Simon Hart

Tim Durrant (TD): You were appointed the secretary of state for Wales in December 2019. Can you tell us about the conversation you had presumably with the prime minister when you were appointed and what it was like entering the role?

Simon Hart (SH): Yes, the circumstances as ever were probably not completely straightforward because, when the election was called, Alun Cairns was secretary of state and there was every likelihood that would continue. Then there was some kind of drama during the election campaign, which Alun was loosely connected to, but certainly not at fault as far as I could tell. The accusation was that he didn't react to information in the way that he should have done, which was disputed. I think in the interest of just removing a distraction from the election campaign, he was invited to stand down, with the view that it would all come good again once the election was out of the way. It didn't happen like that. The number of MPs in Wales is fairly limited, so David Jones, Ministers Reflect, Alun, and Stephen Crabb, Ministers Reflect had all done it [former Conservative secretaries of state for Wales]. So the gene pool is quite small. 

And towards the end of the reshuffle, I just get a call. I was over in the Cabinet Office, obviously doing my old job [parliamentary secretary for the Cabinet Office] at the time, and I just got a call. It was quite comical because they said the usual thing ‘Can you come and see the prime minister?’ ‘Yes. When?’ They said ‘At 5:15’. By this stage, it was 5:10. If I'd been anywhere else but next door, there's no way I could have got there in time! But I got there in time and went through the usual thing – in, out, photograph, social media message, proprietary and ethics check, across the road, off you go.

TD: When you spoke to the prime minister, did he give a sense of what his priorities for the role were?

SH: Not in any detail. It was quite union orientated. The message was – ‘we mustn't lose the union’. We mustn't capitulate to Welsh government. UK government is still a force for good in Wales. People need to remember that. Whilst there are a lot of things which are devolved, there are a lot of things which aren’t. The Welsh economy and the UK economy are intertwined. It's not a sort of ‘them versus us’ type thing. There was quite a strong union feeling about it. 

TD: You mentioned you were in the Cabinet Office in your previous role.

SH: That was the previous role and obviously until reshuffle would be completed, you know everything is on until it's off, yeah.

TD: Did that role inform the approach you took in the Wales Office?

SH: It was very different. Partly because I was a junior minister in the Cabinet Office and the transition from that role to secretary of state was quite significant. But also because the territorial offices, as they were described at the time - Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland - I always thought they were almost more of an ambassador role than a secretary of state role. You didn't have a particular policy brief, and you didn't have a specific budget, per se. But you had the ability to articulate the case for the government in every department. It might have been the MoD [Ministry of Defence] one day and work and pensions the next. You had a finger in every pie, even though often the decision making was somewhere else.

TD: What were your impressions of the office of the secretary of state for Wales when you arrived? 

SH: Well, it was quite fun in a way. For people with long memories, the office  – it's called Gwydyr House, just opposite Downing Street  – was the fictitious office of the Department of Administrative Affairs in ‘Yes, Minister’. Jim Hacker's first ever job in episode one, series one of ‘Yes, Minister’ is him getting out of the car and going into actually what is the Wales Office which, for those who work in the Wales Office, all fifty of us, is a source of great amusement! So there's a little bit of history there. In departmental government terms, it's a tiny place. We had half a dozen people in the private office. There were only two ministerial roles  – myself and David TC Davies, the parliamentary under secretary who was shared with the Whips’ Office, so even that wasn't a full time role. 

The actual secretary of state office, the physical office, was brilliant. It was very grand. I think the insurance limited you to 60 people. So if we had any receptions there, you couldn't have more than 60. I think we bent the rules from time to time! It was actually probably a better reception space than it was an office space. It was very nice. We had a lovely view down Whitehall, so any state occasion was of course fabulous. The government art department had singled out pictures which had a Welsh angle. There was this portrait of Lloyd George somewhere in the building. I remember that got removed after a bit and I asked ‘Where's the picture?’ and they said ‘Oh, somebody worked out it's worth £500,000’. And so they didn't want it too close to the door in case someone ran it and nicked it. It mysteriously disappeared and I never knew where it went. 

It was a small private office. Really nice people, really good people, some with connections in Wales, some not. Very good DG [director general] – we didn’t have a permanent secretary – we had a DG who had been there for 27 years or something, Glynne Jones. Even though he came from Yorkshire he was called Glynne Jones! I don’t know whether he changed his name [laughs]. And then we had an outfit in Cardiff of course. Like Scotland and Northern Ireland, we had an establishment, a dozen people or so, based in Cardiff.

TD: What’s it like managing across offices in two locations? 

SH: That's fine. Yeah, it's good. Any company which has got offices in more than one location has to manage that. It was fine. I thought it worked quite well. And we had the new office in Cardiff. They were in the process of opening civil service hubs which was intended to regionalise the civil service at the time. They'd opened this huge building which had capacity for four thousand civil servants right in the middle of Cardiff and every department was meant to have a presence there. We were on the top floor. Then Covid came along and I don't actually know if it's ever been populated since. But it’s a really good office, 50 yards from the station and had loads going for it, but I think it’s probably largely empty. 

"The role was very much to fly the flag for UK government in Wales"

Megan Bryer (MB): You mentioned that the prime minister had given you a union-oriented set of priorities. To what extent did you see it as part of your role as secretary of state to promote or defend the union within Wales, and how did that affect how you engaged with the Welsh government? 

SH: The role was very much to fly the flag for UK government in Wales, literally in some respects. One of the big rows we had in the office in Cardiff at one stage was how big the Union Jack should be in the window. And look at it now with flags in the news. We wanted to do a big Welsh flag and a big Union Jack. We were saved by the fact that the estimate cost for the Union Jack was £120,000 and I remember thinking ‘Well, that solves that problem!’ You're not going to spend £120,000 on a Union Jack in the window. We were literally rescued. 

Thinking back, the problem we had was that the more we championed the cause of the UK government, the more difficult the relationship with Welsh government became. I don't think that would necessarily always be the case. But Welsh government – partly because at times they were dependent on the support of Plaid Cymru – had to probably over embellish their small ‘i’ independent credentials. But there was a lot of politics involved, and it was frustrating which probably contributed to my scepticism about the model of devolution that we were exercising. Put in its crudest sense  – every problem that Welsh government encountered, they attributed to a lack of funding from the UK government. 

Even though it might’ve been a fanciful claim, it was a bit too easy especially during Covid for the Welsh government to simply say ‘that's London for you’. They used to call it ‘the London government’. It was a deliberate attempt to try and create this impression of some distant, out of touch ivory tower, somewhere down the other end of the M4 which can’t understand the proper needs of Wales. That was really annoying.

"the more we championed the cause of the UK government, the more difficult the relationship with Welsh government became."

And then we would say ‘Well, hang on a minute. You’re getting Barnett consequential for whatever this particular announcement is, that’s 20% per capita more than…’ But they would then just say ‘You’re being patronising, saying that we should be grateful for crumbs from the rich man’s table’. So you couldn’t win. In political terms, you couldn’t win. 

Every time I did oral questions on Wales in the chamber [of the house of commons], of course, you knew you had MPs in in here who would never criticise Welsh government and so they were just a mouthpiece for Welsh government in the chamber. There were numerous examples of things where I think Welsh government was incredibly well funded, or at least, put it this way, funded to at least 20% more than the rest of England but still somehow claimed that everything which went wrong was our fault. 

MB: One example of where there was quite a serious clash between Welsh government and UK government was over the Internal Market Bill when the Senedd voted to withhold legislative consent over the bill. Given that the UK government had accepted that legislative consent would be required from the devolved nations to pass that bill, why did the government decide to proceed in the absence of consent?

SH: Well, we took a view to be honest with you that nobody in the outside world or even in the inside world knew what the hell an LCO [legislative consent order] was. And we knew that Welsh Labour and UK Labour's policy was to remain in the EU [European Union]. We knew that it didn't matter really what we did, they were not going to grant an LCO. But rejecting an LCO was not unique – we’d done it before. There was a precedent for just sort of taking note. And I remember at the time thinking ‘Well, no member of the voting public is going to give a hell or give a toss about this. And we cannot just be held to ransom. The UK government is still responsible for managing the UK economy, not the economy of England. Therefore, thanks for letting us know, but we've got to proceed’. I think the LCO was being used as a as a political weapon rather than as a serious attempt to alter the direction of policy. Also, I think Labour knew at times in Cardiff that if they'd accepted a legislative consent order that their Plaid Cymru colleagues would probably disown them. So, they probably didn’t have a lot of choice anyway. 

MB: The Shared Prosperity Fund came to replace European regional funding after the UK left the EU. What role did you have as secretary of state for Wales in determining the allocation of the prosperity fund across Wales? 

SH: God, my memory might be a bit stretched on this, you’d need to check this, but I remember at the time there was a lot of dispute around whether the pre-Brexit and post-Brexit funding was better or worse. We calculated that the money received by Wales, principally through Welsh government but not exclusively, was in excess of that which Wales had been receiving prior to Brexit – that was hotly disputed. There was a lot of nonsense about whether that was correct or not, but I remember the Treasury and the various chief secretaries [to the Treasury] at the time being adamant that our numbers were right. 

But most of that money went to Welsh government with the exception of some of the levelling up funding [a Conservative Government policy devised in 2019 which aimed to reduce regional inequality through funding packages] – my memory is very vague about this.  The levelling up funds, which were going direct to local authorities, were decided by UK government - – much to the annoyance of Welsh government. So we had an argument about devolution, about whether we're driving a coach and horse over the devolution settlement. We argued that devolution never specified whether it all had to go to Welsh government. We said ‘We are devolving the decision making to 22 local authorities in Wales’ – that's devolution. By giving them £20 million for a project – why is that not devolution? They are making a decision based on the needs of the local community, through democratically elected individuals. We are providing the funding for that. That's devolution. It is literally no different from us providing that funding to Welsh government. 

We used to have these catch phrases in the chamber about whether devolution stopped in Cardiff, or whether we were allowed to extend it across the rest of the country. If I was putting on my slightly partisan hat, I would say that the Welsh government were relentlessly misusing these things by saying ‘It’s some kind of massive conspiracy and the UK government is trying to undermine and expose Welsh government’. It was quite entertaining from a political point of view. But it was frustrating because the intention was, quite rightly I think, that levelling up was something we had to look at from the whole of the UK and was something we couldn't separate into four different parts, or not very easily anyway. And interestingly, the local authorities loved it because of course, a lot of local authorities in Wales got funding for projects that they'd never got under Welsh government. I think that probably essentially underpinned Welsh government’s opposition to what we were doing. They suddenly realised that we were sort of going behind their back and forging a relationship with people that they thought were exclusively theirs, and it turned out that they weren't.

MB: Did that impact intergovernmental relations, and in what way?

SH: Yeah, it did. It improved our relationship with local authorities and the community. We were able to properly demonstrate that UK government had a role and a presence in every quarter of Wales, which of course Welsh government hated because they were very territorial about it. I think it made my relationship with Mark Drakeford, Ministers Reflect [then first minister of Wales] probably more complicated than it had been. I think it was viewed with great suspicion, and it did enable Welsh government to say that we were underfunding and if we had done it differently, there would have been more money. Well, actually there wouldn’t have been more money. There was what there was. It was just how you spent it. 

MB: Moving on chronologically, the biggest crisis that occurred during your tenure as secretary of state for Wales was the Covid 19 pandemic. What role did the Wales Office play during the pandemic and how involved were you in conversations with the first minister and the prime minister about the pandemic response in Wales? 

SH: Well, therein lies one of the most critical decisions that we made in the entire lifetime of the government, and which we got wrong in my view, and I think in Boris Johnson's view as well. That was by putting the handling of the pandemic under the auspices of health and safety legislation, it essentially immediately therefore was devolved. The argument which was put forward mainly by Matt Hancock, Ministers Reflect [then secretary of state for health and social care] was that health and safety legislation only needed to be re-established by parliament once every six months, whereas the alternative, which was civil contingencies legislation, needed to be revisited every month. I think Boris Johnson would have given this in his evidence to the Covid Inquiry – and I certainly did when I gave my evidence – that by far the most sensible thing would have been to declare it as a civil contingencies emergency, and then there would have been a one UK reaction.

"it was tortuous. It was rife with political opportunism and confusing messages"

I was involved in all of the meetings and all of the endless zoom calls which Michael Gove [then secretary of state for levelling up and minister for intergovernmental relations] used to conduct and chair with Nicola Sturgeon, Ministers Reflect [then Scottish First Minister] and Mark Drakeford and others. It was tortuous. It was rife with political opportunism and confusing messages and contradictory policies. One came to light last week when Gavin Williamson [former secretary of state for education] gave evidence [to the Covid Inquiry] about the Department for Education. He explained why schools closed in the way they did, and why there was a row between Department for Education and Number 10. One of the reasons for that, if my memory serves me right, is that both Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford announced that they were going to close schools, putting the UK government in an impossible position. Although the UK government’s considered position was that schools shouldn't be closed, once the devolved nations had decided that they should, we were in an impossible position. 

I again would have to check this, but I think the teaching unions had also begun to say, ‘Well, if you [UK government] don't do it and they [devolved governments] do, then we're going to go on strike’. So we were suddenly confronted with the possibility of a union strike as well. I think that's what made Number 10 capitulate and what put Gavin Williamson in the Department for Education in such a difficult position.  

I cannot begin to tell you the amount of time I thought we wasted largely going round in circles on Zoom calls with Michael [Gove] demonstrating unbelievable patience in trying to get everybody to roughly the same place. We had to almost decrease the amount of time between a Number 10 decision or a Gove decision. Normally what would happen was decisions would be taken in the morning and then Boris and the chief medical officer, or whoever it was, would give a press statement at five o’clock in the afternoon. But what was beginning to happen was that in between those two times, Sturgeon and Drakeford were making their own statements, which were generally quite critical or implied eye rolling about UK government’s tardiness in reaching a decision. It became ridiculous. In the end, we tried to time our decisions, so that there was an hour between our decision and the press conference, so that Sturgeon and Drakeford didn't have time to get on their own potted pedestals and start saying ‘The London government is letting you down’. It became very political, and I know they all deny it. I'm pretty non-partisan but it was flagrant. Absolutely flagrant.

There was also practical insanity about it as well. In my evidence to the Covid Inquiry, I said that my train would be going through the Severn tunnel between Bristol and Newport and you would get an announcement saying ‘Please put your mask on’ or ‘Please take your mask off’ depending on which way you were going. That was the sort of stuff which people thought was ridiculous. 

The general public respect for that decision making was rubbish. All of it would have been fine if Drakeford or Sturgeon could have demonstrated that the infection rates in Scotland and Wales were the same or less than the rest of the UK. But as it happened, the infection rates and the death rates were about in line with everywhere else in the UK. It was one of the very few times that Gove got annoyed with Nicola Sturgeon on one of the Covid-O calls [the government’s regular operational meetings responding to the pandemic], when Nicola was trying to make a claim that Scottish outcomes were better than English outcomes. Michael took her to task and said to Nicola ‘You know very well that you're not comparing like with like because of the bigger rural population, you've only got two conurbations in Scotland, you've got a totally different age dynamic, diet and so on’. Everything about the population of Scotland is actually slightly different compared to the population of the rest of the UK. You cannot make comparisons as if it's like for like. She [Sturgeon] did wind her neck in a bit, but I remember it was interesting watching Gove run out of patience, which he never did.

So I thought it was the biggest mistake we made in the entire pandemic handling. It made everything much more difficult and much more time consuming. And I think Boris Johnson might have given evidence to that effect as well, I don't know.

"The end was heading his way, it was just a matter of timing."

MB: Your time as secretary of state came to an end in July 2022 of course when you resigned from Boris Johnson’s government. You were the third cabinet minister to resign. Can you talk us through that decision and why you felt it was the right moment to resign? 

SH: Well, I don't think there’s ever a right moment. It's just that some moments are slightly less bad than others. I remember thinking in the run up to that, that common sense would prevail and that there would be a graceful exit and that didn't appear to be the case. I remember saying to the then chief whip Chris Heaton-Harris, ‘This has got to end soon’. Indeed, as I said to Boris when I resigned, whichever way you looked at this, there was some fatal intervention heading his way. He was going to go. He was going to be gone either because the standards and privileges committees were going to do him over, or the 1922 [Committee, the committee of Conservative backbenchers] is going to vote no confidence or some such equivalent. 

"there's a fine line between making an honourable exit and hanging on too long."

The end was heading his way, it was just a matter of timing. He could have pre-empted that but being Boris in his inimitable way, he thought he could tough it out. I can see why he would want to do that. From my own point of view, I do remember almost a turning point, a comical moment when Jack Sellers, my special adviser at the time – and you know the place, it felt like there was an earthquake going on and I've never experienced a more intense period of activity, admittedly all in the village but nonetheless. I just remember Jack saying to me ‘At this rate, it's just going to be you and Nadine Dorries [then secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport] left’. And then I remember thinking actually ‘Right, that's the moment. Get me piece of paper Jack’ [laughs]. It was a flippant reference to the tipping point, to the fact that you're running out of credibility and there's a fine line between making an honourable exit and hanging on too long. That felt like the moment. 

TD: Let’s talk a bit about your next role in government. When Rishi Sunak became prime minister, he appointed you as chief whip. There's quite a lot of ambiguity around the role of whips and a lot happens behind the scenes. Can you tell us what does being a chief whip actually entail?

SH: It is a question which has been asked a lot of times. It's made more complicated for two reasons. One is actually most other government roles are what it says on the tin, really. If you’re secretary of state for transport – everybody knows you're in charge of transport. But what the hell is a chief whip? It’s a very archaic term. It doesn't immediately explain what you do. And then, of course, there's been televised dramatisations of the role, which have been great fun, but like a lot of things, there are bits that are accurate, but there’s an awful lot that isn’t accurate.  

To answer the question, basically the role of whips is to is to ensure the government's programme gets through both houses of parliament. It’s a straightforward case of getting your manifesto into law and through two, sometimes opposing and occasionally quite resistant, houses of parliament. That’s the simple explanation. That’s the dictionary definition of what the Whips’ Office does. But I think it's also evolved over the years into being the institution which deals with everything else, without there being a list of what everything else includes. It's basically everything that nobody else wants to deal with. And so it's very easy to say ‘Oh the whips will deal with that’. And to a great extent, the whips do deal with literally everything else, good and bad. I have significant reservations about whether that is sensible and, in some cases, even advisable or proportionate. I think that people seem to forget that the Whips’ Office is sixteen or seventeen members of parliament who haven't quite made it as ministers! Well, that's wrong actually. Certainly, in Rishi’s period, we chose whips under a slightly different set of criteria. 

"the temptation was to just leave anything which didn’t have a natural home to be dealt with by the whips."

But it was very evident to me that we had countless different pressures. It might have been around HR, or some practical considerations, or availability, or health or money, how we handled reshuffles, or whatever the hell it might have been. It was literally everything. So it was an incredibly influential role. The whips can essentially prevent the government from pursuing an agenda. I could have turned around to Rishi at anytime and said ‘You can forget this. This is not going to fly’. I think we probably did that from time to time. I don't think there was a bit of flagship legislation that we tried to prevent, but there were one or two bits around the edges where we used to say ‘Look, this is a headache we don’t need to have. Just can it or put it on the slow burn as best you can’. As I said, the temptation was to just leave anything which didn’t have a natural home to be dealt with by the whips. 

TD: At this point, you've got a large majority in parliament, but there's also been quite a lot of political turmoil. There were lots of different groups within the party – there were the five families of Conservative backbenchers at one point. And then as the election neared, the Conservatives weren’t polling well and there was concern amongst a lot of MPs about losing their seats. In that context, how easy is it to maintain party discipline?

SH: It is inevitably increasingly difficult because the levers that we were able to rely on in order to, to quote other people, ‘keep hope alive’ were limited. Levers like the possibility of another reshuffle around the corner, and the incentive of ‘one more heave and you’ll get the recognition you deserve’, all that sort of stuff. People were recognising that that was all running out. That capital was no longer available to us. 

In the absence of us being able to deliver a promotion or a decent government position or a trade envoyship or some other kind of paid or unpaid position which enabled people to shine, there was inevitably an increase in the number of people who thought ‘Well, maybe I'll chance my arm under another leader. They may be more sympathetic. Maybe we'll get a two-point poll boost and that'll save me’. There was a bit of that, and it made it much more difficult. 

"there was a lot of agitation going on and it was harder and harder to hold on."

This is the bit which I found very difficult to fathom, which was the relentless determination to pursue the impossible. We had a majority, in the end we were dealing with about thirty. If thirty people on our ranks decided to vote with the opposition, we were in trouble. That was roughly where we were. We didn't have a lot of room for manoeuvre. People were beginning to run out of confidence and hope. They would think ‘What's the worse they can do?’ And what could I do? I was highly unlikely to withdraw the whip because they wouldn't have been able to stand, they might not have been selected for their seat, so we weren’t probably going to go that far. It was very difficult to try and keep people to stick with it and hold their breath as long as they could. I think that contributed to the timing of the election. We thought that there was a lot of agitation going on and it was harder and harder to hold on.

We might have been able to reassure ourselves that the polling position was going to somehow miraculously improve if we had some massive announcement we could make which would have changed everybody's mind. But there wasn't one. Jeremy Hunt, Ministers Reflect [then chancellor] had his both his hands tied behind his back. There wasn't a lot of fiscal headroom. We had a massive problem heading our way over prisons and the likelihood of getting flights up to Rwanda [as part of the Home Office’s planned migration deal with Rwanda] was marginal at best. Some of the levers which people were relying on to suddenly jolt the nation out of its complacency and back into our camp didn’t exist. 

TD: When did you find out about the prime minister's decision on the timing of the election?

SH: I think herein lies an interesting story which will emerge maybe one day, but obviously subject to an ongoing case. As is always the case in Downing Street, lots of stuff gets talked about but not always in a structured way where we say ‘Right, today we’re going to talk about the date of the general election and our options are this, this and this. Show of hands in favour of each one’. Some people think that's how we arranged it, but that conversation never happened. 

The first specific conversation I had with Rishi’s team was on about the 18 April. Bearing in mind that there were very few options for him. We obviously weren't going to go in the first quarter of the year. He publicly ruled out May very early on. May was out of the picture probably by the end of the previous year because Isaac Levido's [then head Conservative election campaign strategist] and others’ view was that Ben Houchen, Andy Street and the other mayoral candidates [in the May 2024 local elections], had the best chance of succeeding if they were standalone elections which relied on their own brand rather than ours. If there was a general election on the go at the same time, the local elections would have suddenly become a proxy for the general election. We thought that could’ve damaged them, so we decided against that. 

"we weren’t going to call a general election on the back of another defection."

Rishi then made a public announcement somewhere that the “working hypothesis” was for the second half of the year. That took out the first six months. And then you had to look at what was left. March, April, May, June have gone. You couldn’t have it in August because it's a holiday month and nobody's ever had an election in August. You couldn’t have it in September because that would have meant campaigning in August, so the same problem. So there were only actually three months of the year that it could have been – July, October or November. The Number 10 view was that rather than things getting better, they might have got worse in the key areas that we were vulnerable in. I remember a conversation we had in mid April in which we were just talking about the relative pros and cons. I remember the conversation ended with ‘Well, let's see what happens in May at the locals and then we'll take it from there. We'll take a decision after that’. 

I do remember on the Wednesday the election was announced, being asked by colleagues in Number 10 to go into the chamber early for prime minister's questions because we'd had two defections in the two previous weeks – Natalie Elphicke and Dan Poulter. The view by this stage was that it was on. I was having to bring in people a bit to widen the circle of knowledge because we were doing wash up [the period where the government and the opposition reach agreements on legislation to be hurried through parliament before it is dissolved]. We had to make some plans because we were going for dissolution [of parliament] at the end of that week. 

On the Monday we were making plans for the announcement on the Wednesday, but it was all caveated on the basis that if there was a high-profile defection on the Wednesday, it was off because we weren’t going to call a general election on the back of another defection. We wanted a clear shot. The fact was, if I'd reported from the chamber that there was a high-profile defection, the chances are that it would never have happened. 

In the end, I’ve come to the view that nothing would have made much difference anyway really and that we were done for long before that. I think there had been a national mood change. We were 20 points behind in the polls in the second week of Liz Truss and we never got out of that. We were wedged in that position for the entire Sunak premiership. I don't think the polls ever really changed.

"There was a moment in the in the passing of the Rwanda legislation when we came perilously close... to the whole thing collapsing and with it, the potential of the government collapsing."

MB: Coming on to some final reflections now, what achievement are you proudest of from your ministerial career? 

SH: That's always like the question nobody wants to be asked! I think achievements are sort of in reverse. In the Whips’ Office, your proudest achievements are almost the least visible ones. There was a moment in the in the passing of the Rwanda legislation when we came perilously close to an almighty big fuck up, if I could put it that bluntly. We were so close to the whole thing collapsing and with it, the potential of the government collapsing. Due to some exceptional work by some of the guys in the Whips’ Office and in the civil service in particular, not only was that disaster averted, but nobody even knew that there was a possible disaster. It was like being narrowly missed by a missile. That was the most hair-raising period of time. If you look at it purely through the prism of whipping, that was the triumph. It's in my book in much more detail.  

MB: What advice would you give to a new minister on how they can be most effective?

SH: Gosh, that's a really interesting question. I do think if I was talking to new members of parliament here as well, I would say to just manage your expectations. I do think people have a bit of a ‘bull in the china shop’ attitude sometimes, wanting to go in and change everything and that they can take on the system. I do think the system exists for good reason. The system is slow for a good reason. I think that actually the most effective ministers and the ministers who get the machine to do things that it's not used to doing – Rishi in the Treasury over Covid support, Gove in the Department for Education over his education reforms – is because they took everybody with them. That means from the top to the bottom. It means the permanent secretary and it means the new intern in the private office. Don't try and bully the civil service or bully the system because it'll shut down. So, I think patience, painstakingly plan whatever it is you want to do and just take as many people with you as you can.

And I used to experience this from my time in the Whips’ Office a bit, you can never do too much engagement with backbenchers, particularly over controversial legislation that lots of them don't like. One of our best advocates of that was Michael Tomlinson, the solicitor general at the time. We used to wheel Michael in to deal a lot with the Rwanda stuff – not that it was really his brief, but he was just so good at dealing with colleagues, a natural. He was a sort of Brexiteer so he was sort of on their side. He just had extraordinary levels of patience and goodwill and charm, and I think he was really good. But people on the other hand who you just see go in and throw their weight around, the system locks them out a bit. It's a question to which I could probably give you a much longer answer!