Starmer’s civil service cronies set a dangerous precedent
In appointing donors, yes-men and activists to senior roles, the Labour leader is undermining a cornerstone of our democracy: civil service impartiality, says James Price
After years and years of criticising the Tories, Labour were meant to be different. We were told that they would be a breath of fresh air, restoring rectitude and ethical behaviour to Downing Street. This turns, like much else Starmer has said on his way to the top, turns out to be an empty promise.
There have already been multiple scandals that, had they occurred under the evil Conservatives, would have been headline news on the BBC and the Guardian. My favourite has to be the “passes for glasses” scandal (what a name). A wealthy Labour donor, Lord Alli, has sponsored Keir Starmer’s glow-up, buying our new Prime Minister nearly £20,000 worth of new suits and eyewear, and in return was given a pass to No10.
I have had one of these passes, and the teams inside Downing Street are exceptional individuals who take security extremely seriously.
No one has been able to say why Lord Alli was given this pass, when or who organised it. These tend to be easy questions to answer if the answers are legitimate. The confusion and evasiveness from the new regime suggests that this arrangement is far from kosher.
Incidentally, the same peer also donated to new Labour MP Liam Conlon’s election campaign. Mr Conlon is the son of Downing Street Chief of Staff, Sue Gray.
Then, next door in No 11, Chancellor Rachel Reeves appointed another donor, Ian Corfield, as a senior civil servant. Under gentle scrutiny this appointment (not subject to the usual open and fair employment processes of which the civil service is usually so proud) has been downgraded to a temporary, unpaid advisory role. Again, not something that one would do if one was sure of the propriety of the move.
But the most egregious appointment took place on the other side of the Downing Street link door, in the Cabinet Office. Jess Sargent, a former employee of the think tank come Starmer campaign group was appointed as the Deputy Director of the Cabinet Office’s Propriety and Constitution Group, which is responsible for ‘ensuring the highest standards of propriety and ethics across all government departments’.
And that’s before you get to the highly dubious appointment of former civil servant Gray in such a political role.
I should at this stage recommend the work of former Conservative special adviser and CityAM Contributor Henry Newman, whose ‘The Whitehall Project’ Substack is doing a better job of mounting a Loyal Opposition for His Majesty than any party, or indeed most of the fourth estate.
Newman has become, it seems, a lightning rod for those who are aghast at the way certain figures at the top of the new administration seem determined to ride roughshod over standards and practices of which the civil service is rightly proud.
As it happens, I am entirely sympathetic to the desire of the new government to see through its agenda and have more people who share their worldview and desire to enact those policies for which they were elected.
The post-Blair civil service is, in my view as someone who worked across multiple government departments, to blame for many of the country’s ills, blocking – whether overtly or through omission – an agenda with which they did not agree. The Tories may have been too rubbish in office too much of the time, but there were only ever 200 Tories in government at once (around 100 ministers and 100 special advisers, political appointees with no legal authority to order officials around).
This is a patently absurd way to run a government, and one of the few areas where, say, the US system easily trumps our own. There the executive is staffed by believers after at least the three-month long transition period between presidential election and inauguration. Civil service impartiality is a cornerstone of our democracy, but the British state also needs people with business skills, executive experience, project management ability and tech know-how to function effectively. It’s why the vaccine response was so effective – Kate Bingham knew the pharma world and Nadhim Zahawi had the business chops to operationalise the rollout.
If anything we need more political appointees, not fewer, but they should be clearly distinct from those whose job it is to carry out the work of government without fear of favour. In blurring this boundary, Labour are setting a dangerous precedent.
That Starmer feels the need to fill so many senior positions with yes-men suggests he’s less prepared for power than he pretended.
James Price is a former government advisor