A Midsummer May’s Nightmare: Downing Street’s second Cumming
Sam Rhydderch
When political-aide-turned-weather-forecaster Dominic Cummings predicted a ‘hard rain’ falling on Whitehall in February last year, Number 10 probably weren’t expecting that rain to make the two-minute trip along Horse Guards Avenue to the Prime Minister’s Office in Downing Street – where, as it turned out, it proceeded to rain quite hard and violently indeed on the morning of the 26th. Just not on Whitehall.
It’s an odd thing at the best of times to declare a (naturally short-lived) war against an enemy which only has to reach for a stack of A4 binders rammed with whiteboard WhatsApp screenshots, sensitive emails, and a few late-night texts from the PM with the aim of unilaterally destroying the instigator of such foolery.
And yet, on April 23rd, instigator Johnson did just that – phoning up various news editors to let them know that he couldn’t possibly be inept because Dominic Cummings oversaw seemingly everything that went wrong during the Coronavirus pandemic, and he (Johnson) was actually only in charge of everything that went right. That is admittedly slight exaggeration, but the premise is there.
It didn’t take Dominic Cummings long to stretch his legs, tie his shoelaces, and hop, skip, and jump into a Select Committee hearing chaired by the sort of people he used to call ‘flying monkeys’ during his time at Vote Leave. It probably took even less time for him to don his favourite most-crinkled white shirt – a shirt which must surely hold some sort of record for a shirt which screams ‘the person wearing me hates wearing shirts’. And, in some sort of provocative act of outrageous anarchy, he visibly left the third button of his shirt undone during the entire hearing. Anarchists take note.
It is never usually a good sign when the deputy cabinet secretary rocks into the Prime Minister’s Office on a Friday morning during a pandemic stating, ‘I’ve come through here to tell you I think we’re absolutely f-----’. Nor is it usually a good sign when the cabinet secretary starts touting ‘chicken pox parties’ as a viable solution against a virus which was growing exponentially and disproportionately affecting the elderly and some younger vulnerable age-groups. But then again, perhaps it also wasn’t the right day for such meetings – Friday 13th isn’t usually regarded as a day that brings a lot of good into the world.
Nonetheless, this select committee hearing was less about Whitehall than it was about Number Ten’s conduct during the pre-pandemic preparation phase. So, alas, the dissemination of the current Cummings saga ends here.
The real issue Dominic Cummings has with Whitehall – which the media buries as it does not provide the desired ‘shock’ effect – relates to the waste of very talented and bright civil servants lost in the churning bureaucratic machine that makes up the Civil Service. Too many mediocre managers are promoted automatically based on the length of their tenure – which, by the way, is usually a tenure for life – along with the constant shuttling of bright civil servants across different government departments. Some civil servants spend no longer than a couple of months in a department. And such is the displeasure of those serving in the top ranks of Whitehall that they are duly characterised by Cummings as ‘lions led by donkeys’.
The Cummings saga has also led to much topical discussion relating to the role of Whitehall in government and the subsequent deteriorating relationship between Number 10, the Cabinet Office, and Whitehall departments. The departure of high-ranking civil servants such as Philip Rutnam from the Home Office and Mark Sedwill from the Cabinet Office has been portrayed by some as a breaking point in relations between Number 10 and Whitehall, but this is a gross over-simplification of a very complex and tenuous relationship comprising sacred notions of value-neutrality at the Civil Service and electoral success for their ministers. These two notions are, unfortunately, theoretically and empirically incompatible with one-another. Ministers hold temporary elected office on a political mandate which is dependent on how the electorate perceive them, civil servants have no such pressure, and so the policy priorities of both parties are seen through very different prisms. Understanding this is key to understanding what goes on beneath the backstair media briefings and glossy front-page media headlines.
It is not the first time ministers have fallen out with their permanent secretaries, but it is, perhaps, the first time such disagreements have led to a very public and media-frenzied falling out – eventually leading to the public resignation of a permanent secretary. We seem to be observing an interesting phenomenon whereby the media are successfully managing to sever effective communication between ministers, Downing Street, permanent secretaries, and Cabinet Office.
Talks of reforming Whitehall and accusations relating to its bloated bureaucracy entirely misses the point and is akin to betting on the wrong horse. The issue isn’t so much Whitehall as it is the political direction Number 10 feeds into it. You see, the Civil Service only functions effectively when Number 10 inputs a series of policy directions into the Whitehall machine. A strong Civil Service requires strong policy direction from Number 10. Blair and Campbell were effective in letting civil servants know what their policy aims were and how they were going to go about achieving them – in their case, it was reforming the communication structures at Number 10 and across Whitehall to co-ordinate a common New Labour strategy. After the coalition years of 2010-2015, Number 10 arguably lost its sense of political direction during the Brexit phase, and Whitehall therefore lost its ability to effectively run government – what was left was a series of very public media briefings against the civil service born out of political frustration, when the real culprits of this political gridlock were in fact the very accusers who lacked policy ideas to feed into civil servants.
As for the accusation that Whitehall were too slow to react to the Coronavirus pandemic, my response is two-fold. First, who wasn’t? And second, it was, again, difficult for Whitehall to implement a pandemic-level plan of action when it lacked that very plan Tony Blair and others shunned in favour of doing the bare minimum with a minimal level of expenditure. If Whitehall had a plan to implement, then we probably wouldn’t have seen the deputy cabinet secretary stroll into the Prime Minister’s Office to declare that, actually, there is no plan, we’re all screwed, and nor for that matter does anyone else have a plan.
If there is only one takeaway you should glean from this article, it should be this: Whitehall is only as ever prepared as Downing Street. And, well, if Downing Street isn’t prepared, then the Civil Service haven’t a hope in hell.