🥪 What every minister wants

The two things every minister wants: a sandwich and a toilet break

We asked David Lidington [former Lord High Chancellor] what advice he'd give future ministers. He said ‘make sure your office knows that you need to eat lunch’. 

Civil servants want to fill the minister’s diary and forget that ministers need to eat. But no one is good if they haven't had lunch, right? Ministers talk about the importance of reminding their civil servants that they have friends and family that they want to see, and they're not just a machine that just gets through everything.

If you’ve got a meeting with the minister, it’s worth remembering that they probably had a meeting right before you, they've got a meeting right after you, they haven't had a toilet break or eaten, and they've got a stack of papers to read.

That’s only half of it. They have so many things that they're trying to juggle: relationships within government, relationships with the party, all the rest of it. If you get that meeting, you need to show them why what you're asking for is helpful to them. 

And remember that ministers, especially the new ones, might not be an expert in your area and might value some quite basic explanations rather than getting straight into the jargon and the weeds.

The civil service doesn’t understand politics

There's often a frustration with the civil service that it doesn't understand the importance of parliament and politics. 

Civil servants would say ‘it's not our job to be political’, and it isn’t. But it is their job to recognise that ministers are political and to recognise that it is a large part of the ministerial world. In the case of this Government’s ministers, they are Labour MPs and they want to do Labour things. Just as the last government wanted to do Conservative things. 

It doesn’t mean that civil servants need to be political, but they do need to have an understanding of the politics and how ministers can get things done politically.

Ministers rate their civil servants, but…

We’ve interviewed ministers who were there under Thatcher through to now, and there’s a remarkable degree of agreement and consistency, much more in common than there is that is different. 

Most ministers say they rate the civil servants they work with. Most say their teams are composed of dedicated people who know their stuff who want to do well.

But at the same time, the frustration with the civil service for not understanding the importance of politics has not changed over the decades. And that’s a damning indictment of the civil service.

→ Check out the Institute for Government’s excellent Ministers Reflect series.

Reshuffle? Not as simple as it sounds

The other thing that hasn't changed is the difficulty of getting up to speed with a new ministerial job and the frequency of reshuffles, not least because different departments are… different. 

There are some commonalities. You will have a private office who will look after your diary and make sure you're getting the right bits of paper. You will be spending time meeting people. You'll have to answer questions in parliament.

But, there are more differences. For some ministerial roles, if you're taking through a big chunky piece of legislation, you might spend all of your time in parliament. Some ministers, like those in the Foreign Office, will have lots of foreign travel, lots of summits and discussions.

In some departments you're running a large organisation that's providing services to the public, right? Take the Department of Work and Pensions for example: there is a job centre in every town across the country–you are the boss of 80,000 people. These are different roles that require different skills.

Constituencies as the great unifier

Most ministers are MPs. They still have their constituencies. They have to go back and do constituency business on the weekends. They're thinking about trying to keep their seat at the next election, they're thinking about maintaining their relationships with the party as well as doing all the government side of things.

Why does everyone struggle with objectives?

It's a cliché but the most important thing for ministers, and the government more broadly, is to know what it's trying to do. What is the problem that it is trying to solve?

Brexit is a good example of this. The main issue with it was that nobody knew what leaving the EU meant practically. The Leave campaign had some ideas, but they weren't a government in waiting. David Cameron hadn't allowed the Civil Service to do contingency planning. And the Conservative party had lots of different views as to what leaving the EU would mean and there were lots of different wings of the party. 

Theresa May's challenge as PM was that she tried to square that circle in a way that I don't think was possible. For the first year and a half she tried to push the government in one direction but it didn’t happen. There was no clear rationale of ‘this is what we’re here to do and these are the things we’re trying to achieve’, which makes governing really quite difficult. 

You can’t achieve anything if you don’t know what it is you’re there to do.

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