Something has gone wrong with the Government, and the Prime Minister knows it. That is why, in the past few weeks, the placid air and empty cages of David Cameron’s No 10 have been disturbed by the entry and installation of a number of substantial political animals, all of whose jobs it is to growl and bite on behalf of the Prime Minister.
The remedy suggests the problem. Three weeks ago Paul Kirby arrived from the accountancy giant, KPMG, to run the new No 10 policy unit. This week Andrew Cooper has started as Mr Cameron’s director of political strategy. Tim Luke, formerly of Barclay’s Capital and Lehman Brothers, was hired as business adviser. While the Arab Spring has dominated the news headlines, the Prime Minister has been thoroughly reshuffling his kitchen cabinet of advisers: not so much the Jasmine Revolution as the Marigold Reshuffle.
The various briefings accompanying these moves have spoken of giving the Prime Minister the key role in any strategic discussion and of ensuring that Mr Cameron’s views are “understood” in each of the main departments.
The need for such mechanisms in No 10 formed part of the early education in office of Tony Blair. Mr Cameron, however, came to power suggesting that while he would hope to possess the political instincts and persuasive skills of his predecessor, he would forswear the control-freakery, the centralisation and the sofa government located, as it was, always, on the same sofa.
He would, it was said, be happy to be the relaxed company chairman, delegating jobs to the management, rather than be the hands-on, interfering, second-guessing chief executive. Former mandarins and their academic admirers saluted Mr Cameron’s promised return to what an historian called “proper collective Cabinet government”.
Advertisement
Surveying the political landscape now, Mr Cameron is probably wondering where his hands-off approach has got him. Already Labour senses that his greatest vulnerability is not an unpopular economic and public expenditure policy, but the nebulousness of his political strategy and the lack of co-ordination of government policy. In the Commons on Monday, Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, summed it up (in the context of Libya) as an absence of “grip”. This is an accusation that, if it sticks, is usually fatal.
For example, does the Government have an economic strategy that extends even a hopeful millimetre beyond deficit reduction? Could ordinary citizens, stopped in the street, say what it was? Or do they see the coalition’s policy entirely through (in No 10’s own phrase) the prism of cuts? Would the same people be able — beyond feeling pressed to become a Brown Owl or a parent governor — to locate their own place in the Big Society?
And these questions arise before difficult non- economic problems start to emerge: before crime levels rise (as they are widely predicted to do), and before the organisational confusion that is likely to attend Andrew Lansley’s ambitious reform of the NHS really starts to take effect.
That example illustrates the point. It is hard to imagine the same relaxed indulgence being offered by a Blair No 10 to a minister’s plan to reform fundamentally the country’s largest and most politically sensitive institution — a reform, furthermore, that was not so much as trailed in the general election. So whose reform is it?
Mr Blair discovered something about modern governance that was not to do with any natural disposition towards dictatorial behaviour. He learned it during the fuel crisis of 2000 and the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. It is that people will moan a lot about presidential government, but they will moan a lot more about its absence. It appears that the Prime Minister is now beginning to understand this truth.