Keir Starmer’s next cabinet secretary must learn the lessons from Chris Wormald’s mistakes

Appointed in December 2024, Sir Chris Wormald was tasked by Keir Starmer with “nothing less than the complete rewiring of the British State”. Just over a year later he is, it appears, being removed following the shortest ever tenure of a cabinet secretary. 

Before Wormald’s appointment, the Institute set out the series of tasks facing the most senior British civil servant. Wormald – and the prime minister – have both fallen short.

Wormald’s tenure was troubled and he ultimately failed in the tasks he was appointed to complete

The first task for Wormald was to reform the centre of government and in that he and the prime minister have been half-hearted at best. 

We said before the general election that the centre of government under Starmer and Wormald’s predecessors had grown to become a mish-mash of unclear responsibilities. The government made some belated but helpful changes in a September 2025 reset, and the prime minister’s appointment of Darren Jones as chief secretary to the prime minister was welcome. Plans for a smaller, more strategic Cabinet Office are also emerging, with a programme of voluntary redundancies in place, but change has not gone far enough. No10 remains underpowered and the Cabinet Office bloated – neither are serving the prime minister or the cabinet effectively.

Defining and achieving ‘mission-driven government’ was ministers’ expressed means of completing our second task – of making the machinery of government work. That change did not happen. Missions have remained a vague and lofty ambition, and Starmer’s idea of a ‘government of service’ has never been explained or translated into a way to improve the state. That failure is something for which both the civil service’s leadership and ministers need to take responsibility. Nevertheless, it is a cabinet secretary’s job to get the civil service working for the government, and too many ministers feel very poorly served by the system.

And if there are difficulties right now, Wormald never embraced a process that would build up the civil service to better serve ministers of the future. Leading the civil service means tackling longstanding damaging trends in its workforce, but the underlying drivers of problems like high churn and grade inflation have not been addressed.  

Wormald is an experienced and clearly talented official, with an impressive career working on policy development. This is apparently where he focused his efforts during his time as cabinet secretary. Much of that work rightly happens behind closed doors, but no cabinet secretary today can operate entirely in the shadows. Wormald never accepted the need to operate more in the open, which made it impossible for him to lead and connect with the professional lives of the UK’s half a million civil servants. The need for officials to confidently present government policy and navigate public scrutiny has grown in recent years, and the cabinet secretary has to embody this. As a leader, they also need to publicly represent the civil service and articulate how the civil service is changing to meet the challenges ahead.

The nature of Wormald’s departure damages the role of cabinet secretary

Wormald’s short tenure has not left the civil service or the state meaningfully different from that which he found on taking office in December 2024, and this failure is Starmer’s responsibility. Wormald’s appointment was the prime minister’s choice and Starmer and his team never set out a vision for how they wanted the system to change.

The timing and means of Wormald’s departure also weaken the role of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. That Wormald is being dismissed in the aftermath of a political crisis is not good. It leaves the role of cabinet secretary more ephemeral and less substantial. Prime ministers need robust cabinet secretaries to broker between the big beasts of the state, and to give honest advice, especially when unwelcome. A ‘yes man’ serves no one, and Wormald’s dismissal at this point takes the head of the civil service further down a path of shorter tenures, quick removals from the top post and weaker leadership. 

Starmer’s next cabinet secretary pick needs to lead in the open 

Starmer can limit some of the damage as he chooses who to appoint as Wormald’s successor. He will first need to decide whether the job as currently constituted – leader of the civil service and trusted policy adviser – can be done by a single person. There is a strong case for splitting the two as part of wider reforms to the centre, reflecting that cabinet secretary may now have become an impossible job for one person. 

But whether the prime minister decides to adopt that model or to stick with a single role, he must be much clearer about what he and his government want that person to do. The prime minister now clearly feels that Wormald was another poor appointment. So Starmer needs to find someone explicitly to address the leadership gap that has persisted since Labour took office.

We set Wormald five tasks, but these can be narrowed down to two for the next occupant of the top role.

First, they must be able to re-legitimise the civil service in the eyes of the ministers it serves. While this means rebuilding core capabilities, it also requires instilling lost political confidence in civil servants. Too many ministers have lost trust that the civil service will actively pursue the government’s goals, and the new cabinet secretary must restore a dynamic institution that works alongside ministers for the success of their plans. 

Second, a new cabinet secretary must lead the civil service more openly and more confidently. Many things in government must happen in private, and civil servants need to navigate a delicate balance to maintain the confidence of future governments. But impartiality should not be confused with passivity. The next cabinet secretary’s appointment is even more important because Wormald’s tenure itself followed the underwhelming term of Simon Case. After too many years of missing leadership, the UK’s half a million civil servants need a figurehead they can see charting a clear course and actively pursuing the government’s agenda

No civil service appointment – however well chosen – can fill a political vacuum or solve the prime minister’s troubles, and it is ministers who must set out a concrete vision for the state. But the cabinet secretary can, and must, push at the boundaries of state reform. Starmer’s next choice as cabinet secretary must learn from recent history – getting it right will be of existential importance for the civil service. 

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