What is the national security adviser for?

There were suggestions that General Gwyn Jenkins was not the right man for the job because of his military background: but what attributes are desirable?

The current storm

Extraordinary news emerged this week that Sir Keir Starmer has cancelled General Gwyn Jenkins’s imminent assumption of the role of national security adviser, to which he was appointed by Rishi Sunak in April, and is re-running the recruitment process. Downing Street sources have indicated that Jenkins can apply again but no-one seriously thinks he would be successful: the prime minister has clearly decided he does not want him in that post.

We don’t know why. I wrote in The Spectator on Tuesday that Starmer is displaying astonishing arrogance on this matter, saying only that “there will be an open and transparent process, and no I’m not going to publicly discuss individual appointments”. I don’t think that’s anywhere close to good enough for such an extraordinary decision. Let’s be clear here: a four-star Royal Marines general has effectively been sacked, as he is now not taking up a role to which he was appointed through normal processes, and his previous role, as vice-chief of the Defence Staff, was filled by General Dame Sharon Nesmith in June. Is that the end of Jenkins’s public career? There is nowhere obvious for him to go.

In the absence of any comment from Downing Street, there has been, of course, a great deal of speculation. The Guardian, which broke the story, reports that it is “a move that senior civil servants fear is designed to pave the way for a more politically loyal candidate”, with one official commenting “This looks like another part of the grab for power by Keir Starmer and Sue Gray”. The Times points to accusations that Jenkins, when commanding officer of the Special Boat Service (SBS), failed to alert the Royal Military Police to allegations of extrajudicial killings by members of the SAS. One social media user suggested that Jenkins fell out of favour because of “his work in Northern Ireland with 42 Commando”.

Meanwhile, Dr Jack Watling, senior research fellow in land warfare at RUSI, proposed more institutional issues, which I want to deal with. He also touched on the complaint the Labour Party raised before the general election, of “the appointments having come shortly before the election and thus pre-empting their ability to consider the candidates”. This argument was loudly aired in April, with the then-opposition accusing the government of “needlessly rushing through vital diplomatic appointments” and complaining that they were not consulted. This is an absolute nonsense. As I wrote here in May, there is no prohibition on governments facing possible or even likely election defeat making senior appointments, and prime ministers of both parties have done so.

The two institutional points Watling mentions are these:

• “There is a view that the NSA is very close to the PM but that military advice should come from CDS, and that having 2 mil advisers will muddle things.”

• “NSA should have security experience and a range of other areas of expertise complimentary to defence.”

These are broader than personal factors relating to Jenkins, and should not be dismissed out of hand. They relate to the role of the national security adviser overall and how he (it has so far only been a man) fits into Whitehall’s security architecture. Using that as a starting point, therefore, I want to look at what the national security adviser’s role should be and what it is for.

The (short) history of the role

The post of national security adviser was created by David Cameron in 2010. There had been several moves towards creating a more integrated approach to “national security”, encompassing foreign policy, defence, counter-terrorism and other issues, and in March 2008 Gordon Brown’s government published the first National Security Strategy, subtitled Security in an interdependent world. This document referred to a “diverse though interconnected set of security challenges and underlying drivers, both immediately and in the longer term, to safeguard the nation, its citizens, our prosperity and our way of life”. Brown had established a Ministerial Committee on National Security, International Relations and Development (NSID) as a sub-committee of the cabinet, and from 2007 to 2010 there was a degree of ministerial direction from Admiral Lord West of Spithead, a former First Sea Lord who was appointed parliamentary under-secretary of state for security and counter-terrorism st the Home Office as part of Brown’s “government of all the talents”.

Running in parallel to this, the Conservative opposition under David Cameron had been considering ways to join up government policy on national security. Shortly after he became leader of the opposition, he had created a number of policy groups, and as head of the National and International Security Policy Group he appointed former Foreign Office official Dame Pauline Neville-Jones. She had left the Diplomatic Service in 1996 in frustration, having been passed over, she believed, for the post of ambassador to France because of her sex; although she had served as political director, the second-highest London-based position in the department, once her departure seemed likely, a distinctively FCO-style briefing against her began. She was “difficult”, “acerbic”, “a bit outspoken” and “not absolutely a top-drawer brain, jolly good but more of a 2.1”. (Neville-Jones won a scholarship to read modern history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and was then a Harkness Fellow before joining the Diplomatic Service.)

Neville-Jones’s group produced a report entitled Security Issues: Interim policy paper, which contained two institutional recommendations for government. First, there should be a UK National Security Council, consciously modelled on its American counterpart, so that “national security doctrine would be laid down by Cabinet directive”. Second, there should be a cabinet-level minister for security, within the Home Office but looking after “the Security service, the Police, SOCA, immigration and border control, as well as many other agencies far from Ministerial oversight”, who:

could provide steady leadership and Ministerial oversight in security policy, strengthening the strategic direction of the department’s responsibilities as opposed to operational coordination which generally works well… [and] also increase public understanding of the threat, about which there remains widespread scepticism and, in a crisis, provide—under the Prime Minister whose authority should not be squandered—the authoritative government voice needed to ensure public confidence and reduce the danger of confusion.

The model of the chancellor of the Exchequer and the chief secretary to the Treasury was adduced as one in which a department had two ministers in cabinet. The report also noted that “for this to be a worthwhile innovation, the individual would have to be a senior figure”.

In 2007, Cameron nominated Neville-Jones for a peerage and she became shadow security minister, one of those strange opposition roles which does not have a direct equivalent in government but is a statement of a party’s intent. She had in effect written her own job description, and the proposals sketched out in the 2006 report were reiterated and refined in a green paper in January 2010, A Resilient Nation.

The National Security Council was established the day after David Cameron was appointed prime minister in May 2010. It is a cabinet committee, chaired by the prime minister, and was intended to meet weekly when Parliament was sitting, often on the same day as cabinet met in order to maximise ministerial attendance. The intention was that the council would receive one or two papers, with perhaps 30 minutes of debate and discussion after each. Its initial membership was as follows:

• Prime Minister: David Cameron

• Deputy Prime Minister: Nick Clegg

• Chancellor of the Exchequer: George Osborne

• Foreign Secretary: William Hague

• Home Secretary: Theresa May

• Defence Secretary: Liam Fox

• International Development Secretary: Andrew Mitchell

• Security and Counter-Terrorism Minister: Baroness Neville-Jones

Downing Street noted that “other Cabinet Ministers, including the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, will attend as required. The Chief of the Defence Staff, Heads of Intelligence Agencies and other senior officials will also attend as required.”

Neville-Jones had been appointed minister of state for security and counter-terrorism at the Home Office when Cameron had formed his government, but, contrary to her initial 2006 paper, she was not given full cabinet rank; she was not even placed in that halfway house of “also attending cabinet”, unlike some other ministers of state.

The National Security Council was supported by a senior Whitehall official, the national security adviser, who headed the National Security Secretariat based in the Cabinet Office. The first person to hold the job was a veteran Foreign Office mandarin, Sir Peter Ricketts. He had 36 years’ experience behind him and since 2006 had been permanent secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but his pedigree also included a short stint (2000-01) as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and three years (2003-06) as the UK permanent representative to NATO.

In his evidence to the Iraq Inquiry in 2011, Lord O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, described the role of national security adviser as:

someone who is kind of mimicking the Cabinet Secretary for a part of his work. So just like I prepare the agendas, make sure the papers are there, brief the Prime Minister for Cabinet, so immediately after Cabinet we go short break, and then we go into National Security Council.

There were many in Whitehall who regarded the innovation of the post of national security adviser as more significant than the National Security Council. The NSC is, after all, a kind of cabinet committee, a creature familiar to government, but the NSA was a new single point of contact for the prime minister with all forms of national security issues. When Ricketts was appointed, The Financial Times reported that the civil service had struggled to find a suitable candidate, and it was revealed a few months later that he did not intend to be in post for very long, seeing his job as essentially a transitional one overseeing the establishment of the new apparatus. Indeed, he stepped down at the end of 2011 and in January 2012 became ambassador to France.

There have been five substantive national security advisers since Ricketts departed. Three have come from mainstream Foreign Office backgrounds: Sir Kim Darroch (2012-15) had been UK permanent representative to the European Union, Sir Mark Lyall Grant (2015-17) was permanent representative to the United Nations prior to his appointment while Sir Tim Barrow (the incumbent since 2022) served as political director and second permanent secretary to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Sir Stephen Lovegrove (2021-22), the outlier, had been permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence for five years but also had an extensive private sector background before joining the civil service.

The complicated figure is Sir Mark Sedwill, who was national security adviser from April 2017 to September 2020. To an extent, he was another Diplomatic Service appointment, having served in the Foreign Office 1989-2006 and 2009-13. However, he had been drafted into the Home Office as international director of the UK Border Agency 2006-08, and in February 2013 he was asked to return as permanent secretary after Dame Helen Ghosh stepped down. Theresa May, as home secretary, praised his “wealth of experience and skills which will be invaluable as we continue to deliver vital reforms”, but it was extremely unusual for a career diplomat to be chosen as permanent secretary of another civil service department (although the current official head of the Home Office, Sir Matthew Rycroft, is also a Foreign Office veteran).

In April 2017, May, now prime minister, chose Sedwill to be her national security adviser. He was described as “one of her most trusted officials from her time as home secretary”, and was one of a number of appointments of former Home Office officials to other Whitehall posts. However, he was eminently qualified, and while he was mostly in the same diplomatic mould as his predecessors, his two stints at the Home Office in fact broadened his national security credentials.

In June 2018, the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, was forced to take leave of absence on medical grounds, having been diagnosed with cancer. Sedwill became acting cabinet secretary, but in October Heywood resigned completely, and would die within a fortnight. The prime minister appointed Sedwill to replace Heywood substantively, without the post of cabinet secretary even being advertised, and was said to be May’s “first and only choice”. Critically, however, he retained the role of national security adviser.

This “double-hatting” was widely criticised. The purpose of the NSA was, after all, to have an official whose job was to focus on national security issues, while as cabinet secretary Sedwill had not only to serve as the prime minister’s chief official adviser across the board but was also head of the Home Civil Service. There was a theory that the arrangement was only temporary, and that Olly Robbins, then the prime minister’s adviser on Europe and global issues but also one of the first deputy national security advisers (2010-14), responsible for intelligence, security and resilience, would eventually take over the role. As May’s chief adviser on Brexit, he had become very close to the prime minister and was valued and trusted. Downing Street was asked to confirm that Sedwill would only hold on to the role of national security adviser as a temporary measure, but the only response given was “He will continue as NSA”.

By 2019, it was clear that the arrangement was not temporary, and Sedwill told Civil Service World that it was “part of moves to make a success of Brexit” and central to his notion of a “Fusion Doctrine”.

It’s critically important that we bring together—fusion, as we call it in the national security community—all our national capabilities, including economic, security, social and the rest, with a genuine sense of teamwork across and beyond government. While leadership is about identifying the big ideas, it’s also about building a great team. I am strengthening the team around me in the cabinet secretariats, ensuring that they operate as a real team, rather than in specialist silos.

While Sedwill’s Fusion Doctrine had much to recommend it, combining the two roles still could not address the sheer workload. Either “national security” issues, however defined, were important and weighty enough to occupy a full-time senior civil servant, or they were not, and arguing that they were not would have been difficult.

The arrival of Boris Johnson as prime minister in July 2019 inevitably changed the dynamic, given Sedwill’s closeness to his predecessor. When Sedwill blocked a plan to have civil servants cost Labour Party spending commitments ahead of the 2019 general election, he made few friends in Johnson’s immediate circle, and the following June it was announced that he would step down from both his roles in September. There was a wider plan to restructure the government extensively and put more supporters of Brexit in key positions, while The Daily Telegraph described Sedwill as being seen by Downing Street as “too much of a Europhile and establishment figure to force through the reforms”.

The path not taken: a political appointment

Sedwill’s role as cabinet secretary and head of the civil service was taken by Simon Case, who for three months had been Downing Street permanent secretary but had recently been recalled from the Royal Household where he was acting as private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge. But the prime minister had announced that the new national security adviser would be David Frost, at that point his adviser on Europe and the chief negotiator of Task Force Europe in the Brexit talks with the European Commission. This had the potential to change everything.

Frost had, like all the other NSAs, been a diplomat, serving from 1987 to 2013; he had been ambassador to Denmark, director for strategy and policy planning at the FCO and then seconded to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills as director for Europe, trade, and international affairs. In that role he had been the United Kingdom’s most senior official on trade policy, but it was increasingly clear that his civil service career had reached a plateau, and in 2013 he left Whitehall to become CEO of the Scotch Whisky Association. Only three years later, however, he had returned in a different capacity when Boris Johnson, appointed foreign secretary by Theresa May, chose him as a special adviser. He served in that capacity until Johnson’s resignation in July 2018.

Boris Johnson liked familiar faces and people he felt he could trust. When he became prime minister in July 2019, he brought Frost back to be his adviser on Europe but also chief Brexit negotiator, effectively sidelining the secretary of state for exiting the European Union, Steve Barclay, whose department was then wound up in January 2020. But Frost was once again a special adviser, not a civil servant, and the idea of his becoming national security adviser was in Whitehall terms revolutionary. More so was the parallel announcement that Frost would become a peer. So he would be a special adviser and a member of the House of Lords, and would become NSA, creating a unique and anomalous position in government.

There were two criticisms of this proposal which unfortunately often became conflated, one institutional and one personal. The latter was that Frost had no substantial experience in national security or intelligence issues. Lord Ricketts, as the first holder of the post had now become, was frank. Frost had “never worked closely with the defence, security or intelligence communities. They each have a strong and distinctive culture and I fear he will struggle to win their full trust.” Theresa May criticised Frost in the House of Commons, saying he had “no proven expertise in national security”. Lord O’Donnell argued that Frost lacked “deep subject knowledge” and “hasn’t really had much of a background in national security”, while Lord West, the former security minister, said that Frost would not have been “high” on his list of candidates for the job.

Despite the protestations of the government—and from some people who should have known better—it was true that Frost lacked a significant, let alone impressive, pedigree in any kind of security issues. In a sense, though, his personal suitability and qualifications were secondary. Much more important was the status he would have in such a senior and sensitive role. Typically for Johnson’s premiership, the details do not seem to have been fully worked out. Michael Gove, at that point chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and in charge of the Cabinet Office, gave the proposal more coherence than it deserved.

The NSA is a relatively new position, but it is always an appointment for the Prime Minister of the day. The First Civil Service Commissioner has agreed that the position can be regarded as a political rather than necessarily a civil service appointment. While it is a unique role, David Frost’s status will be akin to that of a special envoy representing the UK abroad, speaking publicly and setting the agenda for policy making. He will not be a permanent secretary or a special adviser, and the civil service will support him in the same way as it supports any other political appointee: with objectivity, honesty, integrity and impartiality.

This was controversial enough, but Frost’s impending peerage was an additional complicating factor. Lord True, a Cabinet Office minister, told the House of Lords that Frost would “not [be] a Minister and will be accountable to Parliament in the usual way for officeholders—for example, appearing before Select Committees where necessary and appropriate”. However, he also admitted with uncertainty that “it is my understanding that he may be introduced as a Conservative Peer, but I cannot confirm that to your Lordships today”.

Former civil servants (and indeed special advisers) have often been awarded peerages, but for Frost to have held the role of national security adviser as an “envoy”, to use Gove’s term, and to be not only a peer but perhaps a Conservative peer would have driven a coach and four through every convention going, at least in peacetime. The difficulty was that the situation was a response to Boris Johnson’s desire to appoint someone he liked and was familiar with rather than a carefully crafted reform of Whitehall structures, and that was reflected in the chaos and confusion.

I wrote about the potential appointment of Frost in 2022 and described it as being “about mood, atmosphere, vibes. To place a political appointee in such a senior and sensitive role, dealing with the state’s darkest secrets, was as provocative as could be.” Boris Johnson and his de facto chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, were waging a kind of war against the civil service in which disruption and innovation were powerful weapons, and the choice of David Frost as national security adviser was at least in part serving that agenda.

There is a defensible intellectual argument in allowing the prime minister to make “political” appointments to some key roles with the occupants of which he or she will have to work intimately and daily. Dr Joe Devanny of King’s College London said when Sir Mark Sedwill was appointed that David Cameron had had a choice in 2010 of making the new national security adviser a minister, directly accountable to Parliament, or a special adviser. He suggested:

This would have formalised just such a deep connection between the prime minister and the NSA, separating the post from the presumption of more formal civil service procedures for appointment.

Devanny concluded that the third option chosen by Cameron, of the national security adviser being a regular civil servant, was probably correct, and that there were:

good reasons for Cameron’s decision to opt for career officials as NSAs, not least the need to operate effectively in the Whitehall context, for which the requisite skills and relationships are more likely to be held by career officials than outsiders.

Even if that is true, however, it does not invalidate other options. I conceded that a political appointment “would rob the post of its independence and its ability to give the prime minister unvarnished and sometimes unpalatable advice”, though I added that “I am unconvinced that only a member of the civil service has the odour of sanctity which allows this revered independence”. Indeed, my conclusion was that more flexibility was a good thing.

It would be a depressing irony if, at a time when the fashionable gossip is of opening up the civil service, engaging with the private sector and drawing on the opportunities presented by outside candidates, the selection for this one post, a very senior and absolutely critical one, were to move in the opposite direction and be reduced to a pool of a few middle-aged diplomats and maybe a senior Home Office civil servant. Let us be aware of what matters and what we can change or influence about public servants, and what is outside our control. Diversity is this too.

I still hold that judgement: if a prime minister wanted to change the post radically and bring in an explicitly political candidate, as has become normal if not universal for the Downing Street chief of staff, that could be accommodated with some changes to the current rules and would have a logic to it. But it would have to be done with absolute transparency, realism and negotiation, and none of those factors was present when Frost was nominated.

In the end, Frost did not take up the role. David Quarrey, deputy national security adviser, stepped into the breach until the end of 2020, and in January 2021 the prime minister affected to have changed his mind, instead appointing Frost UK representative for Brexit and international policy, a strange and nebulous role that did not last long; in March, his position was regularised as a politician when Johnson made him minister of state for the Cabinet Office, a full cabinet member and responsible for the domestic and international implications of Brexit.

Should the NSA demonstrate diversity?

In the most unintentional, chaotic and ham-fisted way, the attempt to make David Frost national security adviser opened up the wider question of what sort of person should occupy the role. Ricketts, Darroch, Lyall Grant and (to a large extent) Sedwill had all been Foreign Office men (as was Quarrey, who held the role ad interim). Boris Johnson’s eventual choice, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, was quite different. He had been permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence since March 2016, so was experienced in some aspects of national security, and before that had been permanent secretary at the Department for Energy and Climate Change, so his knowledge of how the upper echelons of Whitehall operated was extensive. Before that he had been chief executive of the Shareholder Executive (2007-13), the body which managed the government’s financial interest in state-owned enterprises with a view to commercial rather than political interests, but from 1990 to 2004 he had worked in the private sector in media and finance.

It is hard to argue that any of this was why Lovegrove was appointed, however. Although Johnson spoke of his “wealth of experience from across Whitehall and in national security”, it was very much focused in field, that of defence. Virtually no mention was made of his background beyond the Ministry of Defence. The Financial Times noted in passing that he was “originally appointed to the MoD to bring a financier’s focus to managing the defence budget, which was perceived as being out of control”, but the only person to attempt to pray his experience in aid was Ciaran Martin, former CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre, who said his time as the Department for Energy and Climate Change would prove “pretty useful” given the increasing prominence of energy security and climate change as a factor in geopolitics.

The fact that Downing Street made so little of Lovegrove’s differences from his predecessors was probably an accurate reflection of the fact that they were relatively unimportant. Lovegrove was a Plan B, a candidate to plug a gap when Johnson’s initial plan to appoint Frost proved unworkable. In any event, Johnson’s approach to the whole Whitehall architecture was very different from that of his predecessors, and characteristically lax: while the National Security Council had met weekly under Cameron and May, it did not meet at all between January and July 2020, and thereafter met only intermittently. Downing Street sources attributed this to the focus on the Covid-19 pandemic, but the rest of government could not and did not stop. The most likely conclusion is that it bored Johnson or that he disliked the format.

Lovegrove was removed by Liz Truss in September 2022 and given the new and hazy role of prime minister’s defence industrial adviser, and she replaced him with Sir Tim Barrow, who had been second permanent secretary at the FCDO while she was foreign secretary (2021-22) and one of her most trusted advisers: she was rumoured to have nicknamed him (affectionately) “Deep State”. But Barrow was a return to the Foreign Office mould of his predecessors before Lovegrove. It was as if the Johnson years were being smoothed away and forgotten as an unfortunate blip.

The most radical change in the role of national security adviser came this April, when Rishi Sunak chose General Gwyn Jenkins, then vice-chief of the Defence Staff, to replace Barrow later in the year. Jenkins was clearly in a very different category to all of his predecessors, a Royal Marines officer with experience in Special Forces who had served on active duty in Afghanistan. He had been deputy national security adviser for conflict, stability and defence from 2014 to 2017, so was familiar with the work of the National Security Council, and before that had spent two years as David Cameron’s military assistant, so he combined political nous with front-line military service.

Unlike with Lovegrove’s appointment, Jenkins’s background was advertised as an advantage. Sunak spoke of his “distinguished career in both the military and the heart of Government”, while the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, made very similar noises.

Gwyn brings a wealth of experience from both his distinguished career in the military and from his time spent working at the heart of government, including as Deputy National Security Adviser. This experience makes him excellently placed to lead the UK’s national security system and represent our interests overseas in these challenging times for global security.

Sunak told reporters “in an incredibly uncertain and increasingly dangerous world, it’s important the person doing this job has the requisite set of skills to provide advice to me and to help navigate that landscape”, and drew attention to Jenkins’s service in the Royal Marines. “It’s the first time we’ve had someone with a military background in that job and obviously he has worked in No. 10 as well so has that policy experience.” He added: “We need someone in that job who can blend a range of different skills together, diplomatic, intelligence, military operations.”

John Foreman, a former defence attaché writing in The Spectator, suggested that the choice was a reflection of a shift in emphasis and style: the “current government likes to view security through a harder, more realist lens than its predecessors, to the dismay of some—Jenkins’s appointment reflects that”.

Widely respected, softly spoken, he has a very particular set of skills acquired over a distinguished military career of consistently disrupting the status quo. He was the first Royal Marine to serve as director of the special forces. He was the first military officer to work as a deputy national security adviser, earning plaudits from his civilian seniors… Jenkins will have to decide how widely to cast his gaze; whether to be focused on traditional security, defence, development, and foreign policy, or to also include national resilience.

There were no doubt some eyebrows raised, perhaps even noses put out of joint, in Whitehall at the appointment of a military candidate. But there are two aspects to Jenkins’s selection, one personal, one institutional, which made it important and, I think, beneficial.

The first is that the national security agenda is currently dominated by defence-related issues and the use of hard power: the war in Ukraine and the supply of military aid to the Ukrainian armed forces, the ongoing campaign against Houthi militants in the Red Sea, potential conflict between Iran and Israel (aircraft from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus were involved in countering Iran’s drone and missile strikes on Israel in April). There is a strong political focus on the poor state of readiness of the armed forces and the need to increase defence spending. Under these circumstances, the choice of a national security adviser with a strong defence pedigree makes a good deal of sense.

The second broader point is that Jenkins’s appointment sent a signal about the future of the role. Choosing another diplomat, even one (like Sedwill) with experience outside the Foreign Office, would have reinforced the idea that the post of national security adviser was primarily a foreign policy one and effectively a possession of the Diplomatic Service, with Lovegrove written off as an expedient aberration. To view the role in those terms is defensible, but limited: it ignores the experience not only of the military but of the intelligence and security services and counter-terrorism experts. Jenkins was a signal that the government was open-minded on the CV required of someone doing this most critical and sensitive of jobs, and potentially widened the talent pool significantly.

No candidate will ever have substantial experience of every aspect of the national security adviser’s remit. You would need an archetype who had somehow crammed into 30 years or so high level roles in foreign policy, defence, homeland security, borders and immigration, intelligence, cyber security and more far-flung aspects like economic security and trade, energy security, climate change and migration and international finance. Such a man or woman does not exist. There will always be a balancing act, choosing among different strengths, and at this point in time, a deep knowledge of military matters seems entirely appropriate and beneficial.

Confusion of command?

The other danger which Jack Watling articulated was that of potential confusion on command: “military advice should come from CDS, and that having 2 mil advisers will muddle things”. This is an argument against drawing the national security adviser specifically from an armed forces background and would not in other respects prevent widening the pool of candidates beyond mainstream diplomats. So it is fair?

It must, of course, be acknowledged as a potential risk. When a leader has two close advisers with experience in the same field, even if one exists specifically to advise on that field, the other will always be tempted to intervene. Such is human nature. When Viscount Kilmuir was lord chancellor (1954-62), he served three prime ministers—Churchill, Eden and Macmillan—and, having a good opinion of himself and his eminence as a lawyer, often sought to advise on legal issues. His pedigree was impressive: a King’s Counsel at 33, he was solicitor-general (1942-45) and attorney-general (1945), and acted as the United Kingdom’s deputy chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46. At the trial of the first rank of Nazi war criminals, he in fact carried out most of the day-to-day work, since the chief prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was also attorney-general in Clement Attlee’s Labour government and devoted most of his time to his political duties at Westminster.

After three years as home secretary, he was raised to the peerage and appointed lord chancellor, in which role he was unusually political and active, spending relatively little time on his judicial function. Most damagingly, in 1956 he gave his opinion to the prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, and the cabinet that Britain’s planned invasion of Egypt in order to secure the Suez Canal Zone was legal. The issue was not merely that this judgement was hotly disputed, but that it is the role of the attorney-general to act as the “Government’s principal legal adviser dealing with (amongst others) questions of public law, international law, human rights and devolution”. No other minister, no matter how great his legal eminence, is entitled to do so. Kilmuir was well outside his authority and was trespassing extensively and damagingly on that of his colleague Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the attorney-general, whose view was distinctly different:

It is just not true to say that we are entitled under the [UN] charter to take any measures open to us ‘to stop the fighting’.

By analogy, it must be true that a national security adviser with a military background could be tempted to offer advice to the prime minister on matters which should properly be within the purview of the chief of the Defence Staff, who is “the professional head of the Armed Forces and principal military adviser to the Secretary of State for Defence and the government”. The danger might have been all the greater given that Jenkins, a four-star Royal Marines general, holds the same rank as Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the Defence Staff.

The response to this potential hazard is twofold: firstly, are the measures which can mitigate the risk, and, secondly, is that risk so large that it should preclude appointing a military NSA? My instinct is yes and no in turn. Whitehall is planted thick with rules and procedures and regulations and manuals to govern how civil servants conduct themselves, and it is already clear in constitutional terms that military advice to the defence secretary, the cabinet and the prime minister comes from the chief of the Defence Staff. It would be possible to reiterate or emphasise that, but the position is clear and individuals have to be trusted to observe proprieties. The machinery of government cannot be designed or operated on a series of worst-case scenarios or nothing would ever happen.

By that token, I think the risk of confusion from having a senior figure from the armed forces as national security adviser is relatively small and perfectly manageable. Certainly, in my view, it is outweighed by the potential benefits of a candidate with a deep background in defence, if such a person were to be considered: and this was the case with General Gwyn Jenkins. Given that he had been vice-chief of the Defence Staff under Radakin, the two already had a working relationship (and Radakin had supposedly considered Jenkins’s appointment as Second Sea Lord and deputy chief of the Naval Staff two years ago, which would have been the first time a Royal Marines officer had ever held the post).

Conclusion

I think many of the anxieties raised by Jenkins’s nomination as national security adviser were unfounded or exaggerated. His curriculum vitae seemed to offer a broad range of experience—including, let us remember, a stint in Downing Street and three years as deputy NSA—which would have made him an effective candidate, especially in the current geopolitical situation. We do not know why his appointment has been reversed, so it is impossible to say if his military background was a factor. But the overriding principle, I think, is this.

National security is an enormously broad field and new aspects of it seem to appear on a regular basis. That being the case, the national security adviser will never have extensive experience in every aspect of the job, and so from the very beginning those choosing the candidate for the role will be balancing priorities and making judgements. To say that he or she must always come from a predominantly foreign affairs background is permanently to privilege some aspects of the role over others, in the same way that ruling out someone with a military background is to relegate some aspects to secondary importance.

There is also a significant part of the NSA role which is not about expertise at all, but which is a matter of administration, management, balancing arguments, finding as broad an evidence base as possible and ensuring the efficient operation of the National Security Secretariat. Another aspect of the job is to be an “honest broker”, managing competing demands on the prime minister and working with ministers and senior officials to ensure that the machinery of government works smoothly and effectively. Those are all skills which could be learned in the Foreign Office, or the Ministry of Defence, or the Home Office, or the Secret Intelligence Service, or anywhere in Whitehall. They could even—whisper it softly—be developed outside the public sector.

When the prime minister selects a national security adviser, he or she should be clear about the functions the NSA is to perform, but there should also be the widest possible choice from which to pick. It is likely that the prime minister will already be at least slightly familiar with the most obvious candidates, as they will be among Whitehall’s most senior officials, but at a time when we talk so much about diversity and equality of opportunity, it makes no sense to erect unnecessary barriers around the role of national security adviser in terms of who should or should not be considered. The broader the choice, the better the candidate is likely to be. On paper, General Gwyn Jenkins had many ingredients to fill the role impressively. It is now for Sir Keir Starmer to choose a new candidate, and his selection may say a great deal about how he intends to use the national security apparatus.