Starmer humiliated Wormald – but his problems with the Blob remain
Chris Wormald turned up on 9 February expecting a normal day, or as close to a normal day as it gets when your workplace is Downing Street, the Prime Minister is in crisis and you are the country’s most senior civil servant. He certainly hadn’t arrived at No 10 that morning expecting to be fired. And yet, the morning after Morgan McSweeney’s dramatic resignation as chief of staff, Wormald was called into the Prime Minister’s office and given the news.
Wormald came out “stunned”, a friend says. Despite briefings against him for months suggesting that Starmer and his team were unimpressed and that he could soon be forced out, Wormald had felt secure in his job in large part because, when he had asked at the highest levels of Downing Street if there was indeed a problem with his performance, he had been reassured that the briefings were nonsense and unauthorised. The speculation had simply become “background noise”, as a friend puts it.
The news that he had been forced out began appearing in the press that afternoon, before the terms of his exit were agreed: deliberately timed, a friend suspects, to come ahead of Starmer’s high-stakes appearance in front of the Parliamentary Labour Party that evening, where his future was on the line. The Labour government “humiliated the head of the civil service in front of everyone”, Wormald’s friend says, his 35-year career brought to a bitter and very public end after months of being unable to defend himself against attacks in the press.
Civil servants are angry about Wormald’s treatment, even though plenty of them say he was always the wrong choice for the role. “Chris is a brilliant policy wonk, but he’s not a disrupter,” a former colleague says. Another describes him as “a classic Sir Humphrey”, the cabinet secretary in Yes, Minister – “the epitome of the backroom civil servant”. As Wormald would put it, it was his job to explain what could and couldn’t be done. When, for instance, the government announced a digital ID policy before it was ready, it was Wormald’s job to inject an awkward dose of reality (the government has since been forced to drop the policy).
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But still, Wormald was Starmer’s choice. The embattled Prime Minister did not inherit him as cabinet secretary, but actively chose him five months into the job. Starmer had been so spooked by the debacle over Sue Gray’s departure that he decided to avoid appointing a high-profile or colourful civil servant to the most senior position in the civil service, telling colleagues he wanted someone “on the shop floor, not the shop window”. He chose the famously cautious policy expert Wormald and tasked him with nothing short of “rewiring the British state”, which commentators at the time suggested was an odd appointment for the boldness of the task. A friend of Wormald’s says he was given the mission without Starmer or his team ever articulating what “rewiring the state” actually meant.
Nineteen months in, Wormald has been sacked, blamed for being ineffective – collateral damage in Starmer’s effort to save his own skin amid the fallout of the Mandelson affair, in which Wormald played no part. Civil servants who agree that he was the wrong choice for the role are nevertheless furious about how he was treated by Starmer, describing the slow humiliation of the country’s top civil servant as nothing short of “appalling”. As many cabinet ministers will no doubt relate, Wormald is seen as the latest victim of No 10’s culture of “performance review by osmosis”, as one figure coins it: feedback via the press which is denied in private, but persists until the figure in question is sacked. A No 10 source declined to discuss the decision or Wormald’s treatment, saying only that “the PM wouldn’t have done it if he’d thought everything was tip-top”.
Starmer once defended the civil service against attacks by the Conservatives. But since entering government, he has criticised it himself, most memorably a few months into office when he declared that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. He walked back his comments following a backlash, but the substantive point remained: he had been disappointed by the quality of the civil service since entering government. He repeated the criticism a few months ago, complaining of pulling on levers and nothing happening, and a prevailing feeling of “frustration” with the system since becoming Prime Minister.
Civil servants and Labour aides alike agree that there are longstanding issues with the civil service. Brexit and Covid prompted mass recruitment drives which have bent the system out of shape, with “too many people, too much overlap, a whole generation of civil servants promoted too soon who lack experience, leading to poor-quality policy advice”, in the words of one senior mandarin. They describe a loss of confidence among civil servants, in part because of how people were treated in the Conservative years, exacerbating risk aversion and resulting in advice to ministers that fails to make clear recommendations, full of caveats and scared to state a plain view. Many civil servants also agree with Starmer and his predecessors’ complaints about delivery: “We can either be super punchy and impressive, usually only in times of crisis, or extremely slow,” the same mandarin observes. They argue, as Starmer did in his comments in December, that much of that is tied to slow legal, planning and regulatory systems, but conclude the civil service has been slow to reform much of that too.
Starmer was warned about these problems before entering government. Labour aides and senior civil servants told him that the top tier of the senior civil service “had atrophied, was stacked with people who had come up under 14 years of Tories and didn’t understand us”, as one former Labour aide puts it. Starmer was advised to “look for those who had perhaps left the civil service, to bring them back, and to instil a confidence in cabinet ministers to push through their agendas” when they arrived in government. But, as one former No 10 aide concludes, “the ‘disrupter’ mentality just wasn’t real. Too many went native.”
In fact, civil servants and former Labour aides alike now conclude that one of the biggest problems with the civil service at the moment is Starmer himself. The criticism that the Labour Party often makes of its leader – that he fails to provide clear political direction – is one loudly made by the civil service too, and by clear-sighted politicians and aides trying to diagnose what has gone wrong between Labour and Whitehall.
“All of the worst tendencies of the civil service thrive on ambiguity,” a former No 10 aide observes. “The very good civil servants that exist will jump on clear direction and use it to cut through the institutional office politics.” Starmer’s lack of clear political direction and tolerance for different cabinet ministers pursuing rival strategies has resulted in “the different fiefdoms within the civil service following whichever signal most enables the thing they were already doing”. Starmer comes out unfavourably from comparisons with his predecessor in this regard.
Rishi Sunak was known for energetically bounding around the labyrinthine building of No 10, turning up at people’s desks and digging into the weeds of problems, as well as hand-picking people he rated to build teams he could rely on. “He engaged with what the civil service actually is and made it more effective rather than tossing stones at it,” says one civil servant who has worked for both. “Starmer doesn’t seem capable of that and also doesn’t see it as his job, which is part of his wider misunderstanding of the job of PM.”
Scathing civil servants say the problem isn’t limited to Starmer, however. “The overall operation hasn’t made it their job to work at a deep level with the civil service,” the same mandarin observes. Some civil servants are unimpressed by the special advisers they work with, saying they display a “bunker mentality” and engage “sporadically and randomly”.
As Starmer and colleagues have plunged into deep unpopularity, their diagnosis has been that the public is rightly frustrated that the change it voted for isn’t being delivered fast enough. In Labour’s panic, a lot of the blame is falling on the system, including on civil servants who can’t defend themselves. Ironically, civil servants share their concern and, in particular, are worried that the civil service itself will lose the trust of the public if deep-rooted issues within it aren’t addressed and delivery isn’t improved.
“The service needs a major kick or we will lose our licence to operate,” a senior civil servant says, “especially under a Reform government, but frankly under any government.” Nigel Farage’s party has spoken of introducing a more politicised model of the civil service, more akin to that found at the highest levels of American politics. Civil servants worry that if they don’t improve their public image and show they can deliver, they are in danger of losing the argument in favour of an impartial civil service. Just as Labour believes it must deliver or it will cede control to the extreme right, the civil service believes it must deliver or risk being replaced.
Into this existential mission will step whoever replaces Chris Wormald as cabinet secretary. Antonia Romeo, whom Starmer overlooked last time over fears she would attract too much press attention, is now the favourite. A colourful leader, she is perhaps still best known for throwing glamorous parties in New York while she was British Consul – all in the name of promoting British fashion and business. She has shown Starmer in recent years that she can get her head down and deliver for Shabana Mahmood, first as permanent secretary at the Justice Department at the time of the Southport murders, now as the top civil servant at the Home Office.
For now, she is one of three people sharing Wormald’s job before his permanent replacement is announced. She has her detractors within the civil service for her leadership style, with some former colleagues saying she is a “Marmite” character and a self-promoter. But she has many admirers too, who say that, in an age where the civil service desperately needs to make a better case for itself, she is the right person to take that task on, with the energy and dynamism to galvanise it in a difficult period.
Whether Romeo or someone else, Whitehall’s new head will be tasked with reinvigorating a civil service feeling unexpectedly bruised by its experience of Labour in government, as well as with something far more existential: proving that the civil service can deliver before many fear it will be too late.
[Further reading: Gordon Brown: Police need to interview Andrew]
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