Starmer gives Jonathan Powell a second act

Tony Blair's indispensable chief of staff has been appointed as National Security Adviser but the role seems to have changed without any announcements

It was in late August that Downing Street surprised Whitehall observers by revealing that the incoming National Security Adviser, General Gwyn Jenkins, would not be taking up the position after all. The senior Royal Marines officer, previously Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, had been selected for the role by Rishi Sunak in April, and it was planned that he would succeed Sir Tim Barrow when the latter was formally unveiled as Ambassador to the United States. But that choreography began to unravel within a week of July’s general election, when it was briefed to the media that Barrow would not be going to Washington after all, and that Sir Keir Starmer wanted to delay a choice of envoy until the result of the presidential election on 5 November was known.

There were rumours surrounding the cancellation of Jenkins’s appointment that he had blocked the investigation of illegal actions by members of the SAS when he was commanding officer of the Special Boat Service, while some of the more condescending members of the Diplomatic Service suggested that a soldier could not possibly carry out the responsibilities of National Security Adviser and it ought to revert to the Foreign Office mandarinate. Starmer claimed at the time that he was re-opening the application and appointment process, and it was even put about that Jenkins could re-apply if he was so minded.

I wrote in The Spectator that the Prime Minister’s refusal to give any more details about the decision was insupportable, and regretted that Jenkins would not be assuming the post. I also rejected the argument that a soldier would not be suitable to be National Security Adviser, and explored what qualities a successful candidate might need. I still think it is wrong to regard the post as a Foreign Office perquisite and there should be a more imaginative discussion about the future of the job to maximise available talent and experience, as well as provide advice to the Prime Minister on the broadest basis possible.

Last week, Starmer then caught most of the commentariat by surprise when Downing Street revealed that Jonathan Powell, Downing Street Chief of Staff for the whole decade of Sir Tony Blair’s premiership, would be taking up the role. It was only two. months since Powell had been recruited as the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for negotiations between the UK and Mauritius on the exercise of sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)/Chagos Archipelago. That process had ended with an agreement between Britain and Mauritius that the United Kingdom would renounce its sovereignty over the BIOT, including the joint military facility at Diego Garcia.

Powell has many qualities to recommend him for an advisory post of international relations and national security. He spent 16 years in the Diplomatic Service, working in Lisbon, Stockholm, Vienna and as First Secretary (Political) in the British Embassy in Washington DC, as well as dealing with the negotiations to hand Hong Kong over to the Chinese and to re-unite West and East Germany. Having previously declined the offer, in 1995 he agreed to join the Leader of the Opposition’s Office as Blair’s chief of staff—the two had met when Blair, as Shadow Home Secretary, and Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown had visited Washington in early 1993 and Powell, in his embassy capacity, had arranged for them to meet the newly inaugurated President Bill Clinton.

When the Labour Party won a landslide victory at the general election of May 1997, Blair took Powell with him into Downing Street to carry out the new role of Chief of Staff. A form of the job had been carried out on an unpaid and latterly part-time basis from 1979 to 1985 by retail executive David Wolfson (later Lord Wolfson of Sunningdale), but control of the Prime Minister’s immediate staff had traditionally fallen to the Principal Private Secretary, a civil servant. Powell was appointed as a special adviser but exceptionally, under the terms of the Civil Service (Amendment) Order in Council 1997, was authorised to give instructions to civil servants, as was the new Downing Street Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell.

Powell remained in post as Chief of Staff for the whole 10 years of Blair’s tenure as Prime Minister; only Gordon Brown, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, could make a similar claim. During that period, he was one of Blair’s closest and most influential advisers on a range of issues. He was instrumental in managing and sustaining the Northern Ireland peace process which culminated in the Belfast Agreement of April 1998, championed the government’s policy of liberal interventionism including military action in the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and shortly after he left his role, The Guardian described Powell as “at the heart of all [Blair’s] key foreign policy initiatives”.

Once he left Downing Street, Powell continued to work in international affairs and conflict resolution in a private sector capacity. In 2011, he founded Inter Mediate, a charity focusing on negotiation and mediation in international conflicts, and served for a time as a consultant to Tony Blair Associates, the former Prime Minister’s strategic advisory practice. In May 2014, David Cameron appointed Powell as Special Envoy to the Libyan Transition in an attempt to foster dialogue between competing parties in the Libyan civil war, although he was unable to make much headway in challenging conditions.

I do not suggest that Powell is unqualified or poorly prepared to be National Security Adviser. That is not to say I have agreed with his stance on every issue—I am deeply sceptical of the agreement he negotiated with Mauritius over the British Indian Ocean Territory—and indeed in October last year I wrote a critique of an article Powell had written in The New Statesman on Britain’s place in the world. Nevertheless, he had a wealth of experience, a reputation for extremely deft management of policy and personnel and is clearly, to employ a phrase I am coming to hate, one of the “grown-ups in the room”. Whether he is a better choice than General Gwyn Jenkins would have been is imponderable but he is of a comparable fighting weight, albeit with a different set of skills and background.

I also happen not to agree with the Opposition’s initial reaction to the Powell’s appointment, that “it is disappointing the government have appointed another Labour apparatchik to a senior role, sidelining an experienced general”. As the Official Opposition, the Conservatives have a need to take a sharply political approach, which is fine, but I don’t and so I haven’t. I think “Labour apparatchik” is a rather reductive characterisation of Powell, and, while I regarded Jenkins as potentially a promising candidate for the role of National Security Adviser, I reject a simple equivalence between Powell as an “apparatchik” and Jenkins as “an experienced general”. The nature of the job makes it more complicated than that.

However, there are several aspects of the choice of Powell which need at least to be explained by the government. A technical, administrative one is the appointment process: did Powell apply for the role through in the normal way that the Prime Minister indicated in September was being re-opened, or was he approached by the government and appointed directly? If he was approached, when and why was the decision made to abandon the standard process? Were there other applicants? What kind of selection, if any, was Powell subject to? I do not in principle object to the idea, for such a sensitive and important role as that of National Security Adviser, of the Prime Minister choosing a candidate he or she prefers without any significant open application process, but if that is how the post is to be filled, the government needs to state that openly and honestly. In essence, we need to understand the timeline of events between the initial decision that Jenkins’s appointment would not go ahead as planned, and the appointment of Powell.

More broadly, Powell’s appointment will change the role of the National Security Adviser very substantially from the one that was conceived when it was set up by David Cameron in 2010. The first occupant was Sir Peter Ricketts (now Lord Ricketts), who moved across from being Permanent Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and it has been a civil service post since then, usually held by members of the Diplomatic Service. For Powell to carry out the role as a special adviser has a number of consequences, none of which is in principle wrong or harmful, but none of which has, so far as I am aware, been addressed to any substantial degree by the government or by the Prime Minister.

As a special adviser, Powell will not be able to manage or give instructions to civil servants. Although he was given that authority on an exceptional basis in 1997, it is no longer the case, and people who worked with or near him to whom I have spoken all seem to confirm that, even when he was Chief of Staff, the authority was never formally invoked, because there was no need. As National Security Adviser, however, he will not be able to direct the heads of the intelligence agencies—the Director General of the Security Service (MI5), the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) and the Director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)—nor will he be able to manage the Deputy National Security Advisers, of whom there are currently two, Dame Sarah MacIntosh and Matt Collins.

The official announcement of Powell’s appointment also stated that he will be “based in No10 Downing Street”. This is a seemingly minor point, but that presumably indicates that he will not be based in the adjoining Cabinet Office, where the National Security Secretariat (NSS) is located. This unit of around 200 officials had previously supported and been run by the National Security Adviser, but of course Powell as a special adviser would not be able to exercise that role anyway. Equally, he will not be able to act as secretary to the National Security Council, one of the National Security Adviser’s long-standing functions, but will have to attend the NSC in his own right. These duties will still have to be carried out, of course, and it seems likely that, at least formally, the intelligence chiefs and the Deputy National Security Advisers, as well as the NSS, will report to the Cabinet Secretary (the process to find a successor to Simon Case is currently underway).

To some extent, therefore, we are seeing a return to the time under Theresa May and Boris Johnson from October 2018 to September 2020 when the roles of Cabinet Secretary and National Security Adviser were temporarily and, I think, unsatisfactorily) combined by Sir Mark Sedwill (now Lord Sedwill). That was a recreation of the situation which existed before 2010, when intelligence and security matters from an official perspective fell within the purview of the Cabinet Secretary, and which over-concentration of power and burden the creation of the post of National Security Adviser was intended in part to address. Powell will also not be able to oversee the Single Intelligence Account, the budget from which MI5, SIS and GCHQ are funded, and, again, one would imagine that the Cabinet Secretary will act as accounting officer as was the case before 2010.

This suggests a fundamental question: what is Powell actually going to do? What is his role? The government has provided no detail so we are forced to infer and read between the lines, but it would seem that he will be a much more high-level, policy-focused prime ministerial adviser, essentially a courtier to the Prime Minister (I do not use the word in a derogatory sense) rather than a senior government official with an independent power base and a substantial support staff. He is, by analogy, much more the Earl of Leicester to Sir Keir Starmer’s Elizabeth I than he is the Lord Burghley (which is not to suggest Powell and Starmer are conducting a clandestine love affair).

At the risk of repeating myself, there is nothing wrong with this shift in emphasis. Prime ministers have always had and often benefit from personal advisers: Sir Horace Wilson, who advised Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain from 1935 to 1939 and one of the chief architects of appeasement; Professor Frederick Lindemann, later Viscount Cherwell, who was the government’s chief scientific adviser (1940-42) then Paymaster General (1942-45) but influenced Winston Churchill in much broader ways and saw him almost daily during the Second World War; Thomas Balogh, economic adviser to the cabinet and to Harold Wilson from 1964 to 1968; Sir Alan Walters, Chief Economic Adviser to Margaret Thatcher from 1981 to 1983 and again briefly in 1989, a powerful exponent of monetarism.

If the National Security Adviser is to become a much more intimate and political role, more closely tied to the Prime Minister, that is a perfectly defensible reform. Of course there are consequences. For it to become the preserve of special advisers and political appointees would make it difficult for the civil service to recapture, and inevitably changes the skill set required and the likely experience available: bluntly, it means fishing for candidates in a subtly different pond. It also raises an expectation that the occupant of the role will change, if not necessarily with individual prime ministers, then certainly with a new party of government. While not unknown, it is extremely rare for explicitly political roles to bridge that kind of gap.

Removing the National Security Adviser from a structured hierarchy and freeing it of management and financial responsibility also blurs the edges of the role. If it becomes purely advisory and more heavily dependent on the incumbent’s personal relationshop with the Prime Minister, it makes the relationship of the job to others in Whitehall, and especially in Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, less straightforward and clear-cut. The National Security Adviser would obviously lack the formal authority and wider political heft, as well as the bureaucratic support, of the Foreign Secretary, but he or she would have a wider portfolio than just foreign affairs, and much more frequent and direct contact with the Prime Minister. The same would be true of the Defence Secretary’s interactions.

Would the Cabinet Secretary, who is the Prime Minister’s most senior official adviser, be expected to exercise a self-denying ordinance on matters of “national security”, yielding to a special adviser? Or might he or she offer an alternative perspective, built on a career in the civil service (and, traditionally, one spent in the home civil service rather than the Diplomatic Service)? Would it diminish the policy influence of the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs? (A post held, ironically, for eight years under Margaret Thatcher and John Major by Powell’s elder brother Charles, now Lord Powell of Bayswater, who developed a powerful and, some felt, improper influence for a civil servant.) If the Foreign Affairs Private Secretary, constrained as an impartial official and possibly junior to the National Security Adviser, no longer had any substantial scope for policy advice, would the role be reduced to an administrative one, with predictable consequences for its desirability and the calibre of applicants?

The creation of the National Security Council and Adviser in 2010 has generally been regarded as a positive development in machinery of government terms. As Dr Joe Devanny wrote in a recent survey of the changes for King’s College London:

The NSC has been particularly prized by the UK’s intelligence agencies, because it regularised the connection between intelligence and policy… [it] offers any Prime Minister a regular mechanism for ensuring all line departments and agencies work together on the government’s top priorities and to implement its national security strategy (or equivalent).

It is not perfect, and it is highly dependent (as is all machinery of government, in the end) on the intentions and diligence of the Prime Minister; Boris Johnson neglected the NSC, to the extent that it did not meet at all between January and July 2020, Liz Truss abolished it during her fleeting 49-day premiership in September-October 2022, and Rishi Sunak, oddly uninterested in foreign affairs in comparison with most prime ministers, did not convene it as often as its creators had originally been intended.

There have been criticisms that the NSC is dominated by presentations by officials and does not give ministers enough time to discuss issues and interrogate the expert advice provided. Rory Stewart, who was an NSC member when he was International Development Secretary in 2019, was even more critical: “Nobody on the National Security Council wants to tell you what a total joke the National Security Council is”. It is also not true to imagine that the NSC sprang from nowhere under the coalition government, as there had been developments in the central apparatus of national security in the later years of the Labour government.

Nevertheless, I share the general view that setting up the National Security Council/Adviser/Secretariat was a step forward, even if only a process rather than a destination. It is entirely in order for a new prime minister entering government for the first time, as Sir Keir Starmer has done, to review the way advice is provided and decisions are made at the centre. Indeed, Starmer seemed more likely than many premiers to examine the machinery of government systematically and carefully: he had been a permanent secretary-level civil servant as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013 and was familiar with Whitehall from the inside; the Labour Party’s manifesto nodded towards changing the institutions and processes of administration in its section on “mission-driven government”; and Starmer’s Chief of Staff, former Cabinet Office official Sue Gray, had been hired partly to prepare the Opposition for government based on her more than 40 years’ experience of the civil service.

Despite that, it seems—unless more information comes to light or more questions are answered—that Starmer has made significant changes to the role of the National Security Adviser with Powell’s appointment. What is not clear is if these changes have been planned and tested with a logical goal and introduced without fanfare at the same time as Jonathan Powell has accepted the job, or if they have simply come into being by accident, as a consequence of Powell being selected. If they are largely unforeseen and unintended consequences, that is a serious error on the part of Starmer and his colleagues and advisers. At the moment, however, we have too little information to make a judgement. But the questions should be answered.