How one hidden-away decision defines the future of the Starmer government

Cabinet secretary appointment raises questions about whether the prime minister really has turned over a new leaf.

Photo by Digital Solacism on Unsplash

The basic storyline of the Keir Starmer era is simple. He promised serious government. So far he has delivered clown car nonsense. It’s not as bad as the clown car nonsense we had to put up with before, but it is not good enough and we damn well expected better. If he is to improve the country and defeat populism, he must abide by his original promise.

This is the issue at the heart of the Cabinet secretary appointment.

No-one really gives a shit about this, of course. No-one knows what the Cabinet secretary does. No-one knows who they are. No-one knows when one leaves and another arrives. But the identity of this figure, the tasks they are given and the way they behave serves as a litmus test for seriousness in government.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, there is an untested assumption. It is that when events get really serious, a figure from the British establishment steps in and takes care of things. When a prime minister badly bollocks the economy, for instance, or fails in the face of a viable security threat a man with a posh accent, a compelling manner and an expensive suit steps in and makes sure there are sensible outcomes.

This assumption is false. No-one is in control. The world is much more chaotic and tenuous than people give it credit for. But if there is someone who approximates this role, it is the Cabinet secretary. They are one of the most important and under-discussed figures in the British political landscape. If we had a grown-up political culture, they would be a household name.

We’re now in the opening days of Starmer’s death-and-rebirth administrative reset, his last chance to save his premiership. It is a crucial moment, the first in which he acts without Morgan McSweeney, a genuine opportunity for him to govern in a completely different way.

This is why the story of what is happening with the Cabinet secretary this week is so crucial. It is an advance preview of whether there really has been a change of heart from Starmer. Is he going to give someone serious the job? Is he going to treat it with the gravitas it demands? Or is he going to do some half-arsed stupid Westminster bullshit?

Will he really, finally, commit to the seriousness he promised? Or is that high-pitched sound we hear the wheels of the clown car screeching around a corner, approaching us at speed?

When a new prime minister enters Downing Street, the Cabinet secretary sits down with them for their first meeting. They will ask them to write a letter of last resort to the commanding officers of four British ballistic missile submarines outlining what actions to take in the event of the destruction of the British government. They will brief them on existing terror threats. They will instruct them on how to use their phones to ensure the security of their communications.

The Cabinet secretary is the most senior civil servant in the UK. They are the prime minister’s senior policy adviser. They are responsible for making the civil service work for all ministers.

The list of tasks they fulfill is endless. This is Britain, so their constitutional role is murky, labyrinthine, counter-intuitive and beset with structural contradictions. It includes warning against policy mistakes and proposing alternatives, maintaining standards, protecting the civil service, motivating the half a million people who work for it, improving its capacity and efficiency, making sure ministers feel it is responsive to their demands, and dealing impartially with disputes between departments.

In an ideal world, the Cabinet secretary would be trying to sort out the civil service. It is full of decent people who want to do good things, but the incentives are so catastrophically fucked that its chief products are amateurism and vacuity. We do not reward civil servants for deep-subject knowledge or expertise. If they stay in their current job, their wages will stagnate and they will be treated like losers. Instead, we reward them for constantly transferring to a new position. They get more money, more seniority and they’re treated like a high flyer.

This is why we have few people who are experts in things like rail franchise negotiations - the core engine room jobs which modern industrial societies require. And it’s why we have so many people who know fuck all about anything but spent 18 months in the Foreign Office, then 18 months on Brexit, then 18 month on Universal Credit, and have a nice Home Counties accent and couldn’t find their own arse if it was handed to them on a plate with their lanyard sticking out of it.

For a very long time, the Cabinet secretary naturally came from the Treasury, the most powerful government department. It was the source of whoever fulfilled the role, as well as that of the principal private secretary in No.10 - the figure who works most closely day-to-day with the prime minister. The big names in the post-war period, fulfilling one or both of these jobs, were all Treasury men: Norman Brooke, Burke Trend, Robin Butler, Alan Turnball, Gus O’Donnell, Jeremy Heywood.

To a certain extent, that was a reflection of Treasury power, but it was also indicative of the fact that prime ministers needed to know how to effectively challenge the Treasury if they were to govern autonomously of their chancellor. One of the key facts about prime ministers is that they have hardly any staff. Ministers have departments underneath them, full of hundreds of civil servants. The PM has a few dozen people in Downing Street. So if they want to go toe-to-toe with the Treasury, they are going to be hopelessly outgunned by an army of very clever officials with their own institutional view.

Sensible PMs therefore armed up with a Treasury Cabinet secretary - someone who knew how the department thought, how it operated, who understood the economic arguments, who could strengthen the power of No.10 against the money men. This is key for a democratic economic policy. If it isn’t in place, the government goes into its default setting, which is whatever the Treasury says it should be.

This changed around 2016, because of course it did. The age of sense had gone and the era of the clown had begun, its great joyless smile plastered over the political horizon. Theresa May broke the tradition of having a Treasury man in position and instead opted for a securocrat in the form of Mark Sedwill.”I’ve had a gun in my face from Saddam Hussein’s bodyguards; a bomb under my seat at a polo match in the foothills of the Himalayas; I’ve been hosted by a man plotting to have me assassinated; I’ve been shot at, mortared and even had someone come after me with a suicide vest,” he said. You can see why she liked him.

Sedwill became permanent secretary of the Home Office while May was home secretary. She then brought him over to the Cabinet secretary position in 2018. He was only the second Cabinet secretary in history never to have worked at the Treasury.

He was followed in 2020 by prime minister Boris Johnson’s pick: Simon Case. Whereas May had reflected her securocrat roots, Johnson reflected his utter superficiality. Just look at Case’s career. The then 42-year-old’s short time in the civil service, dating back only 14 years, had seen him go from the Ministry of Defence to the Northern Ireland Office to the Olympic Secretariat to No.10 to the Cabinet Office, back to No.10, to the Brexit team, to the Northern Ireland trade team and to the palace.

Classic civil service nothing-sausage. One place to another to another, securing a more senior position each time, getting better pay, winning a reputation as a high flyer, moving up the grades system. And what are you at the end of it all? Nothing. What do you know? Nothing. What experience do you have? Nothing, except for perhaps a smattering of management techniques and an ability to paper over differences through the ingenious use of words. Just a little nothing man in his little nothing house.

In December 2024 Keir Starmer appointed Chris Wormald Cabinet secretary. He was a more substantial figure, but he had the same old civil service quick-rotation background as his predecessor, albeit at greater length.

The decision came just a month after Starmer sacked Sue Gray, a lifelong civil servant, from the chief of staff position and replaced her with McSweeney, his political strategist. Who knows? Perhaps if Gray had still been in post, if she had won the internal battle with McSweeney, we would have got a different appointment. Maybe it would have been more successful.

What we do know is this: Starmer desperately needed someone who could help him work with and challenge the Treasury. Someone who knew how the department thought, how it operated. But he didn’t select for that quality. Instead, he got a generic civil service high flyer. And what did we see after that? A complete lack of strategic direction from No10, a void, and a Treasury which was perfectly happy to step in and fill it. A series of decisions which had Treasury-brain written all over them, from the winter fuel allowance payments to the stubborn refusal to move on the two-child benefit limit to the half-arsed and ultimately aborted welfare reforms. A complete failure by No.10 to challenge the presumptions and agendas of the finance department.

The government’s stated aims started to falter then collapse. Public service improvement and growth require coordinated action from the centre, involving selectively applied Treasury money taps, close communication between departments, and a clearly conceived and articulated plan from No.10. A Cabinet secretary cannot do that alone. But it is very helpful if they’re at least interested in trying.

Evidently Starmer did not approve of Wormald’s performance. This week, the PM swapped out his top team in the wake of the McSweeney resignation and the departure of director of communications Tim Allen. As part of that process, he got rid of the Cabinet secretary.

This is actually quite a disturbing development. By connecting the Cabinet secretary position to the fallout of a political scandal, he has chipped away at any lingering authority in the position. Instead of the voice of institutional reason, the hand on the shoulder of the prime minister, the person who can advise and organise, the Cabinet secretary is being turned into just another blurry cog in the constantly-reassembled political machine. Another paper-thin role, for a political culture which makes all its decisions on the basis of short-term personal tactics rather than long-term national strategy. It basically reduces the position to that of a minister in a reshuffle.

Look at the length of tenure for Cabinet secretaries from the Institute for Government’s recent (and predictably brilliant) blog on the subject. Just look at those lines. What was once a decade appointment is now another 18-months-and-you’re-out churn machine. It’s the story of declining British seriousness in a nutshell.

How can a Cabinet secretary advise a prime minister on policy when they’ve only been in the job six months and will be gone in another 12? How can they bring big egotistical ministers together when they don’t have the confidence or experience to do so? How can they challenge churn in the civil service when they are the product of that churn and in fact owe their position to it? How can they give the prime minister solemn obligations on nuclear strategy when they’ve only just started shaving?

Starmer then compounded this error by briefing that they were going to hand the position to Antonia Romeo.

The initial burst of coverage about this idea revolved exclusively around the fact she is a woman. This is so deeply superficial you want to cradle your head in your hands. The second burst came when Simon McDonald, a former Foreign Office permanent secretary, insinuated on Channel 4 News that Romeo still had questions to answer over allegations of bullying when she was in his department. “If the candidate mentioned in the media is the one,” he said, doing some classic civil servant knife work, “in my view that due diligence has some way still to go.”

The really big problem about Romeo is that she is another example of the know-nothing civil service high flyer. It’s the same old directionless pathway we’ve seen before, from her predecessor and his predecessor, the same one we see all over the civil service. She starts at the Lord Chancellor’s Department, then goes to the Department for Constitutional Affairs, then back to the Lord Chancellor, then to the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice, back to the Cabinet Office, Her Majesty’s Consul General in New York, the Department for International Trade, back to the Ministry of Justice and then to the Home Office.

Every time she moves, she steps up the ladder. But that is a product of the civil service’s deranged churn-incentive and cultural malady, rather than because she has actually achieved anything. In fact, through her long career, she has achieved nothing of any note.

In her first stint in the Ministry of Justice, she was in charge of Chris Grayling’s probation privatisation agenda. This led to the complete breakdown of probation services. Experts warned it would do this. Their warnings were ignored. Exactly what they warned then took place. Countless lives were broken. Offenders were thrown out of prison without support. Probation workers had their careers mutilated on an arbitrary basis. Many burned out. Risk assessments collapsed. Public money was wasted. Countless crimes took place which would not otherwise have taken place.

Years later, hemorrhaging cash, it would be reversed by David Gauke. Was Romeo in any way set back by this outcome? No. She was made permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, the most senior position available.

Up and up she went, a symptom of a wrecked political incentive system. Now she is apparently Starmer’s preferred pick for the most senior position in the whole of the civil service. That suggests very poor things about his judgement, his assessment of where the government finds itself, and his recognition of his own weaknesses. It suggests that the decline of this role in the British constitutional landscape is set to continue. And that in the great clash between seriousness and the clown car, the clown car still seems to have all the momentum.

There have been a few positive signs from Starmer this week, but look to that Cabinet secretary decision as the ultimate litmus test of whether he’ll improve. It’s tucked away, no-one cares, hardly anyone notices. He can make the call without risking a big row. The conclusion he comes to will tell us whether we might feel any degree of hope in the future of his government.

Odds and sods

This week’s newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, on Substack or on Spotify.

My column in the i paper this week was on Starmer’s nightmare wobble and how he recovered. You know, the drama stuff, basically. You can read it here.

We unveiled the editorial board for the New Humanist magazine this week, with a preposterously impressive collection of individuals from science, journalism, entertainment and philosophy. I mean, just look at it. We’ll be overseeing the magazine, shaping its direction and securing its future.

This week I finally read The Human Target by Tom King and Greg Smallwood. The craft is impeccable, with confident razor-tight writing from King and emotionally rich, perceptive pencils by Smallwood. This is a book for people who warmly remember the 1980s Bwa-Ha-Ha era of the Justice League International. Blue Beetle and Booster Gold clapping each other on the back. Fire sneering at whoever talked to Ice. Guy Gardner getting punched in the face. Those were some of my earliest comics and I love them. The Human Target is a genuine continuation, right down to the expressive cartooning Smallwood specialises in. If, like me, you grew up on those old comics, this is going to give you a lot of pleasure. You are going to rock back and forth with glee and delight.

Right, that’s your lot cunts - see you next week.