ve argued, of a deeper difficulty in conceptualising the role satisfactorily since the departure of Jonathan Powell in 2007.
Potential confusion in one direction was resolved within weeks. In June, Sedwill announced that we would step down from his dual roles in September. The initial plan, which did not transpire, was that David Frost, a former diplomat and by then Johnson’s Europe adviser and chief Brexit negotiator, would become national security adviser but in a special adviser capacity rather than as a civil servant.
In August, Case was chosen as the next cabinet secretary. There was initial shock: the frontrunner had been Sir Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department for Health and Social Care, although moving DHSC’s chief official in the middle of a public health emergency could have been unwise. Also hotly tipped were Charles Roxburgh, second permanent secretary at HM Treasury (although his wife, Dame Karen Pierce, had only months before been appointed UK ambassador in Wsahington); and Antonia Romeo, permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade.
It later transpired, however, as The Times reported, that a large number of plausible candidates simply didn’t apply, because they had no wish to work in what was seen as Downing Street’s chaotic and toxic atmosphere. Sir Thomas Scholar (Treasury), Sarah Healey (DCMS) and Sir Stephen Lovegrove (MoD) supposedly all decided against an application. This made Case’s elevation, if not inevitable, but certainly highly likely. But it was impossible to ignore the fact that he had only held permanent secretary rank for a few months, and had never headed a Whitehall department. Sedwill had been Home Office permanent secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood before him had been Downing Street permanent secretary for a longer stint than Case’s, Sir Gus O’Donnell and Sir Andrew Turnbull had both run HM Treasury while Sir Richard Wilson and Sir Robert Armstrong, like Sedwill, had been at the helm of the Home Office.
Robin Butler, cabinet secretary form 1988 to 1998, was the only appointee in an analogous situation. On appointment under Margaret Thatcher, he had been second permanent secretary to the Treasury in charge of public expenditure, before which he had been Thatcher’s principal private secretary. Butler was 50 on appointment, a genial man but with a core of steel and a formidable mind who had topped the civil service entrance examinations in 1961. His grasp of his constitutional role was firm—he would later borrow his predecesssor Robert Armstrong’s aphorism that the cabinet secretary is “the chief engineer on the ship of state, making sure that the decisions that the Prime Minister and the Cabinet took on the bridge were transmitted into the system”—but he was also self-aware and willing to admit to mistakes.
(A tiny sidebar which I may have related before: in my brief official career in the House of Lords, Butler was a member of my committee. I missed one week when my father died and at the next meeting he stopped briefly behind my chair, put a hand momentarily on my shoulder and said quietly “I was sorry to hear about your father”, then moved on. I didn’t, don’t, know him at all well but it was such a gesture of instinctive decency and kindness that it still makes me well up.)
Here is not the place to analyse Case’s record as cabinet secretary, as the ongoing public inquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is already doing much of that work. The chair of the inquiry, Baroness Hallett, last month excused Case from appearing during Module 2 of the inquiry after receiving an application to be released on medical grounds. She wrote then that “it very much remains my intention that Mr Case should give oral evidence to the Inquiry”, but that, like so much, is contingent on his health. There have been criticisms that Case has acted too much as a courtier and prime ministerial fixer rather than as a more detached referee in his role as cabinet secretary (and, let us not forget, head of the Home Civil Service); some suggested from the beginning this would be a weakness. One anonymous permanent secretary remarked early on that “It was not an appointment greeted with high hopes”. Sam Freedman, a former adviser to Michael Gove, analysed some of the shortcomings of Case’s tenure (so far) in a Substack post in June.
At the moment all we know is that Case will not return to work until the New Year at the earliest. I am breaking no confidences in saying that there are those in Whitehall who doubt that he will return at all, whether for medical reasons, professional criticism or some mixture of the two. The absence of the head of the civil service and the man who should be in many respects the prime minister’s chief official policy adviser and sounding board is inevitably a challenge for Downing Street; Sunak’s relationship with Case is thought to be reasonable, and the prime minister said publicly earlier this year “He works very hard to support me, to support the government’s agenda”, although he did avoid saying that Case would remain in post until the election.
That said, The Times reported in April that Sunak was, whether intentionally or not, circumventing Case and had “introduced a new way of working so that he works more directly with departments involved in decisions”. Case had reportedly scaled back the traditional “Wednesday Morning Colleagues” meeting of permanent secretaries to every six or eight weeks; this seems unwise for a cabinet secretary struggling for authority and support, and is particularly dangerous in reducing his visibility of the work of the civil service beyond the cabinet. The WMC meetings include not just mainstream departmental chiefs and some deputies but the heads of the devolved administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast; the top officials from the intelligence agencies; and those running major non-departmental bodies and agencies like the Crown Prosecution Service (Sir Keir Starmer was an attendee as director of public prosecutions 2008-13) and HM Revenue and Customs.
(During his brief stint as chief whip from 2014 to 2015, Michael Gove invited himself to the Wednesday meetings, a development not welcomed by all permanent secretaries. Lord Maude of Horsham, following his recent review of civil service governance and accountability, has also suggested that the Downing Street chief of staff should attend.)
While Case is away, his duties have been divided on a temporary basis between various colleagues. This is an understandable stopgap, as it creates minimal expectations about future personnel changes, but inevitably leads to a degree of fragmentation. The Wednesday Morning Colleagues meeting is now being chaired by the longest-serving permanent secretary, Sir Chris Wormald, who has also taken on some semi-symbolic roles such as liaison with other senior officials and advice on constitutional and ethics and propriety issues. Management of the civil service and matters connected with reform are being taken on by the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, Sir Alex Chisholm (though he will leave his post next spring). Direct support to the prime minister and cabinet, including the taking of minutes at cabinet meetings, has passed to Emma Churchill, who recently became head of the Economic and Domestic Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, while some HR responsibilities are being exercised by Sarah Healey, permanent secretary at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
It is no criticism of any of these officials that to divide Case’s responsibilities in this was is not satisfactory in even the medium term. It would help if the Cabinet Office at least published a formal break-down of who is doing what: but this at-least-four-way carve-up diminishes the government’s ability to act in a co-ordinated way. Each civil servant has a “day job”, none of them minor, and so is running at something like 110 per cent just to carry out the normal tasks of Whitehall. We should at least be grateful that, unlike under Case’s predecessor, there is a separate national security adviser, the respected and experienced Sir Tim Barrow, though there is considerable unease that Sunak is neglecting foreign policy in general and the apparatus for addressing national security challenges in particular.
It is doubly difficult that this absence of co-ordinated leadership comes at a time when fundamental questions are being asked about the adequacy of the institutional arrangements at the centre of government. Lord Maude’s review has made two key recommendations to address this weakness.
Recommendation 12: The centre of government should be reshaped to create a new Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet (OPMC) containing the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet and National Security (and other) Secretariats.
Recommendation 13: A new Office of Budget and Management (OBM) should be created. This would include HM Treasury’s current responsibilities for the allocation and control of public expenditure, together with the centres of the major cross-cutting functions—financial management, commercial procurement, digital, project delivery, human resources.
This notion, of the prime minister having a proper department to assist him or her in exercising executive leadership, is very far from new. I described in an essay last month the way a prime minister’s department almost came into being under Margaret Thatcher in the early to mid-1980s. Fifteen years ago, Anthony Seldon and Dennis Kavanagh wrote a whole book on the issue, The Powers Behind The Prime Minister. The House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee had examined the issue in 2021, but its report raised more questions than it answered, though it was a useful rehearsal of many of the arguments on both sides.
In 2022, partially in response to the criticisms of the report into “Partygate” by then-Cabinet Office doyenne Sue Gray, Boris Johnson announced the creation of an “Office of the Prime Minister” with its own permanent secretary; a former NHS hospital trust chief executive, Samantha Jones, was appointed to set up the new organisation; but little else was done before Johnson was forced to resign and the project was shuffled to the back of the list of priorities. There was enough scepticism about the project to enable this: Andrew Hill, writing in The Financial Times, described Johnson’s plan as a cry of “stop me before I kill again”; Alex Thomas at the Institute for Government cautioned that a hasty response might actually make the centre less rather than mpre effective.
In June this year, the SNP’s Patrick Grady raised the matter with the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, who explained to the House of Commons—as if the point were obvious, rather than contradicting an explicit policy of the previous head of government—that creating a new structure within Downing Street was unnecessary.
Within the hierarchy of Whitehall, Downing Street sits within the Cabinet Office. I have found that the way it works best—I think that this is the Prime Minister’s view as well—is that the Cabinet Office supports Downing Street in the performance of its functions, so I do not think there is a need to create a separate Office of the Prime Minister beyond the existing Downing Street capabilities.
This, of course, was before some of the most damning criticisms which have been aired in the course of then Covid-19 inquiry. But the extended absence of the cabinet secretary at a time when the way in which power is exercised at the centre of government is under active consideration is problematic, because any changes will profoundly affect the job of the cabinet secretary. Perhaps its temporary disaggregation among four other officials is a helpful indication of what the role comprises but it removes an advocate for the position from participation in the debate.
There has been speculation for months as to who might replace Case if he were, for whatever reason, to leave office. In March, Reaction tipped three candidates: Sir Tom Scholar, controversially dismissed as permanent secretary to the Treasury by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng in September 2022, but now the “clever money”; Dame Melanie Dawes, a former permanent secretary who is now chief executive of broadcasting regulator Ofcom; and Antonia Romeo, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice (and therefore clerk of the Crown in Chancery). Scholar now seems an unlikely prospect: he was recently announced as the next non-executive chairman of financoal services group Nomura and seems unlikely to turn his back on the lucrative private sector to return to Whitehall.
Other possible names would include Tamara Finkelstein, permanent secretary at DEFRA, regarded as exceptionally able, and James Bowler, who replaced Scholar as head of the Treasury and has a strong grounding in economics and finance. Lower-key internal candidates, if the prime minister wanted to restructure the job significantly, could include the Cabinet Office chief operating officer Sarah Harrison or director general for propriety and ethics Darren Tierney.
All of this, however, has to be set in its political context. If Case gives up his office for any reason within the next few months, we will be faced with the almost unprecedented situation of a prime minister appointing a new cabinet secretary months ahead of a general election he is expected to lose. Sir Burke Trend took over the job in January 1963, almost three-and-a-half years into a third Conservative-dominated parliament, but the experienced Treasury civil servant was scrupulously fair-minded and diligent, even making it known that he didn’t vote, thinking it inappropriate given his role. An appointment made in, say, the first half of 2024 would be a very different proposition.
To be clear, in constitutional terms, there is no barrier or prima facie impropriety to Rishi Sunak overseeing the appointment of a new cabinet secretary. The Cabinet Manual states “The Cabinet Secretary is appointed by the Prime Minister on the advice of the retiring Cabinet Secretary and the First Civil Service Commissioner”. Often there is no formal competition: in 2005, when Sir Gus O’Donnell was chosen, candidates submitted a “manifesto” of how they would carry out the role, after which they were interviewed first by the first civil service commissioner then by the prime minister; Simon Case himself was appointed by a similar process. Generally, however, the appointment has been made by the prime minister without formal consultation or competition. A recent report by the House of Lords Constitution Committee accepted that the prime minister should have a decisive role in the appointment, given the close working relationship necessary between the two roles, but recommended in general terms that there should be greater transparency and accountability.
But practical politics have to be a consideration too. In an ideal world, Sunak would give at least some consideration to how any potential new cabinet secretary would be able to work with Sir Keir Starmer. In fact, given his past career as a senior civil servant, Starmer is likely to be a relatively accommodating and reasonable chief, and he understands the pressures under which senior civil servants operate. It is unlikely that any current permanent secretary would be unacceptable to Starmer.
There are elliptical and mealy-mouthed semi-criticisms levelled at Antonia Romeo. She is openly ambitious, hardly a grievous sin, and some who have worked for her have suggested they felt she might subordinate their interests to her own if forced to make a choice. Her early career as a management consultant in the private sector—she spent three years as a project manager at Oliver Wyman before joining the Lord Chancellor’s Department in 2000 as a temporary economist—makes some Whitehall veterans uneasy. Likewise, the fact that she is obviously at ease in the limelight, something shown especially during her time as UK consul general in New York in 2016-17, sets her apart from many other senior mandarins.
Her intellectual abilities are undoubted, however. She read philosophy, politics and economics at Brasenose College, Oxford, and her tutor, Professor Sir Vernon Bogdanor recalls that “her particular interests were in game theory and in money and banking. She was an outstanding student in every way.” She was awarded a first, and when she left Oliver Wyman in 1999 she studies for a master’s degree in economics at the LSE, which led her into her first civil service post. She was a successful permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade for four years, and has run the Ministry of Justice since 2021.
There is a a faint, faint suggestion that Romeo might be in some way “right-leaning”. Truss and Kwarteng were said to have wanted her to take over as permanent secretary to the Treasury after Scholar was ejected, ministerial enthusiasm which can on its own create suspicion among officials, but Romeo had never held a Treasury role, relegating her to “outsider” status, and the post eventually went to James Bowler, who had succeeded Romeo at DIT but had long years at the Treasury under his belt. The anonymous commentary from within Whitehall was telling: Romeo was “dynamic” and a “disruptor”; and her close working relationship with Truss as secretary of state and permanent secretary was referred enigmatically. Romeo had turned down the opportunity to head up Johnson’s Office of the Prime Minister in early 2022, perhaps seeing that it had more pitfalls than opportunities; her name had also been bruited as cabinet secretary when Sedwill left in 2020, thiugh it has been alleged by Lord Ashcroft, in his First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson, that Carrie Johnson, the prime minister’s wife, weighed in against Romeo with “an angry tirade and… personal insults”.
Even Romeo’s relatively colourful career would surely not be a bar to her working with Starmer. Nevertheless, the prime minister sees the cabinet secretary every day. Even if Starmer had no reason to disapprove of, dislike or even feel less than comfortable with Romeo, he might feel somewhat shackled by someone else’s choice. But what is the alternative? We are faced by two equally valid principles, that Sunak has the right to appoint whomever he wishes as cabinet secretary if a vacancy arises, and that Starmer has the right to have a cabinet secretary with whom he feels he can work easily and seamlessly. Of course, a new official appointed by Sunak could be moved by Starmer and replaced with his own choice: that would be an unfairly rough experience for the civil servant so moved, but sometimes life is unfairly rough. But it would also be poor for continuity, and would be a precedent which is at least in some ways unhelpful.
A great deal hinges on Case’s personal circumstances. If, as my instincts tell me, he will not seek to return to the post of cabinet secretary, then my prescription would be this: seek an interim candidate—let’s say, until 31 December 2025—and set out an agenda for him or her, ideally by agreement between the two main parties. This could include formulating a careful, detailed, official response to the Maude report; perhaps an interim response to the Covid-19 inquiry as it stands at the time; a review of the devolution settlement, especially in view of the recent unsuccessful Scottish Government appeals to the Supreme Court. Others will have their own priorities. This modified job specification, with a short and fixed duration, some agreed areas of action and, by implication, a freedom from worrying about future career prospects, might deter some who might otherwise seek the role; but it might also make it attractive to some who might not have seen the job of cabinet secretary as a likely destination.
The civil service is facing a greater accumulation of challenges probably than at any point since Northcote and Trevelyan reported in 1854. A cabinet secretary appointed for a short period cannot address all of these challenges, nor should he or she be expected to. What we need someone to do, if Case does not stay in post long-term, is to curate the job through a period of likely disruption and upheaval. The principal objective has to be to get to 2015 with a civil service led credibly and independently, and everything else will have to fall into place behind that. We’re going to need adults in the room on all sides.