The Home Office is never far from the headlines, but a calmish summer suggests that the sacking of Charles Clarke in May achieved the prime minister’s objective of providing a quick fix to negative news coverage.
Many in the party would endorse Clarke’s view that he was harshly treated in the scandal of the wrongly freed foreign national prisoners. But it is not just Clarke who was upset by John Reid’s description of his department as ‘not fit for purpose’.
A senior Whitehall mandarin, of the kind who usually maintains a dignified silence, felt moved to pick up the phone and bend my ear on how, in his words, Reid had ‘traduced’ his hard-working civil servants.
According to the mandarin, the Home Office has a successful recent record in cutting crime, bringing more criminals to justice, tackling drugs and finding new ways to combat anti-social behaviour. Even on the immigration side, acknowledged as the weak-spot, the asylum backlog has been brought under control. High-fliers have been recruited from outside the civil service. Clarke, and David Blunkett before him, published modernisation plans which were fairly similar to the blueprint set out by Reid this summer. The high calibre of the department’s management was demonstrated when senior officials such as Bill Jeffrey and Martin Narey moved on to fill, successfully, big jobs in other organisations.
In case this all sounds like ‘crisis, what crisis?’, the mandarin points to two ways in which talk of Home Office implosion may turn out to be over-egged. He suggests that some the 15 failing directors who are to be moved out of their jobs by the end of this year may be people who would have been transferred in any event. And he claims that a damning Cabinet Office ‘capability review’, which found that every aspect of the Home Office suffers significant weakness, only turned out so badly because the two weeks the inspectors spent at the department, from May 2 to May 12, coincided with Clarke’s sacking – a time when, understandably, things were rather more chaotic than normal.
All of which points to Clarke’s stint as home secretary being more of a success than he is given credit for – a conclusion which may, one day, help him to restart his career in another front line role.
Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell veered off message when unveiling the first four capability reviews highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of various ministries. Waxing lyrical about the ‘four Ps’ which civil servants are meant to follow (pride, passion, pace and professionalism), he said it was easy for civil servants to be passionate about their jobs because they faced such vital challenges as tackling child poverty.
Fair enough. But O’Donnell went on to declare that instilling passion was easier in the public sector than the private sector, where managers were ‘trying to get people out of bed to sell more Pot Noodles’. Can this be the same Gus O’Donnell who served as Downing Street press secretary while John Major was selling off key utilities to the private sector?
ATory front-bench MP tells me that she, and many colleagues, now return to their constituencies most Wednesday nights, because there is little point being in the Commons on Thursdays or Fridays. She maintains that she would be happy to spend longer in the House if parliamentary procedures were reformed to give the Opposition more chance to vote down or filibuster government legislation. I doubt this kind of logic appeals to voters, who like their politicians to be visibly working hard for their salaries. The late Eric Forth, legendary Tory slayer of private member’s bills on Fridays, would not have approved.