Reflections on politics of the week (so far)

The new shadow cabinet, the future of aviation and the government's slow progress on ethics and integrity

With the unveiling a new leader of the Conservative Party and a presidential election in the United States, there is a lot going on and there is more to say than there is room or opportunity to say it. Therefore, as is becoming habitual, I offer a concatenation of stories which are worth marking before they disappear (for the moment, anyway) from the spotlight.

New shadow cabinet

There has been and will be much analysis of Kemi Badenoch’s appointments to her first shadow cabinet, especially given the return of Dame Priti Patel to front-line politics as Shadow Foreign Secretary and the absence of leadership contenders James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat. Underneath the big themes, however, there are a few more minor observations which are, nonetheless, worth making.

Ten of Badenoch’s 25 shadow cabinet members (including herself) have held cabinet office, while 16 were part of Rishi Sunak’s interim shadow cabinet from July to November. That is a respectable number, given the swathe of senior MPs defeated at the general election, while giving Badenoch leeway to bring in some new faces. Of the 23 Members of Parliament, six were elected in 2010, one at a 2014 by-election, nine at the general election in 2015, three in 2017 and four in 2019. Badenoch, elected for Saffron Walden in 2017, is therefore less experienced in parliamentary terms than the majority of her colleagues. But not a single member of the shadow cabinet has been in the House of Commons even for 15 years: a corollary of that is none has been in opposition before this year.

While peers, baronets and knights are occasional features of shadow cabinets, this is the first such body to include two dames, Dame Priti Patel (Shadow Foreign Secretary) and Dame Rebecca Harris (Opposition Chief Whip). Rishi Sunak’s interim shadow cabinet included two knights, Sir Oliver Dowden (Deputy Leader of the Opposition) and Sir Jeremy Wright (Shadow Attorney General).

Badenoch’s team is dominated by Oxbridge graduates (though she herself is not one). The 25 members include 10 Oxford alumni and four Cambridge graduates, in addition to one each from the University of Sussex, the London School of Economics, the University of Durham, Keele University, Swansea University, the University of Nottingham, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Manchester. Two, Kevin Hollinrake and Stuart Andrew, are not graduates, although the former began a physics degree at Sheffield City Polytechnic. The new shadow cabinet only includes one armed forces veteran, Shadow Scottish Secretary Andrew Bowie, who served in the Royal Navy for three years.

As befits the Conservative Party’s reduced strength in the House of Commons, Badenoch’s shadow cabinet is relatively small at 25. Rishi Sunak had 29 members, while Sir Keir Starmer’s top team fluctuated between 31 and 34. Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet topped out at an absurdly large 37. David Cameron’s last shadow cabinet, the most recent non-interim Conservative shadow cabinet, had 34 members.

There has been some anxious (or faux-anxious) commentary on the lack of substantial and independently influential figures in the new shadow cabinet. To an extent this is a function of the departure through retirement or electoral defeat of 16 members of the outgoing cabinet in July 2024. In addition, Sunak was always tipped to step down after the election, and the additional loss of Sir Oliver Dowden, Jeremy Hunt and Andrew Mitchell was anticipated.

More surprising has been the decision of James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat to return to the backbenches. It is always difficult for defeated leadership candidates to know how to react to the victory of their rival. Kemi Badenoch had said she hoped to find room for all of the other runners, and indeed Dame Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Robert Jenrick have all been given important roles (even if there were, supposedly, some negotiations over the eventual brief for the last). Cleverly explained to The Financial Times that he felt “liberated” by leaving office and having no frontbench or party duties for the first time since 2018. “I’m not particularly in the mood to be boxed back into a narrow band again.” In Tugendhat’s case, it is reported that he was not offered any specific role, pre-empting any calculations by telling the Leader of the Opposition’s Office he did not want a place in the shadow cabinet.

Of course it is very early in the Parliament. Both Cleverly and Tugendhat could be recalled in a year or so if they were willing and if Badenoch wanted them. At the same time, Cleverly has been linked with a bid for Mayor of London in 2028: he was born raised and educated in the capital, spent eight years as a member of the London Assembly and led the Conservative group there in 2011-12. As a straightforward, charismatic and able communicator, he would be a strong candidate for such a personalised campaign, and the Labour government might by the time of the mayor election be struggling with mid-term unpopularity. Tugendhat’s future is more difficult to discern. While in some ways he is enormously accomplished and impressive, it is worth remembering that he has only held one government position, Minister for Security at the Home Office, before which he was Chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. It means his political pedigree is deep but narrow, and he may relish the opportunity for a year or two to explore other policy areas.

Leaving on a jet plane—or not

The Financial Times reports that the hardy perennial of a third runway at Heathrow Airport has returned to the political agenda and is dividing opinion in the cabinet. The government’s official line is that it is “open-minded” on the issue but that construction of a third runway would need to satisfy four tests: delivering growth across the country, meeting climate obligations, complying with air pollution restrictions and mitigating noise considerations. Ed Miliband, the Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary, is said to oppose expansion, and both he and Anneliese Dodds, the former Shadow Chancellor who is now Minister of State for Development, voted against a third runway in 2018. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has also long opposed the idea. By contrast, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in June:

I have nothing against expanding airport capacity. I want Heathrow to be that European hub for travel. We would need to look at all the evidence including around the environment, but you know I back our airports.

For all my vehement instincts against dirigisme and state intervention in the economy, and the fact that the words “industrial strategy” make me twitch like Herbert Lom’s Chief Inspector Dreyfus, I said in my City AM column in September that the government needs a coherent view on airport expansion. Because there are competing drivers, it is all too easy for stasis to prevail, and, although there are no easy answers, ministers should engage with the various issues and form a view.

An absence of that determination seems to be holding sway over Heathrow. The Financial Times summed up the paradox:

The airport’s bosses are unlikely to formally begin the costly planning process for a new runway without knowing ministers would support it. But ministers said they were waiting for Heathrow to trigger that process before making a firm decision.

There may well be a compelling case against allowing the construction of a third runway, or unanswerable reasons in its favour. But the worst outcome of all would be to avoid making a decision and let the case fall by default. Heathrow’s management is formally committed to expansion, but this year there have been changes in ownership at Heathrow Airport Holdings: Spanish infrastructure giant Ferrovial announced last November that it would sell its 25 per cent stake in the airport management to French private equity fund Ardian (15 per cent) and Saudi Arabia’s huge sovereign wealth vehicle the Public Investment Fund (10 per cent).

According to The Financial Times, Heathrow management will shortly submit its first expansion proposal since the Covid-19 pandemic, and it will not include plans for a third runway at this point. Building an additional runway was first mooted on economic grounds by the Labour government in 2003 in the White Paper The Future of Air Transport. After a public consultation, Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons in January 2009 that the government supported the construction of a new runway.

A third runway is forecast to create up to 8,000 new on-site jobs by 2030 and will provide further employment benefits to the surrounding area. Its construction alone would provide up to 60,000 jobs. But, more significantly for businesses across the United Kingdom, Heathrow is the only hub airport—it is our most important international gateway. It serves destinations that none of our other airports serve, and it provides more frequent services to key international destinations such as Mumbai and Beijing. It connects us to the growth markets of the future—essential for every great trading nation. In doing so, it benefits every region of the United Kingdom. But Heathrow is now operating at around 99 per cent of its maximum capacity, leading to delays and constraints on future economic growth. Heathrow is already losing ground to international hub airports in other competitor countries. This makes the UK a progressively less attractive place for mobile international businesses. Delays damage the efficiency of the airport, but they also cause unnecessary carbon dioxide emissions as up to four stacks of aircraft circle London waiting to land. The Government remain convinced, therefore, that additional capacity at Heathrow is critical to this country’s long-term economic prosperity.

However, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition withdrew its support in May 2010 and the British Airports Authority (the forerunner of Heathrow Airport Holdings) reluctantly cancelled its plans. But in July 2015, the Airports Commission chaired by Sir Howard Davies, former Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, recommended that “a new runway in the South East is needed by 2030” and “the best answer is to expand Heathrow’s runway capacity”. The House of Commons endorsed the project in June 2018 but an alliance of four London boroughs, the Mayor of London and Greenpeace launched a judicial review of the government’s decision to approve construction.

The question of a third runway at Heathrow is important in its own right, but it is also a microcosm of the failings of the UK in undertaking major infrastructure projects. It is now more than 20 years since the idea of expanding Heathrow’s capacity was formally proposed, but subsequent governments have supported the idea then rejected it then supported it again. That kind of political inconsistency has caused delay, but so too has the ready recourse to litigation by judicial review. Now, in almost the worst of all possible worlds, we have a government which doesn’t even have a fixed view: some ministers see the economic opportunities of expanding Heathrow, while others find the negative environmental considerations compelling, so nothing is being done.

Ministers may be forced to act soon enough. In 2022, the Department for Transport published its most recent aviation strategy, Flightpath to the Future, which in turn drew on the 2018 consultation documents Beyond the horizon: The future of UK aviation and Aviation 2050: The future of UK aviation. It is now being briefed from Whitehall that Flightpath to the Future is “due for review”. The government has already approved the expansion of London City Airport, and £1.1 billion investment in Stansted Airport was announced at last month’s International Investment Summit. Heathrow, however, remains the most pressing project, and decisions cannot be ducked forever if ministers are serious about facilitating economic growth.

Has irony died?

The Times reports that the Prime Minister has signed off on an updated version of the Ministerial Code (this version dates from December 2022), the guidelines which govern integrity and propriety for members of the government. The new text has yet to be published, which is unusually slow, but when it is released later this week, it will reportedly “instruct ministers to consider the public’s expectations when taking hospitality and gifts”, and the quarterly registration process for accepting hospitality will be replaced by a monthly one.

You might think that Sir Keir Starmer is bold, to put it mildly, in announcing tougher rules on accepting gifts and hospitality, given that he has received more than £100,000-worth of largesse from donors since 2019, more than any other Member of Parliament, and spent the summer dogged by adverse publicity relating to such gifts. The revisions to the Ministerial Code do not go as far as some had hoped, as they do not forbid ministers accepting donations. It will, however, empower the Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, currently Sir Laurie Magnus, to initiate investigations relating to the code rather than having to be instructed to do so by the Prime Minister.

The Labour Party made a great deal of issues of integrity and propriety before the general election. Its manifesto declared that “setting the highest of standards in public life” is “central to restoring trust between the public and politics”, and it made a number of specific commitments in this regard. It promised a “new independent Ethics and Integrity Commission, with its own independent Chair, to ensure probity in government”; the updating and tightening of rules on post-government employment; and to strengthen the powers of the Independent Adviser. Stirringly the manifesto summed up these reforms:

Labour will end the chaos of sleaze and division, turn the page, and reset politics to put it back in the service of working people.

Some action has been taken. The Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell, has overseen the establishment of the promised Modernisation Committee to examine proposals to reform the work and procedures of the House (although I have some scepticism on this body to which I will return at some point), and the publication of a revised Ministerial Code with more autonomy for the Independent Adviser will meet another pledge.

It is striking, however, that Downing Street has been so slow in revising the Ministerial Code (the existing version is not even 40 pages long). More surprising still is the apparent lack of any progress towards creating the promised Ethics and Integrity Commission. At the end of July, the Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould blandly assured Conservative MP John Glen:

The Government is a government of service and it is committed to restoring trust and confidence in public life. We will establish a new independent Ethics and Integrity Commission, with its own independent Chair. We will ensure that this Commission has the powers and remit necessary to fulfil its responsibilities and will provide an update in due course.

That answer says literally nothing we did not already know. Of course new governments must prioritise, but the whole issue of integrity and ethics was a strong part of Labour’s campaign. Sir Keir Starmer was Leader of the Opposition for more than four years before he became Prime Minister. Not for the first time, one wonders what he was doing, since preparation for government seems to have been light at best.

Fifty shades of Gray

There is a strange coda here to the saga of Sue Gray, the former Downing Street Chief of Staff. When she retired from the civil service in 2023 and sought permission from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments to take up the role of Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition, her application and ACOBA’s response touched on her specific future responsibilities. The committee noted:

The role of the Official Opposition is to question and scrutinise the work of government. Ms Gray said that while this role is within a party-political environment, her role will be leading preparations for the machinery of government… Ms Gray noted in her application that the Official Opposition (the employer) has not been in office for over a decade, with little direct experience of government and therefore is seeking someone with extensive knowledge of how government machinery works. The role will involve:

1. leading the preparation for government work

2. managing some staff

3. acting as counsel to the Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer MP in his constitutional role as Leader of the Official Opposition

4. It is also likely to involve areas such as: the structure and formation of government and civil service departments, Cabinet and its committees, ministerial appointments and other constitutional questions.

This is all prima facie sensible and there is no reason to doubt that Gray was being other than truthful in her submission to ACOBA. It is a fair and reasonable point that the Labour Party had been out of power for more than 13 years by the time she took up her role with Sir Keir Starmer, who himself had only been a Member of Parliament since 2015 (although it is worth recalling that as Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013 he was a permanent secretary-level civil servant). When she arrived in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office on 1 September 2023, only two shadow cabinet ministers, Yvette Cooper and Ed Miliband, had ever sat in a real cabinet, while two more, John Healey and Pat McFadden, had been “in attendance”. Another three, David Lammy, Baroness Smith of Basildon and Sir Alan Campbell, had held junior ministerial roles.

Gray seemed like the perfect antidote to this dearth of experience and Whitehall savvy. She had been a civil servant for more than 40 years, working in the Departments for Health, Transport and Work and Pensions before moving to the Cabinet Office, the junction box of Whitehall’s hidden wiring, serving as Director-General, Propriety and Ethics, and head of the Private Office Group, immediately subordinate to the Cabinet Secretary. From 2018 to 2021, she served as Permanent Secretary of the Department of Finance in the Northern Ireland Executive, and applied (unsuccessfully) to be head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service in 2020. Gray then returned to Whitehall as Second Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office, responsible for policy on the Union and constitutional matters, before moving across to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities but retaining responsibility for the Union.

The point of all of this is that Gray’s specialism was process and bureaucracy. Although she had worked in policy delivery in the 1990s, her later and most senior roles were predominantly inward-looking, managing ministerial private offices, policing ministers’ behaviour, ethics and propriety and dealing with matters touching on the constitution. If, like Starmer, you wanted a wise and experienced guide to show you how the machinery of government works in practice, you could hardly have designed a more apposite CV than Gray’s.

It is, therefore, deeply strange and ironic that many of the challenges the government. in general, the Prime Minister in particular and, by extension, Gray herself faced over the summer stemmed from carelessness or mishandling with regard to process: the unusual issuing of a Downing Street security pass to Lord Alli, the failure properly to register donations and hospitality, questions over the appointment of former advisers and donors to some key civil service roles, power struggles within Number 10 Downing Street, the slowness of ministerial appointments, relations between the civil service hierarchy and ministerial special advisers. All of these were at least in part technical matters, perhaps impenetrable or vexing for an outsider but the meat and drink of Gray’s later career.

In particular, as Gray had been in charge of the Propriety and Ethics team in the Cabinet Office for several years, it might have been imagined that she would have had detailed and well-informed plans for the Labour Party’s proposed Ethics and Integrity Commission. Getting this body off the ground would have been a very easy win in presentational terms, demonstrating to the largely inattentive public that it was an issue the government took very seriously, and by implication much more seriously than its predecessor. Even if not much more than a press release announcing its creation had emerged, it would have been superficially significant.

Instead, the government is almost 18 weeks old, significantly beyond the iconic and magical “first 100 days”, and the only visible progress is a bland and dismissive holding answer from a junior minister at the Cabinet Office. I don’t contend that this should have been an overriding priority for the government in the abstract, but, like so many petards by which the government has been hoisted, matters of integrity and honesty had been hammered home by Labour as campaigning issues. It is akin to the fiasco over the meaning of the phrase “working people” (about which I wrote at some length recently): if you train a spotlight on something—the party’s manifesto used the phrase “working people” 18 times—you cannot then display impatience or irritation when others challenge you on its detail.

When Sue Gray resigned from her Downing Street role last month, she spoke in her leaving statement of her role “leading the Labour Party’s preparation for government and kickstarting work on our programme for change”. This was echoed by the Defence Secretary, John Healey, who said she had “made a massive contribution to helping prepare Labour for government, we owe her a great deal”. Yet, even after Rishi Sunak gave slightly belated permission for Labour to begin access talks with civil servants in January 2024, it was reported that these had progressed slowly and reluctantly, supposedly because Gray did not think they were necessary and did not trust her former colleagues in the civil service not to leak details. When the issue of her preparing the Labour Party for government was raised, one anonymous adviser told the BBC sourly “if you ever see any evidence of our preparations for government, please let me know”.

We will have to wait for Sir Anthony Seldon or his spiritual and academic successor to unpick the story of Sue Gray’s 13 months as Keir Starmer’s helpmeet. But it is a striking and cautionary tale of an official being appointed with, to paraphrase Liam Neeson, “a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career”, to be applied to a specific and discrete task, and then failing, fatally in professional terms, at precisely that task. But then, as another screen legend, Robert De Niro, observed, there’s nothing more ironic or contradictory than life itself.