A clear sense of purpose can make ministers’ difficult job worthwhile

Being a minister can be frustrating work. When they come up against obstacles or feel like they don’t have the levers to achieve their objectives, it can leave them wondering what it’s all for. In our latest set of Ministers Reflect interviews, Steve Baker, Gillian Keegan and Danny Alexander discuss how ministers can get through difficult times by focusing on their personal motivation and drawing on the team around them for support. 

Ministers have the opportunity to make a difference in an area they care about

As leaders in the political system, ministers have a unique ability to make the changes they want to see in their policy area happen. The ministers we interviewed said that having a real passion for the brief helped them to work well in the role. 

As minister for apprenticeships and skills, and later education secretary, Gillian Keegan worked to expand and promote the apprenticeships offer. Having completed an apprenticeship herself after leaving school, Keegan described how important her experience was to the role: “nobody would have to convince me that apprenticeships were a life changer, I know it because I saw it”. She found that her first-hand experience lent her a “real authentic voice” and told the Institute that her proudest achievement as a minister was “putting apprenticeships on the map”. 

Steve Baker was also passionate about his brief in the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU). Having chaired the European Research Group (the caucus of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs) and campaigned to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, Baker believed strongly in Brexit and had a clear idea of the kind of withdrawal agreement he wanted to achieve. In his interview with us, he advised new ministers to “care about your brief” and warned prime ministers that appointing people who aren’t interested in their brief “is a recipe for disaster”.

But all ministers have to deal with obstacles – and frustration

Regardless of personal convictions, ministers inevitably face obstacles to achieving reform and implementing new policies. Steve Baker told us about his frustrations: he had a strong vision of the Brexit agreement he wanted to see, but not all the powers to achieve it. He recalled being “extremely heavily obstructed” by those higher up than him in the system. His view that the direct instructions of DExEU ministers were ignored by the prime minister, Theresa May, led to his decision to resign in July 2018. He told the Institute, “I wish people would just do what I asked them the first time and then it’d be a lot easier for everybody… I am so frustrated that time and time again I’ve been proven right”. 

Ministers can find reform in public services particularly frustrating where the actual delivery of policy changes takes place ‘at arm’s length’ and so beyond the direct control of ministers. On the Conservative government’s education reforms, Gillian Keegan reflected that it was tough to implement change in the public sector because there are “a lot of stakeholders that… try to knock you off track”. For example, she described the difficulty of negotiating with teaching unions when she felt like “what the heads of some of the biggest unions actually wanted was a general strike”.  

Danny Alexander approached such obstacles by advising ministers to work constructively to bring stakeholders on board, as when he negotiating with trade union members who opposed the coalition’s public sector pension reforms. Although the reforms led to some protests and strikes, Alexander accepted that that was “part of it” and he had wanted to find the “fairest way” forward to secure a “sustainable way to give public service workers decent pensions”.

By building the right team, ministers can ensure they are supported in their role 

One way ministers can make sure they are best prepared to navigate these obstacles is by building the right team of officials and advisers around them. For Gillian Keegan, this meant building a team of people from diverse backgrounds with different views. She argued that to avoid ‘groupthink’ in the civil service and compensate for a lack of diversity in other parts of the system, ministers can build a team of people “who have come from different walks of life, have got different experiences from their professional life, who come with a real knowledge of something”.

Baker and Alexander talked about the importance of good leadership. Danny Alexander’s advice for new ministers was that “most of the officials who are working for you are educated, committed people who are trying their best. And you’ll get the best out of them if you treat them properly”. Baker echoed the importance of a minister’s ability to lead a team well – “you recruit brilliant people, show them the problem, set some guardrails and standards, and then encourage and nurture and coach them to succeed beyond their own expectations”. 

Being a minister is difficult work. But these three former office holders were proud of their achievements and reflected positively on the opportunity to work on a brief they personally cared about, which made the difficult aspects of the job worthwhile.