Reflections on politics of the week

Does development matter; and Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here's drink: I drink to thee

I shall be using the word “week” somewhat loosely here, but, as often before, a few observations to enter into the record before we move on and they are left as, to quote Ralph McTell, yesterday’s papers telling yesterday’s news. (Usually yesterday’s papers tell the news of the day before yesterday, but I will let Ralph have that one.)

Regard it as a development role

At the beginning of the month, I wrote about the resignation of Anneliese Dodds as Minister of State for Development at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on 28 February. Dodds, a former Shadow Chancellor whose star had waned somewhat, resigned in protest at Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to reduce the overseas aid budget substantially in order to fund increased spending on defence from 2027. It was an honourable act and a principled one, and she was courteous enough to wait until the Prime Minister had returned from his visit to Washington DC to announce it. Although there is widespread unhappiness in the Labour Party at the reduction of aid spending to provide more resources for the armed forces, I don’t think there will be a significant rebellion or threat to Starmer’s leadership; certainly I don’t think Dodds has the temperament, inclination or personality to instigate or lead such a protest.

My view, as I’ve expressed before, is that the development “establishment” has a tendency towards rather pious self-regard because of the “virtuous” nature of what it does. This can lead to a brittle intolerance of criticism and a belief that it should be, exceptionally, shielded from the realities of life which everyone else must face. Crudely, many of the arguments made against the Prime Minister’s decision could be reduced to “We don’t mind you spending more money on defence, and it may even be vital, but it should come from anywhere except the aid budget”. Extravagant claims are made about the efficacy of development assistance in preventing conflict and therefore in the long term saving money on defence spending, and I am not wholly persuaded that they are evidentially robust.

This exceptionalism can be seen in the fury which greeting Boris Johnson’s decision the merge the Blair-era Department for International Development (back) into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office where it had been from 1970 to 1974 and 1975 to 1997, mostly as the Overseas Development Administration and overseen by a separate, largely autonomous minister of state-rank political head. This was treated by some less as a machinery of government change and more as a moustache-twirling act of deliberate cruelty towards the world’s poor. Johnson may not have acted from especially noble or efficient motives, but it seemed lost on some of the more outraged that having control of overseas aid within the foreign ministry is not some outlandish power-grab but a normal arrangement of responsibilities practised by, for example, France, Canada, Australia, India, South Korea and Mexico.

Another demonstration was the fate of the House of Commons International Development Committee. Since there was no separate ministerial department for it to scrutinise after September 2020, administrative logic suggested it should have been wound up; after all, since 1979 we have had a system of select committees broadly mirroring the departmental structure of Whitehall and changed, sometimes with a time lag, to reflect machinery of government changes. Again, that is normal practice. But the chair of the committee, Labour MP Sarah Champion, who had only taken the position in January 2020, attacked the merger with vehemence, calling it a “land grab” and warning that “in the long run, we will have shot ourselves in the foot on the world stage”. By the end of the year, the government simply calculated that it was easier to leave the committee in existence, and it remains in the Standing Orders, an anomalous body “to scrutinise the work of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in respect of aid policy, and the expenditure of Official Development Assistance across UK government departments”.

If Sir Keir Starmer wanted to smooth feathers in the wake of the announcement that aid spending would be cut and of Dodds’s resignation, he could have replaced the departed minister with someone high-profile and popular in the development community. He could even have appointed Champion herself. His actual response has been telling. In fact, no new minister has been appointed at all. Instead, Baroness Chapman of Darlington, who was already Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State with responsibility for Latin America and the Caribbean, was promoted to Minister of State and placed in charge of international development while retaining her previous portfolio. It would not take an enormously cynical bent to conclude that she either must have been underemployed beforehand or is overworked now; it is hard to see a situation in which one of those statements is not true.

Chapman is the former MP for Darlington (2010-19) who was ennobled in 2021 and held a wide variety of opposition portfolios in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. She was chair of Sir Keir Starmer’s campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2020 and became Political Director in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office and his “closest aide” (by which I mean nothing more than that, pace the legal case against Tim Shipman). However, Starmer, perhaps reluctantly, removed her from her role in June 2021 after “months of friction with [Labour] MPs”; she was blamed for the party’s disastrous performance in the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021, which saw a triumphant victory by the Conservatives, and there had been “often fractious relationship with some shadow cabinet ministers”.

That said, she was not dropped entirely, rather being appointed to the Shadow Cabinet to shadow Lord Frost, at that point Minister of State for the Cabinet Office and a full member of cabinet, Minister for EU Relations, Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe and Co-Chair of the EU-UK Partnership Council. This was hardly a sinecure, and Frost’s senior position in government allowed her a larger opposition role than would normally be available to a peer.

It is unlikely anything will come of this but I think it is worth noting. Suffice to say, if I were Sir Keir Starmer and I sought to pour oil on troubled waters after being forced to make a painful spending decision which made many colleagues feel deeply uneasy, I don’t think I would have replaced the only minister to resign on principle with a very close ally of demonstrable unpopularity in some quarters, and asked her to carry out the role as an add-on to her existing duties. It seems nonchalant to the point of dismissive.

The graveyard of careers?

This week it was announced that Dame Antonia Romeo would become the new Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, succeeding Sir Matthew Rycroft who is stepping down after a gruelling five years as the department’s senior civil servant. Rycroft, a career diplomat, was previously Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Development (RIP, see above) from 2018 to 2020 and, as he remarked, has been a permanent secretary under 10 different secretaries of state and four cabinet secretaries.

Dame Antonia herself is a formidable and experienced figure. She was Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Trade from 2017 to 2021 before taking up her current position as Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice and Clerk of the Crown in Chancery. When Liz Truss became Prime Minister in September 2022, she appointed close ally Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor of the Exchequer and dismissed HM Treasury’s Permanent Secretary, the widely respected Sir Tom Scholar; Romeo was all but announced as his replacement in one of Whitehall’s top jobs until and very much Kwarteng’s choice, but early in October Truss decided against the move and instead appointed the Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Trade, James Bowler. With more than 20 years’ experience in HM Treasury, he was seen as a safe pair of hands compared to Romeo, who has never worked in the department.

Romeo had previously been tipped for even more senior office, regarded as a possible candidate for Secretary to the Cabinet and Head of the Civil Service when Sir Mark Sedwill was forced out by Boris Johnson in the summer of 2020. The job went instead to Simon Case, a surprise choice at only 41 years old and only recently having returned to Whitehall from a secondment as Private Secretary to HRH The Duke of Cambridge. However, when Case retired last year on grounds of ill health, Romeo was again a favourite to succeed him, and reached the final shortlist of four candidates alongside Sir Olly Robbins, Tamara Finkelstein and successful applicant Sir Chris Wormald.

As she takes on her third permanent secretary role, Romeo is only 50. Had she succeeded Sedwill as Cabinet Secretary in 2020 instead of Case, she would have been the youngest occupant of the role since Sir Norman Brook in 1947 and one of the youngest ever. Yet she is not quite a Whitehall lifer: when she graduated in philosophy, politics and economics from Brasenose College, Oxford (where her tutor had been Vernon Bogdanor, David Cameron’s tutor nearly a decade before), she joined the American-owned management consultancy Oliver Wyman and worked there for three years. After studying for an MSc in economics at the London School of Economics, Romeo applied for a one-year temporary contract as an economist in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, despite the fact that, as she admitted later, she “barely knew what the civil service did”.

That was 25 years ago. Romeo stayed in Whitehall and has held some significant and challenging roles, as Principal Private Secretary to the Lord Chancellor (first Lord Falconer of Thoroton then Jack Straw) in 2006-07, head of the powerful Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat in the Cabinet Office for nine months in 2015, and HM Consul General in New York and Director-General Economic and Commercial Affairs USA for UK Trade and Investment in 2016-17. That last dual role was described by The Times as:

not only heavyweight, but socially demanding, as she welcomed the world of American business, fashion and culture to the British Residence in the heart of Manhattan.

The job gave Romeo an unusually high public profile, especially on social media, for a civil servant not quite at the top grade of the organisation, and undoubtedly it earned her some suspicion among more staid colleagues. Not only did she have a high profile, she seemed to enjoy it.

There are a number of euphemisms, hints and code words deployed to paint pen portraits of Romeo: “candid”, “engaging”, “energetic”, “high-flying”, “stylish”, “fiercely clever”, “seemingly unstoppable”. Taken individually, none is explicitly condemnatory. Indeed, some could be interpreted as positive and desirable qualities. In combination, however, they hint at something less universally welcomed. They suggest that Romeo is overbearing, ambitious, self-regarding and selfish. When she was tipped to replace Scholar at the Treasury in 2022, the profile in The Times described her as “not one to be overshadowed, even by the ministers to whom she reports” and noted her “unapologetically ambitious personal style”. It also reported that “even her admirers call her ‘a massive self-publicist’”, and told of an unnamed cabinet minister who saw Romeo as “so full of energy that at times she seems like a frustrated politician”. It does not need a radical feminist attitude to discern some degree of sexism in her depiction.

There are alternative points of view. With Simon Case mired in the scandal of so-called “Partygate” in the last year or so of Boris Johnson’s premiership, it was noted that Romeo as a senior permanent secretary stepped up and tried to provide some of the professional leadership and collegiality which would normally be expected from the Cabinet Secretary. She was a strong and serious presence in the weekly meetings of all permanent secretaries known as “Wednesday Morning Colleagues”, and a fellow mandarin observed that “she’s got a hell of a lot of credibility so people listen to her”. A friend countered the accusation of excessive ambition by saying simply “she wants to get stuff done”.

Romeo leaves the Ministry of Justice after just over four years. It has been a turbulent period for the department: apart from the seven-week period of Liz Truss’s premiership, the Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor from September 2021 to April 2023 was the difficult, prickly and sometimes overbearing Dominic Raab, who resigned after an independent investigation found he had bullied staff. He described himself as “inquisitorial, direct, impatient and fastidious”, and Romeo had been forced to speak to him, without success, about his manner and behaviour. Raab disputed the findings of the investigation and felt victimised but fulfilled a commitment to resign if found guilty. He was certainly deeply unpopular with many officials at the Ministry of Justice, though it is impossible to rule out a degree of ideological antipathy towards his uncompromising, Brexit-supporting and sometimes brutally iconoclastic conception of the world.

In policy terms, the Ministry of Justice has had to manage a succession of crises over condition in prisons, overcrowding and controversial decisions over prisoner release. Romeo’s reputation does not seem to have suffered unduly, partly because HM Prison and Probation Service is an executive agency rather than under the MoJ’s immediate and direct control, and partly because the roots of its problems are so widely accepted as lying in the inexplicable Chris Grayling’s privatisation of the probation system and hardline but incompetent policies on prisoner management. It is useful to have a scapegoat, and avatars of pig-headed and arrogant lack of ability do not come much more explicit than Grayling.

In transferring to the Home Office, Romeo is taking on an even greater challenge. In 2022, I wrote about the department’s reputation as a “graveyard of careers” for ministers; its responsibilities including law and order, counter-terrorism, borders and immigration and identity, passports and visas contain a number of areas in which Whitehall is essentially supervisory and reactive. It can be very difficult for the Home Office to try to get ahead of the curve on policy and avoid all its energies being consumed by localised firefighting (sometimes literally).

For example, the Metropolitan Police Service is accountable primarily to the Mayor of London through the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, but it has a secondary degree of accountability to the Home Office. This implies a degree of shared responsibility, and eyes will quickly turn to the Home Office when there is a serious crime, major public disorder, a terrorist event or (worryingly frequently in recent times) misconduct or criminal behaviour by police officers. At the same time, the police are operationally independent of government, a principle stressed repeatedly, and officers must be regarded as impartial in the discharge of their duties. This can leave the Home Office blamed for mistakes and disasters but without the powers to have foreseen, mitigated or prevented them.

Romeo is not the first female Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. Dame Helen Ghosh managed the department for almost two years in 2011-12, and Helen Kilpatrick, Director General Finance and Corporate Services Group, held the position on an acting basis from Ghosh’s departure in November 2012 to the appointment of Sir Mark Sedwill in February 2013. Nor will Romeo’s pairing with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper be an unprecedented double act, as both Ghosh and Kilpatrick served during Theresa May’s long tenure as Home Secretary (2010-16). Indeed, despite the department’s “tough” set of ministerial responsibilities, six of the last 10 Home Secretaries including the incumbent have been women, in office for 15 of the last 18 years.

The Home Office’s overwhelming priority is the management of everything related to immigration, now regularly one of the electorate’s most important concerns. Cooper announced almost as soon as she was appointed Home Secretary the creation of a Border Security Command, as promised in the Labour Party’s manifesto. It is intended to:

provide strategic direction to work across agencies, drawing together the work of the National Crime Agency (NCA), intelligence agencies, police, Immigration Enforcement and Border Force, to better protect our borders and go after the smuggling gangs facilitating small boat crossings.

In September last year, Martin Hewitt, a one-time Royal Artillery officer, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and former Chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, was appointed as Border Security Commander, reporting directly to the Home Secretary. However, the organisation is in its infancy, and will not be on a statutory footing until the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, currently in its Committee Stage in the House of Commons, passes into law. What is clear so far is that the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats has risen by. more than a quarter since Labour came to office, which is a serious political embarrassment.

Another major challenge facing the Home Office is the backlog of asylum claims awaiting an initial decision, currently at almost 100,000. This is a complicated and multifaceted problem involving various different pieces of legislation and a variety of categories of asylum seekers. Progress has been slow, and the government’s (politically understandable) habit of blaming the previous administration is increasingly time-limited and wearing thin. It is additionally difficult to manage the backlog given that the number of new asylum claimants is at a record high.

The Home Office is never less than a bed of nails, but those nails are especially sharp and piercing at the moment. The government is failing on several of its promises and there is no obvious change imminent. Dame Antonia Romeo faces a daunting prospect in managing the Home Office’s 40,000 employees and £20 billion budget, and she must address policy issues which are among the most important and emotive to voters. She must work closely with a Home Secretary in Yvette Cooper who is undoubtedly able, hard-working and on top of her brief, but cautious, staid and chilly. Cooper finds it impossible to form an emotional connection with the public, and when her brief includes such sensitive subjects as murder, rape, violence against women and girls, terrorism and child sexual abuse this can make her, and by extension the government, seem distant and technocratic. Romeo is cut from very different cloth, but it is not the role of a permanent secretary to emote.

If Romeo has already missed out on the role of Cabinet Secretary twice, it is not a closed book. She is six years younger than Sir Chris Wormald and could be a leading candidate to succeed him in four years’ time or so. If she still has ambitions to run the civil service—and it would seem odd if she did not—then she will know that her new position is, to use a terrible cliché, make-or-break. If she can prove a success as Permanent Secretary at the Home Office and make a positive impact on that most grindingly challenging and high-profile of departments, she will surely be unstoppable. Three of her predecessors (Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, Lord Wilson of Dinton and Lord Sedwill) went on to be Cabinet Secretary, another, Sir David Omand, became Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office and yet another, Sir John Gieve, went on to be Deputy Governor for Financial Stability of the Bank of England.

If Romeo is truly as ambitious as her critics (and friends) suggest, she might look at another predecessor, Sir John Anderson, who was Permanent Secretary from 1922 to 1932. After his tenure at the Home Office, he served as Governor of Bengal, MP for the Combined Scottish Universities, Lord Privy Seal, Home Secretary, Lord President of the Council and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was created Viscount Waverley in 1952. In January 1945, Winston Churchill had written to King George VI advising the sovereign that, in the event of his (Churchill’s) death and that of his heir apparent, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, he should invite Sir John Anderson to become Prime Minister. Now that would be ambitious.