Ministers Reflect: lessons from the Chancellor, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary

Today, the Institute for Government publishes three new interviews with Great Offices of State holders from the last Labour government:

• Alistair Darling – Transport Secretary, Trade and Industry Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2007–2010
• Margaret Beckett – Business Secretary, Environment Secretary and Foreign Secretary from 2006–2007
• Alan Johnson – Education Secretary, Health Secretary and Home Secretary from 2009–2010.

All three have impressive biographies, collectively spanning four decades of experience in government and a range of senior ministerial jobs. Their interviews shed light on how the Labour Government worked at a senior level, and also provide advice for their successors.  

The role of Chancellor is a “very political job”

Alistair Darling’s time at HM Treasury was dominated by the financial crisis. Dealing with global uncertainty and constantly changing events meant that there was less time to take a strategic view and focus on longer-term change programmes, something Philip Hammond may face as he tries to steer the economy through Brexit. Darling emphasises that the Chancellor’s job is about much more than being a steady administrator:

“The first thing you need to remember is it’s a very political job,” he said. “The Budget Statement, for example, isn’t just like a company annual report or announcing your housekeeping measures for the next year, it is a political statement of what the government is about.”

As Chancellor, the pressure is intense and all of your actions have consequences, warns Darling: “…you can make a speech and you can watch the FTSE move or Sterling move as a result of what you’re saying."

Darling also reflects on special advisers and negative briefing (“…the amount of time that I spent putting out fires when fires never needed to be lit in the first place, it is debilitating), the importance of networks in the House of Commons (“One of the reasons that I never met Jeremy Corbyn is because he never came into the lobby with us!”) and managing in a crisis (“We got into real trouble over Northern Rock, because it looked like we’d lost control”).

“…the Foreign Secretary always does this”

The experience of entering office in a new department can hold surprises even for ministers with long and varied experience. They have to get on top of a new brief, identify personal areas of focus and set priorities, as well as challenging the status quo where necessary. “One of the things I found at FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] was there was a sort of expectation that the Foreign Secretary would do this, because the Foreign Secretary always does this, there was a little list of places you would go to and I was like, ‘Hang on a minute…’”, said Margaret Beckett.

But it was her security arrangements as Foreign Secretary that came as the biggest surprise: "I realised that they would be with me on official engagements, but it hadn’t really struck me that if I was going to the supermarket or if I was, as I say, going for a walk, that they would be there somewhere.”

The Foreign Secretary’s role involves a lot of negotiation, something Beckett had experience of from working on international climate change agreements at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Reflecting on how the Government can best negotiate Brexit, she suggests: “Bring back some of the people you’ve let go. We had, in Defra, on the environment and the agriculture side, we had some really, really ace negotiators and we had quite a number in the Foreign Office as well… we were big hitters, we carried weight, we could get our way in Europe because of the way we handled ourselves and because we were just really good at it.”

The Home Secretary faces “a crisis a week”

Alan Johnson was on quite a “merry-go-round” of ministerial jobs (“Ridiculous! It’s one of the things that David Cameron got right, he didn’t have constant reshuffles”) before his final posting as Home Secretary.

Crises that require immediate attention and prioritisation loom large in all ministerial careers, especially at the Home Office. Johnson recalls encountering “one a week”. Fortunately, he felt that the Civil Service was “pretty good” at coping: “Number one, they don’t panic.… The way government swings into action, particularly now when they’re used to it after Northern Ireland, and 9/11 and 7/7...  you’ve got the forums to get all the experts in and to deal with it.”

Johnson’s time in the role was, however, cut short by the 2010 election. On identity cards, for example, he reflects: "You get a bit of a ‘hurry up’ to get stuff implemented and finished, identity cards being a case in point. I mean, I’ve still got mine, people were merrily buying them for £15, because we thought you might get a certain volume in there that was going to be very difficult for the government to just tear up the legislation, but they found it very easy to tear up the legislation!”

Dealing with Number 10

For all three interviewees, the close relationship with Number 10 also stood out. “The relationship between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor is so important, because if they’re not at one everybody will find out very quickly", says Darling.

But Johnson warns against accepting everything Number 10 spads tell you. Right before he was due to make a big policy announcement, he “…was told that Gordon Brown disagreed with it. I said ‘if that’s the way Gordon feels, if he doesn’t ring me himself to tell me that then this is going to be published.’ No one rang me.”

Margaret Beckett meanwhile, was characteristically unafraid to stand her ground with the Prime Minister: “I do actually remember screaming at the Prime Minister and Chancellor in a room full of rather white-faced civil servants and special advisers, all of whom were assiduously looking at the floor and saying absolutely nothing!”

Our Ministers Reflect archive contains interviews with more than 40 ministers from the 2010-15 Coalition Government and a further 15 interviews from the 1997-2010 Labour period.