Episode Twenty-Seven: The Route to Power
Endless column inches and quite a few books will no doubt be written about Britain’s shortest prime ministerial tenure of all time, but there might just be time to squeeze in a couple of somewhat original observations. We invite you, the reader, to imagine that you’re a Tory MP of perhaps the 2005 or 2010 intakes. You want to be Prime Minister in ten to fifteen years time. How can you best help your odds?
To some degree, this depends on factors beyond your control, such as your party being in office at all. But clearly there are things you can to help yourself. The key thing is to stay on good terms with your fellow MPs, the party members, and the electorate more broadly. This is a tricky balancing act. You need preferment to ministerial position at some point, and will inevitably have to outcompete some fellow MPs, who might feel resentment. On the other hand, some decisions you take in office could very conceivably annoy the members and the general electorate. Even assuming no huge party-dividing issue like Brexit comes along – where you will inevitably have to pick a side and cross your fingers – the road to power is paved with crumbling cobblestones with brambles sprouting up between them.
The obvious solution, therefore, is to become a minister, but avoid all real power and restrict yourself to bullshit jobs. You absolutely don’t want to be Chancellor, since the Treasury’s overweening power across Whitehall antagonizes virtually everyone else, while the electorate might frown on any tax hikes or spending cuts you have to implement. You don’t want to be Health Secretary, since this involves being the front (wo)man in winter when the NHS inevitably descends into crisis yet again due to poor spending decisions made long before your time. You don’t want to be Home Secretary, which involves failing to control immigration, the one thing that the public really want but the political elite can never deliver.
Thankfully, there are some mercifully high-profile but very fake jobs you can do. The Foreign Office is an overgrown consular service, now with development & aid tacked on, but is for some reason still counted as a Great Office of State even though all meaningful foreign policy is run out of No.10 and the Cabinet Office. The Department of Trade is an even better fake job: lots of foreign travel, good photoshoots, and EU rollover agreements to sign. If you can’t get either of these plum posts, perhaps the Departments of Transport or Culture, Media & Sport or Environment would do? At the latter you will probably annoy some farmers, but this need not be terminal. If you’re incredibly lucky you can even get your own fake job custom-made for you (Minister for Portsmouth? Equalities? Mental Health?), but this can’t be relied on.
In-between, of course, are a tier of ministerial positions that either can be fake or very real, depending on both events and how much you yourself care about doing your job (Defence, BEIS, Education). These will do in a pinch, but in an energy crisis everyone suddenly might really care about who runs BEIS. A war could break out, or a major defence & security review occur during your time at the MoD, or a disastrous procurement programme like Ajax suddenly become impossible to hush up. Best to avoid these departments if you can.
Liz Truss’s career, of course, is a perfect demonstration of this career path. Two years as Environment Secretary, two years at Trade, a year at the Foreign Office. A year’s stint as Lord Chancellor while serving as Secretary of State for the Department of Justice (2016-2017) was probably the most non-fake job she ever did. Penny Mordaunt has had a similar trajectory: a variety of inoffensive junior ministerial posts, with two years as Secretary of State at the Department for International Development. You could even consider Boris Johnson as belonging in this category: two terms as Mayor of London, followed by a stint at the Foreign Office. As a fun thought experiment, imagine if Priti Patel had never gone to the Home Office and had had Truss’s jobs at Trade and FCDO instead. Perhaps today she would be the ex-PM instead? It certainly seems more likely.
Ah well, nevertheless.
Doing the real jobs, meanwhile, increasingly comes with huge political penalties. George Osborne’s unpopularity accrued at the Treasury had probably ruled him out as David Cameron’s successor even before the 2016 Brexit referendum. Rishi Sunak has managed to avoid this fate, it’s true, but in very unusual circumstances. Very rarely do Chancellors get the opportunity to disburse cash in the way Sunak was forced to do during the pandemic. Perhaps most unfairly of all, Jeremy Hunt seems forever doomed to a sort of Blair-style hatred in the minds of the general public merely by virtue of having been quite a good Health Secretary.
Whether or not anyone has to date actively planned their career in this way, the bad incentives seem clear enough for the future. Perhaps one way to address the issue could be by amalgamating (or even abolishing) departments, which would not abolish the fake ministerial jobs but would at least limit their number and remove some of their prestige, since their holders would no longer be secretaries of state. DfiD has already been rolled into the Foreign Office, and Trade could go there as well. Perhaps two fake jobs combined might make for half a real one. DCMS could simply be abolished altogether and the tech-facing aspect of its functions returned to BEIS. Transport could quite plausibly be amalgamated with Housing & Communities. A smaller Cabinet (perhaps cut down to no more than eight people) might be a more useful consultative venue for the PM and would probably leak less.
More radically, however, if in advanced democracies politicians face increasingly bad incentive structures, perhaps the only solution is to get them to do less. In a sense, this represents perhaps the most compelling argument for a suddenly-unfashionable small-state libertarianism. Alternatives, however, are available. Just this week the Social Market Foundation – a very respectable centre-left thinktank - had a fascinating proposal for removing ministerial authority over the size of the state altogether, establishing a new technocratic body with fiscal autonomy in the same way as the Bank of England enjoys control over monetary policy. In increasingly desperate times, as a brutal recession looms and the mainstream democratic political system lapses into outright chaos and chronic dysfunction, it seems worth at least thinking about.