Paul Scully

Millie Mitchell (MM): You were appointed a parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and as minister for London in 2020. What was that conversation like with the prime minister when you were first appointed?

Paul Scully (PS): I was in Ras Al-Khaimah in the UAE [United Arab Emirates] for a wedding, a really swanky wedding. So I celebrated being a minister with 700 of my friends that I had never met before! I was in the hotel room with Susie Cleverly as James [Cleverly, then minister of state in the Cabinet Office] was staying behind because he was hoping for cabinet and I got the call from Boris [Johnson] who actually appointed me to the wrong job. 

He appointed me as science minister and said, “I want you to do ARPA, DARPA or whatever it’s called” when he meant ARIA [Advanced Research and Invention Agency]. So it was very exciting, it was really good because it was the first day of the reshuffle and I got the call directly from him whereas actually as a junior minister often that would be done on the second day with the chief whip or someone else making the call. So it’s good and I got very whirlwind calls from the perm[anent] sec[retary], the people that were in charge of propriety and ethics asking you normal questions, so that kind of stuff. And then crikey, when I get back to Blighty, I’ve got to go in and see the office. So yeah, a whirlwind, and it was a month before lockdown, I came straight back into lockdown, so that was quite something.

MM: You’d been an MP since 2015, with various roles in parliament and before that you’d had experience in local government and outside of politics in business. So how much did those experiences prepare you for taking on ministerial office?

PS: I think all of them – it’s how you just gradually layer upon layer upon layer the transferable skills as a politician. I started off as a salesman and the skills you learn in sales – how to deal with people, how to relate to people – build up a sense of emotional intelligence because you’re always trying to connect with people emotionally, which is important in politics. But in business, you then have got to have the layer of ‘how do you get stuff done?’. I always talk about how politicians, in general, tend to have a slightly stunted emotional intelligence by wanting to do the job in the first place and then the rest of it gets beaten out of you by the selection process and the election process. But as a minister, good leaders need that emotional intelligence. So all of that adds together, I think, those skills.

“politicians, in general, tend to have a slightly stunted emotional intelligence”

Patrick McAlary (PM): Was there a specific role that you had done before entering government that you could draw on when you became a minister?

PS: Well I always ran very small businesses, so I had to do everything myself. You know, I designed the websites, I cleaned the office and that kind of stuff. And so actually, I think it was the dependency, to work with a team, building up the team, to actually roll up my sleeves and get involved with them, which I think got the respect of the private offices that I worked in and helped me get the most out of the team. Because otherwise I saw lots of other secretaries of state and ministers that would bark instructions to get things done, I could see the flinching of some of the junior civil servants as a result of that. It’s not a good way of getting stuff done, so I think that was probably the key thing.

MM: You were the minister responsible for postal affairs when the independent review was launched into the Post Office Horizon scandal in 2020 and then nearly a year later this became a statutory inquiry. The government had known about this scandal for a few years – how did you come to the decision that an independent review was going to be necessary and did you face any opposition to that decision?

PS: I knew as I was doing this that it was going to be the best thing I ever did in politics. And I think again, it’s that emotional intelligence, it always comes back to that because it was a human cost.

So I came into it, but there were a series of ministers, clearly from all parties, that just really hadn’t grasped it and the human scale of it. And then when I came in we’d just had the court case that the postmasters had won, but of course all of that, or at least most of their compensation, was sucked up by the legal financiers that came in. So they got I think £12 million, which is nothing compared to the fact that a state-owned enterprise had destroyed their lives, imprisoned them, forced some of them to commit suicide, etc. 

And the civil servants were saying, ‘No, we can’t open this. This was a court case that we weren’t a participant in as government and so, therefore, it has nothing to do with us.’ But again, as I say, the human scale of it, we sort of pushed back against that. As we really shared the stories and we met Alan Bates [a campaigner for victims of the Post Office scandal] and other people and shared the scale of it, I really wanted to push for an inquiry. But I wanted it to be non-statutory, purely and simply for speed. These guys had been through enough process and I knew there was nothing that I could say to these people that would support them – they needed action. And so I thought a non-statutory inquiry, so that people didn’t need to get lawyered up would be the way to do it. The problem is with the system – I actually had to start googling differences between a non-statutory and a statutory inquiry myself – because the problem is if the civil service don’t want to do something and they’re pushing back, they’ll help you to a certain extent, then you have to sometimes just go and do your own little research and then say, ‘What I’ve found here is …’

“These guys had been through enough process and I knew there was nothing that I could say to these people that would support them – they needed action.”

But then it was clear that it had to be statutory because it was so involved and there was so much to cover, even though we’d had the Post Office and Fujitsu, who’d agreed to participate, we just felt that we needed that extra layer as statutory. But that meant it went on a lot longer, still not finished yet in terms of reporting back, whereas I’d wanted it sorted in 18 months. I think that’s the difference.

MM: When you were giving some push back to civil servants, how well was that received – were they flexible?

PS: They were fine. I mean, to be fair, they were a great team. They’re a really good team. I think it’s just default mode, it was inertia rather than, you know, any sort of ‘Oh no, we don’t want to do this.’ It’s just taking that step into the unknown, I think was what they didn’t want to do. I think actually what I did was empower them, because I said that I knew it was the best thing I was ever going to be doing and when we got further down the line, they really got into it, they really said themselves, ‘This is the best thing we’re going to do as well.’ They really joined in in that endeavour and it felt that they were empowered, so they all wanted to do as much stuff as they could. 

“You just need to throw money at these people because that’s all you have, I don’t have anything else to give them!”

What was interesting though as well, is the interplay between the department and the Treasury. Because it was one thing getting the inquiry done, but the compensation scheme, you know, we were looking up to £750 million plus, and the daft way that the system works, I suppose, is that you have to make a business case as to why you’re going to spend £750 million or underwrite using that money. Is it good use of taxpayers’ money? Now, if you just look at a value-led accountancy type exercise, you can see why you might need to do that exercise. If you talk about the human scale that I was talking about, £750 million is on the cheap side. You just need to throw money at these people because that’s all you have, I don’t have anything else to give them! But I do have a sense of giving them some sense of recompense, for them to start restoring their lives. And that’s when the bean counters and the human cost really sometimes comes into conflict, or at least a bit of tension.

MM: You read my mind about what my next question was going to be – how did you go about negotiating that tension with the way that the Treasury saw this issue and the way that you saw it?

PS: I mean, I didn’t do any of the negotiation with the Treasury. I gave clear instructions to my guys and I think by that point they’d seen what I was wanting to achieve, they knew I wanted to push back. A couple of things I did do, I started going off on the hoof a little bit when I was doing statements. So here is your prepared script, I would maybe add a little bit just to give a sense that there was something else coming and maybe commit myself to something more than my department thought they were allowing and that kind of stuff, just to push it on. And I think that had the influence that it needed to have. 

What was great actually – so Alok Sharma was my first secretary of state in the Department [for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy] then Kwasi Kwarteng took over and they both let me get on with that. The thing is in that department, such a massive department, you had energy as a massive sector, you had industry and science as a massive sector. And I did everything else – I did lots and lots of small stuff. And the Post Office in traditional times is small stuff because it’s actually a separate organisation, Post Office and Royal Mail. But then it was just the centre of attention, but they didn’t even bother needing to play catch up, they just said, ‘No, you’re doing a good job, you get on with it.’ 

So when I went to them – I mean in politics and life, I tend to be relatively low maintenance. But I will say, if I stamp my feet, it’s because I mean it. I’m not a prima donna stamping my feet all the time and with this it was something that I said, ‘No, we’ve got to do this’ and they responded well. So I’ve got the backup of the secretary of state which is really important.

PM: Did you have a conversation when coming into the role with the secretary of state that set the boundaries about what it was that you would specifically be taking ownership over?

PS: Yeah, I mean we would try to work out what the roles were. I’m trying to remember now, but we had those introductory meetings with Alok at the time. He was a new secretary of state himself, so I think with each of the departments actually there was always a little bit of a gap between when the ministerial responsibilities were finalised. Actually, I do remember, because, as I said, Boris promoted me to the wrong position and so it was only afterwards that he said, ‘Right, no, you are going to be minister for small business’ and then because there were several bits that I was doing, that was when they said, ‘Oh by the way you are doing this, and by the way you are doing that’. And then with Covid actually, extra layers got added.

Alok was, not a control freak, but he micromanaged in many ways. So it’s great that he let me go with postal affairs, but he always wanted to know exactly the detail of other stuff, especially with Covid, to the point that he was doing mystery shopper exercises with the bounce back loans and those kind of things to test the systems.

MM: And how did that compare with Kwasi Kwarteng’s leadership style?

PS: Kwasi was very different because Kwasi had been a junior minister in that department – he was the energy minister under Alok and then moved through. And Kwasi had an academic background, and he would often push civil servants back if they came with a presentation that he didn’t like in the department, he would say, ‘Go away, this is what I want to see in the presentation’ and then they would come back. And so you wouldn’t even get them through the door or much time through the door if it wasn’t in that process. I suppose it was that early creative process he would push back on. 

Whereas, actually, I have a different style. I’ll happily sit in the room for an hour with people and just take the nuggets out of the conversation that I need to. That’s one of my skills I think: here’s a big brief, here’s the five salient points that are either human or the essential bits. It’s outcomes over outputs and I always define an output as being a report. We write lots of reports in government, most of which I use to prop up my laptop during Zoom calls. It’s the outcomes, what you’re changing, that’s the bit that has the real interest for me.

PM: You later moved to be minister for local government and then minister for technology and digital economy. Your brief became quite complex and technical, covering things like artificial intelligence (AI) and online safety. How did you go about getting on top of your brief and establishing what the priorities you wanted to achieve were in the role?

PS: It’s interesting because I remember when I got put into that role and obviously I started doing the role within DCMS [Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport] and then it got spun out into DSIT [Department for Science, Innovation and Technology] and so my role slightly changed there. The AI role went to Viscount Camrose [minister for AI and intellectual property at DSIT, 2023–24] – this was around the time the AI white paper was coming out, so I’d been there for the foundation of that.

“I think I was sufficiently nerdy enough without having worked in the tech sector to understand the general side of it.”

I remember seeing a tweet from someone that was like, ‘Oh, what does he know about science and technology? Does he know what SaaS is (software as a service)?’ and this kind of stuff. So what? It doesn’t matter, don’t care – all good leaders have people around them that do the detail. You need to know how to get the best out of your team. You need to obviously read up on it. I think I was sufficiently nerdy enough without having worked in the tech sector to understand the general side of it. 

The AI white paper was all about how we do soft regulation in terms of regulating outcomes, not technologies. It was all to do with using existing regulators. There were things like the Digital Skills Council, which was actually how you create jobs and good careers within the sector, and I’d done that with the hospitality sector. It’s a totally different area, same process; where we were co-creating solutions: we had the government, academia, representative bodies and businesses themselves all represented in those groups and then coming together. So actually, I needed to know enough of the technology, but again, it was making sure that we had the right people to do the right work. 

I mean, things like the Online Safety Bill, I had the chief exec of one of the big tech companies, platforms, and he wrote the entire code for that platform in a weekend at university. And when I met him he was, shall we say, quite dysfunctional in terms of going off on one – I wouldn’t want him running anything. But he can run his company, but not really wider because it’s that connection that I said that he was slightly lacking because he was, you know, a tech bro, so you need teams around you who can do all of those things.

PM: As prime minister, Rishi Sunak was quite interested in science and tech policy, and then, as you said, he took it out of DCMS and set up a dedicated department. What did the prime minister’s interest in this new department mean for your work as a minister?

PS: I think it just gave a really good light at a good time for the sector. I was able to go to all of our stakeholders and say, ‘Look well, you know, he’s a tech guy, he’s got a real interest in this, so know we’ve got your back.’ That gave a lot of confidence to people when we were looking at those foundational stages of AI, and then he grabbed the AI safety summit that came up a few months later himself and took a lead on that. 

“there’s good and bad when you’ve got someone in No.10 that’s got a particular interest in it”

The only area that we really, I suppose, struggled with the sector was when we had the Digital Markets Bill. There was a debate about the appeal standards; people didn’t want to weaken that so to give more strength to the big companies, Amazon, Meta, Google, etc., which it was there to tackle entrenched power. And that debate had been taken directly into No.10, so No.10 wanted to have those discussions themselves. And the risk is that the prime minister is dealing with those top-end big companies, I’m dealing with all the people that are badly affected by entrenched power. So, ‘Sorry, it’s above my pay grade, it’s that guy over there that’s doing it’. I didn’t finish doing the Digital Markets Bill because we had the reshuffle before, but that was always the tension, but I think we ended up in a reasonable place with it anyway. 

So there’s good and bad when you’ve got someone in No.10 that’s got a particular interest in it – you can give the confidence, but sometimes they want to micromanage it, which delays as well as confuses.

PM: How did you work with experts from academia and industry? Do you have any specific examples of how those relationships worked? 

PS: So there was an existing Retail Sector Council. When hospitality was struggling through Covid, we had the hospitality recovery strategy. We stood up a hospitality team in the department, and actually they were brilliant. It was early days of [Microsoft] Teams and Zoom and I didn’t realise Craig, the head of that team, he had something like ‘civil nuclear’ written on his screen name and I never really noticed it before and then it was only a couple of months in when he said, ‘Right, I’m going back to my day job, we’ve got a new head coming in.’ And because he was so knowledgeable about hospitality, I thought he had been doing it forever, but no, he was back to civil nuclear infrastructure. But as I say, I was able to replicate stuff that had already been there, so the fact is, as I said, it’s about co-creating solutions that meant those people from academia or the stakeholders felt they were part of the process. 

“I think No.10 felt, ‘Okay, let’s give Scully the role of calming them down a little bit.’”

With the businesses, it was interesting because again, during Covid everything accelerated. You were effectively seeing government in about as real time as you’re ever going to get it. When we were making decisions I remember the trade unions, one Sunday, about safe working guidelines. We had a draft on a Sunday morning and we said we’ve got 12 hours to go through it and then discuss it that evening and the unions were moaning that we had given them no time, but we had the same time. It wasn’t that we were hanging on to it, but they weren’t used to that. I think no one was really used to that, so we didn’t hold anything back. It was how you really just give them all the information they need and work through it. Which I saw again when you get to the harder pressed stuff. So, I basically got given all the really-hard-to-open businesses – nightclubs, hairdressers. I mean nightclubs are actually designed to press everyone together close in a darkened room so they’re always going be the hardest to open. And I think No.10 felt, ‘Okay, let’s give Scully the role of calming them down a little bit.’ But you need to give a little bit more than just calming them down, otherwise I can look as though I’m just taking one side. But if I can’t get No.10 or the people making the decisions, which again in Covid, there were some quite centralised decisions taken with Matt Hancock [then health secretary], with Michael Gove [then chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster] and of course the prime minister [Boris Johnson] and the scientists … which some were better than others, shall we say.

PM: When trying to engage with outside expertise, do you think that the civil service helped enable that – if so, how?

PS: Yeah, they did. I gave a little bit of guidance in some areas, but they had a really interesting roster of people. If I needed to test anything, they would often come up with a decent roster of people, but otherwise I could reach out myself or add some other people. I mean, one of the examples was I set up two forums, one was a small business forum and one was a BME [Black and minority ethnic] business owner forum. And so these were essentially just small groups of people that would get together, a bit of a focus group, once every couple of months almost to sense check what I was doing. 

Which actually gave me an idea for another brief, bearing in mind throughout all of that four years I was minister for London as well, which is a totally different dynamic to any of the stuff we’ve been going through because it was just me and my political assistant, effectively. My private office helped as much as it could, but it felt like the two of us, because there was no structure there. That was all about stakeholder engagement. And one of the initiatives we did with that was I brought together a ministerial oversight group. It was junior ministers because they were the ones that tended to get stuff done on a day-to-day basis, whereas the secretary of state would obviously do strategy. And I’d have one of the health ministers, I’d have Johnny Mercer [minister for veterans, 2019–21 and 2022–24] talk about the veterans too, so I could add about homelessness, someone from [the Department for] Levelling Up etc. so that I could again sense check what I was doing and I could put a London perspective on what they were doing. I didn’t want to take up too much of their time because there’s so many of these various ministerial boards, some of which are more relevant than others. So as long as you use people’s time well, sparingly but productively, then I think that’s fine.

PM: We’ll come back to the minister for London role. You led the UK delegation to meetings of the G7 and G20 tech ministers. What value did this tech diplomacy have in practise for the outcomes you wanted to achieve in UK technology policy?

PS: Well, I think that the thing is with technology is that there are so many areas that you cannot solve as one country. I mean even America, the superpower that it is, can’t solve things like semiconductors. We saw during Covid when there was a shortage of semiconductors and people forget, with computer chips that you’ve got tens in your phone, you’ve got 3,500 in a Tesla. So if you stop supplying semiconductors, we really grind to a halt in this day and age. And with that you have to look at scarcity of supply, we don’t manufacture lots of semiconductors here: we design them really well, we package them really well and we’ve got a load of expertise, but we rely on other countries. They rely on us to do that design work, so how can we get that quid pro quo and of course, making it secure, how can we work with the countries with which we share common values? That’s really where the G7 and the G20 were very powerful. 

And it was down to the serious conversations with Nate Fick [then US ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy], minister [for digital transformation] Kono in Japan – he was a real tech whiz, he had an avatar, so a robot of him that looked just like him doing speeches in other parts of the world. It’s quite crazy. So we had some really serious discussions and of course at those I was inviting people to the AI safety summit to try and sell the idea that we are going to be taking that space of AI safety in the early days, ‘Come and join us!’ Whereas everybody, the EU, Japan and others were trying to do their own thing. I think we pushed forward and we became good leaders in that. 

I remember that we were struggling, because I think it was after Brexit, to get any engagement with the commissioner [Margrethe] Vestager [executive vice president of the European Commission for ‘A Europe Fit for the Digital Age’, 2019–24] in the EU and they hadn’t really engaged with us at the previous G7 the year before. So I had a list of people to go speak to and I saw her across the room, so I went and dashed over and introduced myself and we got on quite well so I thought ‘Right, that’s job done!’. I reported to the team with me and they ticked it off their list; they hadn’t realised that I’d disappeared! It’s relationship building and I think it did actually crack open a productive relationship.

PM: You played a role in bringing various pieces of legislation through parliament. Could you walk us through this process and the role that you played specifically in making changes to the Online Safety Bill as it went through parliament?

PS: I think I did about 8% of the entire legislative programme over those three or four years. I did about 10, 11, 12 bills or something like that in part. You know you had the early stuff, the Covid changes, the work around insolvency and rent arbitration and that kind of stuff – so that was very much start to finish. And then working at speed, the sanctions bill, the economic crime bill I did in a day in all its legislative processes. It’s making sure that you’ve got a good bill team and again, getting the best of that bill team to create something that you can then really engage. With the opposition, on each one of the bills that I did from the start, I would always speak to the lead from each of the parties and say, ‘Look, we’ll argue about the politics of it in the chamber, but what do you need to know so you do your job properly? Is there anything we can work on that I can actually just sort out now, rather than it’s in draft form and it’s a bit too late because of political posturing or just complex drafting?’ A number of times they actually cited that on the floor of the house saying thank you for that relationship. I think that just helps because then you can focus on the ding dongs that you have to have, but you’ve laid the pitch enough. 

“I did about 8% of the entire legislative programme over those three or four years. I did about 10, 11, 12 bills or something like that in part.”

In terms of the Online Safety Bill, Michelle Donelan, who was the secretary of state [at DCMS, 2022–23, and DSIT, 2023–24] at the time, she took on a lot of the lead herself. That was the one area of all of our briefs that she grabbed and wanted to lead on, even when she was on maternity leave. It was a massive change to what had been proposed over the previous summer when Nadine Dorries had been secretary of state [at DCMS] and it was the ‘legal but harmful’ debate which we had to totally pivot away from. 

Again I think it was trying to boil it down into salient points that people could recognise – so effectively we were saying that it’s become a child protection bill, let’s do stuff that tackles access to pornography, abuse and things like that for under-18s. But it [also] protects freedom of speech, so we’ve got a lighter touch for adults and, importantly, all we were doing effectively was getting the big platforms, the entrenched powers that I was talking about to adhere to their own terms of responsibilities and have clear reporting requirements. Everybody wanted lots more, whether it was the families of some of the tragic stories that we that we know about, such as Molly Russell [who took her own life aged fourteen after being exposed to content on internet platforms] through to people that wanted a stronger approach to pornography and age gateways and the like, or people that didn’t want to entrench on freedom of speech. 

It was a really tricky one to negotiate. But I think it was just making sure that we’ve spoken to everybody, giving them a fair hearing and understanding that we have to get something on the statute books. This should have been done at the advent of social media about 15 years ago. Of course we were talking about AI, that’s why we’re talking about regulation now, we’re not going to wait 15 years to talk about AI regulation. We should have done social media regulation at that point when it was at the foothills – [the need was to] get something on the statute book now, you can always improve it, you can always change it. But the world was watching us as well because we knew that there were other countries looking at what we were doing so that they could do the same thing – which I think helped focus minds.

PM: How did you interact with legislation teams in the civil service – did you find them to be effective?

PS: Generally, yes. There were some that were better than others, but my first team when we did the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Bill were brilliant because they walked me through it. What I said to my private office when I first walked in was the same as to that first bill team: ‘Look, you guys teach me clutch control and then I’ll learn my road craft afterwards.’ So you teach me the mechanics of this and then we’ll get on with the rest of it. I think they enjoyed it, because it was something that was having a really significant effect in a short period of time because of Covid bringing it together and I took an interest in it. I remember when I was doing the Subsidy Control Bill – that’s probably the most technical bill I did – and again, the senior bill team valued my input, allowing them to do the job, but also taking an interest in the detail and grabbing some of the detail. Departments just provide reams and reams and reams of papers and documents that they know the minister is not going to read. I couldn’t read everything, but they recognised that I read the points they really wanted to get over and for me to then explain that in a comparatively simple way when it got to the floor of the house. But I think it’s just that mutual respect actually helps get the best of them.

“What I said to my private office when I first walked in was the same as to that first bill team: ‘Look, you guys teach me clutch control and then I’ll learn my road craft afterwards.’”

PM: We understand that you trained civil servants about how to work with ministers in the legislative process. What did that involve and what were the benefits that you saw from it if any?

PS: Well it was chats like this, it was exactly the same process. It was conversations that I would do in person and in Zoom calls: how do you get the best out of the bill team; how do you want them to present to you; how do you respond to them and those kind of things. It’s an open dialogue rather than a formulaic sort of blackboard type thing. They felt they were part of the discussions, and this goes back to the theme I am developing about empowering people. I think they felt, ‘Oh, that’s relatable’, rather than someone sitting behind a big chair at a desk wagging a finger at them. So they were really good conversations, I really enjoyed the conversations and you could see some of the teams were responding to it well, I thought.

PM: If you were to be faced with a bill team now and you had to give them one piece of advice about how to support a minister, what would it be?

PS: Be proactive. Different ministers have very, very different foibles and you need to be able to go with the flow, try and shape the conversation, but go with the flow. That’s not always easy – I’m relatively easy going, there are other ministers that aren’t, shall we say, and that can be difficult. But don’t try and overload the minister, you know, give them the really good salient points and then work with them.

MM: I have a question about a theme that’s coming out across this conversation, which is the idea of rapid policy making. You were a minister during Covid when things had to be done quite quickly – are there any core lessons that you took from that, that you then tried to bring when times started to return to normal?

PS: So I became known as, I can’t remember if I came up with it, the minister for unintended consequences – ‘Okay, fine, if we’re going to do this, what else is going to come out of it?’ I can see problems. The decision that always rankles with me during Covid was the 10pm curfew. I saw that as both the hospitality minister and as minister for London. I used to get the Google mobility data on public transport services every 15 minutes and it bore out what I’d seen myself when I was in a restaurant and got kicked out near Oxford Circus at 10pm. Tube ridership went up 40% between 10pm and 10:15 – this is an airborne disease and you’re shoving everyone into a metal tube underground. It bore no medical reasoning behind it at all. But I think we just got to a sense of a bit of groupthink in some of those decisions when you respond rapidly – sometimes just the common sense bit goes. I’d really hoped, and I’m not sure we have, but I’d hoped that we’d better learn the lesson in government of Covid – keep the speed up. 

“I became known as, I can’t remember if I came up with it, the minister for unintended consequences”

The one big difference between public sector and private, you asked earlier about my experience of business, is that you can’t fail as the government, you can fail as a business. It’s taxpayers’ money, it’s a zero sum game in that, so you’ve got to make sure that every decision is excellent. And that does mean that sometimes you’ve just got to go round the houses and you can’t do it as quickly as you want to. However, I’m sure there are lessons that we can learn in terms of making sure that we can do some of that in parallel rather than in series, so that we’re speeding up the process a little bit. But that requires quite a significant change in machinery or mindset of government to be able to do that, I think.

“you can’t fail as the government, you can fail as a business”

MM: Coming on to your role as minister for London, which you held between 2020 and 2023, what was the brief you were given and what did you see as your own personal priorities within that role?

PS: Literally wasn’t given a brief. So if you look at all the ministers for London that there have been, they’ve all done different things and very few have done much with it. But that was probably my favourite role. It was one I could get my teeth into because I could shape it. Because there was no structure within the civil service to support it directly, I’d asked for a spad [special adviser] and No.10 said, ‘No, you can’t have a spad, only secretaries of state have a spad – you can have a PAD [policy adviser].’ Fine. And this worked better because obviously a PAD works within the civil service as a non-political role. And I had the most amazing PAD, Robyn Thackara, who I had known, she went through an open process for interview, but I’d known her before and I knew what I didn’t need was another civil service researcher type person, I needed a relationship person. Because there were lots of people that I could call on for that sort of detail and getting information, but what I did not have is that extra person to help connect, because this was all about stakeholder engagement. 

“it was just me running around London, enjoying myself!”

The mayor of London, the boroughs of London, they have their own mandate, so it doesn’t matter what party they’re from, they have their own mandates, they need access to government to deliver some of that, the levers of government. But the quid pro quo was that government had priorities in London. It was my job to hold those guys accountable for government purposes as well. But then it was wider in terms of, let me get around to the business groups, to the think tanks, to other organisations and especially at that time, it was all about getting the central activities zone open. So what can I do to work with the mayor at points, with other groups, call out the mayor if he wasn’t doing what I thought was necessary to open London. And a lot of it did coincide with my role in business because of the hospitality stuff, the retail things that I was talking about – so there were a lot of crossovers. 

But it was just me running around London, enjoying myself! What I used to do, when we were able to start returning to the department, there was often just me, me and Robyn, my PAD, and we were busy with meetings after meetings after meetings. She lived near Regents Park, so actually we would walk through London together, across Oxford Circus and then I would double back and go home because I live in south west, but we would walk through London and see what was going on for ourselves. Sometimes when the shops were open, we would just go in and chat to people, much to the horror, probably, of some of the visits teams. But it was fascinating – getting the insight was just amazing and that helps you make better conversations and better decisions.

MM: You talk about the double facing nature of the role: facing the mayor and the boroughs and then also facing inwards to government and representing London’s interests. What was that like and were there any tensions with government in the context of the broader levelling-up agenda?

PS: That was really important because it was all about language. It synced into the politics of it as well because, you know, the Conservative Party at the time was sometimes being described as anti-London and that kind of stuff, which it was. But levelling up was really interesting because obviously when we talked about doing stuff in other parts of the country, which is absolutely necessary, it’s not about levelling down London. So everybody else around the country was saying, ‘Well, yeah, London’s okay’, people in London were saying, ‘Hold on a sec.’ In parts of Tower Hamlets, you literally have some of the richest people in the world in some of the big towers in Canary Wharf looking down – probably in every sense of the word – at Whitechapel market, some of the poorest people in London. So how do you have that cheek by jowl working if you’re just going to antagonise? And I remember going to Battersea Power Station early in Covid when the construction workers were still going around. The chief exec was telling me the story about how he was setting it up and he was saying, ‘Look, there’s 72 red wall seats that are getting the benefit of what we’re doing here.’ Actually the language is really important – this would not happen without the labour, the services, the goods from those 72 constituencies. So it’s the partnership. Black cabs are made in Coventry and these kinds of things. If you talk like that, then it’s still London gets what it wants, but the rest of the country feels like it is part of a partnership rather than the condescension that can happen from us all within a London bubble.

MM: And did you feel that other people in government were receptive to that sort of narrative?

PS: I think so, yeah, I think so. But often they’d forget about it – one of the Arts Council decisions to repurpose a load of money outside of London took a lot of London arts scene stakeholders by surprise and annoyed them. Because again, it’s that partnership. It’s all very well doing that in theory, but something like 50% of the entire tourist spend in the UK is within the M25. In reality, you need to almost hand hold tourists in London and around the M25 to go out, rather than the other way round – you can’t force them to do that. 

“That’s what levelling up should be – people can come to London if they want to, but they shouldn’t feel like they have to.”

I used to do lots of things as minister, but also just in general terms as a politician, with Indian business people, for example, and I’d often just do straw polls, so, ‘Tell me how do you define UK in your own mind’ – [and they would say] London. And these are the people who will invest. On tourists, just walking here I had to wade through a whole lot of people having their pictures taken outside just by the phone boxes. But we know there’s a fantastic country around London – I think one of the best examples I had was when I was doing the levelling up stuff, I was in Lancaster because I did some work with the north west councils – Eddie Lister, when he was working with Boris Johnson as [Downing Street] chief of staff, asked me to do that – on their growth plan post-Covid, I said I’d follow up with a visit. And I remember going and seeing a place that Lancaster council had repurposed from the old social services base to a digital startup, and I remember it just chimed with me with me. There was a guy that was sitting there saying, “I actually went to Lancaster University, I’ve got my business hub here, I’ve got a really good network of people around me, I can find people I want working with me – I don’t have to go to Liverpool or Manchester.” He didn’t talk about London. That’s what levelling up should be – people can come to London if they want to, but they shouldn’t feel like they have to. So language was way, way, way the biggest thing and that approach, rather than specific policies.

MM: During your tenure Sadiq Khan was the mayor of London – how closely did you work with him and did that change over the time?

PS: We worked pretty closely at the beginning because we were just in regular conversations together on boards and things like that. You know, at the time I was doing everything because I wanted to join in on everything in London, because there wasn’t a structure around my position. There were daily calls at one point [during Covid], again with Eddie Lister at No.10 and with some of the guys from the City of London Corporation and some of the boroughs. We were literally talking about where we were going to put temporary mortuaries – it was that granular and quite horrendous. Then through to the bigger roundtables about how we’re going to get London open again, which the mayor would chair, there was one that I co-chaired with him as well. 

We did work reasonably well together – there were obviously differences because he was very political and he is a very skilled political operator, you know, we would have confidential meeting and he would always be sending letters to the government via the press and that kind of stuff. So it was hard to work out how to balance that sort of approach, but I think we just had to park that and work on the things we could work on together. And I think we always respected each other – he sent me some very lovely notes when I eventually got the sack and those kind of things, he reached out, and that was nice, it was respectful. But we worked slightly less together because it was going back to normal times, but actually he used to invite me to a lot of things, he used to bring me to the front because it was all about the man that, you know, he’s the elected one and I’d always leave, I wouldn’t want to tread on his toes – he’s the one with mandate, but often he would pull me in for photos and things like that. So that sort of mutual approach was good.

MM: Would you say that you could be described as kind of his political counterpart? 

PS: I think so, yeah. I used to be effectively his shadow. And I’d do a lot of media around that because there was no counterpart candidate for the mayor of London outside election times. There was no one single focal point to go to, so I did do a lot of media and other political stuff as minister for London, the go-to person from our party and government.

“I used to be effectively his [Sadiq Khan’s] shadow.”

MM: One of the big stories was around the TfL [Transport for London] long-term funding settlement and how that was being arranged. What role did you play within that?

PS: It was a bit of a go-between really. I didn’t get heavily involved in it – obviously, interest wise I did, but in terms of the direct negotiations. When Grant Shapps was secretary of state for transport [2019–22], I know Grant pretty well, my policy adviser had worked with him in the past, so she knew him as well and we spoke to the deputy chief of staff in particular in the mayor’s office, got on very well with him. And so we’ll often be able to just pick away at some areas, leave the big negotiations to the department and the mayor, but just pick away certain things that we needed to get involved with, that sort of thing.

MM: Going back to your other ministerial roles, you’ve already said in a way that you saw them as connected – to what extent were there common threads between the different roles that you were holding at the same time?

PS: I was giving out grants as hospitality and retail minister and minister for small business and what was interesting – that was when I was giving out those grants and trying to go around the country on local radio and phoning up chief execs and the councils, ‘Why haven’t you got your money out yet?’, it was clear that there was not enough connection. The connections between local businesses and councils weren’t as strong as people thought. Because they were used to bringing in business rates, receiving money, the council will receive money, but they were not used to handing it out, so they didn’t connect to their businesses. And so talking about business rates, I think the West End collects more business rates than the whole of Wales.

So it’s working with those kind of big numbers and those big areas to my next role when I was in local government finance that the council should have a massive role in place shaping. I did spend too much of my time in local government finance dealing with the councils that were in trouble financially, but I’d like to have had a bit more time there to sort of really work out how to simplify local government finance. I know that’s probably a panacea. But within local government, obviously there’s a massive connection because I took on Grenfell at one point and I’ve done that as a London MP before and kept in with some of the groups and some of the people. And then with science and technology, you’ve got all of the big [industry bodies], like techUK, the Startup Coalition and the rest of those groups, they’re all based in London. And so it was actually relatively easy to see the stakeholders here, see what the City of London Corporation does, which has a very understated but a powerful role in selling the benefits of the UK as well as the City of London. But also comparing that to areas like Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle, which I went to on various tech shows. I thought it was going to be all about access to finance, they just wanted the railway so they can bring connectivity between Leeds and Nottingham so that they could get staff between towns and to work in their offices and those kind of things. So it’s just everyday issues. That’s what I’m meaning about connecting because you can come up very highfalutin tech stuff, it’s still about people at the end of the day.

MM: You left government as part of Rishi Sunak’s reshuffle in November 2023. How did you feel about leaving government and did you have any sense that this was on the horizon?

PS: No. Interestingly, because I talked about the fact there was no real system with the minister of London, notionally I was told that the secretary of state for levelling up was my line manager, my boss for that, even though I was in different departments. I never had a meeting with him in all four years. The day I got my meeting with Michael Gove [who] was back at Levelling Up was when I took the call from the chief whip. So after four years, I was really pleased to be on this call – it was a Zoom call, he was in his department and I was on with other people – and I took the call from the chief whip, I turned the screen off and he sacked me and I said, “I’ll speak to you about this another time, I’m not happy”. But never mind, I ended the call, said goodbye to my private office, gave them a hug, gave my iPad and pass back and I had a gin and tonic in my hand within 20 minutes at a pub in Trafalgar Square. So I made it more brutal than I needed to probably!

“I was told that the secretary of state for levelling up was my line manager ... I never had a meeting with him in all four years.”

But no, I hadn’t expected it. Partly because of politics I wanted to stand for mayor of London, because it was a natural process having been minister for London. I was talking about being that front man for the party as well as government. And that hadn’t gone well as there was an internal kerfuffle, which would be outside the scope of this. I had assumed that actually just what I’d heard from the chief whip was that I was going to at least carry on in the job, if not doing something else. But it wasn’t to be – so a surprise, but fine. 

PM: Before wrapping up, is there anything else you would like to talk about which we have not covered so far?

PS: No, I can’t think of anything. I think the key thing is you do need to have strong leadership so you can shape the civil service, but you shouldn’t be wagging your finger at them. I think that’s the key lesson. Always make it easy for people to say yes, especially when you’re in the middle ranks as a junior minister. If you’re pitching into the Treasury, especially the Treasury, if you’re pitching into No.10 – make it easy for them to say yes. Because there are many positions within government, whether it’s civil service or ministerial or chief secretary to the Treasury, whose almost defined role is that they’re there to say no, they’re the barrier, so it’s how you work through that. That’s a key lesson for me.

PM: Throughout your time in government, what achievement are you most proud of, and what do you think your specific role was in achieving that outcome or outcomes?

PS: Well, I think it has to be the Post Office. As I say, it’s just grabbing something that was seemingly going nowhere, a bit of an impasse, through to something that I knew I could look at any of them in the eye. I saw a lot of postmasters, affected postmasters, and I’ve had Seema Misra and Lee Castleton [former sub postmasters and campaigners for victims of the Post Office scandal], you know, just come up, you know, Seema gave me a hug and they had just won an award and I happened to be at the same thing. Slightly tearful and it was very powerful – it gets me now.

PM: What advice would you give to a new minister about how to be effective in government?

PS: Don’t micromanage but go beyond the macro. At the end of the day just remember there is a human behind a lot of this sort of stuff. So I mean, the nightclubs are a really good example. I remember speaking to a Treasury minister about nightclubs, which, as I’ve said were always going to struggle to open. And I got the impression at the time that Treasury was sitting there saying, ‘Yeah, but it’s a unit of economic activity. If there’s not a nightclub, there’d be something else there.’ Yeah, but someone is losing a business and someone’s probably going to lose their house or see an effect on their mortgage. It’s going to affect their relationships, it’s going to cost other people’s jobs at the time. It’s having the sense of connection between the human nature of business in this example, but that’s true of other areas and the macro. I know you’re trying to deal with strategic points – this is about strategic decision making at the end of the day – but it’s not all just top level. There are people involved in this.