The revenge of the Blob

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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If you still have any appetite left for a new goal in 2025, one idea might be to apply for a (dismally unremunerative) public appointment at what used to be called a “quango”.

Governments of all stripes have rightly tried to increase the number of people who apply for roles at the V&A, Network Rail, the Parole Board and so on. Like “Your country needs you”, the appeal is to public service. But does it actually want you?

In fact, before you upload your CV and a “supporting statement”, you must answer some questions, badged as “equality information”. Until recently, the existing questions centred on the applicant, such as their ethnicity, religion, sex and even sexual orientation. What is new is a section requiring socioeconomic information.

There once was a disclaimer that none of this material would actually be seen by selectors — it was being collected merely for statistical analysis and general purposes. No longer. This information is going to be used in the assessment process.

You must indicate what kind of secondary school you attended between 11 and 16 (what about privately-educated sixth formers?). But the private/state sector distinction is not enough. If you attended a state school, you must declare whether it selected on the basis of “academic ability, faith or other grounds”. Pesky grammar school types, beware. If you attended a private school, you are to be in a different category if you received a bursary of 90 per cent or more. Scholarship boys and girls are thus placed in a less privileged category, for these purposes.

You will be asked about your former eligibility for free school meals and, at the apparently significant age of 14, whether your highest-earning parent was employed, self-employed or “not working”. It is unclear if the latter category is meant to embrace those with more elderly parents or those who had taken early retirement. There is also an enquiry as to what was the highest level of qualification achieved — by your parents.

As those with children who have recently applied for university through UCAS will know, this information can be withheld of course (“Prefer not to say”) but at what price?

This sudden interest in one’s teenage years flatly undermines one of the Seven (originally Nolan) Principles of Public Life that:

Holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias.

It would seem these new arrangements work against these supervening principles, though they fit more easily with the woollier imperatives of the Civil Service Code: “You must carry out your responsibilities in a way that is fair, just and equitable and reflects the Civil Service commitment to equality and diversity.”

However, these are public appointments, where individuals explicitly are told they do not become civil servants, join its payroll or receive a pension, though these demarcation lines are being blurred in more than this respect, which we will come to.

Johnson soon discovered that influencing public appointments is trickier than Conservative candidate selections

Keir Starmer’s government has thereby reinvigorated the so-called “Blob”, since the social aims and objectives of the political and official classes are now working in lockstep.

This warrants scrutiny. It is not even an effective means of meeting social justice goals. In particular, the substitution of a genuine attempt to seek cognitive diversity and external inputs and talent, which was a key objective of the Declaration on Government Reform (2021), co-signed by the head of the Civil Service, in favour of this lazy socioeconomic box-ticking, is an especially depressing development.

Whatever their problems and their vagueness, in place of Dominic Cummings’ drive for “misfits and weirdos”, or even David Cameron’s calls for the Big Society, there now seems to have been substituted the blunt tool of socially engineered appointments.

A little recent history may be helpful in suggesting how we got to this point.

Ever since John Major set up the Committee on Standards in Public Life 30 years ago, originally under Lord Nolan, the practical effect has been towards bending ministers and MPs to modern HR and (more recently) DEI norms and “due process”.

Despite 14 years in office, the Tories never quite got the hang of how to bend the machine back towards its will, despite Francis Maude’s necessary but insufficient reforms at the Cabinet Office.

Most particularly, there was a real opportunity (especially once the coalition ended), to bring in more people with commercial experience, as well as those who did not have a public sector mindset. Above all, to avoid groupthink.

So, in delivering Lord Grimstone’s report on the issue, Maude sought to ensure that ministers had greater input into public appointments at each stage — in setting the brief, reviewing the work of the (now advisory) appointment panels and making the final decisions (including, technically, the right not to appoint the favoured panel choice, or even someone not deemed “appointable”).

Under Theresa May’s premiership, progress slid, and the Blob began to recover — her interest in initiatives such as gender pay gap reporting and “workers on boards” was balm to the Blob’s instincts for social activism. Boris Johnson’s government saw a return to a much more dynamic, political and occasionally cack-handed style of intervention, assisted by Alex Hickman at No.10, with shadowy, isolated and occasionally spirited dark arts support from Dougie Smith. These often failed, as he soon discovered that influencing public appointments is trickier than Conservative candidate selections.

Such attempts were often torpedoed by bureaucratic process and malicious leaking. Charles Moore was not installed in the chairmanship of the BBC (the candidate, never very keen, soon took fright) nor Paul Dacre to Ofcom (the candidate, never very adaptable, engineered his own slow-motion car crash at the interview).

Later, Nadine Dorries did report being shocked to discover that a recommendation from her as secretary of state at DCMS to appoint Michael Grade as Chairman of Ofcom had been changed to that of party apparatchik Stephen Gilbert by the time it had reached the PM’s red box. Still, discovered it was, and frustrated it was.

More recently, the new government has felt able to step in to slow down or, in most cases, cancel key appointments initiated under the previous regime — most notably, the DCMS secretary Lisa Nandy’s annulling the appointment of Dame Mary Archer as chairman of the Royal Parks, even after it had been approved by due process.

For all these reasons, there are now, therefore, not one but two levels to the chicanery: DEI, which introduces a deliberately subjective variable to the question of whether someone is “appointable” and the gerrymandering, or at least retrofitting, of the biggest competitions and plummest roles for those favoured by the Prime Minister and his team.

There is unarguably much more technical scope for such ministerial tinkering now, thanks to the Tories — fuller powers which the Blairites had managed quite happily without — but which they proceeded to use erratically, vetoing someone here because of a stray anti-Brexit tweet, whilst waving through other dubious crony choices.

The Tories thus did not make themselves popular with the Blob, but as often as not, for understandable reasons. Woke management teams, especially in the well-known cultural institutions, did get very frustrated with ministers for repeatedly rejecting their quietly favoured (and secretly tutored) candidates to the board of trustees which would oversee them. This was especially so when it came to appointments that had anything to do with “social purpose”, often designated as public engagement.

Now that the political weather has changed, we see that the Conservatives delivered a system which pulls hard for a much more united political and bureaucratic class that talks and thinks the same way.

However, all is not quite lost: some checks and balances remain.

William Shawcross is the current commissioner for public appointments, whose term of office runs to September 2026. In his final 18 months, Shawcross might make it his business to consider the appropriateness of the new DEI questions in relation to public appointments.

After all, he is solemnly enjoined as commissioner to uphold two principles which are increasingly at odds with these new socioeconomic questions: appointment on the basis of merit, and diversity considerations. When the latter relate not to an applicant’s present characteristics but to their past upbringing and parental circumstances, there could be an issue.

The same applies to Gisela Stuart, who heads the Civil Service Commission which regulates its senior level recruitment, and is also specifically tasked with ensuring that appointments are made on merit after fair and open competition.

A recent example of overstepping may suffice — it falls close to their beats. An official is to chair the panel which appoints independent members to the House of Lords Appointments Commission. It is Simon Madden, the Director of Propriety & Ethics at the Cabinet Office, the job Sue Gray once did. This follows the equally inappropriate decision of Simon Case when cabinet secretary to chair the very panel which appointed Baroness Stuart to oversee the Civil Service (which he was running).

This kind of mission and personnel creep by officials is evidence of poor governance, for what are designedly not civil service appointments. It should be axiomatic that no civil servant should be chairing a public appointment panel.

Beyond these Commissioners, oversight lies with Parliament, and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in particular. They hold pre-appointment hearings and periodically review the system. This committee is chaired by Simon Hoare, MP for North Dorset, and a member of the consensus-minded Tory Reform Group; he is one of only two Conservatives, alongside seven Labour MPs, and two Liberal Democrats. Experienced hands do not expect much pushback from this quarter.

So, by all means dust down your CV and apply. Just don’t expect an interview unless you tick the “right” boxes and will accommodate the political aims and social purposes of those people who actually run the system.