Clare Short

Sachin Savur (SS): You entered government after Labour won the 1997 election as secretary of state for international development. Can you tell us about what the conversation was like with the prime minister when you were appointed?

Clare Short (CS): Well, I’d known Tony [Blair] quite a long time – we were elected the same year, ’83. I had been on the National Executive [Committee, the governing body of the Labour Party], then he came on. And just latterly in the shadow cabinet there was meant to be a rule then under the Labour Party constitution that the last elected shadow cabinet became the cabinet – but the spinning was that Tony would drop people, etc. And just the day after the election or so, there were newspaper reports saying Michael Meacher [then shadow cabinet minister for environmental protection] and I would be dropped. And I thought, ‘Oh well, blow it. We'll soon see’ and I went off to my brother’s birthday party, and then I missed the phone calls! 

So eventually I turned up and Blair said, ‘Well, Department for International Development it’s going to be’ and I said ‘yes, great’. And there was a discussion about the name – because some people thought a name that sounded like a Welsh village wasn’t very good, and we were making a pitch to have some environment in it, but he wasn’t having that. So we agreed on DfID, and that was it. 

I think the drama all happened outside the room, the games with the press were over. The Foreign Office had made a big effort to prevent the department [for International Development] becoming an independent government department. Some people that were around the Foreign Office deny it, but the evidence is overwhelming. I won’t bore you with it. And the funny thing was that Robin Cook [foreign secretary 1997–2001] had chaired the committee of the Labour Party, ‘Britain in the world’ that had made this recommendation [to create a dedicated development department]. And I’d been on that committee but then left it when I was supposed to be shadowing transport. Anyway, it remained in the policy document for the election. 

"The Foreign Office had made a big effort to prevent the department becoming an independent government department."

When I was appointed to shadow Development, Tony asked me to look at whether it was a good idea to have a separate department. So I genuinely did that and looked at all the examples – the Scandinavians have tried all sorts of options, and Germany has a ministry, but an independent agency that delivers most of its programmes, etc. And then when I got to John Vereker, who was the permanent secretary at the old ODA [Overseas Development Administration], which was part of the Foreign Office, but had its own structure and its own permanent secretary (it’s quite an interesting organisational model. It arose partly because of the politics of Labour putting development on its own and the Tories putting it back in the Foreign Office. That structure meant it held its expertise together, which they’ve now destroyed because it doesn’t have that anymore).

And I looked at all those models and John Vereker said “If you want to have a serious development policy, it has to be an independent department.” Otherwise short-term trade and political interests constantly destabilise and you don’t get any serious, coherent development. He’s a serious guy and he put his life into working for that department, so I took that very seriously, I wrote it up and I sent it to Blair. No response. I mean, obviously the Foreign Office had tried to divert it through Robin, through Jonathan Powell [Blair’s chief of staff]. And my own conclusion is that Blair thought ‘I don’t want yet another row with Clare right at the beginning of the government.’ And that’s my own theory on why DfID squeezed through and managed to be born. 

But that drama didn’t happen in the room. That was some of the surrounding drama.

SS: Thinking about those early days, how did you learn how to be a minister? Did you speak to anyone else with previous experience of being in government, or did you discuss how things were going with any other ministerial colleagues?

CS: My first job after university and then some research was in the Home Office in the old, very privileged entry system. And then the young assistant principals always became private secretaries. So I’d been a private secretary to a couple of ministers in different parties, so I knew systems and I respected civil servants.

So I understood the system and didn’t have any problems with it. I think some ministers are sort of scared of these Oxbridge civil servants, probably not so much anymore. And some are convinced that they’re political and need to push them back. But I knew they were quality people who believed in the policy area and constitutional principles and you should get on and work together.

"I think some ministers are sort of scared of these Oxbridge civil servants..."

The other thing is that, although I wasn’t in the opposition job for very long, when I took on a new portfolio I always started by reading and looked at the work of people who were significant in the policy area. So I already was committed to trying to implement the report of the development committee of the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], Shaping the 21st Century, which drew on all the big UN conferences of the 80s – they’d had them on every policy area: education, healthcare, reproductive healthcare, environment, women (the famous Beijing one), etc. And the UN conferences had looked at what had been achieved and what could be achieved with a bigger push. And then the OECD development committee (DAC) had a committee that pulled all those together and said ‘let’s have a more ambitious push’. 

And I’d read all that and thought ‘this is good, it’s strategic, it’s clear, it’s internationally agreed, it’s based on experience of something that’s worked.’ So when I met John Vereker – now Sir John – he was the permanent secretary, I said “This is what I want to do” and he said “Great, I was on that committee!” [laughs]. And also there’s a guy called Sir Richard Jolly [a development economist], worked for UNICEF for years, and he’d said to me early on “Look at that report. It’s really significant.” 

So I had some grasp of policy thinking and strategic analysis before we began. So I think I had the advantages of a clear sense of strategy, the department liked it a lot, I respected them, they respected me, and we just got stuck in.

SS: You spoke a little bit earlier about wanting to have a dedicated development department – I’m interested in the ministerial element to that. Could you give us an example of how it was helpful to be a cabinet minister overseeing your own department as opposed to, say, being more of a junior development minister?

CS: I think people always talk about these things politically and don’t have much knowledge of the machinery of government. And lots of people think development is just giving out a bit of aid, but of course good development is also about trade agreements, environmental agreements, health and education, investment and taxation, ending conflict, preventing conflict, arms sales – it goes right across the political agenda. And a department headed by a cabinet minister has more heft in inter-Whitehall relations. 

People think it all happens at the cabinet – the cabinet hardly happened under Blair. There was virtually no serious discussion of anything. But the department had far more say at official level in inter-Whitehall consultations and I could back it up in correspondence and meetings where necessary. And of course, the Foreign Office was used to having a veto – if development wanted anything and they didn’t want it, the foreign secretary would just send a note and that was the end of it. And even having fought to stop us being established, the FCO did petty things to undermine us – there was a Commonwealth heads of government meeting shortly after we were elected, I think it was in Scotland, and we wanted to have a small meeting, just with sandwiches with the countries that we work with a lot, and the Foreign Office wouldn’t let us, there were various petty things going on including hostile press briefings. And in the early days, a few months in, they wanted to stop us doing something and they sent a note from Robin to me saying ‘no, you can’t do it’ and I wrote back and said politely, ‘sorry, Robin, this isn’t how it’s decided anymore’. 

So, one, having a separate department ups the ante right across Whitehall. And anyone who seriously understands development knows it needs those relationships right across, to influence a shift in the whole British approach to international, and indeed sustainable, development. And two, the Foreign Office – it’s not there for development. It has short-term diplomatic perspectives. The trade department, we had to have a struggle with them… the older officials think ‘we’ve got to get an advantage for Britain.’ Whereas the concept of having an international trade agreement that is beneficial to the global order, once the penny dropped, a lot of the younger civil servants loved it. But we had to fight for that. 

"…lots of people think development is just giving out a bit of aid, but of course good development is also about trade agreements, environmental agreements, health and education, investment and taxation, ending conflict, preventing conflict, arms sales – it goes right across the political agenda."

So if you understand my answer, there was no cabinet discussion of any quality at all. But the cabinet status of the department improves the heft and the influence and the authority of the department enormously. And if it remained inside the Foreign Office, it would almost have been subject to ‘do the Foreign Office people agree with what the ODA is saying?’.

SS: You spoke about John Vereker earlier and the fact that he’d worked on the DAC. How was your relationship with him throughout your time as secretary of state – did you work very closely together? How did you decide your respective roles?

CS: Lots of people thought we wouldn’t get on, because he went to Marlborough [college, a fee-paying boarding school]. His father was an admiral, I think, and looked just like him. But we got on extremely well. He had been dedicated to the task of development since he was young, you know in the 60s and thought ‘I want to work for that department’. I think he’d then had lots of disappointment because the department had lots of quality people and was much better than it was allowed to be, because of the way it was crushed. And Chris Patten [minister for overseas development 1986–89] valued it. He said to me, “on a bad day it’s a great job; on a good day, it’s the best job in the world”. But nonetheless, on the whole – both financially and in the machinery of government – it was constantly crushed. John Vereker tells this story of once when he was ordered to provide instruments for a band somewhere in South America because Princess Anne was visiting – and that was paid for by the development budget. It’s got nothing to do with the people in the country or poor people – that is a small example of a much bigger thing.

So when we met, I listened to him, he said ‘we must have the separate department’, he gave me the reasons. I believed him. We agreed over the DAC report. We then set about organising the department to achieve those objectives – we decentralised it a lot, for example. He would come and see me – was it once a week? – with an agenda. He could have come in anytime, but we did it in a structured way. We got on really well, I respected him, he respected me. We might have been chalk and cheese, but we knew what we wanted and we were doing it together.

Patrick McAlary (PM): I’ve got a few questions about leading the department. Could you give us a few examples of what you did practically to set the direction of the department and how you communicated this vision to your officials?

CS: Well, as I’ve said, we decided we would do everything we were doing around the international development targets that were based on this DAC committee report, Shaping the 21st Century. And we knew from the start we would focus all our work around it, but we needed to take them into the international system and try to get the whole international system pushing down the same track – then we could get some really big consequences. So that was what we were doing, using our influence in the World Bank, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the UN, the EU. We also reviewed all areas of the department’s work against those objectives.

The department was very pleased to have a change of government. They were very pleased with the clarity of objectives. They were pleased with the seriousness and the decentralisation –obviously you can’t decentralise overnight, but serious decentralisation means decentralising budgets. And we had extremely good financial management systems – people always pretend that aid money is badly spent and wasted, and it wasn’t. So the mood in the department was high and dedicated.

I remember a bit later, the Treasury came up with all the ‘targetry’ that became fashionable in the Blair years and we had to slightly modify ours. And the department was fed up and said ‘we know exactly what we’re doing and we’ve already got our targets and we don’t need all this messing about’. But we adjusted a bit and that was OK, and the Treasury knew we were being very effective right from the beginning because we were kind of ahead of the game. And they take an interest in development, partly because debt relief is always an issue for them. It is always a senior Treasury official; it was Gus O’Donnell at the time that was in Washington [as UK executive director] at the IMF  and the World Bank and we had officials in his team. I was the UK governor of the World Bank, and the expertise on the World Bank lay in DfID and always had in the ODA days. So the links with the Treasury were strong and good, but we were ahead of things because of our clarity.

And I wasn’t interested in short-term announcements – I think one of the things that’s gone profoundly wrong with government is the absolute domination of the 24-hour media and everyone looking for announcements. We had a big long term strategic theme.  And in fact, we did some research and generally the public love the idea of helping kids to go to school, or making sure that women don’t die in childbirth. But they don’t like the idea of ‘400 million [pounds] for this, 500 million for that’ – the public doesn’t have any idea of what these figures mean, they have no idea in numbers of how much our own health service costs, and the announcement of big spend creates resentment. So I stopped any of those announcements and we would [instead] say ‘we’re funding more schools for primary children in Tanzania’ or whatever. 

So we stopped the endless announcements that have become fashionable since New Labour and have intensified, and I think it’s one of the things that’s wrong with government now – it’s so focused on 24-hour media. It’s not just Britain – you know, under [US president George W.] Bush, Karl Rove [Bush’s deputy chief of staff] was like the deputy president, just as Alastair Campbell [Downing Street press secretary 1997–2010] was like the deputy prime minister. And that’s because of the announcements, not because of the strategy. And of course, then you end up with all the important people in charge of the announcements and not anyone thinking very much about the strategy. And partly because Alastair Campbell and I never got on – we just got on with the strategy, and in not very long time we became really respected in the international system as being a very effective organisation.

"I think we’ve got politicians who don’t understand the need to have long-term thinking and strategy beyond polling and focus groups. We used to make considered speeches, politicians used to read books – they don’t anymore."

And let me say this as a side note: I read in the paper that Sue Gray [Downing Street chief of staff, July to October 2024] was trying to set up a structure for Whitehall with the power basically in the departments and coming together to get agreement and so on. Whereas the people around the prime minister wanted to suck power to the centre. And I think this is related to what I’ve just said – when they want to suck power to the centre, they can’t conceivably have the expertise that lies in all those departments. And so you get people who want announcements, and then you get less and less effective government. And I think that’s a real serious problem that we’ve got. And I think we’ve got politicians who don’t understand the need to have long-term thinking and strategy beyond polling and focus groups. We used to make considered speeches, politicians used to read books – they don’t anymore. This is a big, serious question, I think it’s one of the things that’s wrong.

PM: What was your relationship like with the wider political team in the department – your junior minister, your special advisers. How did you work out your respective rules?

CS: Well, to begin with, I only had one junior minister, which was George Foulkes. Because, you know, ODA had been a small little thing. And he was appointed by No.10. I didn’t have any say in it, but I was quite happy. The really good thing is I’m policy greedy, strategy greedy, [whereas] George loved speaking at meetings and doing announcements, so we were very complementary. 

We had meetings in the early days of the department on every single area of policy reviewing what it was and how we could improve it – I haven’t probably stressed that enough. So we did a big strategic review of every single area and people throughout the department wrote papers, and everyone was invited to write papers, and everyone came to meetings. We thrashed it out and then we agreed and we published lots of these things. And George was invited to all those meetings – he didn’t often come; he loved glad handing and announcing, and he did stuff in the Commons. Obviously I did Question Time and so on. But you had to do these little things telling the EU what you were doing about something and I would sign them off and then George would take care of things like that. So it was extremely complementary. And then we recruited Valerie Amos, who was a whip in the Lords, to answer questions in the Lords for us – she was a whip, but we picked her out. She went on to greater things.

So that was all. By the time the department closed down [when it merged with the Foreign Office in 2020], they had about four junior ministers. This is one of the features of the British system – patronage says ‘get more ministers, get more ministers’ so you can control the parliamentary party and everyone can be a minister. And I think by the end there were three or four juniors. But in my time there was George and I, and then we recruited Valerie just to answer questions – so we’d give her the briefing and that was that. 

"This is one of the features of the British system – patronage says ‘get more ministers, get more ministers’ so you can control the parliamentary party and everyone can be a minister."

Then special advisers – I appointed them, and then you have to get No.10 to approve. And I took in the people who’d been working for me. One went to Australia very quickly because her father was ill, and she was originally Australian. Another one was really a local government person and she went to another job. Then I recruited someone who’d worked for the Labour Party, who was extremely good and had been the secretariat of that Britain in the World policy document – David Mepham. And he then helped me when people left and changed – because people are young and they’re often going onto better things – he would help me recruit the second one. 

So when we settled down, we had two special advisers, and it was all very united and so on. I mean, David used to tell me that officials in the department would go to see him and say, ‘what would she like me to recommend?’ and he would say ‘she would like you to recommend what you think is the best thing, and then you’ll discuss it and she’ll decide’. You know, you get that sort of deference thing, which is silly. But we were so united. There wasn’t any room for those kind of games. The Foreign Office continued to play games and to put us down, but we were united, so that was alright. 

And No.10 then left me to myself, until Tony started travelling a bit and getting compliments about the development department of Britain, and then he said “I don’t know what’s happening, but everyone says how well your department’s doing”. So we came in well that way.

Gordon [Brown, chancellor of the exchequer 1997–2007] always had a kind of sympathy with development. In the early days he wanted to splash a bit of money on one-off objectives, but we’d stopped all that sort of nonsense. I remember it was the Queen’s jubilee [in 2002] and he put £25 million into a Commonwealth education project, and by then we were putting funding into country’s education systems to help them develop the capacity to run their education system indefinitely – which is obviously a thousand times better than £25 million for a thing with the Queen’s name on it. So Gordon always was sympathetic, but was in a rather old-fashioned mindset. But we got on well. 

And then as the budget started to increase, he set up – this is a few years down the line – they set up a little mini development team in the Treasury. I think he wanted the credit for what was going on. And I got one of my good officials to be the head person in it, but I can’t remember, there was something like three principal-level [equivalent to grade 7] officials for an absolute nonsense organisation that wasn’t needed. It hardly matters, but it’s just interesting that these little games go on. And the Treasury – they’re supposed to tell everybody not to waste money, but they’ll waste money when they feel like announcing silly education initiatives or having a whole little group of civil servants paralleling us.

SS: Just to pick up on something you mentioned earlier about a civil servant asking what you’d like them to recommend – how did you encourage challenge and honest advice from the civil service?

CS: Well, from the beginning, as I said, we agreed we would be taking the international development targets as the framework. But then there wasn’t anything in there for trade, and so on, and we had to set up a capacity for trade in the department that didn’t exist before, and caused the guy in charge of the Department of Trade and Industry to nearly have a heart attack! And we had a real battle there to just be entitled to have views on the international trade system, which in the end we won, as I’ve mentioned before.

In the first two years, Gordon Brown had committed to stay with the spending targets already announced by the Tories. Ken Clarke [chancellor of the exchequer 1993–97] later said he wouldn’t have stayed in them, but in my case it was good because it meant we reviewed every single thing we were doing and got officials to write papers on everything, and then a meeting of everyone who wanted to come or had an interest – a very open discussion – and then we decided the policy. I had to get a bigger table because so many people came to those meetings! And they worked for me anyway, very stimulating meetings. 

"I always knew that the department was where the expertise laid."

The media and, I think, a lot of politicians talk as though politicians run policy in departments, but obviously we have very limited expertise. The expertise, the knowledge is in the department, with the people who’ve run this policy area forever. If there’s going to be a change, then the advice has to come to the minister, who will make a decision between the options. You can see also how ministers keep being moved around after a very short stay – they don’t know all about Home Office policy or whatever. I always knew that the department was where the expertise laid. 

I’m just saying that my special advisers told me that some officials would go to them and say ‘how would she like us to recommend this?’– I mean, that’s just a bit silly. But they would also say ‘she doesn’t want you to recommend anything other than what you think is the best thing’. And I just give that as an example where we were all on the same side, my special advisers and me, there was no tension between us – so those kinds of things wouldn’t happen. 

I mean, there’s another thing. For example, I had an agreement with Patricia Hewitt about Tanzania air traffic control. There was some kind of liaison committee of junior ministers on development – we were trying to stop it, because it was a piece of complete nonsense. Blair overruled us, and then it was found in the courts to have been corrupt – you probably don’t know the story. And she had promised me she’d stick with me in this argument across Whitehall – and then she got promoted and she changed her mind. I said “what happened?” And she said, “well, No.10 doesn’t want it.”

See, that’s an example because in the end, Tony can say no, but if she knows it’s a foolish thing, she should argue it right through so the prime minister overrules, knowing that people who know what they’re talking about are saying this is not a good idea. But you’ve got that very sort of arrogant, centralised, Alastair Campbell kind of authority flowing around No.10 and then people kowtow in order to stay in the good books and get promoted. And you get less good policy.

I suppose this perspective I’ve got is because I’ve been there as a civil servant. This was like ’70 to ’76 or something. There was quite a gap – I mean, when I first went to the Home Office, the home secretary would have cards on his mantelpiece reminding him when someone was going to be executed, because we still had capital punishment! That’s how long the distance is. 

So I think we were exemplary partly because we agreed, we had clear strategy, we kept out of the hands of No.10. And what I’m saying is we ended up being a very effective organisation. But what’s going wrong now is right across the piece and in the system of government, and I keep reading in the papers ‘oh, the British civil service is useless’ and so on – and I think they’ve made it useless by this over-centralised, media announcement way of doing policy. And I suspect – I’ve never met Sue Gray in my life – that she sort of understood this and that she was advising ‘let the policy come out of the departments and then let them come forward and then let No.10 decide’, or the centre asks for what it wants and asks for departmental advice on how to achieve it, and obviously she’s been assassinated for doing that [Gray resigned in October 2024].

PM: This all seems like a great segue to ask: what was your relationship like with No.10, and how did that change over time?

CS: Well, people used to say “are you a Brown-ie or a Blair-ie?”, and I was never really either. And I just worked with both. I hadn’t voted for Tony – he wasn’t my cup of tea; I was a John Smith person (who was supposedly right-wing but he was extremely intelligent and thoughtful – anyway, that’s another story). And as I said, Alastair Campbell didn’t like me at all – partly because I decided whether I was going to speak to the media or not without asking his permission.

But Tony, I think, had a bit of a soft spot for me and he saw that if I became unhappy, it would cause reverberations in the Labour Party and it was better to keep me on side. And then he found that we were running a rather good organisation, so ‘let’s get on with it’. So the relationships were fine, but we were much more independent than a lot of other departments, because we were willing not to be pushed around by Alastair Campbell or whatever – but other people volunteered to be pushed around, out of their ambition and so on.

But for the Institute for Government, I mean, this is a serious issue in my view. I won’t bang on, but it’s part of a pattern that’s led to a real deterioration in the quality of government.

PM: Blair took an increasing interest in development from around 1999 and went on to say the poverty in Africa was “a scar on the conscious of the world” in 2001. What did this increased focus from Blair mean for you in practice?

CS: Well, I was there – he said it at the Labour Party conference and I nearly fell off my seat. He’d never shown any interest in anything, apart from when they were embarrassed that the cabinet meetings were so short – the press outside No.10 were commenting and he’d say, “oh, is there something you could report on?”, they’d send me a message. And so we’d report on the help we were giving to the famine in Zimbabwe or another current issue – but we were doing it, it didn’t require a decision [from the cabinet] but I could take up a bit of cabinet time reporting on what we were doing.

So there was no real interest. And then suddenly he said that and then later set up the Commission for Africa, which was insignificant in my view. He asked African presidents to be on it: [Olusegon] Obasanjo [president of Nigeria 1999–2007], Meles [Zenawi, prime minister of Ethiopia 1995–2012]. Meles was an enormously bright guy, now dead. And I always thought – though I don’t think the timing is easy to see – that part of it was triangulation because of Iraq. It wasn’t sincere. [But] it didn’t do any harm. Then he went on a trip around Africa, and I went too, and that was also to do PR. And it didn’t do any harm. And you know, countries liked having the prime minister of Britain come to visit. 

I’d love to get to the bottom of that really – because as I say, it came out of the blue, when they set up that commission.

PM: You talked a little bit about this earlier, but how did you approach securing funding from the Treasury?

CS: Well, every round of funding decisions – which didn’t come every year; Gordon changed that – there’d be an offer. And you had to make proposals beforehand – and we were good at that, because we had all our targets and record etc. But I remember the first one, it was pretty mean and I went to see him and made a fuss and he gave us a bit more, but that was within the two years when the budget wasn’t increasing for anyone. And then later you got this commitment – I mean, there was always a fight over it – to [spend] 0.7% of GDP [on overseas aid]. So there was a bit of an increase each year, but it still wasn’t spectacular until much later, and after my time. 

And my own view on that is that the focus only on money when everything else was being cut led to a real deterioration in the quality of British development assistance – everyone was attacking the department, because their departments were getting cuts and it wasn’t. So money was given to all sorts of different departments to spend, and of course they don’t know what they’re doing in development. That’s just a little story about how it never is just money; it’s knowing how to spend the money. 

"...my own view on that is that the focus only on money when everything else was being cut led to a real deterioration in the quality of British development assistance"

But in the early days I had to do a personal thing with Gordon, and then we were on a track and it was increasing a bit – not massively, but quite well, and we had a good capacity to spend. We had debt relief as well, but we’d agreed that and we – DfID – had got international agreement that the debt relief would be linked to implementing poverty reduction strategies arranged around the targets. And in the meantime the OECD targets became the Millennium Development Goals and then were UN-led, and Gordon became very keen on it all.

The money increased, but not spectacularly in my time and I think the latest spectacular increases led to a deterioration in the quality of Britain’s development efforts. I don’t mean that in all cases – for example, I remember Frank Dobson [health secretary 1997–99] saying you just can’t sort the health service out without a significant tranche of money. I think that was true – it’s probably true now – but you can spend money well or badly. You know, you can splash it around or announce it or give short-term … you know, same story for that money. 

PM: Do you have any advice for any ministers who are dealing with the Treasury?

CS: Create an effective department. Be very clear what your objectives are and your priorities, and show that you can deliver. I don’t know about the Treasury now – but anyway, I think that that’s what anyone should do. 

The Treasury tends to interfere and thinks it knows better than the departments – that’s a mistake on their part. The department needs to be really clear and strategic and have its clear objectives and its capacity to deliver and then ask for the money from the Treasury. That’s what the relationship should be like. But sometimes the Treasury gets very arrogant and tries to tell the department that it actually knows better than them how to spend its money.

PM: Blair changed his cabinet a number of times from 1997 to 2003, but you stayed in the same post throughout. Why do you think that was?

CS: I think because he knew we were doing a good job. He might have thought he’d get rid of me, but then the department’s reputation was spreading across the international system. And again, the argument about the politics – if you kick me out for no particular reason other than maybe giving the odd press interview that Alastair Campbell wasn’t pleased with, it would have caused a lot of trouble, and I was no trouble inside.

I mean, he left Michael Meacher in post too, didn’t he? He wasn’t in the cabinet, but he was environment minister and was said to do a good job. I don’t know in detail, but The Sun had announced before the government was formed that both of us would be dumped.

PM: Could you give us an example of how being in post for that period benefited you as a minister?

CS: Enormously, I mean, I was more and more experienced. The department was more and more honed. We knew what we were doing. We had a lot of respect from the World Bank, the IMF, the UN system. The EU was very bad at development early on, and I did make speeches criticising them and we made proposals for reform and they did improve.

So I was more knowledgeable. The department was more … we were good. And being there for some time made us all be more effective. It was brilliant.

SS: Do you have any specific examples of how that was useful to have that knowledge and to have those relationships?

CS: The thing is, most people think they know about development and they think it’s sprinkling a bit of money around, you know, for poor kids. Whereas of course, if you’re serious about sustainable development across the world and in the poorest countries, it’s everything, it’s enormously complex. You need to end conflicts and work with countries in a long-term way and help them improve their systems of government.

And you’ve got a right to supervise the money you’re putting in, because you’ve got to account to your taxpayers. But that means – in terms of governance problems and dealing with corruption – without intruding in a rude way, you’re helping countries deal with these issues and create more robust systems. 

Over time, we became more influential. Whenever the spring meetings or the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, [James] Wolfensohn [president of the World Bank group 1995–2005] might invite me to a special lunch and dinner. We were just seen as high-performing, worth listening to – countries wanted us to work with them.

It just makes you more effective! Honestly, if you’re serious and you do it well and you’re honest and you deliver what you say, the civil service hums with its desire to perform well, because everybody wants to do a good job, especially in development. I used to have seminars asking them not to stay too late in the office. Because you know, they’d say, “oh, the Foreign Office people all go home at five o’clock” and I’d say, “but I don’t want you all to work long hours all the time. If there’s an emergency, yes. But you’ve got to go home and see your families and be normal human beings.” And I used to have campaigns against long hours because they were so committed. 

I mean, you just have to ask around the international system. The department became a star in the international system and I was part of it, but I was part of the department – it’s not just me.

PM: How did you maintain your priorities over that long tenure?

CS: Well, we had these measurable targets – halving the proportion of people in extreme poverty in the world is an ambitious and big thing. And then in the countries in which we had big programmes we were measuring not lots of these short-term, New Labour type targets, but the proportion of people in extreme poverty in Tanzania, the proportion of people in extreme, poverty in Zambia, wherever.

In that period, we achieved – working with the international system, of course getting others to do the same – the proportion of people in extreme poverty in the world went down from (this is roughly right, but not exactly right) 40% to 10%. That’s enormous.

And you know, getting kids to school, including girls, has a massively developmental effect on the country because girls marry later, have less children, improve their family income. So we were hooked into really ambitious, important objectives that were measurable but weren’t silly bureaucratic targets, which I think are causing enormous trouble in the health service, churning out lots of paper and distracting people from big objectives. And we were lucky in that because we had our strategies and targets early before New Labour kicked into its bureaucratic targets.

PM: You resigned from government in May 2003 – how did you come to that decision? Did you discuss it with anyone?

CS: Well, it was about Iraq. And of course the issue, whether or not the war in Iraq was going to happen and what Britain’s position was going to be wasn’t clear. I mean, Blair was playing two sides, you know, never quite saying or including me. 

I used to say this thing, “Let’s hold on to Blair’s ankles, then he might hold on to Bush” and we might get a more considered policy towards dealing with Saddam Hussein [president of Iraq 1979–2003]. So I was very worried about it for a long time, but it wasn’t clear that it had been decided until towards the end. And even then, there was all this business about the UN resolution, and of course no one had a right to operate in Iraq without another UN resolution. And I thought we might be able to get an international reconstruction rather than [it being] American-led – Blair said he would go for that and it was a fantasy, but it stopped me resigning at the same time as Robin [Cook]. 

"I used to say this thing, 'Let’s hold on to Blair’s ankles, then he might hold on to Bush' and we might get a more considered policy towards dealing with Saddam Hussein"

I was never going to go along with the invasion – it was a breach of international law. It was stupid. It led to the birth of ISIS, killed a lot of Iraqis. It was very, very bad policy. It damaged Britain’s reputation, as is happening with our position on Gaza now. And I couldn’t stay in a government that did that. I’m surprised there aren’t more people who can’t stay in a government that’s so ambiguous and dishonest about international law in relation to Gaza. But that’s another question – they’ve probably flushed out all the people of that kind of internationalist perspective from the Labour parliamentary party now. I mean this is very serious. It’s part of the collapse of the whole international legal order, which is happening right now, but it started then. 

I did everything I could to use whatever influence I had to prevent the UK going with it and then even to salvage the situation – which I got lots of flack for, rather than going earlier. But my conscience is clear in the sense that I tried everything. It’s a tragedy – I mean, look what happened to Iraq as a country, look at it. You know, these are very big things. 

And anyway, although I loved the department and I loved the work, I knew I left behind me a very effective organisation.

SS: You’ve spoken about DfID’s achievements, but what are you most proud of from your time in government? What do you think your specific impact was in achieving it – you’re part of that broader system, but what do you think you personally did as part of that?

CS: My proudest achievement was the creation of the Department for International Development and what it achieved.

In terms of the rest of the government effort, I think it wasn’t as good as is being written up. I know Blair and Campbell say peace in Northern Ireland. Now that was very good – but of course it was constructed years before, out of Dublin and out of co-operation with previous UK governments, and then the [Blair] government did its bit on that. On the health service, in the end they found the money that was very important. I think the overdoing of targets was very unfortunate. So it was by and large a good government, but not wonderful. I wasn’t allowed to be a major player in the overall development of policy in other areas in the way I had 10 years on the national executive of the Labour Party. The system of government changed compared with, as I say, 10 years on the national executive of the Labour Party, having a say in the whole development of policy. But what I did have was this department that had a big push right across Whitehall and across the international system, that was under my hands and we did an exemplary job there. And I’m proud of that.

SS: What advice would you give to a new minister about how to be effective in the role?

CS: I’d say respect the civil service. Prepare, read, get up to speed on where the current best thinking is on policy. Get long term in your objectives. Stick with it, create good relationships with your officials.

I mean, I think all this knocking of the civil service is really a mistake – I think the British civil service is a very high-quality organisation which gives its loyalty to the constitutional arrangements, and all this bashing of it will damage it. And then where will we be?

I knew ministers who were scared of their officials. I know some who were so ineffective that in effect, the civil service has to step forward and run the thing, and it’s good that you have someone to do it.

But you must be strategic, be long-term, be clear. Have a good partnership with the civil service. Be firm but straight with the rest of Whitehall.

I think take forward your policy case right into the system. Don’t give in without arguing the case – don’t argue for the sake of arguing, but argue for the policies that would be best. And then of course, in the end, if the prime minister says no – which is what happened with Tanzania air traffic control – you have to accept it even though you know he’s wrong. And in that case the courts found him wrong.

SS: On partnership with the civil service – do you have any specific tips on how you do that?

CS: I think they like a minister who knows what they’re doing and is clear about what they’re doing and includes the civil service in the project. And then they like you to be fair and decent with people – but sometimes that includes having to be tough. It’s not just being ‘nice-y nice-y’: you have to mean it and expect good performance from everybody and then respect it and honour it.