Simon Case: spearheading Dominic Cummings’ radical Whitehall reforms won’t be straightforward

Pretending not to want the top job is a classic piece of office politics often employed by those on their way to ending up with the top job.

So it was confirmed today that a “reluctant” Simon Case will replace Sir Mark Sedwill as Cabinet Secretary, the most senior job in the civil service. The former private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge was appointed as a permanent secretary in Downing Street on a temporary basis earlier this year to handle the coronavirus crisis, and made clear to friends that he didn’t want a permanent job. The official line is that he has since been persuaded to take the top job by figures in Downing Street.

In a statement, the Prime Minister said: “Simon will make a fantastic Cabinet Secretary.… His years of experience at the heart of government and working for The Royal Household will make him ideally suited for this crucial role.”

Case, a Bristol Grammar School boy and Cambridge graduate, will have an unenviable in-tray when he walks into his new office. His immediate role will be to continue to manage the situation in Downing Street – or, as one friend of Mark Sedwill put it, to “manage Boris”. This will require him to cultivate an intricate relationship with the Prime Minister, who has been known by his colleagues to be an opaque and impenetrable figure.

But perhaps Case’s most important relationship will be with Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser. Cummings has been given the green light to radically reform the civil service – a project which he said would make a “hard rain” come to senior civil servants – and would like to see the new Cabinet Secretary implement his broad vision, it is reported. For Case, it will mean finding new ways to centralise the Whitehall operation while simultaneously encouraging innovation.

It could also mean clashing with his senior civil service colleagues. There has already been a trickle of permanent secretaries leaving Whitehall in recent months; some forced out, others leaving in protest of a system they considered to be cheapened by Johnson’s administration. Jonathan Slater, who resigned from the Department for Education last week, was the fifth permanent secretary to resign in seven months. In the lower ranks, there is a sense that expertise has been sacrificed in favour of jarring political calculations.

The situation presents Case with a major dilemma. His official job is to oversee the civil service, but much of his time will be spent arguing with civil servants on behalf of a government that many in Whitehall consider to be degrading the fabric of government. Last month, a former Foreign Office permanent secretary told Reaction that Case’s lack of experience, having only been a permanent secretary for several months, meant that he would particularly struggle to convince Whitehall of the need for reform.

“It’s important that the Cabinet Secretary has credibility over the other permanent secretaries and can coordinate them,” he said. “It needs to be someone whose experience they respect.”

Still, Whitehall’s failings during the coronavirus crisis has given Downing Street a new authority over its mandarins and made some officials more open to reform. A source familiar with Case’s management style presented this as a uniquely fitting scenario for him. “He’s very good at political manoeuvres,” said the friend. “He very much cultivated his relationship with the Cameron regime, particularly George Osborne. And when he was working in Kensington Palace, he very much kept his lines open to Osborne and Boris.”

But, the friend added, when he was sent to Brussels as part of negotiations surrounding the Northern Ireland Protocol in Brussels, he “found it all rather difficult.”

Case’s deep knowledge of government machinery is undeniable. He is a bona fide historian of government, having undertaken a PhD in political history at Queen Mary University of London, overseen by Peter Hennessy, a leading constitutional historian.

Titled “The Joint Intelligence Committee and the German Question, 1947-61”, his thesis traced both the development of policy and of the role of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee during the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, the riots in East Berlin of June 1953 and the 1958-61 German crisis. At a time of historic and radical change in the governance of Britain, this knowledge will do no harm to Downing Street’s thinking.

Another bright star in Case’s portfolio is that experience at Kensington Palace, where he is said to have radically modernised the Cambridges’ communications as private secretary to Prince William. The Palace has shifted its focus away from legacy media and towards social media, while continuing to maintain a constructive relationship with individual journalists.

Case displayed political prowess in cultivating Prince William’s image as a modest, humble king-in-waiting, in comparison to his maverick brother. “It is notable that on Case’s watch, William and Kate were revealed to have flown by budget airline to Balmoral, after Harry and Meghan and ‘snubbed’ the Queen to fly by private jet to Elton John’s mansion in Nice,” wrote Camilla Tominey in her profile for The Spectator of the new Cabinet Secretary.

Such was Case’s success at Kensington Palace that the Prime Minister had to personally phone Prince William to ask permission to poach him earlier this year. Now, as he becomes Cabinet Secretary, the Prime Minister has had to make another apologetic call to Kensington, it seems.