Why ministers fail

I, like most people on the Right, have a lot of time for Shabana Mahmood. This fact does her no favours, for two reasons. The first, more obvious one is that she is marked to her comrades as a latent enemy of the faith, whose penchant for compromising with the electorate should be treated with deep suspicion. But the second, more important reason is that it leads to her being moved around too often.

Mahmood first made a name for herself in the Ministry of Justice, where she was widely viewed to have started getting a grip on the prisons crisis. The critical word, however, is started. Mahmood was Justice Secretary for barely more than a year, which is simply not long enough to achieve anything substantial.

And lo and behold, less than a year on, the Government is staring down the barrel of yet another toxic round of early releases, with David Lammy forced to argue that if he doesn’t start letting sex offenders out of prison there won’t be any room to put sex offenders in prison.

Is the same thing happening again? We have so little by way of firm pronouncements on the subject of Burnham Thought that it is difficult to say. If the speculation that she is going to be his Chancellor of the Exchequer is borne out, it could be a vibes-based appointment of somebody generally viewed as tough and right-wing to the finance portfolio in order, at least in theory, to reassure the bond markets.

But it could also be a way of moving the only true believer in Mahmood’s immigration reforms out of the immigration brief. Generally speaking, the easiest way to effect a politically-sensitive redeployment like this is via a promotion; see also the apparent plan to move Ed Miliband to the Foreign Office. Neither Mahmood nor Miliband actually want to move, each being relatively serious politicians with actual policy ambitions, but it is hard to present elevation to a great office of state as a slight. The phrase “kicked upstairs” comes to mind.

The actual impact of all this on the Government’s immigration policy is not, from where we are now, easily discernible. Whilst on the face of it moving Mahmood is an ill-omen, Burnham could yet fill the role with a New Labour veteran such as Yvette Cooper; people tend to forget, given the eventual shape of its legacy, how mind-bogglingly vigorous (by modern standards) New Labour could sometimes be on immigration.

An able minister with a vision for her brief is once again moved before she has a chance to really achieve anything

Stepping for a moment into the usually-fantastical realms of 4D chess, it’s also worth noting that one of the biggest problems with immigration-reduction efforts under the Conservatives was that it was repeatedly outsourced to the Home Secretary despite the most important opinion being that of… the Chancellor, who typically allied with education and business to advocate for ever-higher numbers. Any serious attempt to roll back mass immigration will have to be a whole-of-government effort with the Treasury on board, and that means having a committed (and I mean really committed) restrictionist.

Is that likely to be how this plays out? No. But it behoves us to mention it. Far more likely, however, is that an able minister with a vision for her brief is once again moved before she has a chance to really achieve anything.

The great counter-example which all governments should learn from is, I think, Nick Gibb. The man himself might have mixed feelings about a career which never saw him elevated to Cabinet rank, but it nonetheless offers a model of NCO-style ministerial leadership. Gibb made it his mission to transform the teaching of reading, and he was actually able to do this because he served as schools minister for, with a short interregnum, ten years. 

By contrast, Michael Gove was only in post at Education for four years; long enough to undertake some really substantial reforms, but not long enough to properly bed them in. His successors took their feet off the gas almost at once, and Bridget Phillipson has rolled back much of the progress the Tories made on schools with a speed and vigour which puts the supposedly-reactionary Right to shame.

Much of what made Gibb and Gove successful doesn’t apply to Burnham’s choices, of course, because they not only had extended periods in office but also significant time shadowing their portfolios in opposition to develop their thinking. The new Cabinet will have no such luxury, and beyond strong feelings about devolution there is not much evidence of “Manchesterism” as a serious political programme.

And debilitating as they are to effective government, we must acknowledge that reshuffles are today an important instrument of both party and media management (and for that reason are usually overseen by the whips rather than any political visionary). A prime minister who takes a firm stand against regular reshuffles would find themselves short of baubles to dangle before restive backbenchers, and Labour has at present an awful lot of those.

But the modern rate of churn at the top is undoubtedly a significant cause of what Tom McTague has branded “our most forgettable age”. Superficially, the characters change too frequently to grow in the public imagination into the “big beasts” that glower at us from the history books; substantively, modern politicians simply don’t have time to achieve anything, even in the unusual case that they have achievements in them.