The Covid-19 Inquiry: a bibliography
Baroness Hallett's public inquiry has years to run but already we are hearing fascinating insights from inside Whitehall: here is some extra reading
This week’s sessions of the public inquiry into how the government handled the Covid-19 pandemic have already been fascinating and (in relative terms) dramatic in their insights into the way Whitehall was functioning, or often not functioning. We’ve had evidence from Martin Reynolds, Boris Johnson’s principal private secretary; Imran Shafi, private secretary for public services; Lee Cain, Downing Street director of communications; Dominic Cummings, senior adviser to the prime minister; Helen MacNamara, deputy secretary to the cabinet; and Professor David Halpern, CEO of the Behavioural Insights Team.
Although Cummings has been the stand-out witness, trenchant opinions and near-unprintable expletives flying hither and yon, each official has pulled back the curtain a little further on a ramshackle bureaucracy controlled by haphazard nihilists, showing us in ever more brutal terms how badly adrift the country’s leadership was at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Yesterday I tried to give a sense of the failures both committed and witnessed by Reynolds as the prime minister’s key administrative aide, and there is more material than any commentator—or satirist, or tragedian—could use in a dozen lifetimes, so I will come back to this inquiry again and again.
Neverthless, the issues at the heart of all of this week’s testimony—leadership, political will and administrative capability, bureaucrat institutions, historical patterns and influences, the role of official and partisan advisers, the “hidden wiring” of Whitehall—are subjects on which I’ve written a great deal in the past too. So I thought it might be helpful to distill and identify some of the work from my back catalogue and share a few thematically grouped links to allow the casual browser, of whom I am sure I have many, to see where I’m coming from, what I think, and how often I’ve got things wrong. You could, naturally, save yourself all of this anxiety and brow-furrowing by subscribing to this blog, and to the Authory site which brilliantly gathers and concentrates the writing I do both commercially and otherwise.
The cabinet and the Cabinet Office: the constitutional seat of collective government
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/07/whatever-happened-cabinet-government/
https://www.cityam.com/the-ship-of-the-state-is-the-only-vessel-that-leaks-right-from-the-very-top/
https://theideaslab.substack.com/p/the-business-of-government
https://theideaslab.substack.com/p/has-ppe-become-oxfords-black-sheep
The prime minister and his team in Downing Street
https://theideaslab.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-machismo-of-difficult
The dramatis personae: Boris Johnson, his personality and his advisers
https://www.cityam.com/introducing-the-new-cast-and-crew-of-downing-street/
https://www.cityam.com/the-long-shadow-of-dominic-cummings-might-just-start-an-invention-boom/
https://theideaslab.substack.com/p/the-power-of-the-happy-warrior
Managing the Covid-19 pandemic
https://theideaslab.substack.com/p/preparing-for-the-worst-when-the
The civil service, civil servants and broadening the talent pool for Whitehall
https://www.cityam.com/a-call-to-arms-where-will-we-find-tomorrow-bright-whitehall-leaders/
https://theideaslab.substack.com/p/do-ministers-need-to-be-subject-experts
https://theideaslab.substack.com/p/remaking-the-civil-service-while
I hope these might be of some interest, elucidation and assistance, or just a useful temperature check on what one reasonably well-informed observer of the machinery of government has made of these issues over the past four years. Other opinions are available, recollections may vary etc, and you know who the others are in this field. And if you have a question, or a killer fact, or a disagreement, well, you know, do say.