Whitehall vs the pandemic: nobody wins
Martin Reynolds, Boris Johnson's principal private secretary, gave evidence to the Covid-19 public inquiry on Whitehall's handling of the pandemic
The public inquiry into the UK government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, chaired by Baroness Hallett, a former high court judge, was announced by Boris Johnson in May 2021. To an extent, it was, like all public inquiries, an exercise in kicking the can down the road. I wrote in the summer that we reach for the judge-led public inquiry too readily after any rending crisis, believing it to be a panacea, but it has its disadvantages, and one of them is potential slowness. Hallett’s inquiry did not start its long programme of public hearings until September this year, and are expected to last into 2026. On that basis, we can expect no definite judgement until 2027 at the earliest, and that is on the assumption that there are more unforeseen delays. It is worth noting a November 2020 WhatsApp message from Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, that a potential public iqnuiry into Covid-19 “should go on for a decade or more [want] someone like [Lord] Saville to chair it and keep it going forever".
I have not watched the hearings religiously, though they have so far been extremely revealing about the hidden wiring, to steal Peter Hennessy’s phrase, of government and the way that it had reacted to the incredible stress of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yesterday, I did happen to give it my attention, and I thought it was worth making a few general observations.
The witness yesterday was Martin Reynolds CB CMG, a diplomat who was the prime minister’s principal private secretary from October 2019 to March 2022. A Cambridge graduate, Reynolds trained as a lawyer and spent three years at a City law firm before joining the Diplomatic Service, and he and Johnson have “form”. He was the foreign secretary’s principal private secretary, the head of his private office and closest personal aide, for most of Johnson’s inglorious tenure from 2016 to 2018, and it is received wisdom that Johnson wanted a reunion with him after he became prime minister. The incumbent PPS, Peter Hill, was moved to become chief executive of the COP26 climate conference and Reynolds was recalled from his post of ambassador to Libya after just five months.
Before 1997, the principal private secretary to the prime minister was a hugely powerful position, not only the head of the PM’s office but also a close adviser on all issues of government. Previous incumbents like Robert Armstrong, Robin Butler, Andrew Turnbull and Jeremy Heywood had gone on to run the civil service. Sir Tony Blair’s creation of the post of Downing Street chief of staff, and his appointment of Jonathan Powell, a special adviser, took some of the sharper political tasks away from the PPS’s portfolio, but any official who sees the prime minister every day and controls their diary as well as controlling the flow of paperwork to and from the premier will always have substantial clout in Whitehall. Dominic Cummings, not a neutral witness on the civil service, who acted as “chief adviser” to the prime minister from 2019 to 2020, stressed the status of the role.
The PPS exercises far more influence and actual power over many issues than Cabinet ministers. He can nudge policy, he can nudge vital appointments (real power). He can and does walk into the PM’s office and exclude all political people ‘on security grounds’.
The post is a director general-level appointment, one below permanent secretary, so Reynolds was no ingenue, no insubstantial functionary. One of the reasons Reynolds’s appointment was widely welcomed in 2019 was that he would, it was believed, bring structure and order to the affairs of a famously chaotic prime minister. There was obviously a strong bond between them; one FCO colleague noted that Reynolds was rare among members of the Diplomatic Service in not thinking Johnson incompetent as foreign secretary, and on one official trip to the United States, Reynolds, deputed to engage with the press corps, “gushed about what an amazing man Boris was”. As a Whitehall source remarked acidly, “He saw his career as benefiting from being hooked to this guy [Johnson]. I think it was self-interest rather than anything philosophical.”
In Downing Street, Reynolds was initially regarded as friendly and approachable. One insider said “He was helpful and supportive and helped make things work”, but there were concerns, at the same time, that he was too eager to please, too keen to avoid conflict. If so, this is, of course, a trait he shares with Johnson, a man profoundly confrontation-averse and willing to say or do almost anything to avoid face-to-face unpleasantness.
I dwell on this because it is important to understand that Reynolds was a senior figure in Downing Street, a major Whitehall player with considerable influence available to him. He did not, I think it’s fair to say, exude that impression from every pore in front of the inquiry yesterday.
Under questioning by Hugo Keith KC, the inquiry’s deft and insistent lead counsel, Reynolds found himself bogged down early on in the government’s use of WhatsApp, which seems to have exploded under Johnson and especially during the pandemic.
Our policy on WhatsApps, certainly throughout this period, was, in a sense, the same as our policy on other material, which was around retention of WhatsApps or messages which were important for the decision-making process, but not the ephemeral side of things.
WhatsApp has taken such hold partly because it was convenient during remote working, but also because it was clearly a platform which suited Johnson. I have no problem with WhatsApp—I am a heavy user myself—and I am also strongly of the belief that ministers, like select committee chairs, are entitled to have people working for them use whatever system they find most effective and efficient. WhatsApp was not widespread when I was in the House of Commons, but I certainly had some chairs who were very comfortable with text messages and some who much preferred the greater apparent formality of emails.
However, WhatsApp is not enough. It is one of the very basic tenets of bureaucracy, in Westminster as in Whitehall, that proper written records need to be kept, not simply for posterity but so that principals can look back at who made decisions, what exactly was agreed and where the burden of delivery lay. I no longer quite keep formal minutes of my conversations with loved ones, but that instinct to record, to make explicit, to maintain an audit trail, is still very strong, and I think it should be in any administrator or bureaucrat.
This is not to say that there must be transcripts of every chance encounter. Reynolds told the inquiry:
I suppose in any decision there is all sorts of ephemeral discussions around a policy; not all of those discussions are recorded in full, even in the main meetings themselves.
He is quite right: as I have expounded countless times before, minutes are essentially a tool for recording decisions which are made and actions which must flow from them, not a rehearsal of every viewpoint casually aired. There is a judgement to be made in taking notes about what to include and what not to include, and that is one of the skills of an official, to know instinctively and instantly what to include and what to omit, so that records are concise but also show how decisions were reached (and therefore can be scrutinised in hindsight).
The WhatsApp messages made available to the Hallett inquiry have certainly been plentiful, and have shown the public a lot about the psyches of those making key decisions during the pandemic. Reynolds tried to explain to the inquiry that even in the informality of WhatsApp there had been a rigour which would have pleased Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Erm, if I can explain the PM update system, that might sort of give you a better sense of actually its importance, which is that we had throughout most of this time a system of updating, of giving the Prime Minister updates on factual developments, on quick decisions he might need to be taking, and that was done initially in paper copy. The “PM Updates” group essentially translated that paper copy into WhatsApp, but it remained, unlike almost any other WhatsApp group, basically on email and hard copy. So what you had was, as it were, parallel structures where what I would do is I was sent an email with the updates for the day on, I would put it onto a WhatsApp, and send it to the Prime Minister, and then I would take it back from the Prime Minister and send an email out with his record on it.
I don’t think you need too much experience of Whitehall to see that this approach was cumbersome, duplicating and so full of potential pitfalls that any sensible civil servant might have avoided it entirely. Nevertheless, let us concede that everyone was working at breakneck speed under new and demanding circumstances, and not every judgement will, in hindsight, seem impeccable. Reynolds laboured his explanation of his use of WhatsApp; essentially his argument was that for documents and messages in this “PM Update” group, “the vast majority, if not all, have been cut and pasted” from elsewhere, and anything genuinely original or recorded nowhere else was “ephemeral”.
Reynolds also brought more heat than light when he attempted to outline the role of the prime minister’s Private Office—which he led—in the management of information and the basic administration of the admittedly complicated Downing Street machine.
My job was to try to make sure that the civil service—sorry, the private office machine was underpinning—well, making sure that the decisions which needed to go to the Prime Minister, the meetings, and all the sort of arrangements around the processes, were there to enable the Prime Minister to get the best possible advice from the real experts on Covid and to hear from his ministers or other political advisers some of the political dynamics around those decisions. I was not—if that is what you are suggesting—there to give the Prime Minister advice on Covid.
Perhaps sensing his clarity had not been crystalline, he tried again.
The role of the private office very often is around choreography and making sure the right people are there at the right time, managing the processes around the Prime Minister, so preparing for press conferences, preparing for Parliamentary statements. So it’s the organisational underpinning for what is going on, but the actual advice to the Prime Minister came from others.
Reynolds does, of course, identify a critical role of the private office here. Any cabinet minister, but the prime minister especially, receives advice from myriad sources: from the mainstream policy advisers in the civil service, from special advisers, from official specialists and from informal sources, and the job of a PPS is to manage these, to bring order to potential chaos and, in essence, to manage the traffic flow to and from the prime minister.
Counsel raised the suggestion, based on statements made by Dominic Cummings, that Reynolds had not merely been a junction box but had exerted an influence on Johnson in policy terms, and that his shying away from confrontation had in fact led to a degree of optimism bias in Johnson’s approach. Reynolds tacked away from that interpretation.
In terms of the Prime Minister’s perspective, I think he is instinctively optimistic, but I also think that he instinctively believes that as a leader it’s important to project confidence and ability to deal with things. But I think that the suggestion you’re making is one which is shared not just, as it were, by the Prime Minister but across the centre of government more generally, that in a sense this was a worrying pandemic in China, it was being tracked quite closely, and the preparations were in place to deal with it if necessary.
Boris Johnson has many qualities, but I am not sure how many people inside or outside Whitehall, would assent to the proposition that he projected “ability to deal with things”. He certainly exuded confidence: he always does, a more Wodehousian spin on Sir Tony Blair’s messianic certainty but no less profound nor any less damaging.
If I can straddle this issue for a moment both as a former bureaucrat and a member of the Conservative Party (though I did not vote for Johnson), his candidacy was sold first to the party and then to the public on the basis that, yes, he was shambolic and unpredictable, but despite that—indeed, in part because of it—he was a big-picture man, a politician who dealt in ideas and imagination and vision, and would simply need a steadying hand on the tiller to translate that into fizzing public policy genius.
The problem was twofold. Firstly, what was the overarching vision? What was the plan? “Get Brexit done” was a masterpiece as a pithy election-winning slogan but it said nothing about the future, while “Global Britain”, an umbrella under which I continue to believe a lot of useful work could be done, was shamefully neglected as anything more than a strapline. It had appeared in the last weeks of Johnson’s stint as foreign secretary, and its snappy brevity, hinting somehow at not only hidden depths but perhaps genuine transformation, were deeply Boris-esque; but the only attempt to give it any flesh, in Johnson’s speech in February 2020 at the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, had still been light on details and heavy on swagger and hyperbole, with “well-fed nymphs and cupids and what have you”, “the great multi-dimensional game of chess”, ‘what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” and “there lies the port, the vessel puffs her sail… the wind sits in the mast”. At times he was almost free-associating: “Boomerangs to Australia—Nigel Farage to America. Then he came back of course.”
As a speech it was a bravura mess. As a policy vision it was useless.
If the vision was lacking, so too was the steady hand on the tiller. Sir Edward Lister, Johnson’s right-hand from his City Hall days, acted as a de facto chief of staff for a while, the seasoned veteran to Cummings’s whirling dervish, but he left at the beginning of 2021 and Johnson never found an adequate replacement, let alone a proper, dedicated, rigorous chief of staff to transform his woolly thoughts into policies and action.
Against this backdrop, Reynolds was teetering his way around Downing Street. He argued to Hugo Keith that matters were under control at the beginning of 2020.
At the end of February there is a note to the Prime Minister setting out, as it were, the assessment of the challenges that Covid presented, and that note is produced by a group of the most senior advisers on the issue, plus the director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, and that note I can see does seem to be pretty—I wouldn’t say reassuring, but gives the sense that the system is gripping the challenge in an appropriate way.
“I wouldn’t say reassuring.” No, Mr Reynolds, nor would I. But he was insistent at the inquiry.
The overall sense was the relevant parts of government were already, as it were, looking over exactly what needed to be done in preparations, and the overall message was that, while there are some difficult decisions or there will be some difficult decisions to be taken, the government machine is prepared for that eventuality.
It might almost have been Johnson himself speaking. As Reynolds himself noted, in that narrow window between the December 2019 general election and the onset of the pandemic, the government had several major issues to think about, not least the details of Brexit, the future of High Speed Rail 2 and the expansion of 5G capability across the UK. But Reynolds admitted that, even at this early stage, civil servants were becoming aware that Johnson and Cummings were not always of one mind, and that Cummings was using provocative and deliberately confrontational language about system failures within government, “the appointment of various—and I use quotes here—‘weirdos and misfits’ and bringing in very different people into Downing Street”.
To make all of this yet more complicated and potentially dysfunctional, there was a sense that Downing Street would and/or should be reorganised both physically and systematically.
There was a lot of work going on around a possible reorganisation of Number 10, because we were considering relocating the Prime Minister’s office to a different part of the building. So a lot of work was going on on that. And there was, I think, quite a bit of unease in the civil service around, and excuse my language, the so-called '“shit list” of people who were thought to be at risk in what was perceived to be a potentially more muscular approach to the civil service.
Any decent civil servant would have known this was too much to do at once. To extract the United Kingdom from its near-50-year membership of the European Union, take on major infrastructure programmes, shake up the civil service intellectually and culturally and reorganise the machinery of central government was insanity. Perhaps it was insanity which could not be avoided, but there is no sense that, at any point before the pandemic consumed all the oxygen in the room, any senior official figure raised a warning hand and said “This is too much”.
Reynolds did not accept that these early months of 2020 represented dysfunctionality. While Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, remarked “No 10 chaos as usual” at one point, Reynolds painted a picture of adjustment and evolution.
We are, in my view, bedding down new arrangements, the—but the flow of information into Number 10, which you will no doubt hear from Imran Shafi and others, the actual work process and so forth are, I think, managing in the normal way.
This is a point which can be laboured almost ad infinitum. My observation of Reynolds, in essence, is that in front of the inquiry he looked uncertain, hesitant and adrift, and the narrative which emerged from his evidence was of someone who, wilfully or unwittingly, was not seeing the scale of challenges facing the machinery which he was responsible for operating. Pollyanna syndrome is not a fatal affliction, but when you are a director general in Downing Street, controlling access to the prime minister, there is a responsibility to recognise and mitigate it. Reynolds seems not to have addressed this at all. Married to the notional leadership of Boris Johnson, the Pollyanna’s Pollyanna, this was a catastrophic weakness.
This is not a matter of scapegoating. Reynolds is not solely responsible for the failures of central government in the early stages of the pandemic. He happened to be giving evidence to the Hallett inquiry yesterday, but his failures illustrate the nexus of personal and institutional qualities which are so vital at the level around the prime minister. His role as principal private secretary was a key part of the machinery, and the way he handled it, and in particular the way he managed his relationship with Boris Johnson, had very serious and deleterious effects on the business of government.
The inquiry continues. Dominic Cummings is giving his perspective. What I will, very ruefully, say is that the Rolls-Royce machinery is looking very badly maintained.