‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Keir Starmer seems to have mirrored Juliet after deciding to move on Chris Wormald on as Cabinet Secretary. Yet the young Capulet was asking not where her lover was, but why he must be Romeo – a Montague. ‘Deny they father and refuse they name’, she implored, so that the pair could be together. With Antonia Romeo widely expected to be Wormald’s successor, a similar chorus of ‘whys?’ seems to be pricking up across Whitehall.
Cutting NHS waiting lists should not be harder than defeating Napoleon
Sir Simon McDonald, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary and reliably pompous avatar of the Ancien Régime , has said that ‘more due diligence’ needs to be done around Romeo’s appointment, suggesting it would be a mistake. When serving as the UK’s consul-general in New York a decade ago, she was investigated for bullying and some expenses snafus, but was cleared, and has since served across several departments, often attracting rave reviews. Our own Tim Shipman is a fan.
Currently at the Home Office, Romeo is regarded as a dynamic force. She has a reputation as someone able to steer a civil service regarded by critics as more Trabant than Rolls-Royce. Upsetting a few colleagues may be a regrettable necessity, and a welcome contrast to the incumbent, a dutiful public servant not famed for his initiative. Starmer recruited in his own image.
On appointing Wormald, Starmer claimed he would oversee ‘nothing less than the complete re-wiring of the British state’ – a ludicrous promise, especially when attached to so gray a man. Romeo or not, Wormald’s successor will be the fourth Cabinet Secretary since the late Jeremy Heywood’s stepping down in 2018 – a rate of turnover matching Downing Street’s more famous residents. How Larry the Cat must watch them come and go, and purr in quiet contempt.
Just as cycling through five premiers in a decade is illustrative of Weimar Britain‘s decadence and dysfunction, the heart of government is foundering. A growing chorus of ex-government Labour figures are lamenting the Whitehall machine that they were so recently charged with running. Paul Ovenden, until September Starmer’s Director of Strategy (an oxymoron par excellence), has blamed a ‘stakeholder state’ for failing to deliver – a state-funded cadre across the bureaucracy, judiciary and charity sector, frustrating ministers through process and legal chicanery.
Similarly, Ben Judah – until recently an adviser to David Lammy – has claimed that the ‘state itself is failing’ and that this ‘has been a shock for [his] generation of Labour advisers and politicians. It was ‘not just’, as they once believed, that ‘the Tories…were failures’ – the ‘government machinery itself is jammed’. Judah pins it on a Number 10 operation dwarfed in number by the officials, departments and quangos it must control and push through.
Yet as much rejoicing as the repentance of any sinner engenders – especially one responsible for something as laughable as ‘progressive realism’ – neither Ovenden nor Judah’s criticisms of the heart of government should not surprise anyone familiar with the analysis of Dominic Cummings – erstwhile Vote Leave supremo and former chief adviser to both our editor as Education Secretary and to Boris Johson in Number 10. Even if Morgan McSweeney is thought to be a fan, Labour’s unwillingness to learn from Cummings lessons helps to explain Starmer’s mess, especially as they are readily available across his blogs, public lectures and interviews, including on the Spectator‘s very own Quite Right.
Cummings has long argued that Whitehall is broken – that ‘failure is normal’, that it cannot handle complex challenges, and that it is a ‘fake meritocracy’ of hollow men and women. Elite talent has drained away; compared to the Whitehall of half a century ago, let alone that which served Winston Churchill or even Pitt the Younger, it is stuffed with ‘public school bluffers’ promoted through their incompetence. Of course, I was a scholarship boy.
Fixing this requires a ‘hard rain’ to fall – reforming recruitment to replace generalists with the infamous but talented (and infamously talented) ‘weirdos and misfits’ with experience in science and data; cutting through the thicket of departmental over-reach by empowering Number 10; quitting constraining international obligations like the European Court of Human Rights; ending the stultifying culture of ‘managed decline’. Britain deserves the best; failure should not be an option. Cutting NHS waiting lists should not be harder than defeating Napoleon.
In Downing Street, Cummings’s efforts to implement his ideas were frustrated by the Covid pandemic and what one might diplomatically brand differences with his Prime Minister. But while Whitehall reform is neither sexy nor a voter priority it is an essential prerequisite for any government serious about delivery, just as curbing inflation was necessary for Margaret Thatcher’s battle against the trade unions and socialist sclerotises. To deport 600,000 illegal immigrants and give every village its own nuclear reactor, you must first tame the Blob.
Reform seem to grasp this. By putting Danny Kruger in charge of government preparation, they have empowered a Cummings afficionado to ensure that Nigel Farage enters Number 10 readied. So far, he has focused on rewriting the ministerial code and curbing headcount; similarly, Alex Burghart and Neil O’Brien have led on Tory plans for office. Each, like Cummings, is influenced by Stepping Stones – the policy document that served as the Thatcher revolution’s foundational text, and is now the starting point for Britain’s New Right, the Tory Leninists, the coming men.
But even the best plans will struggle to survive the government maelstrom. The boxer Mike Tyson famously declared that ‘everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth’; Starmer lacked even that. But a future right-wing government must still push through Sir Humphrey’s inertia, media alarmism and voter volatility. Begin reaching for the Carl Schmitt. We have one last chance to get this right, or face a Prime Minister Tommy or Zack in 2034.
The wilting of Whitehall is part of a broader elite collapse, as our editor once outlined. The undoing of Iraq, the financial crisis and the expenses scandal, record migration, the Brexit wars, the pandemic – each chipped away the public’s faith that they were being governed by the best and brightest. For a future government to restore faith in our democracy, it must learn the lessons from Cummings that Labour ignored and overcome the forces of inaction to make true on their promises. If they do not, they will meet a fate as tragic as that of Romeo’s namesake.
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