Sue Gray’s report into Partygate is coming out soon and the PM is announcing a big shake-up of the structure of the Civil Service by way of a pre-emptive defence against criticisms of chaotic management in 10 Downing Street, as the Guardian reports.
Under the shake-up, the Government announced changes that will “enhance the support that is offered to the Prime Minister and to the Cabinet”. The Cabinet Office will be split into two, with domestic policy oversight, national security and legislative units handed to No 10 under Jones. The remaining Cabinet Office functions including Whitehall changes and Civil Service administration will remain under the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, Alex Chisholm.
This raises the question: ‘Who is Jones?’ In April 2021, Samantha Jones was appointed the Prime Minister’s top adviser on NHS transformation and social care.
It is perhaps unsettling news that an NHS management guru is now suddenly a permanent secretary under the beleaguered Simon Case, based in 10 Downing Street. She is the second most important Government official in the state, with a brief covering national security. As the Daily Mail reported:
She began her NHS career as a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital but quickly realised life on the wards was not for her. While still a trainee, she went to see the Chief Nurse at the London Children’s Hospital and declared she wanted to go into management. She later recalled: “I said, ‘I don’t know why I want to be a manager, but I’ve got four brothers. I’m too stroppy. I have to stand by my beds while the consultant does his ward round and I’m not allowed to speak until I’m spoken to – and I’m not having any of that.’”
The Mail interview goes on to say that her favourite book is Machiavelli’s The Prince, a 16th-century guide to ruthlessly obtaining and maintaining political power, perfect for life in the byzantine 10 Downing Street court. Her dream dinner party guests would include Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, David Walliams and Nelson Mandela, so she will fit perfectly with Sir Michael Barber, the PM’s manager of ‘delivery’ and former close aide to Tony Blair – the Blairite tendency grows apace. So the NHS, a truly broken institution, is now the source of salvation for our nation’s administration, supplying top officials to Downing Street. Matthew Taylor, who is Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, is a former political strategist to Tony Blair.
Ms. Jones was involved in a minor scandal when, as Chief Executive of Epsom and St Helier Hospital, she was involved in appointing her sister-in-law, Ruth Harrison, to a £50,000 a year job after Harrison, Chief Executive of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, had been criticised for her management of a hospital in which patients died due to poor infection control. Ms. Harrison also got a pay off of £140,000, which attracted criticism from MPs and the Tax Payers’ Alliance.
On the face of it, NHS management would seem the very last place for 10 Downing Street in its state of utter chaos to recruit an administrator. So who is Samantha Jones and why has she been propelled to the top of the Civil Service so fast? Her claim to fame appears to be that she was in charge of the implementation of the Vanguard programme of restructuring care in the NHS via new ‘care models’ between 2015 and 2017.
This extremely open-ended, costly programme described itself in September 2016 as follows:
Between January and September 2015, 50 vanguards were selected to take a lead on the development of new care models which would act as the blueprints for the NHS moving forward and the inspiration to the rest of the health and care system. Through the new care models programme, complete redesign of whole health and care systems were being considered.
Vanguards are local collectives which offer health care and which can experiment and develop new ways and models of provision.
How might the effectiveness of Ms. Jones’s project be evaluated? With difficulty it seems, according to the Manchester University Evaluation Report of 2019. Referencing the 2018 National Audit Office Report, it says:
The recent NAO report (2018) suggests approximately £329m direct investment between 2015 and 2018 with an additional £60m on the Vanguard NCM programme, support and monitoring (including national and local evaluation and staff costs). However, support costs are approximate, as there is no clear accounting for the time of staff seconded from other roles in NHSE to support the programme.
The project clearly costs a lot of money, but is it worth it? This Manchester University report concludes that the project is muddled, to use lay language:
In terms of future policy making and planning we suggest that the multiple purposes underpinning the NCM Vanguard programme may have been problematic. For example, there is a tension between the need for ‘good news’ from a programme and the need to really understand in depth whether and how particular changes to services are actually beneficial. We have highlighted the lack of clarity over how the NCM Vanguard programme was intended to be disseminated and spread and shown a tension between approaches to ‘scaling up’ and ‘spreading out’. It may be useful for those involved with the NCM Vanguard support and evaluation programme to work closely with the team now responsible for supporting developing ICSs, with the explicit intention of considering whether and how the different local NCM Vanguard service models might best be implemented over a wider population.
A major difficulty with the Vanguard project erupted with a threat of strike action by staff affected by one of the new Vanguard models introduced in Manchester. Unions warned that they could see support workers given potentially dangerous tasks like administering controlled drugs. They were concerned that the Vanguard new model would involve “piling duties on to unqualified workers”.
Vanguard has been very expensive and is hardly a storming success story. While Ms. Jones may have been an effective hospital chief executive, her record doesn’t really explain why she is now a permanent secretary atop the British Civil Service and a close advisor to the PM in 10 Downing Street across all policy areas. Just what criteria is Downing Street using to make these appointments?
Dr. Timothy Bradshaw is a retired Lecturer in Theology at the University of Oxford.
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I think this article is called damming with faint praise.
The praise seems to me real, and to have admiration in it. If anything, I felt it was the criticism that failed to go home
The British constitution will not matter a jot because Britain will cease to exist once white British people are in a minority.
But would it matter if changes to it had helped to make that possible?
Yes, that’s a good point.
I am not sure when the rot really set in.
My impression is that people in former times were generally happy to make observations about race that would now be considered “racist”. At some point that started to change and now people are afraid, even to admit to themselves, that they might hold “racist” views. Certainly since non-white immigration into the UK started in earnest, “anti-racism” has been drummed into us. Maybe it started with the drive to abolish the slave trade. I am not saying that the slave trade was right or that we should not have abolished it or that we should go back to it – but we seem to confuse quite rightly not treating people as property with the perfectly natural preference for your own tribe.
Yes, terrible confusion,
Both the author and David Starkey seem to take the view that the post-Restoration constitutional settlement was a universally good thing, only to be broken later by the likes of Blair and co.
This is a fairly conventional view, and carries with it a whiff of the Whig interpretation of history, which holds that the political evolution of this country has been one of progress whereby power has been gradually transferred from an abolutist monarchy to our present representative democracy.
If only.
This view also informs much of what’s taught in schools as history, from what I can gather.
It was only when I read Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) that I started to see things a bit differently.
Although it’s a novel rather than a political tract, it does mark the origin of One Nation Conservatism, which is still a view much in play even today.
Put simply, Disraeli’s view was that the post-Restoration political settlement had put too much power in the hands of Parliament, and by sidelining the role of the monarch, had left no voice to defend the interests of the common people of this country.
Then as now, Parliament was stuffed with vested interests.
The results at the time had become very evident. The common people, pushed off the land by parliamentary acts of enclosure, had in many cases become desperate wage slaves often living in shockingly bad conditions.
Disraeli correctly identified this, and tried to re-invent the Conservatives into the party which would balance the interests of the common people and the capitalists who had brought about such material and technological progress, thereby assuming the role which in previous times had been enshrined in the monarch.
With the rise of the Labour movement to power or a share of it in the early 20th century, maybe it was considered that Parliament had finally reached a balanced and fair representation of interests, and that at last the common people had proper advocacy in the seat of power.
In retrospect, we can now see that this was probably a high point and that things have gone downhill very badly since, with vested interests very much back in charge.
The Labour Party has morphed into a bizarre embodiment of bad ideas who only cultivate their client class of state functionaries and poorly-educated graduates. They certainly don’t represent what we might call the traditional Working Class. The Conservatives reject any kind of ideology so just go along with the drift, becoming the Socialism Lite party, continuation One-Nationers, whose aspirations never rise above a bit of managerialist tinkering.
Once again, the interests of the common people have been sidelined.
This vacuum is what has allowed our rulers to impose mass immigration on our society, something that the people were never consulted on and which had damaged and undermined our shared cultural identity.
We know who the beneficiaries of this are, and it’s not the common people.
The summer riots were a manifestation of this. Others may follow.
To counterbalance parliament as representation of the factional interest of society, something representing its shared interests is needed. This used to be (at least in Germany) a monarchial government existing above and besides parliamentary strife of the parties. This suggests that the problem we’re facing is how to strip parliament of its status as dictatorial institution of power with no regard for anything but itself to put it back into its bottle, force it to accept the existence of legitimate, extraparliamentrial institution of power it didn’t create itself, ie, not His Most Toniest Blairness’ quango straightjacket supposed to guarantee New Labour government even in absence of a New Labour government.
Even the US model of an elected head of government with real power who’s not part of the parliamentary machinery might be suitable for that. OTOH, the traditional model worked fine. It took the parliamentarists to major European landwars to abolish it.
Maybe the only answer is Swiss-style direct government through regular referenda.
Whether that would work in the UK is moot, given that we’re a bigger and more diverse country with a very different history.
It would also require a vigorous and free press and media, something under continual attack.
This essay is puzzling. Professor Alexander very obviously admires Starkey; his essay is full of praise of him. But the title promises, also, to tell us where he is wrong. As someone who also admires Starkey, I was keen to learn where he is wrong but, search as I may, I can’t find it, not much anyway, and nothing developed. It might be expected to follow the heading, “Now for the criticisms”. But it doesn’t, not distinctly.
To begin with, it contains more praise: “[I am] someone who agrees with Starkey that we should read more history … Starkey’s remarkable history of England, and the Union … About the modern time, I, again, find most of the picture persuasive … a great deal to be said for Starkey’s particular history … to say something about the past that enables him to make a copious criticism of the present … almost no sound voices from history [apart from his] … the only historian who has managed to turn history into prophecy in a powerful way. Everyone has something to learn from his recent lectures.”
Alexander is plainly struggling to find anything much wrong. He begins by lighting a damp squib: “His suggestion that we should study history for the sake of the present is [not wrong but] badly formulated” and not all that badly either evidently, for, although “most historical comparisons are naive. In fact Starkey mostly avoids this naive sort of comparison … What he does instead is something subtler … to use the past to explain the present (not to explain what to do in the present, but to explain how we got where we are.”)
He does go on, “But there is a problem even with this. For we cannot restore anything by studying history.” But he has already admitted that Starkey doesn’t offer to use history to explain what to do in the present only to explain how we got where we are. So Alexander not only has not yet shown anything wrong, he hasn’t even shown us what the ‘problem’ is in what Starkey has to say.
There is, in fact, only one place where Alexander finds something wrong with Starkey that he doesn’t qualify out of existence and, even then, he introduces and closes it in a muted sort of a way: “Starkey is rather too admiring of Thatcher. As I said in an earlier piece, Thatcher only understood one of Enoch Powell’s concerns: the managed economy. She did not understand the problem of Europe until very late on, and never understood the problem of immigration, which remains a taboo subject. Starkey, as a humorous atheist, is unwilling to extend his political and constitutional analysis to include religion.”
And then this: “I suppose I dislike some of the cartoonish, or naïve, analogies, such as the comparison of Christian Europe to the European Union. … [The former] appealed to belief, and depended on faith or truth. No one has ever claimed the EU depends on truth or belief. Indeed, it entirely lacks either. … It is a confection, an arbitrary construction, a sort of Heath Robinson conspiracy whereby secular rational universalists – who are influenced by, alas, those English or Scottish habits of universal trade and profit-arousing and rent-seeking as well as by French and German habits of control and planning – attempt to break down all national significance, and, worse, all independent political significance.” And, even that he sums up as, “The story is a bit more dialectical than I think Starkey could admit without damaging his story.”
I don’t think Alexander has himself got a story about Starkey. Except for Starkey’s blankness about religion (which, filled up, might show an unintelligent hostility), Alexander is (not unreasonably) a straightforward admirer. And the title of his essay is seriously misleading.