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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
‘Renewables’? How are rare metals (some not so rare, but lithium certainly is), renewable? Cui bono from the mining and usage of such minerals? Does little Gaia magically manufacture these elements and minerals? How is bird chopping and eco devastation from panels and turbines ‘renewable’? How are they manufactured, transported and setup on site? How are they maintained? How much oil needs to grease the bird slicers? How often is it changed? How do you charge your EV? What happens when it dies? etc etc. etc
The stupid of the modern age, really f*ing hurts.
Not to mention that the windmills must keep turning, even when there is no wind (i.e. they use electricity to rotate). If they are stationary for too long, the bearings become unbalanced.
There is the bigger broader agenda of Social Justice and Sustainable Development, for which Climate Change is just a tool. Or as George Chirac pointed out some years ago that Kyoto was a “genuine component of world governance”. Global treaty’s like Kyoto, Copenhagen and Paris enable progressives to work around National Interests, because national interests have no place in their World order. We now have the “International Community” and under the guise of stabilising the climate, infact climate is really just the means by which activists as part of this “Community” can achieve world governance based on progressivism. But because temperatures are not rising as climate models projected, extreme weather has become the new means to insist humans are interfering in climate. Every storm, food or drought is because of our greenhouse gasses, with zero evidence for that., but when you have a compliant media telling the whole of the western world on the 6 o’clock news that we have a “climate emergency” who needs evidence? When no one can falsify any of this “crisis” stuff (1) It isn’t science, and (2) It isn’t evidence of anything, it is just the language of politics. or as Richard Lindzen pointed out —————“Climate alarm belongs to a class of issues for which there is no evidence and is characterised as immorality pretending to virtue”.
It’s not just fear and panic. It’s a marketing tactic, with a profit to make, from equipment manufacturing, and maintenance, disposing of scrap, and so on.
A statement like
Climate change isn’t solely to blame for extreme weather, but… it stacks the deck against us… it’s baked in with our weather and often a key ingredient in the outcome… it supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.
is content-free fear-mongering. It’s actually even worse than that: Literally, this is complete nonsense. Climate change isn’t a rational actor trying to get us by cheating (stacking the deck), life isn’t a poker play with possibly stacked decks, nobody knows exactly what a weather pattern is supposed to be, let alone a normal one, as opposed to an unnormal one (how can one tell one from the other?) and there’s certainly not way to charge or even supercharge patterns.
The only meaning of this sentence is someting like An inhuman, shady entity with magic superpowers is seeking to ensnare and ruin you! Beware! Be afraid! Be very afraid! Sounds awfully like the traditional Puritan story of Satan lurking in the wilderness to corrupt and destroy the good people (of Salem, to wit). In more rational times, people making such statements would have been laughed out of of house (or put into a sanatorium).
Another neat take down of how climate emergency journalism works from the pen of Mr Morrison. Keep it up.
I am a sensible environmentalist but these extremist climate activists and policies are destroying true environmentalism. Their policies and actions are so politicized and impractical and not based on any engineering, they are destroying the environment themselves. Wind turbines and electric cars are not environmentally friendly nor sustainable. They direct funds away from real environmental problems such as garbage management, sewage disposal and over use of pesticides, to name just a few issues.
I don’t think anyone truly knows how much human activity affects weather and climate, there are too many variables, but surely the huge change to forest cover especially across the equator has an impact? Trouble is politicians and globalists have latched onto CO2 theories as a way to gain leverage and impose their command and control agendas on us, even though those theories now seem to be wrong.