Lead, listen and lay down the law: how ministers can achieve their aims

From running departments, navigating legislation through parliament, and responding to crises, being a minister is a job like no other. But the ministers of yesteryear provide many lessons about how to navigate the world of government, and our latest Ministers Reflect interviews – which span from the New Labour government through to Boris Johnson’s premiership – provide some key pointers for life at the top of government

Ministers set the tone for their department’s organisational culture 

Generating a positive organisational culture – and being a role model in shaping that culture – can make or break a minister’s hopes of achieving their priorities. For Clare Short, who established the Department for International Development, creating an open and collaborative environment was key. Her special advisers warned officials against pandering to what they thought Short would want to hear and instead encouraged them to provide candid advice. As she reviewed her department’s remit, she invited officials into the discussions, recalling how she needed “a bigger table because so many people came to those meetings!”

John Denham, the first – and only – secretary of state for innovation, universities and skills, recognised the central role that ministers play in setting the mood music. Whether a new department, a new policy or simply a new minister in post, there is important work to be done to persuade officials and ministerial colleagues that a new approach provides a better path. For this, “forging a story about the department” was key. 

The role of a minister as a role model for the department becomes more acute when an all-encompassing crisis looms. Matt Hancock, health secretary during the Covid crisis, quickly realised that dealing with the pandemic was going to be “the biggest thing that [he] did in public life.” Hancock stressed how important it was for the leadership to “[keep] ourselves fighting fit” while they steered the machine and he and his officials “actively talked about getting enough sleep and making sure that we ate well.”

Ministers can deal directly with their cabinet colleagues 

A new minister must grip a whole new layer of inter-departmental rivalries – and manage a way through them. Short revealed how the Foreign Office attempted to stymie the birth of DfID, while Hancock highlights the difficulties of having to “upward manage” the prime minister amid tensions with powerful advisers like Dominic Cummings. Reflecting on his time as a junior minister, Denham highlighted a difficult relationship with the Treasury: “I learnt very early on that the Treasury was a law unto itself and would do things that were damaging to other government departments without any consultation.”Ministers can attempt to cut through the bureaucracy by engaging directly with their cabinet colleagues. For example, early in her tenure Short told the then foreign secretary Robin Cook that he could no longer intervene on development affairs. 

Ministers also need to work with the centre as they pursue their priorities, as Hancock found: “[if] the prime minister is dead set against this, then you drop it, right? Because they’re the prime minister!” But ministers who hear that ‘Number 10’ or ‘the Treasury’ is at odds with their agenda might find it useful to look into who exactly is the source of the blockage – Denham felt the need to “cut out all of these people who are trying to influence policy who had no mandate to do so” by requiring that the chief secretary or the prime minister be willing to discuss any objections they reportedly held. 

Senior officials can help set and drive priorities and provide advice

Ministers can get sound advice and support from senior officials. In John Vereker, then permanent secretary at DfID, Short found someone who emboldened her belief that “if you want to have a serious development policy, it has to be an independent department.” His previous work at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development set the blueprint for her department’s work.

Likewise, Matt Hancock drew on the expertise of Sally Davies – chief medical officer between 2011 and 2019 – and the then permanent secretary at DHSC, and current cabinet secretary Chris Wormald, who Hancock describes as “a past master of understanding what I wanted to achieve and advising on how to get there”.

It is important, however, that ministers establish a two-way dialogue with their permanent secretaries. Denham remembers how his permanent secretary requested a ministerial direction over his decision to establish unitary authorities despite not having discussed any reservations with his minister: “So I was in this extraordinary fait accompli where the permanent secretary had gone behind my back to take a decision on something which, if he’d ever raised any issues with me, we could have discussed.”

Every minister will face their own challenges, but many of these challenges will be familiar to the men and women who held office before them. All ministers can learn a lot from their predecessors and the Ministers Reflect archive offers unparalleled insight, candid recollections and advice from people who served, and sometimes survived, at the top.