Why Sedwill is set to fall in Cummings assault on the civil service
Sir Mark Sedwill has long been accused of holding too much influence in Whitehall, because he occupied the dual roles of national security adviser and cabinet secretary. In the vacuum of Theresa May’s Downing Street, he amassed the power to oversee defence reviews, coordinate intelligence agencies, dictate the direction of the entire civil service, and shape the structures of the cabinet office. Little wonder, then, that some advisers see him more as a political competitor than a neutral facilitator. Now, in Dominic Cummings’ Downing Street, he looks set to be locked out of his own fiefdom.
The cabinet secretary has been the subject of an aggressive briefing campaign, commencing in recent weeks, in which he has been accused by his enemies of arrogance and worse. They have blamed him for some of the failures in handling the coronavirus pandemic. Several sources this weekend told The Telegraph that an announcement on his future could be forthcoming as early as tomorrow. Reaction has been told that his departure has already been finalised, but Downing Street has yet to confirm it.
But this campaign stretches much further than the man himself, for Cummings – Boris Johnson’s powerful chief aide – seems to have been permitted to take an axe to the entire civil service, as he had planned but failed to do in January. At a meeting of special advisers last Thursday, he castigated the machine for being “too big and incoherent” and demanded drastic change. “Anybody who has read what I’ve said about management over the years will know that it’s ludicrous to suggest the solution to Whitehall’s problems is a bigger centre and more centre,” he said. Rather, he would prefer the civil service to have a “smaller, more focused and more elite centre.”
This vision has been given a new urgency in light of the coronavirus epidemic, with Downing Street already making moves to streamline civil service processes. Most notably, private sector executives have been recruited to take on major government projects – such as Dido Harding, a former TalkTalk executive, who now oversees the contact tracing system. According to Cummings’ IPPR speech in 2014 on civil service inefficiency, more such recruitment is needed to energise the machine. With less deference to the civil service system, these appointees will also extend the Downing Street team’s influence over Whitehall, runs the theory. There is likely to be a concern, however, that Cummings will turn a good idea into a shambolic distraction, as he did when he advertised the recruitment of “weirdos and misfits”. One appointee had to be removed swiftly following a row over social media posts.
The official groomed to succeed Sedwill has been working outside Whitehall for the last two years. As private secretary to Prince William, Simon Case is said to have rapidly modernised the media strategy of the Cambridges strategy, focusing on social media virality and encouraging the royals to embrace Instagram. There has since been a marked improvement in the couple’s media coverage. Camilla Tominey captured this media savviness in a recent profile: “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 had ‘snubbed’ the Queen to fly by private jet to Elton John’s mansion in Nice.”
Such was his success at Kensington Palace that the prime minister had to personally phone Prince William to ask permission to poach Case. In May, he was duly appointed Downing Street permanent secretary, a new position, to help manage the coronavirus crisis. The revival of this unique role – only previously held by Sir Jeremy Heywood and notably carrying the same title as civil servants who lead government departments – was an obvious challenge to Sedwill’s authority. In hindsight, it was also the beginning of the end of the cabinet secretary’s government career. It is telling that the prime minister asked Case rather than Sedwill to spearhead an urgent review into the two-metre-rule.
What we know about Case’s personality and skills makes him a good fit for this Downing Street operation. He served as Principle Private Secretary to David Cameron and then Theresa May. He is described as deeply loyal – so loyal, in fact, that he is thought to have authored this anonymous Guardian article defending intelligence agencies’ access to bulk data when he was working at GCHQ. He is also “patriotic to his core” and a “passionate unionist,” according to The Spectator.
Case, 41, studied history at Cambridge before undertaking a PhD at Queen Mary, in London. His thesis on the Joint Intelligence Committee and the German Question, 1947-61 was supervised by Professor Peter Hennessy, a leading historian of British statecraft.
Most importantly, Case has an abundance of experience navigating intricate constitutional difficulties – first as director-general for the UK-EU Partnership in 2017, working on the Irish border problem, and then as one of the most senior royal staffers during the Harry and Meghan crisis.
As one Sedwill critic told The Times: “Mark could convene a loya jirga [legal assembly] of Pashtun elders, wire up GCHQ and probably kill a man with his bare hands but Simon’s rather better at solving a series of ticklish problems and making the whole thing tick.”
Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove – close ally and friend of Cummings, and the key figure at the heart of Whitehall – made clear in his speech to the Ditchley Foundation (republished on Reaction) that the government is determined to press ahead with an overhaul of the civil service and the wider machinery of the state. It seems Sir Mark Sedwill is going to be the first big casualty of their renewed push.