PPS to the PM - the most important job that (almost) no one has heard of....

Who will Keir Starmer (and Sue Gray) pick to run 10 Downing Street? The corridors of power are echoing with three possible names (all HM Treasury types) - read on to discover the front runners.

The Principal Private Secretary (PPS) to the Prime Minister (PPS/PM) is one of the key roles in Whitehall. He (and so far all but one of the office holders have been men) is the overall head of the Private Office – one of the vital parts of 10 Downing Street. Typically the PPS is in charge (on the Civil Service side) of Downing Street. The Chief of Staff, now Sue Gray, runs the political side.

Every minister in charge of a department has a PPS who runs their Private Office. The Private Office are the elite squad of civil servants supporting a minister. The Private Secretaries handle the flow of papers (and emails) through the office, record decisions, and minute meetings. They make sure their minister knows what he or she needs to know before each meeting. The Private Office help decide what meetings their minister should take, and which invitations they should delegate, delay or decline. They represent their minister’s views to the department, to wider Whitehall and beyond. The Private Office prepare box notes for their minister [more on that and Private Offices in a future blog] which help ‘crystalise’ available choices. Private Secretaries need to be efficient, hard-working, organised, clever but also smart.

A PPS will recruit (or retain) the rest of the Private Office (a deputy PPS, diary secretary, and the other Private Secretaries). All PPSs work closely with special advisers (SpAds) as well as ministers….so there’s an obvious premium on being able to ‘handle’ the political layer. And in Downing Street this is even more true because the ratio of SpAds to officials is much higher.

Typically the PPS to the PM is also head of 10 Downing Street overall – the whole building (including the Press Office, Policy Unit and so on). The post is usually at Director General level (ie one rank below the top Civil Service grade of permanent secretary) but this isn’t set in stone.

At some points there’s also been a dedicated permanent secretary in No10 [a separate question is whether this administration will be tempted to appoint one]. Under Boris Johnson, Simon Case did this role (albeit briefly), before he became Cabinet Secretary. Jeremy Heywood was also a No10 Perm Sec, before also becoming Cabinet Secretary.