Hutton How to Be a Minister

A 21st-Century Guide
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84954-800-7
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

All ministerial careers end in failure, but they start in hope. True, not everyone expects to end up in No. 10, but everyone wants to do something important. Politics has all sorts of downsides as a career choice but the fortunate few get the opportunity to do something meaningful - prevent or win wars, reduce poverty, create the NHS or, just sometimes, put an end to real injustice. How to Be a Minister launches you into your fledgling ministerial career and shows you how to proceed. This is a fail-safe guide to how to survive as a Secretary of State in Her Majesty's Government, from dealing with civil servants, Cabinet colleagues, the opposition and the media, to coping with the bad times whilst managing the good (and how to resign with a modicum of dignity intact when it all inevitably falls apart). Co-written by former Labour minister John Hutton and former Permanent Secretary Sir Leigh Lewis, How to Be a Minister is not only an invaluable survival guide for ambitious MPs but a tantalising view into the working lives of the people we elect to run our country.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hutton, John

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

I’M HERE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

CONFUCIUS (C550–478BCE)

ALL MINISTERIAL CAREERS MAY END in failure, but they all start in hope. Not everyone thinks they’re heading to No. 10 (though far more travel in hope than arrive, or were really sensible to think they might).

But everyone wants to do something. Politics has all sorts of downsides – but it has one unique upside: if you’re lucky and become a minister you are handed a set of decision levers that are attached to something – when you pull on them something quite remarkable can happen. You can prevent or win wars. You can reduce poverty. You can create the NHS or, just sometimes, you can prevent real injustice.

Those rare days when you are first appointed or promoted should be treasured. There will not be many of them so savour each one as it comes along. But, as you stride purposefully through the ministerial floor for the very first time, trying to look confident and bashful at the same time, do take a couple of seconds to notice the row of photographs hanging outside your office. They start in black-and-white and edge into colour for the last few. Some you recognise immediately, some you are embarrassed to discover were Secretaries of State from your party’s previous administration, whose existence you had forgotten.

They are your predecessors. All of them made this walk for the first time. And all of them made it for the last time too. So will you.

Ask yourself: for how many of them, can you remember anything they did? Sure, if you sought them out now in their city boardroom or Antipodean University, they could list all the great achievements they remember from their time in office. But could anyone else list them?

Yes, I know, politics can be a pretty grim life, but stop complaining – no one is ever going to sympathise. Instead, try to do something meaningful with your time in office. You’re lucky to be here at all – many aspiring MPs never even make it to Parliament. Many aspiring front-benchers never catch the eye of their leader. And many opposition parties never make it into government.

You have cleared all these hurdles; this is payback time. Christopher Hitchens says that friends are what God gives us to apologise for relatives. Well, office is what God gives us to apologise for website comments at the bottom of that seminal article you wrote for ‘Comment is Free’. Or for having to share your sleeper cabin to Glasgow with a loquacious constituent returning from a well-lubricated business conference in London.

So, don’t just ring your Mum and Dad from your new ministerial telephone – though don’t forget to do that; they are unbelievably proud of you. Work out quickly what it is you’re going to do as a minister.

Not a bad place to start is to think how to start. As the 1980s TV series so accurately said: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. The public don’t pay much attention to politics, and have quite a short attention span, though often longer than the political journalists through whom they find out about politics.

To be fair to Lobby journalists (not something many ministers can do after the first few weeks in office), they have to cover every department in Whitehall and all the political parties. All you have to do is understand your own department. They can be forgiven for not knowing the ins and outs of the Child Support Agency, or that its name has been changed to CMEC.

You need to make it easy for them. You need to give them a frame in which they can put you. They will quickly caricature you, unless you do it for them first.

So, what are you going to be: tough on welfare or the champion of the poor? Public service reformer or defender of the public service ethos? Intervening before breakfast, lunch and dinner; or the scourge of ? The iron chancellor or the great spender?

Yes, I know, you can be tough on welfare so as to help the poor. You can be prudent so as to spend later. You can intervene in industry while having a tough competition policy. And you can both support public service as well as champion the contribution that the outsourcers can bring to the table.

But if you go for a frame of reference that no one understands, then you may as well not have tried.

Here’s a simple test. You’ll have received a letter from a Lobby journalist who was always too grand for you, but who has suddenly decided to ask you out for lunch. The first course will be gossip. Then over the second course, they’ll feel a duty to ask you what you want to do with your department. If they’re pushing their peas around the plate after a couple of minutes, then your frame is too complicated.

Or, put another way, you can only be one thing. This is what is called definition. It means standing for something. If you don’t, you may as well just enjoy the dinners and concentrate on making some good contacts for your post-ministerial career. Because without definition, your civil servants won’t know what you want them to do, and if by some miracle you still manage to get something done, the public won’t have noticed you’ve done it.

Definition is the opposite of triangulation. Triangulation is the art of making yourself sound reasonable by contradistinction against exaggerated opposites. For example: ‘Old Labour would never sack any teachers, however bad: the Tories would have to fire lots of good teachers: we would pay properly the good teachers and get rid of the bad ones.’

Triangulation can work in opposition. It sounds reasonable, allows you to tell voters why you’re no longer the party that they ejected from government a few years ago (an important pathway to getting back to power) while categorising the new government as extreme or failed.

But triangulation has a small problem: it usually leads to disaster in government. It leads to a desire to support both sides of an argument at the same time, to avoid decisions which have any downsides and never to make enemies. Ever. And that leads to a simple place: stasis, at which point you should start brushing up those headhunter contacts again.

But how do you work out what you want to do? Ideally, you’ve been put in a department that you know something about. Getting this is slightly tricky, because it’s also rather badly seen in No. 10 to lobby for a particular ministerial job. Any minister who keeps on appearing in the press as desperate to be Foreign Secretary is rather more likely to end up in Agriculture. Nor is it much less embarrassing to keep on button-holing the Political Secretary, the head of the Policy Unit, the Chief Whip, the Prime Minister’s wife, Rita the tea lady, about how really the current Education Secretary is making a horrible mess of things.

No, the best you can really hope for is to develop an expertise and have it noticed. Get yourself appointed to a Select Committee. Have a policy idea. Write a chapter of a set of essays. Get an article in the – or on ‘Comment is Free’ if the won’t have you. If anyone from No. 10 does ever ask you what job you’d like, be honest, modest, but nonchalant (if you can manage it).

Let’s assume you’ve been lucky. Your efforts at mastering the most obscure details of pension policy have been rewarded. You’ve been asked to be minister for something you know about. Enjoy the day – script some mildly rhetorical but safely anodyne words to say as you go into the department for the first time (but don’t be disappointed if the TV cameras are outside the Treasury rather than your department). And then immediately set to work on saying something as interesting as possible as soon as possible.

Reshuffles tend to happen on Thursdays or Fridays; general elections on Thursdays with key ministerial appointments made the next day if the outcome is clear cut. So, if you feel confident enough of the territory, get in early with a Saturday or Sunday political interview. There is likely to be plenty of appetite from the media in getting you in front of the cameras and microphones. But do it only if the following condition is met: you know exactly what the story is going to be. When James Purnell became Secretary of State at DWP, for example, it was clear right from the beginning that he knew what he wanted to do: he wanted to continue with radical reforms to our welfare state. James had been an excellent Pensions Minister when I was at DWP and I knew that he took a keen interest in the wider welfare agenda. David Freud had produced an excellent and hard-hitting report for me on reforming welfare but it had been a struggle to convince Gordon Brown that we should implement his recommendations. After all, these ideas had not originated in the Treasury. The Labour government had devoted a considerable amount of energy to this agenda under Tony Blair. Many of our backbenchers felt we had gone far enough already and wanted a quieter, less demanding programme from the DWP. Welfare reform did not appear to be at the top of Gordon’s list of priorities.

James took a different view and decided to reappoint David Freud as his adviser on welfare reform. It was a simple and powerful assertion of the direction he was going to take as the new Secretary of State. James was going to be a reformer and this was the clear message he was sending in reappointing David Freud. No ambiguity or confusing messages here. There was only one problem –...