Taking the Mickey
Today's news that Government appointed a Labour staffer to a Constitutional guardian role in Cabinet Office, opens a new front in the politicisation of the Civil Service row, following 'Donorgate'.
The new Labour Government is fully entitled to see its agenda delivered. It is entitled to make changes to Whitehall to help it deliver its agenda. And, it is entitled to ensure it has the right staff in the Civil Service to deliver that agenda.
But there are rules and norms to be followed. As I have already set out in One Rule for Them, if a Conservative administration had appointed a recent donor as a senior civil servant, we would never have heard the end of it. Let alone if that donor was appointed to handle business relations. We still don’t know if Rachel Reeves breached the ministerial code over that appointment….
Today, Guido Fawkes reported that Jess Sargeant had been appointed to the Cabinet Office as a Deputy Director in the Propriety & Constitution Group. Sargeant was recently ‘Director of Constitutional Change’ at Labour Together. Before that she also worked for the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute. She has deleted her LinkedIn and locked her Twitter account, but her role at Labour Together is visible through a cached file.
This appointment crosses a line. To my knowledge, it is entirely unprecedented to have a staffer from a Labour-aligned campaign organisation appointed into the heart of the Cabinet Office - into the team which is basically the guardian of the Constitution.
Labour Together is not a charity like the IPPR or Policy Exchange. Its website says it was ‘built by a group of MPs - Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood, Steve Reed, Bridget Philipson, Lucy Powell, Lisa Nandy and Jon Cruddas - who fought to make Labour electable again’. It says ‘Labour Together exists to explore how to win and govern’.
Labour Together is explicitly about Labour political power - winning it and holding on to it. There is nothing wrong with that. But it is clearly fundamentally incompatible with a politically impartial Civil Service.
The last Labour Government legislated (The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010) to require the Minister for the Civil Service (one of the titles by tradition held by the Prime Minister) to ‘lay..before Parliament’ a Civil Service Code. That Code sets out the values of the Civil Service. One is ‘impartiality’, which is defined as:
‘acting solely according to the merits of the case and serving equally well governments of different political persuasions’.
This section is expanded later in the Code to set out that civil servants must:
‘act in a way which deserves and retains the confidence of ministers, while at the same time ensuring that you will be able to establish the same relationship with those whom you may be required to serve in some future Government’.
The problem is that it’s hard to see how any future Conservative Government (or indeed a Lib/Lab Coalition) could possibly accept a Labour campaigner working in the team responsible for Constitutional guardianship. That’s why this appointment is in some senses even worse than the mess over ‘Donorgate’ - the appointment of Ian Corfield, and Emily Middleton.
The team to which Jess Sargeant has apparently been appointed is the Cabinet Office’s inner sanctum. It was formerly known as Propriety and Ethics (‘PET’ in Whitehall speak and I will use that acronym for convenience below). PET are the closest you get in Whitehall to the Guardians who Guard the Guardians.
When I worked for Michael Gove in the Cabinet Office, the PET team were part of what Gove described as the ‘dark side of the moon’. Their work was out of sight for almost all ministers. It was even out of sight to my then boss who was the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Minister in charge of the Cabinet Office. We basically had no clue what they were doing.
When I was in Number 10, the arrival of a Director from PET in my office invariably meant a crisis was brewing. The PET team by definition deals with the most sensitive and difficult matters. It’s not the right place to put someone with an explicitly political background.
The longstanding head of Propriety and Ethics was Sue Gray (later appointed by Keir Starmer as his Chief of Staff to the consternation of many Conservatives). She was succeeded by Helen MacNamara, and then the incumbent Darren Tierney.
The team has recently been re-styled as the Propriety and Constitutional Group. [I will note only in passing that Ethics has been dropped from the title of the Group].
According to the Cabinet Office’s website the Propriety & Constitutional Group is responsible for ‘ensuring the highest standards of propriety and ethics across all Government departments’, and ‘advising on the policies and codes governing ministers and special advisers’. What this means is that the PET team (or whatever the new acronym is) can dictate to departments what they can and can’t do in situations which are ethical grey areas. Departments will consult them on contentious appointments, difficult areas of conflicts of interest, problematic expenditure and so on. If a minister is accused of bad behaviour or doing something wrong, PET will open an investigation. As I saw in the Cabinet Office, this can happen with almost no political oversight. They are also responsible for questions of the Ministerial Code…such as how Rachel Reeves’s conflict of interest was (or was not) addressed when her department made one of her donors a senior civil servant. This is the team which departments would ask before appointing an external figure like, say, Emily Middleton.
They are also responsible for ‘overseeing constitutional policy and providing advice…on parliamentary, crown and other constitutional issues’. That’s a hot potato of a policy area. Imagine a question which engages the Lascelles Principles - the circumstances when a sovereign could refuse a request for a dissolution from his Prime Minister. Or other messy issues at the intersection of Parliament, the Crown and the Government. We have had a few of those recently….
PET are also responsible for Honours and the Privy Council. So dishing out gongs, and awards through ‘independent’ honours committees [more on that another time] and more Palace things.
And they are in charge of ‘managing the Government’s relationship with the “Independent Offices” (e.g. the Civil Service Commission)’. It’s PET which will be involved in appointing a permanent Chief Executive for the Civil Service Commission, and which are (behind closed doors) updating the protocol which governs the relationship between Government and the Commission….precisely at a moment when the impartiality of the Civil Service is under serious question.
Finally they are responsible for ‘advising on public appointments’ - so they will advise departments on the appointments of chairs and board members of quangos. This is obviously of huge political interest and a key question of ministerial patronage.
Every one of those responsibilities are highly sensitive.
One former colleague of Jess Sergeant suggested to me that her role in Government was likely to be on the ‘Constitutional’ side of the ‘Propriety and Constitutional’ Group, rather than the Propriety side, given her previous expertise. A senior Labour figure has said something similar to Politico’s Playbook.
But I am not sure this helps her defence. The Constitutional side of the Group is still responsible for hugely important and sensitive questions - for example elections, dissolutions, prorogations and so on. These are matters concerning HMTK (as the King is known inside Whitehall). This appointment is in danger of politicising the very part of the Civil Service which deals with the Sovereign. And a Government should not be dragging the King anywhere near politics….
Anyway a Deputy Director is a relatively senior part of a Group’s team. How could people be certain that she was not aware of what was going on elsewhere in the team. The Cabinet Office told Politico that Sargeant wont be ‘dealing with casework relating to proprietary [sic] issues’. This of course is in danger of accepting, implicitly, that it would be a problem for her to be involved in those propriety issues which part of her Group works on.
This appointment is a major mistake by the new Government.
It was also an error of the new Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary to agree to the appointment. (The appointment is too junior to have required specific approval by the Civil Service Commission).
But its the role of the Cabinet Secretary which is really raising eyebrows inside Whitehall.
It is to him that the PET team ultimately works.
What people are asking is simply - why did the Cabinet Secretary not just say no?
You say ' it is entirely unprecedented to have a staffer from a Labour-aligned campaign organisation appointed into the heart of the Cabinet Office - into the team which is basically the guardian of the Constitution. ' I think Starmer may know what he's doing. The Cabinet Office is the 'guardian of the Constitution - well they've singularly failed to do that'. They've acted in an entirely corrupt way: take their Clearing House unit - a unit set up for various departments faced with an embarrassing Freedom of Information requests and our unit will advise on how you can evade responding or prevaricate. Eventually that admirable campaign group openDemocracy and their lawyers Leigh Day, took them to court and they were condemned by Judge Hughes and David Davis MP for 'suppressing transparency'.
Shortly after the unit was disbanded. Then there was their 'Rapid Response unit also heavily criticised and disbanded.
There was Helen MacNamara, the then government's head of Propriety and Ethics fined for a party-gate knees up in the Cabinet Office (you couldn't make it up - Propriety and Ethics!). And there was the CO's response to my Freedom of Information request about 'how many times had they received a complaint about the Treasury Solicitor -(which has to be forwarded to the PHSO Ombudsman via the complainant's local MP, but is sent by May to the Cabinet Office - she says she was confused - obviously very confused because it began 'I wish to make a complaint about the Treasury Solicitor'. and then the CO sent it to the Government Legal Department whose Head, of course, is the Treasury Solicitor. The CO's FoI response was when they receive an email that's obviously not intended for them, it's sent to the department that seems to best match the content of the email. That means they ignored the opening line of the email which says 'I wish to complain about the Treasury Solicitor'. I detect a whiff of something in the air again. Perhaps the CO should disband their own Office?
And this is the outfit that's supposed to 'guard the Constitution? I think labour's quite right to send in someone to keep an eye on the Cabinet Office ... and maybe help to cleanse the Augean stables