Ioan Phillips: Reshuffling the deckchairs – the Whitehall perspective

Ioan Phillips is a former civil servant who worked as a private secretary to three secretaries of state for transport.

Like a flustered head teacher, the Prime Minister is probably looking forward to six weeks’ respite from their troublesome charges. Despite the ostensible outbreak of harmony following the shambolic welfare vote at the end of the parliamentary term, much talk abounds of a reshuffle following summer recess. The received wisdom suggests that the chief architects of the welfare mess, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, and Chancellor Rachel Reeves, may well be heading for the exit.

But, since the Prime Minister will have all summer to mull a reshuffle, predicting which ministers to buy and sell stocks in is about as useful as the Mission Delivery Unit.

The one thing we can say with any degree of certainty at this stage is that prime ministers use reshuffles for a multitude of reasons: think any, or all, of balancing party factions, blooding fresh talent, signalling their policy priorities, and imposing their authority.

The problem for the Prime Minister, relative to the latter two reasons, is that he lacks a coherent governing philosophy (save for seemingly outsourcing policy-making to Esther Rantzen) and, following the welfare climbdown, has expended already diminishing political capital.

Given the steady administrative emasculation of the Prime Minister, it’s arguably more fruitful to consider how the Whitehall machine is preparing for a reshuffle and what it’ll want to get from it.

This site rightly highlights when the state gets things wrong (which it does with alarming alacrity). It’s hard, however, to fault the Civil Service’s level of perma-readiness for ministerial churn. Each department will have teams of officials coordinating and collating day-one briefings, ready to put to their prospective new minister(s). Considering how many ministers come into post without much grounding in their brief, these documents are pithy policy explainers – refreshingly free of the standard alphabet soup of acronym-laden jargon – and will often give a nod to issues that’ll soon be coming across their desks.

Then, at private office level, there’ll be a lot of thinking about how to adapt to ministerial preferences and ensure the new minister feels like they’ve got the support, both in terms of practicalities and personnel, to advance their priorities. (Even the question of whether to clap or not gets chewed over in minute detail.)

In theory, this should result in ministers slotting seamlessly into the day-to-day business of their departments, with an idea of what they plan to use their office to do.

Yet, too often, ministers are bombarded by so-called “urgent” advice, introductory meetings, departmental town halls, and the like. Taken alongside their constituency and parliamentary commitments as MPs, this doesn’t exactly give them much breathing space to familiarise themselves with a challenging policy issue or think about what objectives they’d like to advance. Whilst Rory Stewart isn’t someone regularly cited on ConservativeHome nowadays, his description, in Politics On the Edge, of how the Civil Service tends to view elected decision-makers is particularly pertinent in this regard:

“I was beginning to sense… civil servants often preferred ministers to be dignified mouthpieces, who defended the department competently and fluently.”

Anyone who, like me, has experienced how long it takes your average government department to fix a lift or get the air conditioning working will scoff at the notion of a deep state conspiracy to control ministers. That said, Whitehall does seem to possess a pathologically hardwired knack for presenting supposedly time-critical advice in the expectation of eliciting a snap decision on the basis that “there is no alternative”. Some ministers – entirely justifiably – have been known to push back against this tendency and (shock horror) the sky doesn’t fall in.

You don’t have to be Dominic Cummings to agree that this model of ministerial decision-making – where a principal who has spent their day in back-to-back ministerial meetings, voted in the House (possibly followed by a political engagement), and is then asked to review dozens of pieces of important advice – might need some reform. (Don’t bank on artificial intelligence private secretaries just yet, mind.)

It’s not just Whitehall for whom a government reshuffle offers opportunities. Even allowing for the Leader of the Opposition’s light-touch surgery earlier this week, most shadow ministers will likely have been in post longer than their new opponent and can exploit that greenness to cause them some parliamentary discomfort with their knowledge of the policy terrain. Additionally, some of the current crop of shadow ministers served in government and will likely be able to spot, and dissect, policies being promoted that they previously rejected (the mandarinate are excellent at tweaking and rebadging policies, per the politics of their principals – as recent (re)announcements in the infrastructure space attest).

Whichever way one looks at it, back-to-school season in the Palace of Westminster is unlikely to be dull for anyone – especially Britain’s bureaucracy.