Labour’s plan for Great British Railways is spot on. The track had to be nationalised by the Blair govt after the private company collapsed. The same now happening to train operators whose costs/profits are excessive with plummeting service standards. Time to put passengers first.

RT @prospect_uk: The government has failed renters—and homeowners, writes @Andrew_Adonis."The UK has nearly 10m fewer homes than France, fo….

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RT @prospect_uk: There’s nothing illegal or surreptitious about the immigration surge since Brexit, writes @Andrew_Adonis—“it is the result….

RT @prospect_uk: Allowing Putin to dismember Ukraine would create a new Berlin Wall dividing Europe—and threaten UK security and democracy,….

Huge.

Sunak hasn’t visited Kyiv this year. Let’s hope that absence makes the heart grow fonder, since the going in Ukraine is set only to get tougher if victory against Putin is to be secured. My Prospect column.

RT @Andrew_Adonis: My full response to Sunak & critics of HS2 who trashed Britain’s future 🧵 .You would think, from Sunak & the media, that….

both a new government—& a new cabinet secretary. As in 1916, the new leaders of the state—both the prime minister and the cabinet secretary—have a massive task to rebuild a crippled machine, and it can’t start a moment too soon.

of civil service drive and morale. Case’s failure to stand up for Tom Scholar, the Treasury permanent secretary fired by Liz Truss on her third day in office, was in retrospect an especial low point, signalling the storm to come. So in 2024 there will in all likelihood be.

by May/Heywood. Beyond that, Johnson constituted an assault on civil service values and propriety, while Cummings took against many of its top leaders, including Case’s predecessor Mark Sedwill, who left hurriedly in 2020. But not much has improved since Johnson/Cummings in terms.

the machine and its most able people, however reluctantly, to deliver a just-about-workable Brexit under Theresa May. For a time, the civil service leadership void was partially filled by Johnson and Cummings. Together, they completed Brexit—in a far worse way than envisaged.

Edward Bridges under Churchill and Robert Armstrong under Thatcher are key examples, driving forward the machine under strong PMs while maintaining its integrity. Here again, Heywood was the last substantive leader of the civil service. And his last great act was to cajole.

the machine running. But where there has been strong central leadership of the civil service—both in delivering for strong prime ministers and in shaping and defending its own structures, ethics and independence under PMs strong and weak—cabinet secretaries have been to the fore.

that of leader of the civil service. Not every cabinet secretary has taken the title, and the Treasury has always played a big role in the management of the civil service through its control of the purse strings. The Cabinet Office and its officials also keep.

he appears essentially as a hangover: kept in office because he is weak, but with no close relationship of trust or confidence either with the PM or his advisers. However, since the beginning under Hankey, the cabinet secretary has played a key second role.

infighting and ceremonial glad-handing. In the turbulent court of Boris Johnson, and the 49 days of Liz Truss, Case played some part in making Number 10 function at all (when it did), particularly during the Covid lockdowns. Under Sunak and his more orderly team in Number 10,.

Whitehall clout, he has no previous experience either of the Treasury or of running a major government department, which were the customary backgrounds of cabinet secretaries. His previous job as private secretary to Prince William was hardly a training for anything much beyond.

might threaten his own role in Number 10. Case has significant experience of working with the security services, from his time as a senior official at GCHQ & has done a perfectly good job of maintaining their functional relationship with No 10 But in terms of wider.

office to be a close adviser of the PM, and this is certainly not a role played by Case vis-à-vis Rishi Sunak. Case has been a weak adviser since he was appointed by Boris Johnson, or perhaps more accurately by Dominic Cummings, who was anxious not to have a cabinet secretary who.

1920s and 1930s. This prime ministerial advisory role has been played by most cabinet secretaries since, and is far more important than any formal role they might play in respect of the cabinet. Jeremy Heywood, who tragically died five years ago, was the last holder of the.