How can you tell?
The excellent Institute for Government has a major hard hitting report out today on why there is a crisis at the top of government. It basically claims that the current structure is not fit for purpose, the cabinet too big, the Treasury and Cabinet Office in desperate need of reform and so on.
But my first thought is; how can they tell?
How do you distinguish between a sequence of the 5 worst PM’s in recorded history and the structural problems of Westminster?
Seriously, Cameron who invented austerity as a policy, risked a referendum designed to solve an internal Tory Civil war and lost, having made no plans for Brexit at all and walked off humming while leaving decades of economic and political damage behind him.
Theresa May, well those red lines doomed us to a hard Brexit which no one voted for and even so she failed, totally.
Johnson who stabbed her in the front and the back and then lied for years while at the top of the greasy pole. He was so lazy and stupid that he employed Lord Frost to negotiate the Brexit deal and then lied again about the details again and again. Eventually defenestrated for serial lying, what damage he did to the system of government it is impossible to judge, but it is huge.
Truss, enough said.
Sunak, a political pygmy and inadequate who is living in fear of his own back benchers and a return of, yes, Boris Johnson.
Would we really be discussing reform of major departments, the cabinet and the government, if the last 5 PM’s had been even vaguely competent? If they had put the country first, had stood up to their rancid racist back benchers, had not played the race card, invented the Rwanda plan, had a hint of decency or common sense, stood up for human rights, admitted the economic costs of Brexit?
The real trouble is that it may take another 15 years of competent, decent, principled leadership before we can be certain of what is the real cause of the UK’s failings.
I am no great lover of the Treasury, the Home Office, the Foreign Office; and the Cabinet is obviously far too large. But a fish stinks from the head.
Would a good leader and a good team make it all work better? Or, should a new government reform everything it can, just to be sure?
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
I think Ian Dunt in 'How Westminster....' makes a reasonable case for reform, saying that currently only the Lord's (as a law revising chamber) and the Select Committees work reasonably well. I think he values experts who do not rotate endlessly as both ministers and civil servants. What's your opinion?