Making press releases more political won’t improve how government communicates

In a new guest paper for the Institute for Government, Steph Driver, Keir Starmer’s former No.10 communications director, makes five recommendations on how government communications can become what she calls “a steward of public trust”.  In doing so, she rejects the notion that the answer – as proposed by Boris Johnson’s former communications director, Lee Cain, in his own IfG guest paper – that the answer is structural change involving greater central control and reduced headcount.  

Driver has some interesting insights on modern media management

Driver makes a persuasive case for rejecting the choice between “legacy media” and “digital first” strategies. She argues that No.10 must still engage with the lobby, the need to embrace specialist media and “manage the media as an active stakeholder”, and to recognise the limits of influencers, who are solely concerned with monetising their own brand. These all seem sound advice for anyone trying to manage comms from No.10, and it will be interesting to see how No.10 media management changes with a prime minister who seems to relish playing with social media in a way that Keir Starmer could never convincingly do.  

So too is her view that while the grid still matters, it is no longer the case of focusing on a single announcement and then standing back. The days of Alastair Campbell being able to parcel out the latest headline to a supine and cowed correspondent, and then watching the story cascade through the less favoured outlets, are long over. Driver argues that issues need to be “microgridded” – to recognise the multiple outlets and times a story needs to be repeated. She also argues that reducing headcount is a “red herring”, which can distract from the need to upskill the civil service to go out and confidently sell the government story.  

Driver draws a false distinction between “persuasion” and “explanation”

The more contentious part of Driver’s analysis is her concern about the way in which civil service press teams work with special advisers, which she thinks hampers the ability of the government to make a convincing case for what it is doing – and thus is a direct cause of low public trust in government. Driver argues that “the current system produces a clash between the Government Communication Service (GCS) mission to explain and the SpAd mission to persuade. The result is “reduced external impact, internal noise, misdirection of resources and a dent in collaboration”.

This needs much more unpicking – and Driver’s thesis would benefit from giving some concrete examples of where government efforts have been undermined by this division. Some of her frustrations seem to be borne of the civil service being too reluctant to make clear that this is a Labour government (rather than simply “the government”) and to put change in the context of Labour’s inheritance. Driver argues that “when we had success, it had to be the government’s success, not the Labour government’s, even though the decision making was informed by the country’s ask for Labour to govern”.

It is far from clear why these reservations should undermine government communications efforts. But the Starmer government has been notable for its tribalism and desire to frame issues in a highly partisan way. Ed Balls remarked on his “Political Currency” podcast that Rachel Reeves’s budget speeches contained more “political content redactions” – there were 36 pieces of content excised as too partisan for gov.uk in Reeves’s 2025 budget speech, compared to 25 in Jeremy Hunt’s last budget. Driver complains that even factual references to the previous government’s record are off limits. This may reflect a degree of overcorrection by the GCS in the light of past abuse of official government communications by the Conservative government, but it hardly undermines the government's ability to tell a story.  

Explaining and persuading should complement each other. The role of the GCS should be to put out convincing explanations of the purpose of government policy – the basis for the decisions; why the policy is the best way to address an identified problem; why the policy is the right choice to make. None of that is helped by adding the word “Labour” to the explanation. The spads can then come in alongside the official communication to put any helpful political gloss on the move and show how it is the government is delivering on its promises.  

The government’s real problem is not that the explanations are not political enough but that, in too many cases, there was not a well thought through rationale for the policy in the first place.  If government communications are to be the real steward of public trust in government, then a better approach to policy making inside government is far more important than adding the word “Labour” to a government press release. Driver appears to recognise this herself when she gives the example of the approach the government has taken to the social media ban – the shame for Keir Starmer is that it seems he has only discovered that approach when his premiership was already terminal.