How Sedwill was sacrificed in sweeping Whitehall reform

The departure of Sir Mark Sedwill as Cabinet Secretary and National Security Adviser was fixed between him and the Prime Minister nearly a month ago. “It was by mutual consent,” a friend of the civil servant said. The move had been under discussion for months, since both Boris Johnson, the head of the Civil Service and consigliere-in-chief Dominic Cummings had been felled by Covid-19.

For Sedwill there is no prospect of a bit of down time, as he will now have a seat in the House of Lords and lead the advisory panel for Britain’s taking over the G7 next year. Beyond that there is the prospect of a good run at a major international post – for which he will have vital support from key American and European movers and shakers.

So far, so good – but of course there is a lot more to this business than meets the eye, amid a plethora of not very inspired leaks about Sedwill.

This has all been hatched, matched, and despatched in and around the Covid crisis. But there’s a lot more to the departure of Whitehall’s top mandarin. It heralds a revolution in government affairs – if the kite flying exercise by Michael Gove in his Ditchley speech on Saturday is anything to go by.

It means a major shakeup of the civil service, a radical defence review, and a changed relationship between the executive and legislature which Johnson, Gove and Cummings have been yearning for. It certainly means the end of the Cabinet Office in its present form, which has been seen to fail in running the show during coronavirus. It probably means the end of the role of Cabinet Secretary, too.

There is an interesting sleight of hand in the immediate moves that came with the announcement of Sedwill’s resignation. Putting him in charge of preparations for the G7 chairmanship means he will handle an important presentation of the UK’s position on climate change. It is a matter which he takes seriously, but on which he is pretty moderate in the present febrile debate. His job is to keep sensible reformers and critics on board.

If the G7 appointment has been subtle, the removal from the post of National Security Adviser has been brutal. Sedwill had clung on to his twin roles as Cabinet Secretary and national security chief in order to see through the Integrated Review, covering the waterfront of defence, intelligence, security, foreign policy and aid, which is due in December. Many had advised against him trying to run the two jobs in parallel.

He had seen the review as the summation of work he had begun with his Defence Modernisation Review of two years ago. I got a distinct impression, rightly or wrongly, that he aimed to deliver the review this autumn, moving on to pastures new by next year.

But the Integrated Review is seen very much as the “Mastermind” specialist subject for Dominic Cummings. He has strong views about the way defence, security and foreign policy are conducted – or mismanaged, currently – as his blog makes plain. Work on the review is already in hand, and putting a hard man like David Frost in as National Security Adviser signals that the armed services and the defence lobbies are unlikely to get their way. The bland Whitehall formulae and platitudes of the 2010 and 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Reviews and National Security Strategies are headed for the great policy shredder in the sky.

For the armed services, no more musical chairs on the decks of the Titanic – where somehow you can always squeeze a choice programme or piece of kit through the Treasury, with a trick of Hogwarts accountancy or the never-never of private finance initiatives.

Forget about the super new aircraft carriers, generation six strike planes, new fleets of tanks and fighting vehicles. There are more pressing requirements – fixing the Huawei conundrum, the OneWeb satellite navigation net, and the gaps in cyber surveillance architecture. Like it or not, Covid-19 has put the threat of biological and chemical warfare, by states or terrorists, firmly back on the agenda.

Sedwill made most of his career in this world. As a diplomat with a strong defence and intelligence expertise, he achieved unexpected international recognition in Afghanistan, first as ambassador for the UK to Kabul, and then as the high representative for the international assistance force in Afghanistan, sponsored by Nato.

He succeeded by promising low, and delivering high – winning huge respect from Afghans and American generals such as David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal. Unlike his predecessors he doesn’t feel the need to grandstand. He talks straight and believes in dialogue and conversation, and in the genuine exchange of views – an increasingly rare commodity in today’s political and media culture.

Soon after Afghanistan and related posts at the FCO, he was chosen by Theresa May to be Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. They got on, in that she trusted him. May notoriously extended trust to few. She went on to give him the national security job, and then made him a stop gap replacement to Sir Jeremy Heywood as Cabinet Secretary. But May fell, and almost by default the appointment became permanent.

Then came Covid-19, a nemesis for the Cabinet Office, for which Sir Mark, rightly or wrongly, looks like carrying the can.

The problems of the Cabinet Office, and Whitehall in general, in handling Covid-19 back in early March become plainer by the day, however much the government may try to gloss over them. The whole operation became too centralised, the setting for a massive bureaucratic snarl-up.

There wasn’t sufficient expertise in the institution itself to handle the crisis – whether it was managing PPE supply, testing and tracking, securing emergency equipment such as ventilators, managing the care sector, or helping the destitute. In panic it outsourced to private consultants, contractors, and security and logistics services, issuing whacking non-compete contracts totalling billions. Many of these failed to deliver, as public scrutiny is likely soon to reveal.

In addition, the Cabinet Secretary had to referee the battle between different ministries, who jealously guarded their budgets. “They fought like ferrets in a sack,” a senior Tory committee chairman told me at the time. Charities, local services, and military aid to the civil authority all came under different departments. Many declined to talk to the media, a major failure in public engagement. The Defence Secretary was only permitted to brief defence journalists, anonymously, or “off the record.”

Most visible was the failure of a track and trace mechanism based on a mobile phone app, the “all-British world-beater” which would be up and running by June 1. It was abandoned in a humiliating U-turn; thousands of Covid sufferers went undetected. Crucially many were unloaded, untested and untracked from hospitals into care homes.

Dropping the pilot, as they said of Cummings’s hero Otto Von Bismarck when he was sacked as German Chancellor, won’t make much difference. Various replacements for Sedwill are being touted. The insider favourite has been Simon Case, who was rushed in as Permanent Secretary at Number 10 when things got bad a month ago. But at 41 he is seen as perhaps too young and short on broad Whitehall experience to run both the machine itself and the massive overhaul of Whitehall now on the way. It’s likely someone will be brought from outside.

The scale of reform was trailed heavily on Saturday by Gove, who suggested that the UK now needed something on the scale of Roosevelt’s New Deal to get out of the current crisis. With it would come a massive reorganisation of government, including decentralisation of whole ministries to the regions. The Cabinet Office would be slimmed down, and possibly wound up altogether. Old civil service amateurism, he suggested, is to be replaced by new hyper-tech specialists, familiar with the world of artificial intelligence, detailed modelling and algorithms.

Quite who is to play the role of Harry Hopkins, FDR’s political bruiser and fixer in New Deal America, is far from clear. Simon Case and Dominic Cummings don’t exactly seem type cast.

The biggest task ahead, not mentioned by Gove on Saturday or Boris Johnson broadcasting on Monday morning, is the creation of a Public Health Emergency strategy for a pandemic which is set to run well into next year, if not beyond. It requires quick practical thinking and adjustment in government at the national and local levels.

It cannot be guided by a Cabinet Secretary or head of a Cabinet Office alone. This suggests that Sir Mark Sedwill could, and perhaps should,  be the last holder of the office of Cabinet Secretary in its present form. After all, it only took shape 103 years ago, under the genius of Maurice Hankey, when things were going really badly in the Great War, in the autumn of 1916.

It was born in a national crisis , and perhaps another national convulsion, of a different kind, should herald its demise – with the hope of a resurrection for the better in a new form.