The civil service is about to take over the government

The permanent secretaries are coming.

Photo by Eugene Lagunov on Unsplash

The most boring and important thing in the world is actually doing the job. There's been a lot of extreme cuntishness in the last few years of British government - inadequate people announcing wrong-headed policies on the basis of imaginary evidence. But the core failure, the one which supersedes all others, is the failure of organisational competence.

No-one likes to talk about this in detail, apart from uber-level governance nerds - the types who man the barricades at the UCL Constitution Unit, the Institute for the Government and the Hansard Society. I love them. They take British politics seriously even when politicians don't seem able to. They give it a dignity it forgets to bestow on itself. But for most people, these issues are considered dusty and methodological, an Ikea flat-pack instruction leaflet instead of the shouty-shouty Eastenders bullshit that typically constitutes political coverage.

But whether people love it or hate it, the competence issue is at this point existential. The British economy has been part-suffocated by what the FT called an "idiot premium" after the premiership of Liz Truss. Labour will fail to get a second term if it cannot demonstrate meaningful success. 

And there's something else, which is more profound. We've had seven years of right-wing populism: hatefulness, post-truth, grand promises and a complete failure to deliver. Labour has to show that rational, evidence-based, moderate politics works. To paraphrase Commissioner Gordon in a crucial philosophical conversation he had with Batman: "By the book, you hear! We have to show him! We have to show him that our way works!"

Why did Boris Johnson fail at levelling-up? Why doesn't Rishi Sunak have a hope in hell of meeting his five pledges? It's because they have no organisational competence. 

It doesn't matter how many times Nick Robinson talks fawningly about Sunak having his own spreadsheets - as if that was some unimaginable level of technical ingenuity. It doesn't matter how mystically someone like Johnson can deploy their charismatic 'deft touch' with the public. If you don't establish clear delivery systems, you will fail. They didn't establish them. So they have failed.

Delivery requires a lot of things: a realistic benchmark process for achieving evidence-based targets in a given policy area which reflect broader organisational improvement, a robust communication web linking together Downing Street and the civil service, the departments and the Treasury, and finally thick insulatory walls to keep the whole thing chugging along when new events threaten to blow everything off course. In short - it's really fucking hard, it's almost completely unsung and most prime ministers are therefore dreadful at it.

Can Starmer do any better? The answer to that question tells us a lot about the kind of government we're likely to get next year. 

The Labour leader is a mercurial figure. Is he the Remainer darling of 2017? The left-wing agitator of the leadership election in 2019? Or the Blairite clone of 2023? Hard to nail down. But if we ask ourselves about his organisational tendencies, the picture starts to come into focus. 

Keir Starmer is a civil servant.

He ran the Crown Prosecution Service - basically equivalent to a permanent secretary running a government department. Indeed, he'd have attended the Wednesday meeting of permanent secretaries.

And it's not just him. When you take a close look at senior positions in the Labour party, you start to find civil servants everywhere. 

Muneera Lula, head of domestic policy, was previously at the Department for Business. Tom Webb, director of policy and research, was at the Department of Work and Pensions. Ravinder Athwal, the lead on the manifesto, was at the Treasury. Even those hovering around the leadership are civil servants. Rachel Reeves' husband, for instance, is a senior civil servant, formerly of the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions, and currently second permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

And then there's Sue Gray. 

Author of the partygate report. Former second permanent secretary in the Cabinet Office. Former director-general of the Propriety and Ethics team in the Cabinet Office. Former head of the Private Offices Group. Former permanent secretary of the Department of Finance in the Northern Ireland Executive. And now chief of staff to Keir Starmer.

She joined the civil service straight from school and - apart from a sabbatical in the 1980s when she ran a pub in Northern Ireland, top marks for that by the way - she's been there ever since. 

When she secured the Labour position, there was a of noise about what this meant in terms of her impartiality during the investigation into partygate. That was all nonsense. Bias isn't about what you think privately, it's about how you behave. Loads of civil servants have opinions about the policies they pursue - they are human beings. The crucial thing is that they do not let those views get in the way of their work. She hadn't.

The more pertinent question was the one hardly anyone bothered to ask: what does it say about how Starmer plans to govern?

Most chiefs of staff are political figures. Blair had Jonathan Powell. Theresa May had her thug-moron guardians in the form of Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy. Boris Johnson had a succession of figures, including bumbling dimwit Steve Barclay. Civil servants do occasionally get a look in, but the default setting is for political appointments.

Starmer has gone for Gray. That tells us a lot. It speaks to the kind of administration he plans to run. 

The most interesting debate about Gray is within civil service and governance circles. 

Some are impressed by the appointment. She was highly accomplished when she served in Northern Ireland. She's been at the heart of the government machine her entire working life. She's worked closely with a succession of Cabinet secretaries - the most powerful position in the civil service. She got on well and learned a lot from Gus O'Donnell and Jeremy Heywood. She did not get on well and did not learn anything from Simon Case, because he is an idiot. That fact alone speaks well of her.

Others are wary. Gray has been in the civil service a long time, but with the exception of that Northern Ireland sojourn, she's basically been doing the same job forever: buried deep in the Propriety and Ethics team in the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. That's quite an unusual and specific role. It suggests she's good at fixing things, investigating cases and working with the civil service. But it would not have provided experience running a department. She has very little knowledge of how to implement a strategy, deliver a project, formulate a policy, or pull together a political programme. 

She is therefore fundamentally unproven in the core task which she faces, which is melding together a big and competing policy agenda under a Labour government, marshalling Whitehall behind it, and keeping the Treasury on board. 

Time will tell if she can live up to the task she's been given. It's a big one.

But regardless of how well she performs, one thing is now very clear: We are about to get a government of civil servants. 

This is the first time this has happened. It's a new development in British politics. Critics will call it managerial or technocratic. Journalists will call it boring. But it actually stands a chance of working.

It is morally imperative that it succeeds. Years of piss-poor government have frayed public trust in politics. A succession of prime ministers have behaved like a bloke pissed on the high street on a Saturday afternoon wearing his trousers as a fucking T-shirt. A public that was already jaded is reaching the point where it believes that voting won't change anything. And that is ripe ground for populism.

It's not enough to knock down conservative populism at the election. We have to kill it stone dead, proper dagger through the heart stuff, or it can come back in a more toxic form. You only have to look at the batshit, far-right, conspiracy theory horror show rhetoric of the Tory party conference to see how that might play out. 

Rational, sober, transactional politics must prove that it can deliver. Starmer's civil service government won't just carry Labour's political fortunes. It'll carry those of the liberal democratic system.