Sajid Javid

Tim Durrant [TD]: If I can start with your first ministerial role – you entered government in September 2012 as economic secretary to the Treasury. Can you tell us about the conversation you had when you were appointed?

Sajid Javid [SJ]: I joined parliament in 2010 and one thing I'd just like to say, because I know we’re talking about ministerial experience but when I came into parliament, my background wasn't in politics at all. I had 20 years of experience in the finance industry. I had wanted to be a parliamentarian for quite a while and obviously eventually made it in 2010. But when I arrived in parliament, it felt like an odd place, to say the least. I don't think anything can properly prepare you for it, other than having done it before. So therefore, the first time you arrive, no matter how many MPs you talk to or books you read, it is a place where you question how are things going to work? Am I going to get on? Who’s actually looking after my own? There's no HR department. I'm not saying there should be one. The people that claim to be HR are the whips, and they're the last people I'd want to be looking after my long-term interests! So it is a weird place. You don't know who's really your friend, who’s really your enemy. It's just a really weird place.

But it is what it is, and you learn that some of the things that you think are strange at the beginning actually do have positives. For example, I used to think early on – why do we have to physically walk through the lobbies every time to vote? Why can’t we have an electronic system? Why don’t we keep up with the modern age? Then, after doing that for a while, you realise actually, this system really makes you come into the debate a bit more, makes you talk about it a bit more and think about it a bit more. You can speak to your colleagues, you can obviously lobby ministers. I then learned that's why it's called ‘lobbying’!

I wanted to be a minister, of course I did. I wanted my party to be in power, like any MP, because we wanted to make change and help people and you’ve got to be in power to achieve that. Obviously, I wanted to be a minister. I gave up what I did before because I wanted to come into politics, I wanted to make a difference, and I thought the best way to do that is by becoming minister. But there's no handbook for ‘How do you become a minister’. I didn't know any of the really senior people in the party when I came into parliament. I'd never met David Cameron [then prime minister], I'd never met George Osborne [then chancellor]. I had never met any of the senior leaders. I had a couple of friends that had just become MPs – Robert Halfon, Ministers Reflect [former MP for Harlow] and David Burrowes [former MP for Enfield Southgate] had been an MP a few years earlier. I went to university with them but that was about it. I didn't really have much knowledge about parliament, let alone how you become a minister.

The first thing I did was I thought ‘now that I'm in parliament, I will just focus on and talk about things that I know about’. To a lot of people, it might sound normal that you talk about things you know about, but it’s not normal in parliament because you’re asked to talk about all sorts of things -especially by the whips as a backbencher - that you've got no knowledge of. And so quite early, I started to say ‘no’ to the whips which some people advised me was a bad idea and that if you wanted to become a minister, you should always say yes to the whips. But I just thought - I'm here, I'm going to try and do this the way I think I should be doing it and not really listen too much to too many of the old hands saying ‘this is the way to do it. That's the way it is’.

That was important because I think, had I not behaved the way that I did, I don't think I would have become a minister so early. Because I was talking about something I knew about, which was the economy, there was the global financial crisis at the time, there was the eurozone crisis, it got noticed. I think people started to notice both in parliament, and just as importantly in the media, that there's a new MP in parliament – and there were a lot of new MPs at the time – that seems to know what he's talking about and is making some interesting points.

"I wanted to make a difference, and I thought the best way to do that is by becoming minister."

I got invited by media to do interviews. There was one interview in particular which directly answers your question about how I got to be economic secretary so early on. I did this interview on Newsnight and talked about the eurozone. I was arguing with some senior economist that used to be in the in the Bank of England. I started arguing with him on Newsnight about the euro, and I think I called the euro a ‘bankruptcy machine’. Why is that important? Because the next day I'm going up to a 1922 Committee [the committee of Conservative backbenchers] meeting. The lift door opens. George Osborne walks in with his chief of staff, Rupert Harrison. I didn't know either of them. I mean, I knew who George was. Everyone did. But I didn’t know Rupert. And in the lift, Rupert said to George ‘Oh, that's that guy from last night that you asked me about’. And George turns to me and he says ‘Bankruptcy machine, hey? The euro. Where'd you get that line from?’ I said ‘What do you mean?’ He thought it was a line, but I just said it myself. Then George said ‘Oh, well, what you said was really interesting… so you’ve worked in finance have you?’

Think about it. I'm in parliament, I'm a Conservative MP. The chancellor was basically co-running the government with the prime minister because obviously they were so close. It’s not his fault but he doesn't know who the MPs are and what experiences they have. So that's what I think put me on the radar. Then the next thing that happened was George had done a budget quite early on. As parliament watchers will know, most MPs love to speak in the budget debate, but most of them will speak in the following day and the following days after the budget. They won't speak on the day of the budget itself.

The only MPs that speak on the day typically I think are the select committee chair [of the Treasury Committee] and the former chancellor and that's what happened on that day with the exception of me speaking in the first day. But I didn't think anything of it. I just listened to the budget, I made a few notes in the back of my order paper, and I tried to catch the Speaker's eye. This is important because the chancellor stays after his speech for the first budget day debate and doesn't turn up for the rest until the final day. I didn’t know anything about the protocols and all this kind of stuff. I just thought, I want to speak at the budget debate, and I'd heard that everyone wants to speak in future days. Why not get in now when it’s not too competitive?

I think the chair of the select committee spoke, Andrew [Tyrie] spoke, Alistair Darling, Ministers Reflect spoke, and then it's my turn all of a sudden. I thought ‘wow, this isn't so hard to get to speak in the budget debate’. George was sitting there because that's the protocol. He sat there and he listened to what I was saying, and I think that made a big change because then I heard afterwards he went back to his room in parliament and said to his staff ‘Who was that guy? We need to speak to him because the points he made, how he made them, he clearly knows what he's talking about’. He'd already sort of bumped into me. Sorry, that's a bit of a long-winded answer to your question, but I thought it was important about what one’s journey is, as it were, to become a minister.

I got made a PPS [parliamentary private secretary] in nine months of being in parliament and that was to John Hayes when he was a further education and skills minister. Then I got made George Osborne's PPS when there was a mini reshuffle, when Liam Fox, Ministers Reflect resigned as defence secretary. That obviously brought me very close to George. It was a couple of days before a reshuffle – which everyone expected – when George said to me ‘If David offered you a job in this reshuffle in 2012, what would you like?’ I said ‘Well, I’d love to be in the Treasury. I’d love to be one of your junior ministers, that’s the job I really want. And if you can't do that, then I'd love to be in the Foreign Office’. He didn't make any promises or anything. But then a few days later, I get a call to from the prime minister. I didn’t go to Number 10, but I got a call from Number 10, and the prime minister asked me if I wanted to become economic secretary to the Treasury. I said ‘Of course I do’. And that’s how it happened.

TD: As you mentioned, you had a career in banking beforehand and obviously knew the topic well. How did working in Deutsche Bank compare to working at the Treasury?

SJ: Well, if I may broaden the question and think about how did working in the private sector, in my case in finance, compare to working in ‘Yes Minister’, whether it’s the Treasury or not because what I'm about to say is a reflection on the difference between those two worlds.

"there's a lot of pressure on you not to say or admit that you made a mistake." 

What I'd say is that in the world of business, including whether it's a Deutsche Bank or any business, you can say that it's pretty black and white – you need to make money, you need to make a profit on whatever it is you're selling as a business. All businesses are selling something – it might be a service, it might be a product. You need to basically sell it for more than the cost of production, and that's called profit. And you can't really fudge it. You might be able to fudge it for a few years, put it off and stuff, but eventually it's going to catch up with you. You need to hit sales targets and so on. It's pretty black and white. In the world of politics in Westminster, it’s anything but black and white. It's all grey. Everything is grey, even success and failure is grey. What I mean by that is I might achieve something as a minister and it might, to any rational person, be a great success.

But first of all, you've got a professional paid opposition whose job it is to tell you ‘It's crap and it's rubbish and you failed’. That's their job. That's what they do. It's not a party-political thing. It's what whoever's on that side, that’s what they do. Also, no government is going to get everything right. Of course, they're going to make mistakes, but there's a lot of pressure on you not to say or admit that you made a mistake. Even as minister, you might want to do it, but Number 10 – or your boss if you're not the secretary of state – might say to you ‘Look, don’t call it a crisis. Don’t say this and don’t say that because you’re just inviting trouble and media attention’. You therefore have got to then go and stand at the despatch box or an interview and pretend something is a success when it's a complete failure and look like an idiot.

Those examples show that it’s all very grey and because of that, I think when the public are then looking in on that, it becomes quite hard for them sometimes to work out if this is good or is it bad. One side is saying they’ve got housing up and the other side are saying they’ve got housing down. One side is saying we can borrow more, and the other side is saying we can’t borrow more. So it's a very grey world. I think the biggest difference between coming from the business world into the Westminster world is you go from black and white to grey and I noticed that a lot.

The second thing I noticed a lot is that Westminster is very risk averse. Very risk averse. Now obviously all businesses take risk. You could go that way, you could go this way, you could borrow more or not – you make a decision. It's a calculated risk and that's how you should take risk decisions. But the whole Westminster system is structured in a way – not deliberately but this just happens to be the structure – that is very risk averse and therefore at every level, the pressure is on not to take any risk. The result of that is that when it comes to policy making and delivery, the system won’t allow you quite often – although there will be exceptions – just to take a calculated sensible risk.

Everyone will just be thinking ‘What if it doesn't work out?’, I saw that every single time at every single job. As you know, eventually I become a secretary of state in six different departments, and it was the same in each one. It didn’t matter if it was the Treasury, every single department was the same. Whether it's pressure from other ministers, pressure from the prime minister or pressure from civil servants. No one wants to take a risk. They're totally discouraged from taking a risk. I think if I had to summarise why it is so risk averse, it’s because of the idea that if you get something right and it really works out, you're never going to get any credit for it. I'm not saying I was sat there thinking I wanted credit for things but generally in the whole system, there’s no credit. The minister might even have moved on, and the credit might go to your successor. But if you get it wrong, you will absolutely never hear the end of it. Whether it's from your political opponents, your internal opponents or from the media, you'll never ever hear the end of it. So it's always risk asymmetric. In Westminster, people always perceive there's a huge downside to everything and very limited upside.

"the system won’t allow you quite often – although there will be exceptions – just to take a calculated sensible risk."

The final point I’ll make, which is related to that risk point and is one of my abiding lessons from being a minister, was that because of this asymmetric risk issue, ministers often think it’s better not to make a decision. They avoid making decisions. But the problem with that – which I thought is obvious, but I don't think everyone agreed with me – is that not making a decision is a decision. Not making a decision has consequences. I think a lot of ministers either accept they don't need to think like that. They just think ‘Do I go this way or that way? I'm not sure. Let's just not do anything. Let's just kick it down the long grass’. Or, they might even think ‘I know I’m not making a real decision, but at least I can't be blamed for not doing anything. It was the status quo, it wasn't as if I got us into this position, it was already there’. That is one of the central problems in government; it is risk averse and lots of people are encouraged to just not make a decision and just carry on.

Stuart Hoddinott [SH]: You mentioned that you went on to work as a minister in six different government departments. Those departments you led were very varied – some more economic focused and some more delivery and service focused. How do they compare from your point of view in terms of how you led them, the officials within them, how the officials gave you advice and the different rhythms of work?

SJ: Sure. The first department I ran was the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and it turned out to be a great department to begin a cabinet career. If you're going to have a cabinet career, it's a great one to start with. Why? Because it's quite small. I think at the time it was around two to three hundred civil servants, so it's quite small in that regard. But it has impact because culture is everything from the BBC to arts, to football. These are things that have an impact on people's real lives. It's the kind of thing people talk about and think about. So I felt it was a nice balance between being a quite small, therefore relatively more manageable, department but having some impact as well.

I thought that most of the people in that department wanted to be there. They want to work on sport, they want to work on culture, they want to work with theatre or whatever it is. Why do I say that? It's because in some other departments that I ran, take BIS [Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] for example, or even DCLG [Department for Communities and Local Government] after that, I felt that certainly in those two departments there was quite a lot of civil servants that were generalists. Those felt to me like two departments that you can just put people in because they're in the civil service. I felt there was probably a disproportionate number of people in those departments that weren't very passionate about it, and, like anything, I think that reflects in the quality of work. Generally speaking, I think there’s a rule that the more passionate you are about it, the more you want to be doing the job and probably the better you are at it.

In terms of other reflections, I thought the Home Office and the Treasury were two departments where in general, most of the people really wanted to be there. There's a big part of the Home Office, especially in security and intelligence, where people are very passionate about their job. That's the only job they really want to be doing. They'd be loathe to be moved out of it or be asked to move. Similar with the Treasury. As you know, the Treasury in terms of the number of civil servants is one of the smaller departments but has a disproportionate amount of influence, of course. It's the only department that raises money. Everyone else spends it. You can't do much without the money and everyone in the Treasury knows that. I felt that in the Treasury, you had a lot of civil servants that really wanted to be there. As a result, they're just more likely to be really, really good and passionate about their job.

Other things that are important in terms of your ability to do things is who are your junior ministers. In general, you don't get to choose your junior ministers, the prime minister does. The quality of the spads [special advisers] you've picked is also important. Obviously in your first department, in my case at least, it was all new to me. I'd seen spads in action as a junior Treasury minister. I learned that the spads are very important in terms of your ability to get stuff done. Therefore, when I entered my first department, I think I got rid of one spad, kept one spad and hired another. I spent a decent amount of quality time recruiting spads because I felt that it would really pay off in terms of the quality of my work if I get the right people now.

Now again, people listening might think that's obvious, but it's not. I've seen other ministers, friends of mine, keep the spads that were there. They rushed it because they felt ‘I’ve got this job, I’ve got to fill the spots, and I’ve got to do it quick because I've got to make a speech tomorrow. I’ve just got to get someone in’. I just felt it's better to take a bit of time, interview people, spend time with them, get references and all that common sense stuff to make sure you're hiring the right people because it makes a big difference to your ability to deliver.

SH: Since we’re on the topic, how did you find managing your political teams in each department and your junior ministers? Were there different challenges that you encountered in different departments?

SJ: In general, I felt that in all the departments there was, amongst civil servants, a clear understanding that they didn’t want to get involved in anything political. As long as you had, not just good ministers but good spads, and the civil servants were aware of that and how to manage all that, I didn’t generally find that an issue. Sometimes, you’d want to make a speech that might have some political content in it. Your civil servants would say ‘We can't write that bit’. So they’d leave a spot blank and your spads would write it. Things like that. Also, there might be meetings you have, especially with MPs, where you wouldn't have civil servants present because it's a purely political meeting and they understood that. I can't really think of a time where that was such an issue. But again, I think it comes down to having good spads.

SH: You were secretary of state in six different departments across eight years. How did you find moving departments so frequently?

SJ: I didn't particularly like it in one sense, because just as you're getting into something, you get moved. And like anything, some things that you're trying to do take time to see the payoff. I understood it, I understood it. Why? Because I felt looking back that one of the reasons I was being moved was a positive reason in the sense that I think I was starting to build a reputation of just getting on with things, getting things done, and also probably being calm in a crisis. A lot of the places I got moved to, it was to deal with a crisis. It was the Grenfell crisis when I stayed in the communities secretary role after the election, the Windrush crisis in the Home Office, even as chancellor having to deal with the no-deal Brexit and the economic challenges around that. 

"just as you're getting into something, you get moved." 

So if I'm going into a crisis, I thought ‘Right, roll my sleeves up, I've got a job to do and that's why I'm here'. But also clearly because you're in a different department, you need to learn a lot. You have to learn a lot about the department, the issues and get up to speed pretty damn quickly. Because I moved quite a lot, I almost managed to develop a routine or a system in my own mind about how to do that. So every time I was moved I would spend a huge amount of time going through the briefings with civil servants, a lot of material. I used to get a lot of material to read, a lot. In every department. A ton of it. You had to have a system around documentation material because obviously some of it is really important, some is less important. Quickly, especially after the first couple of departments, I decided on a system.

What was my system? One was what I talked about earlier in terms of spads. Second was I would look at my workload and say ‘Ok, I can't do everything’. There's a temptation for you to want to be involved in it all, but I can't. It's not real. You wouldn't do that in a company so why would you do it in a big department like this? It's too complex. There's too much to do. No human can do everything, of course. So I used to break up my workload. Broadly, I'd say about a third of it would be a watching brief, which would typically be handled by junior ministers. In every new department early on, I'd send letters, formal letters to the junior ministers about their responsibilities. I might rejig them around a bit and make sure I was happy with it. I would send it to them and hold a meeting with them to make sure they totally understood what day-to-day responsibilities they were going to handle. And I'm going to keep an eye on it with the help of my private office and my spads.

"Just focus, focus, focus and don't let go." 

Then a third is identifying the priority area. I'd pick two or three priorities. When I was in the culture department, my first department, I wanted to pursue like seven or eight priorities. As I worked through the departments, I realised two or three are enough so you can really, really make a difference. Just focus, focus, focus and don't let go.

And then the other third is putting out fires. No matter what you think, something's going to happen and something's going to come up that no one has planned, and you're going to have to deal with it. Something's going to blow up somewhere, especially departments that are notorious for that – the Home Office or the Treasury because it touches so many things. Something's going to go wrong and you're going to be needed so I'd organise my work by that.

In terms of the documentation, the reading material and stuff like that in my box, I had some set of rules. When I talk about my box, I’m not just talking about the box you take home. In fact, I didn't really like taking stuff home. It's unavoidable, especially at weekends and stuff, but I didn't really like it. I used to say about my box – which was basically on my desk  – ‘Right, I want it split three ways’. I wanted background reading material that’s helpful to know, but not a necessity, in one section. I wanted routine stuff that I just had to do – like sign letters and correspondence that just had to be done by me – in another section. Then I wanted an urgent section. And that was it. Obviously, I addressed the urgent material first, then the routine stuff, and the background reading material next.

Often, I’d let the background reading material pile up till the weekend and then I spent a few hours just going through all the background material. I used to close my box, as it were, reasonably early – I think at five o’clock everyday. I just used to signal to the civil service that no new material could come in after five. If you wanted to give me stuff that you think is important, it has got to be in by five. If you didn't put a deadline, I'd learned in the culture department, it'd just keep coming and they just never stop. I just think there's nothing wrong with the five o’clock deadline. Obviously, with the exception of emergencies, that was the way it worked. That worked brilliantly.

The other thing that comes to my mind in terms of organising my life is that I cannot overstate the importance of a good diary secretary. I had really good diary secretaries. I had crap diary secretaries. It makes a huge difference in performance on the basis that everything requires time. I think most people agree with that. Whether you're reading something, having a meeting, even thinking time, even going to the toilet, or having lunch – it all requires time. It's one thing that you can't create more of and it's limited every day. I'm stating obvious stuff, but it wasn't very obvious to a lot of civil servant diary secretaries in private office. 

"they don't understand that you need to eat, and that you need to go the toilet, and that you might need to have 10 minutes with your wife or your daughter on the phone"

I’ll give you two practical examples. The first thing that I found that most civil servants didn't really understand is that a minister has more than one job. You are also a member of parliament, and you have parliamentary responsibilities, but also you have constituency responsibilities. You might also be a father or a mother or something. You've got other things going on in your life and you can't totally ignore those. Things like kids’ parents evening or even dinner with your wife. I learned quickly that private offices don't tend to understand this. So when I go to a new department, I'd sit them down – the head of your private office or all your private office – and say ‘Look, I have a number of jobs. I am not just your minister’. If you don't do this, they tend to think that you are just the chancellor or that you're just the home secretary – that you've got no other responsibility in life other than that.

The second thing they think is that you are a machine. What I mean by that is that they don't understand that you need to eat, and that you need to go the toilet, and that you might need to have 10 minutes with your wife or your daughter on the phone. They don't get it. They just think you’re a machine. I’ll give you some examples. They used to put in my diary a meeting that would finish at say, 11:00 in the Home Office. Actually, the Home Office is not a good example, as my diary secretary was brilliant there. Let's say in another department. You'd finish a meeting at 11:00 and your next meeting would start at 11:00 in parliament. They haven't worked out that you actually need to move physically. I'm not kidding! It used to happen so often until you point it out. The other one was lunch. I mean, I need to eat. When I say lunch, I’m talking about 15 minutes – that’s fine. Even half an hour just to have a bit of thinking time where you have a sandwich with a spad at your desk. That's fine. That's all. That's what I'm talking about. But there wasn’t that.

You would have a whole trip visiting hospitals or visiting police stations but there would be no provision at all. You actually need to eat. I don't even mind if they got me a sandwich from a shop and gave it to me in the car when I'm driving to a meeting. But the point was, no one had thought about that. No one thinks about these things. Then suddenly I would say ‘Can I get something to eat?’ and they would say ‘Oh, we haven’t got that on schedule’. These were really practical things which they didn’t understand. A well-nourished minister is probably a better performing minister. These are small things in a way, but they actually have a huge difference on performance.

I have one last point to make on diary management. I quickly learned two things about efficiency of department and getting things done. One was keeping meetings short. I had a general rule. No meeting can be longer than half an hour, hopefully shorter if possible, but no meeting can be longer than half an hour unless I specifically personally authorised it. No one else could authorise it, not even my top spad. They would have to ask me. I didn’t care who I was meeting with. Half an hour. Unless, of course, the prime minister's asked for a meeting or something like that. If they were my meetings, they had to be half an hour. Quite often, I thought a meeting could be really quick if it was just a quick decision that was needed. Everyone’s already read everything. We don’t need to sit down and discuss it again because I found that people, civil servants, sometimes love sitting down and discussing it again, again and again. But I thought ‘We’ve got to just deal with this. We’ve got to make a decision’. Quite often I would just have the meeting standing up. If I stand up, then everyone else stands up. We’re just going to stand up and have a chat. You can do in ten minutes standing up what will have taken you an hour sitting down. It improves efficiency.

I had rules around meeting times, how the meetings happen, how we sit and all that kind of stuff. I used to ask for a routine where civil servants would come knock on my door after 25 minutes of a meeting to say there were five minutes left and that the next person was arriving, especially when external people came in for meetings. I was really a stickler for time because I could only fit so many meetings in my diary. Even then and despite all of that, my whole day, from eight in the morning to seven or eight at night if we were voting late, would just be meeting after meeting after meeting.

I used to also ask for half an hour blocked for thinking time. I need to think. I can't just go from meeting to meeting. I need to actually absorb and think. I need to look at the news quickly or give someone a quick call and check something. I learned a lot of that just after the first couple of departments.

SH: You've mentioned the global financial crisis, Grenfell, and the Windrush crisis. You were also secretary of state for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) during Covid. How well do you think the British state responds to crises?

SJ: I think the good thing in responding to a crisis – if I can call it good – is that the appetite and willingness to take risk goes up. Compared to normal times, the state realises ‘We’ve actually got to do something, and we’ve got to make some big decisions’. It moves much, much faster. But it depends a lot on what the crises are like. When I came into parliament and when I was the junior Treasury minister, there was still a lot of dealing with the global financial crisis. The immediate crisis was over but there was still a lot to do. I felt generally that was handled pretty well and fast. Obviously, it started with the previous government, and I think the new government continued that.

With Covid, it’s harder for me to speak about the first part because I wasn’t there. When I came in as health secretary after like a year of Covid, it was still the number one issue – not just in the department, but for the country. We were still in lockdown. To go back to the point about taking risk and making decisions, I did find that there was a willingness to accept that decisions needed to be made. They wanted someone to make decisions, which turned out to be me of course – as it should be. But I felt that a lot of pressure was put on me to give a decision when everyone knew it might work and it might not work. If it didn’t end up working, I knew I would never hear the end of it. If it ended up working, there would be plenty of people lining up to take the credit. But that's the way it was.

Maybe we’ll come back to Covid, but in general, I think that in a crisis situation, things move faster and they come together faster. Decisions can be made faster and there's more risk appetite which is obviously all good.

SH: Continuing with Covid, what was it like stepping into a department and having to maintain relationships, a crisis response strategy and vaccine rollout plans which were already well underway and in train for a few months before you arrived?

SJ: Clearly by the time I got to the department, we were still in crisis, still in lockdown but we had just got the vaccine going, which was obviously huge. That was a huge, massive positive development. We had more testing and all that kind of stuff. The really big decision was, when are we going to open up? When are we going to remove a lot of the restrictions? On that there was completely contradictory advice. Either open up in the summer because it’s better to do it when kids are off on holiday and the virus doesn’t like the summer, but the infections are going to surge before they come down. Or wait until the winter, but you probably never open up. Also, Europe has decided not to open up which will make us an outlier. So that was the biggest decision I’ve made in government ever in all my departments, which was to open up in the summer.

Yes, infections did go up. But again and again, I kept making the point that it’s not about infection, it's about hospitalisation. That was a big distinction that people found it hard to accept, even within parts of the government. In the end, the prime minister did accept the distinction, and it was the right decision to open up.

The other big decision regarding Covid, which is on par with that in terms of the biggest decisions I ever had to make in government, was Omicron [the Covid variant]. Things were all looking great. Then in November, the department briefed me on Omicron. I remember the CMO, [chief medical officer], telling me that they've never seen anything so contagious. It’s already going to be in the UK given the number of flights from South Africa. No matter what we do, pretty much everyone is going to get it.

I asked him ‘How quickly?’ He said ‘In about six to seven weeks pretty much everyone is going to get it’. And I thought ‘Oh, shit’. My next question was whether the vaccines work against it. And he said that we don’t know. I thought ‘Oh, that could be problematic’. We quickly discovered in the labs that the vaccines offered a high level of protection but not as good as with the previous variant. The decision I had to make was whether to enter lockdown again like everyone else was doing in Europe or stay open. There was a lot of downsides to lockdown – closing down schools, the economy and all of that.

But by then we had different vaccines, a lot more vaccines, we could get hold of a lot more tests and we had better treatments. So I decided not to lock down and rely on the pharmaceutical defences which was a big risk decision because what if it didn’t work? One of the things I had to do was to get the population over the age of 50 – adults basically – boosted with another vaccine before Christmas. That meant we had to ramp up daily vaccinations to almost a million a day, and that had never been done before. It was double the maximum that we'd achieved before.

The NHS managed to achieve it, but I had to almost underwrite that I will get there. In the end it worked, but it was a big, big risk decision and anyone else in that job could have made the same decision as me, but they could easily have argued to go the other way and go for lockdown. Looking back, it's one of those things that turned out to be absolutely the right decision. But no one really looks back at it like that. They don’t ask ‘Did the government and the health secretary make the right decision at that point?’ because they don't miss what didn't happen. If I'd made the wrong decision, then clearly it would be a very different matter in terms of the history books. It was a big moment.

SH: The vaccination program was accelerated and extended during your time leading DHSC. What lessons do you think ministers can take from the Covid vaccination rollout about effective policy delivery?

SJ: I think, going back to what we said earlier, the fact that it was a crisis meant that a lot of the usual procedures were either changed or not necessary which allowed for quicker decision making. Also, it required a lot of daily focus to make things happen. There was a regular drum beat of meetings, really important meetings every day. Every day, I’d have a vaccine delivery meeting and a meeting to look at the infection rates. Every day, I'd have a meeting about the pressures on the NHS and the backlogs. They might only be 30 minutes, and in some cases I’d have to break my 30minute rule. But for me, an important lesson in a crisis is to have these regular meetings that you, as the secretary of state, are going to chair every time. What was important wasn’t so much what was happening in the meetings. It was the whole preparation for the meetings and thinking ‘I’m going to scrutinise this, I'm going to look at that and get to know about that’. I used to probe a lot for information. I'm very comfortable with numbers and data, so I used to ask for a lot of data and graphs. The people doing the work realised that I was going to take a real, serious interest in things and that just kept the pressure on in a good way for delivery.

"Boris Johnson was probably the least well briefed and probably of the three took the least interest in most things. I think David Cameron was always well briefed. So was Theresa May, but Cameron knew that the objective of each meeting was to make a decision."

TD: For this final section, I’ll ask you some broad questions which span your whole time in government. Across your ministerial career, you worked for David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. How did their approach to being prime ministers compare?

SJ: David Cameron was the most effective in my opinion. Out of the three, he did the job in the way I would have thought the job should be done in terms of making decisions and getting things done. Whereas I'd say that Theresa May was very indecisive and used to let meetings go on and on and on. She would let her ministers argue with each other and still not come to decision. Boris Johnson was probably the least well briefed and probably of the three took the least interest in most things. I think David Cameron was always well briefed. So was Theresa May, but Cameron knew that the objective of each meeting was to make a decision.

A lot of a prime minister's job, as well as making some of the big decisions of course, is choosing as best you can the right people for the various departments and roles and letting them more or less get on with the job. I think David Cameron was trying to do that, generally speaking. Second, a lot of the prime minister’s job is chairing meetings. People are coming to talk to you and share ideas but eventually you’ve got to make a decision. Cameron was very good at chairing meetings and letting everyone have their say but not letting them blab on and on about something that was irrelevant. Then he’d ask ‘What’s the decision guys? We’re going to own this together. Do we all agree?’

The third thing, which is a super important one, is that the effectiveness of the government in general, but certainly the prime minister and his or her office, depends massively on the relationship between the prime minister and the chancellor. Those two individuals have to work really closely together. They have to have a very high level of trust and respect for each other. I think that, certainly during the Conservative period of government, it only existed between David and George. I tried as chancellor with Boris, but it was just not going to be possible. I think that's key in terms of the effectiveness of a prime minister as well – who is their chancellor, do they respect them and do they work well together as a team?

"the effectiveness of the government in general, but certainly the prime minister and his or her office, depends massively on the relationship between the prime minister and the chancellor."

TD: On the topic of the relationship between the chancellor and the prime minister, you also worked with Rishi Sunak in various departments before he became prime minister. What was he like to work with and how do you think his earlier roles informed his approach to being chancellor?

SJ: I found him very easy to work with. I thought he was super smart, really energetic, loyal and pretty easy to work with. I worked with him twice in two departments. First was when I was local government secretary and he was my junior local government minister. Then when I was going to be chancellor, I asked Boris if Rishi could be my deputy. Boris was already thinking of giving Rishi a big role and he actually asked me ‘Do you think that's a big enough role for him? Wouldn’t he rather run a department?’ But then Boris would answer his own question and he said ‘Well, he hasn't run his own department yet and he hasn’t spent much time in ministerial roles’. Then I said ‘Actually Boris, it is a big role being chief secretary to the Treasury, especially if you get on as chancellor and chief secretary’. So I worked with Rishi in that role.

TD: As you mentioned, you were the chancellor to Boris Johnson. You resigned from that role in February 2020. You also resigned as health secretary in the summer of 2022. Each of those resignations, I think it’s fair to say, were quite impactful on the government. Why were those the moments when you thought it was the right time to resign? Can you tell us a bit about your thought process ahead of each resignation?

SJ: They were both different. I resigned as chancellor because the prime minister asked me to fire all my spads and I refused. I said ‘I’d rather go than fire my spads’. I felt that if I'd continued, if I'd accepted his request, yes, I would have remained chancellor, but I would have basically been chancellor in name only. What the prime minister asked was not only for me to fire my spads, but the new ones would have been put there by Dominic Cummings, who was Boris’ chief spad. I found that unacceptable – both firing my spads and then also how they would be replaced, because I thought I'd just be chancellor in name anyway. I wasn't there to be a fake chancellor. I thought I'd be absolutely gutted in terms of my responsibility and power to do things and make a difference. It’s not why I was in government, even though being chancellor was the one job I’d always wanted in government, before I became an MP. I just thought, I'm not going to be chancellor in name only. I'm not going to be a puppet. 

"I'm not going to be chancellor in name only. I'm not going to be a puppet." 

I did say to the prime minister at the time ‘You realise you're the actual puppet here, right? Dominic Cummings is running rings around you, and you can't even see it’. At the time, he couldn't see it. He denied it and said ‘That’s not the case. You don't understand him. You've got him wrong. You guys should become friends and this and that’. But today – I don't know if you're going to interview Boris for this thing –he would absolutely agree with it. In fact, he would totally agree that he got it totally wrong. He’s said to me since then a number of times, ‘You were right, and I was wrong about Cummings, and I didn’t see it’. But that was that.

Boris couldn’t believe I was going to resign. I said ‘I am going’. And he said ‘No, you’re not. You’re not going to do this’. The last thing I said to him when I quit as chancellor as I left his office was, ‘That guy, Cummings, is not going to be content until he burns this house down. And he’s going to take you with him’. That was the last thing I said and then I left. I walked up to my apartment. My wife just thought I'd been reappointed! I said ‘Right, can you get the dog and the bags? We're going back to our house in London before the press get there’. She said ‘What?’ and I said ‘I just quit.’ She couldn't quite believe it!

The second resignation was as health secretary. I came back as health secretary despite having left Borris before for two reasons. The main one was that the country was in a crisis. There was a national crisis. Boris had asked me to come back as health secretary, arguably the most important job that needed to be done at that time. One of the reasons I was asked is that he knew I had experience in running big departments and crisis situations. Second, Dominic Cummings wasn't there anymore. He'd already been fired, so that negative influence over the prime minister had gone.

Boris also agreed when I said to him at the time, ‘Whatever I want in health, you have to agree. My spads obviously, and anything else I’m asking for within reason. I don't want any bullshit, I don’t want any issues’. For example, they were looking to recruit a new head of the NHS. I said I would get to pick the person and Boris agreed to everything. He said ‘Fine, yes, yes’. By and large, in the department, he stuck with that.

In the end, when I left, it wasn't really so much to do with the health department or my responsibility in that department. Boris pretty much stuck to that and by then we got through omicron and stuff. We had a lot of successes. I just got to the point where I lost confidence in him as a prime minister, because there were so many other things going on. People will recall the whole thing over Owen Paterson, Chris Pincher, partygate [three ethics and integrity scandals under the Johnson premiership]. For example, I was told categorically by people – I won’t say who, but people very, very close to him – that there was no partygate, nothing happened, that this thing was bullshit and stuff. But it all turned out to be true and I just felt I was misled a lot. I just thought, if the centre, broadly speaking led by one man, is so easily willing to mislead his cabinet ministers, then you can't function. The reason I told him at the time, both verbally and then in my letter and then later in my parliamentary speech, was that I just lost confidence. At a personal level, I found he is very fun to be with, he's a nice man. I think he does care about people. I really do. I think that he's got so many talents and stuff, but I'd lost confidence.

"Dominic Cummings is running rings around you, and you can't even see it".

TD: If you had your time again as a minister, is there anything you would do differently? 

SJ: I think that there might have been things early on in my first cabinet jobs where I might have been more forceful in trying to get things done that I really wanted to get done. I think I could have prioritised better in my early departments. I learned that later. I’m just trying to think is there anything policy wise that I really wanted to do but didn’t get done? Obviously, I would have loved to be chancellor longer. I know that it would have gone into Covid eventually, but I probably would have liked to have dealt with that crisis. But that is not me saying I wish I hadn't resigned because given that set of circumstances again, I still would have resigned.

The things I would have liked to have been different were basically out of my control. I wish Boris had never hired Dominic Cummings, but that's not in my control. Of the things that I advised prime ministers, especially Boris at the time early on in his premiership, there were some things he did do and some things he didn’t and maybe I should have been more forceful.

TD: What achievement are you most proud of from your time in ministerial office?

SJ: Well, I think a few things just very quickly! When I was local government secretary, my main thing before the Grenfell disaster, was housing. I spent a lot of time on housing supply, the housing white paper, and made big changes to what's called the National Planning Policy Framework. These things take time to work through, but actually some of them started to work quite quickly. I think I’m right in saying that, what are called residential housing starts, were highest in that period, the whole period of government. And especially a couple of years after when a lot of it was coming through. I thought housing was a big social issue, not just an economic issue.

I was very proud of the Housing First initiative to reduce rough sleeping. I pinched the idea from Finland. I went to see it, I loved it, and I managed to squeeze the money out of existing budgets for it. It really worked in reducing rough sleeping. It's one of those things where you look back and now, it’s been instituted in many places. It really would not have happened if you didn't think about what works and making the decision.

In the Home Office – there’s some things I did that I can’t talk about, but I think they’ve saved lives. I can’t talk about them, maybe one day we can, but we can’t now. Looking back now, I think anyone involved would think that saved lives. So obviously I'm pretty proud of probably saving lives of innocent people.

Second, though, in the Home Office, I think two big things very quickly. One was on Windrush – I'd learned some really serious lessons from that and that directly fed into how I handled the settlement of European residents in the UK post Brexit. I insisted that there had to be documentation of that through a really light touch digital scheme, but we had to have everyone's name who wanted to settle. A lot of people were asking ‘Well, why are you doing that? It's bureaucratic. Why are you asking for names? What if they don't register and stuff? What are the consequences?’. I did that because it was a direct lesson of Windrush – where people were allowed to stay but there was no documentation, and they paid the price. The country paid the price. I didn't want that to happen again.

It's one of those things I spent a huge amount of time on. It affected probably 4 million plus people in terms of European citizens. It's one of those things, an example where because I insisted on having documentation, it didn’t become a crisis. I could 100% guarantee you if I had not done that and if I'd continued with what was planned - which was just going to be an act of parliament that says you can stay - I guarantee to you, down the road there would be an issue of ‘Why isn't this person documented? They should be kicked out the country’. Then you have Windrush mark two and it will be totally unavoidable. Then everyone would look back and ask ‘Why didn’t he do that differently?’. So it's preventing a crisis, being proud of preventing crisis.

Also, when I was in the Home Office – I was going to say it's a small thing, but it really mattered to me. Sometimes these small things really matter. It was basically when I legalised the medicinal use of cannabis. There was a case of a boy which was quite public. The mother was going to come back with medicinal cannabis from Canada. She was going to be arrested and charged and it would be confiscated. He needed it and I learned quickly there were, I think, eight to ten thousand children in the UK that had this extreme illness. I had big arguments with Theresa May – she was totally against my decision. 

I remember the last meeting with her about it. The mother was on the plane about to land at Heathrow, and the police and customs officers were ready to arrest her. She publicly announced she was doing this. I felt she was absolutely right. I thought ‘What mother wouldn’t be doing this?’ I learned quickly that it was legal in almost every single European country except the UK. I thought that was just nonsense. You should be able to have medicinal - medicinal, that's the key - use of cannabis with doctor permission and all that.

Theresa May was completely against it. I had a meeting with her then chief of staff and then I walked out of the room. She said ‘You're not going to do this’ I said ‘I am. I'm going to go to Parliament today and I'm going to publish a written ministerial statement announcing this decision that I'm going to do it and I'm going to do today’. By the way, on that note, the civil servants had said that for us not to arrest her, to allow this cannabis to be used, it will take about three months. Then it became one month. And on the day I wanted to do it, it became two hours. It's done. I sign an order and announce it to parliament. The key was that the prosecution could only take place if I believe that it was in the national interest. It is agreed that if the home secretary says it's not in the national interest, then you can't prosecute that person. But I allowed that.

I left the prime minister's office, and I said ‘I'm going to make this written ministerial statement, and you can't stop me. Well, you can stop me, but there's only one way’. She was absolutely furious. I walked out. Her chief of staff called me up – that’s Gavin Barwell, Ministers Reflect. He called me up and he completely agreed with me. He said ‘Saj, you’re totally right. This is nonsense from the PM. You go ahead and do what you need to do. I'll take care of her’. That was it, and I did it. That's a massive, consequential decision. I truly believe it would not have happened had I not been in that department, because this issue had come up again and again and again. I just took the time and effort to look at it. I actually just thought ‘What if this was one of my kids? What would I do?’

Also in that department, one thing I was very pleased to have done that absolutely was not going to happen if I wasn't in the Home Office and which had massive consequences and a knock on impact for when I was health secretary – I happened to be health secretary when it was published – was the Dame Carol Black review into drugs. I asked her to do an independent review because I was very worried in the Home Office about the impact of drugs on knife crime, on inquisitive crime and all sorts of crime. I ordered an independent inquiry into all of that by her. I picked her, asked her to do it, and then I remember just before I left the Home Office, I said ‘I want you to do this in two parts. I want you to talk about the criminal justice system. Then I want you to talk about what we can do about it - how can you have fewer drug addiction problems, better rehabilitation and all this kind of stuff’.

Her inquiry took a bit longer than expected because of Covid. She reported back her final report when I was health secretary. While I was on the backbenches – I left the Home Office, I was chancellor, then I was on the backbenches – I kept in touch with her. I kept following what was going on. I was really interested in drug rehabilitation, and she reported back when I was health secretary. Her recommendations were very good, really broad for the department, mostly around rehabilitation, how we treat offenders in the criminal justice system with drug addictions and how we rehabilitate both in prisons and outside. The bottom line was it required £800 million of funding over the next five years to do it and some big changes in the NHS and the NHS’s approach. I went to Boris, and I said ‘You told me I can have everything I wanted when I took this job. I want this.’ After a bit of moaning he agreed. So the inquiry would not have happened had I not requested it, because there was no plan for that inquiry until I got to the department. Then I happened to be in the health department and most of the delivery was in the health department at the time the report came out.

Then one final thing I can think of in the health department again that absolutely would not have happened if I was not the health secretary and I think it's going to impact many, many lives – that was on gender dysphoria. The NHS had already started looking into this before I came to the department, but it was very low level, it was quiet and deliberately so because everyone thought it was just too sensitive an issue to look at. The issue was that there were lots of children getting misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria when they had another problem or an issue. In the inquiry, we appointed Dr Hilary Cass. I remember a meeting I had with her. She was doing her work, which really impacted me. She was the former president of the Royal College of Paediatricians and is really highly respected.

She came to see me. First of all, she asked for a meeting with me and the department said no, without it even coming to me. One of the spads found out and said she thought it was wrong because it’s really important. But the department had said no because they just think it's really sensitive and it was an NHS review rather than a departmental review. They said she should see the head of the NHS. I said ‘No, I want to see her’. I overturned it. I saw her. And that was a very impactful meeting - one of the most impactful I’ve had – where she told me that in her opinion, based on all the primary research she has done, the vast majority of children over the last 20 years have been misdiagnosed. In many cases, they've been put on hormone blockers and irreversible treatments that they should not have been on, and many of them will regret it in adult life. She said there was plenty of evidence of that.

She wanted me to know that, but she also wanted my permission to get data from the NHS. Children’s NHS numbers change when they become an adult and she wanted to link the two numbers so she can see how they were as adults. Long story short, in the end she published her final review. I accepted all the recommendations, and I announced them both in terms of prescription, but how the triaging is done. I shut down the main clinics that she said were the culprits of what was going on. Now, virtually everyone, including the opposition, most doctors and nurses, apart from some extreme individuals, say that was absolutely the right thing to do. Lots of other countries have done similar. But my point being that it wouldn't have happened unless I was there thinking of it as a priority and I’m proud of it.

TD: For our final question, what advice would you give new ministers on how to be most effective in the role? 

SJ: I'd say prioritise. You can't do everything. Don't be afraid of making decisions. Not making a decision is a decision and you will reap the consequences one way or the other anyway so be proactive and actually make a decision. Own it. I'd also say spend a valuable amount of time on recruitment. Obviously spads, but even other things. If I had not picked Dame Carol Black, maybe my report would have been different. I can think about many people that you appoint where you ultimately make a decision of who's going to chair or run an organisation. If I had picked a different head of the NHS, running a budget of £180 billion, things could have been very different. So don't leave recruitment and things to others. 

"be proactive and actually make a decision."

And then lastly, I'd say just make it count. You're there for maybe a year, two or three years, whatever it is, in a ministerial role. Clearly, you're going to be moving on probably a lot sooner than you realise or think. If you're good, you might get moved because you're good – either to a bigger department or to where there's a real problem issue that needs to be sorted. And if you’re crap, they’re going to fire you anyway! Well, they should fire you. Plenty of crap ministers didn’t get fired in my time! But make it count. That comes again back to prioritising. Find one or two things. We talked about the health department. Obviously, I had to focus on Covid and rightly so. But I still had time to do other things, whether it was the gender dysphoria work or the drug rehabilitation work.

There was stuff in health that I would have loved to stay on and done. The health inequalities work, the 10-year plans for cancer and dementia and all that – I would have loved to see all that through, but that wasn't my decision ultimately. But the things that are your decision where you can really make a difference, really get your teeth into it and make count, will be the things you look back at. There'll be very few. There's a lot of routine stuff. But the really big things where you made a difference will be the very few things that you look back at and think ‘I made it count. I really made a difference beyond the routine. I really made a difference’. That's what I'd say.

"I do hope that things like this can make a difference to a future minister and the ones that want to listen." 

My final comment is to thank you for doing this, to both of you, but also the Institute for Government. I've done a few things for the Institute of Government, I think you’re great guys. You do really important work and it really matters a lot in terms of good governance. I wish you had even more influence than you do. I think what you're doing, even this initiative, as always, you're not party political. You're just trying to make the best of a system that's far from perfect. There can always be improvements, but I do hope that things like this can make a difference to a future minister and the ones that want to listen. They know they can listen to you guys if you put it together because it all comes from a good place.