“This is where we should be working.” Keir Starmer took a wistful look around the offices in Hull where he had just been speaking. There was so much light and space, you could see him thinking. There were tables around which you could have a meeting, or a “break-out session”. The chairs had been engineered for spinal comfort by people who had spent years studying ergonomics.
The prime minister’s thoughts turned to the place where he actually does work, the most famous address in the land, 10 Downing Street. “It’s a rabbit warren,” he sighed. “Dark rooms underground.”
It’s a moment that comes to every prime minister: the realisation that Britain is full of places and institutions that are world famous but also, once you look at them up close, tatty and out of date, and that their own office is the biggest example. Gordon Brown visited Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral suite in New York and tried to remodel Number 10 along similar lines, with big screens and rows of aides circling out from his command desk, like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, if it had been fuelled entirely by bacon sandwiches and resentment. But there are limits to what you can do to a seventeenth century listed building.
When Covid struck Downing Street, all small rooms and tight corridors, became a plague pit. Pretty much exactly five years ago, I attended a cramped briefing there from health officials about how they were going to stop the virus spreading. A few days after that I suddenly felt very tired, and within hours I was barely conscious. Two weeks later, returning to work, my first job was to get Boris Johnson’s obituary ready. He’d just been hospitalised. I’ve always maintained that I picked the virus up in the building, suppressing the worrying thought that I might have carried it in there myself.
In some ways, our current prime minister has been quite quick in reaching the conclusion that nothing in Whitehall works. Perhaps it was because he arrived without any real plans, and then discovered he couldn’t even implement those.
“The state employs more people than it has in decades,” he told his audience, the usual mix of press, guests, and slightly baffled staff at the office he was visiting, who were forced to stand still behind him, on camera, for the best part of an hour. “And yet — look around thecountry. Do you see good value everywhere? Because I don’t. I actually think its weaker than it’s ever been.” We had been told this was going to be a positive speech about the civil service. Perhaps there was a more negative draft in which he just called them all slags.
The subject was “the agile and productive state”, and to prove it Starmer had taken off his jacket and paced the room, tieless, shirt sleeves rolled up. Sometimes he leaned on one of those lovely tables, like your boss who’d just popped by for an uncomfortable chat about the football.
At the end of last year, the prime minister had seized on one idea, that regulations applied with excessive zeal were holding back the building programme he wants to kick off. His prime example then was the £100m Bat Tunnel that was delaying HS2. On Thursday we got new horror stories. “‘Jumping spiders’ stopping an entire new town!” Starmer declared. There was another building project under threat “because the regulator was not properly consulted on the power of cricket balls!” It was like listening to a Daily Mail news meeting.
We also got a new idea. “There is a knee jerk response to difficult questions,” Starmer said, towards the end of his speech. “The response goes like this, let’s create an agency, start a consultation, make it statutory, have a review. Until slowly, almost by stealth, democratic accountability is swept under a regulatory carpet.”
This was a familiar complaint coming from an unfamiliar place. Add some misunderstood history and a bit of schoolboy Latin and we could have been listening to Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The prime minister is on a journey
There was more. The problem, he explained, was “politicians almost not trusting themselves, outsourcing everything to different bodies.” The news that the prime minister doesn’t like reviews and consultations will come as a surprise to anyone who followed the first six months of his time in office. Still, more rejoicing at the Taxpayers’ Alliance over one quango-creator come to repentance, and all that.
And he had a final surprise: the abolition of NHS England, the arms-length body that has run the health service for the last decade and, presumably, got in Wes Streeting’s way once too often. “I am bringing management of the NHS back into democratic control!” the prime minister declared. This is one of those announcements that journalists realise is a big deal without really being sure what it means. And in truth it’s unlikely many people will notice the difference. Indeed, a few may see the headlines and panic that he’s abolishing the health service altogether. But the Taxpayers’ Alliance will have to wait a little longer for that one. The prime minister is on a journey. Who knows where it will take him next?
