The unbearable lightness of being a minister

Being a government minister is a strange job in lots of ways.

There is no formal interview process. You are simply appointed by the Prime Minister. You may have little or even no direct experience of the department you are being put in charge of and hence need to get up to speed very quickly in often very complex areas. You may never have run anything in your life before and suddenly find yourself (at least nominally) in charge of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, their jobs and livelihoods. You take decisions every day that can affect the entire country even though the only people who have actually put you in parliament are 1/650th of those people.

But one of the most curious aspects of the life of a minister is just how precarious the job is. That same Prime Minister who appointed you to the position can just as easily take it away from you. There is no notice period. If you're out, you're out. Clear your desk and go. Now. Oh and all your perks go instantly. You are suddenly just an ordinary person. There is no tribunal to appeal to. No due process. No unfair dismissal procedure. Just the door and your best attempt to avoid it hitting you on the arse on the way out. And once you are fired there is little chance of getting back into government again. A few do return but they are a statistical anomaly. The much greater likelihood is that you will never return.

The reason for your dismissal could be that a major scandal has broken about your department and perhaps you are not seen to be "gripping it". It probably wasn't your fault (directly) but that's immaterial. If the newspaper headlines are unforgiving for long enough you'll be toast anyway even if you've moved heaven and earth to try and sort things out. The explanation for your political demise may be even more prosaic though. Perhaps the PM just needs to maintain political balance and you're from the wrong wing of the party. Or maybe you're in coalition and there just aren't enough seats for everyone.

There are very few jobs nowadays that are given and taken away so lightly. Can you imagine a CEO of a large company being forced to resign because of something that happened in one of his offices or shops that he could not possibly have known about? Even if they did, you can be sure there will be a whole bunch of other directorships with other companies ready and waiting. It certainly wouldn't be the end of their career. But with ministers it is different. There is only one government and you're either in it or you're not.

I'm not trying to elicit sympathy for ministers here by the way. Politics is a brutal game. They knew what they were getting into and that is just the way it is. However I think it is important to recognise and acknowledge these facts because it can help us to understand why politicians who either are (or want to be) ministers behave in the way that they do.

Look at how Jeremy Hunt acted last year after the communications between his SpAD Adam Smith and News International. He allowed his underling to take the entire blame and then employed all his political skills to wriggle out of any responsibility for what happened. It was a most unedifying sight. But think about how high the stakes were for him. If he'd have resigned or "been resigned" as the fashion seems to be these days that would have been it. His political career would have been finished. All those years in student politics schelpping around different constituencies currying favour and trying to get elected followed by years as a backbencher and then shadow minister would in the end have come to nothing in a heartbeat. When you look at it through that end of the lens it is no wonder that ministers fight so hard to keep their jobs.

Part of the problem is that being a politician nowadays is very much seen as a career. It used to be seen as something that you did perhaps after 20 or more years spent in "the real world" building a career and that could be returned to if politics did not work out for you. But increasingly we have a professional class of politicians who have gone through the SpAd route and/or working in PR for a few years while trying to get a safe seat in parliament. It is not an adjunct to a career any more, it is the career.

I'm not sure there is an easy answer to this. I personally am very unhappy with the idea that MPs should have outside interests/careers while they are supposed to be serving their constituents and holding the government to account. That's more than a full time job as far as I am concerned.

So people like me who think that also need to accept that if you put politicians in the position where they have that much skin in the game, they are going to fight tooth and nail to keep their grip on the greasy pole. It's only natural and I think it's hypocritical for us as the electorate to think badly of them for doing it. We collectively force them to by stacking the chips in the way we do.

The MPs who avoid this precariousness are few and far between. Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and Alastair Darling from the first cabinet of the Labour years were the only ones who were not at some point fired or had to resign. You can probably include Blair as well who (sort of) went at a time of his own choosing. In this government the only ones who are really secure are Cameron, Osborne and Clegg. All the others know that at any point they could be out.

That "unbearable lightness" is the prism through which they view the world. We would perhaps understand their actions better if we bore it in mind.

Why is leaving things alone never an option?

Michael Gove has been sticking his oar in in recent days. He's decided that he wants children to start learning foreign languages from the age of 7. Also he's announced that he wants 5 year olds to recite poetry to each other in class.

I'm not going to dwell on the merits or demerits of these specific proposals. Except to say that if there was strong evidence that these things would increase the wellbeing of British children I suspect it would have been done a long time ago.

What I'm more interested in today is what this says about how governments approach governing.

Gove is an intelligent man. I know this because he used to sit on the Newsnight Review sofa regularly and intellectually spar with the likes of Germaine Greer and Paul Morley. And also I sometimes didn't know what he was on about. OK, maybe that just makes him more intelligent than me. We'll draw a veil over that.

But what makes him think that he knows best about how to micromanage the national curriculum for everyone in the country? The answer is quite simple. He is a politician.

Politicians have to do something. Anything. It's how they get elected. It's no good them standing for election and saying "Vote for me and I'll leave things pretty much as they are.". They'd be vilified by their opponents and would be a laughing stock. Politicians get elected by promising to change things.

But the consequence of this is that things keep getting changed all the time whether that's a good thing or not. Labour embarked on goodness knows how many sets of reforms of the NHS. I think it was at least 3 in 13 years. Now the coalition is at it all over again. Schools have had lots of fiddling in recent years too. Curriculum changes, Key Stages tweaked and meddled with, targets, league tables, new powers, powers taken away, Academies, Free Schools, tighter Ofsted regime, slackening of Ofsted regime etc. etc. etc. And that's just two departments in the last few years. The same pattern is repeated all over government.

Here's a thought. What if we just left things largely alone for a bit? Maybe if we allowed things to settle down, for doctors, nurses, teachers, managers etc. all to get used to the latest way of doing things for say 5 (or shock horror 10) years perhaps we might find performance improving. You know, because so much time and money wouldn't need to be spent reorganising everything every 3 years.

Of course this is fantasy land. But it is worth pondering why we demand politicians always have to campaign on a platform of major change. Because until we allow them to be more reasonable and sometimes say things like "In this area we're doing OK and we propose no major change" without shooting them down in flames we will keep getting these huge shake ups right across all departments.

But if we did this then Gove would have to go back to debating the work of Gilbert and George with Greer and Kirsty Wark.

That's a price I'd be willing to pay.....


This post was first published on Dale & Co.

Should the government be selling its Lloyds TSB shares now?

Lloyds TSB announced an unexpected profit of £1.6 billion for the first half of 2010 this week.

Given that the government owns a substantial chunk of the bank this is very good news for taxpayers. In fact the current stock price is over 73p per share which is way above the 63p per share break even price for the government. If they were to sell their stake now they would make a handsome profit.

Although this should be caveated by the fact that if they were to try and unload all their shares right now that could have a distorting effect on the market and they may not do as well. I expect when they do eventually unload them they will do it in phases.

The question is, when should they do so? After all it is not their money but the taxpayers. It is an important question to ask now that selling the shares would net a profit. The reason they were purchased in the first place was to prevent the bank from collapsing. It is now pretty clear that that is not going to happen. Things have stabilised.

So why are we still holding onto the shares? I imagine it is tempting for the government to wait and hopefully get an even greater profit. We have a huge deficit and a few more billion would be welcome. But of course share prices can go down as well as up. Although for example Robert Peston's analysis this week would suggest that further profit is quite likely it is no guarantee.

I am interested as to exactly what criteria the government will use to decide how and when to sell. Of course the problem is that if they were to announce this strategy then that in itself could affect the share price. However I very much hope there is a plan to sell and quite soon, now Lloyds TSB is profitable and the government would also make a profit.

After all, we do not elect governments to speculate with our money in the banking market.

Why is this Government so incompetent?

The mortgage rescue scheme that this Government announced with such a fanfare last September but didn't actually introduce until January has so far only helped one household. Yes, that's right one.

I am getting so sick of them announcing some measure or other that they claim will help all sorts of people, only to find a while later that either they have not been implemented or have hardly helped anybody.

Ministers constantly use the announcements of these schemes to beat the opposition parties over the head with. It is as if the announcement is all that is needed and is then job done.

This Government in particular is terrible at administration. I think one of the reasons for this must be that most of the members of the administration have never run their own business and some of them have spent their entire working lives in politics. For them, making the speech is the job as far as they are concerned. They have never known anything different.

Something which I have been meaning to write about for a while is the sets of skills that a successful politician needs. They need to be able to speak with confidence in public with few notes. They need to be able to remember a brief. They need to be able to ingratiate themselves with enough members of a constituency party to get selected so this means they need to be charismatic. They need to be able to look like they are answering a question when in fact they are studiously not answering it. And they need to be able to use language in such a way as it sounds like they are agreeing with anything and everything that their party colleagues have ever said on any subject. I am sure there are other skills too but these seem to me to be the main ones.

Now those skills might be vital to climb the greasy pole and get selected, elected and then promoted to ministerial office. However I would argue that there are much more important skills that are needed for someone to be a government minister. And herein lies the problem. If you go for a job interview for a senior position in the private sector let's say Head of Marketing, you will be expected to have done marketing for many years followed by having previously been a Head of Marketing somewhere else (or at least a deputy or equivalent). You would stand virtually no chance of getting the job without being able to demonstrate aptitude and the correct skills and experience for the position.

Contrast this with how ministers are appointed. The PM chooses them on the basis of keeping a balance of positions within the party, loyalty to the whip, longevity of time in parliament, popularity of the individual (usually from them having made good speeches), alignment with his own political views etc. etc. etc. There is no interview or aptitude testing. They are just dropped in at the deep end without the requisite skills or any meaningful training. And these people then end up in charge of Multi-billion pound budgets.

It is no wonder that there are so many cock-ups. I am not really sure what the answer is because when they bring in ministers from outside they often also become croppers. They are usually much better at the administrative side but come a cropper on the political side. There are very few people, certainly in the Labour Party who straddle both. It is generally better in the Lib Dem and Tory parties because many of their MPs have run their own businesses so they have a better idea about this sort of thing.

This Government is now the walking dead

With the pointless Budget today and Gordon Brown's surprise and cack-handed attempt to take control of the MP expenses issue yesterday it is really starting to feel now like this government is in its death throes.

I am old enough to remember the last couple of years of the Major government. It wasn't pretty and it was like watching a slow motion car crash. That lasted years. One big difference between then and now though was that John Major was initially elected by his own party, then he won a general election and when the whispering and back-biting got too much he submitted himself again to a leadership election in 1995 which in the end he won convincingly with almost 2/3rds of the votes of the parliamentary Conservative party.

Contrast that with the unelected and politically amoral current resident of Downing Street. It is now clear to me that he used his goons to ensure that nobody stood against him for the leadership when Tony Blair stood down. It is also becoming ever clearer through memoirs etc. that he spent his 10 years in No 11 plotting against and trying to destabilise Blair's leadership. That is Tony Blair who was elected leader of the Labour party with a decent majority and won three general elections.

Brown to my knowledge is unique, certainly in the modern age of politics for not have been elected in any way shape or form (discounting his constituency election which is about as red rosette and donkeyish as you can get and thus not a real test for him) and this is now painfully apparent. He has no empathy or feel for the concerns of the public and he comes across appallingly badly.

The worst thing is that we are going to have to wait another year at least before we have the chance to get rid of him and his rotten government.