‘What would have to change for people in 2024 to say that Boris Johnson has delivered his promises?’

Conservative prime ministers have discovered the hard way that Tony Blair was right. One of Blair’s most successful innovations was the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, which in his second term helped to ensure that higher public spending on the NHS, schools and police resulted in better outcomes for citizens.

Sir Michael Barber, the head of the delivery unit, had a unique approach to the job that was the secret of the unit’s success, and it is no surprise that David Cameron came to regret abolishing the unit – and that Sir Michael is now back in 10 Downing Street advising Boris Johnson, who has asked him to carry out a “rapid review of government delivery to ensure it remains focused, effective and efficient”.

So when Sir Michael this week joined the class on “The Blair Years” that I co-teach at King’s College London with Jon Davis and Michelle Clement, he was bound to be asked about his work for the current prime minister. One of our students asked him if he could say what advice he was giving to the Johnson government.

“Obviously when you’re giving any advice to government and it’s in real time, you need to keep it confidential,” he said. “But the basic idea is that, as the vaccine rolls out and something approaching a more normal and post-lockdown world comes, the government is going to be judged in 2024 on whether it has delivered its domestic policy agenda, with Boris Johnson talking about uniting and levelling up the country. What does that mean in practice? What would have to change for people in 2024 to say, ‘Yes, they did do that,’ or, ‘No, they didn’t’? So, the question I’ve been asked to answer is, ‘How should they set up to get that stuff done effectively?’”

Sir Michael told the story of how he created the delivery unit in 2001, and how it had to overcome the initial scepticism of the senior civil service, who inevitably saw it as a threat to their power.

“I don’t know if this will ever enter political theory, or the academic literature on power,” Sir Michael told the class. “But to some people power is a zero sum. So if A has got power and gives some of it to B, A has got less power and B’s got more, but the total stays the same. That is not my view. I think we demonstrated that you grow power by building good relationships.”

He managed to persuade ministers and civil servants that he could help them by being honest about the problems of improving results and allowing them to take the credit for it. Above all, he was able to persuade Gordon Brown at the Treasury, who tried to set targets, “but there’s a black box between allocating the funding and the target being hit four years later, and you don’t really know what happens. What I was saying to Gordon, Ed Balls and Nick Macpherson [Treasury civil servant in charge of public expenditure] is: ‘We can show you what’s happening in the black box.’”

One of the students asked about the criticism of the delivery unit approach being that it aimed to rule by “target and terror”. Sir Michael was scathing: “Their view is, ‘Give us the money and leave us alone.’ And I don’t think that is ever a credible position, because the money isn’t the government’s money, it’s the public’s money and the public want to know what you’re spending it on and what the results are.” It is an “inaccurate critique”, he said, but surprisingly widespread around the world because professions are influential. He cited his work on raising school standards in Pakistan: “I personally was very unpopular in the Punjab. When we started, there were 35,000 teachers who collected a salary never to work, and now they’ve got to work, so of course they don’t like me. You can call that ‘targets and terror’ if you want to.”

Another student asked how important it was for Sir Michael to be ideologically aligned with the Blair government, and whether there were any projects that he thought were a bad idea, which was an ingenious way of asking whether the skills deployed for a New Labour prime minister are readily transferable to working for a Conservative one.

“It did really help me that I was ideologically aligned,” said Sir Michael. “The day Tony Blair became leader I thought, ‘That is what I think; that is what I’ve been waiting for.’ I was frustrated in the John Smith era by the traditional-ness of the Labour agenda.”

Sir Michael even bought into some of the more controversial parts of the New Labour worldview: “What I used to say in the delivery unit was that there were some difficult things in there that not everybody would believe in, the traditional civil servants included. One of the targets was to remove from the country more failed asylum seekers. That’s a pretty unpleasant thing to do. You’re forcing people on to planes. They’ll do horrible things like swallow razor blades to try to make you take them off the plane.” He told his team: “If I ask you to do something you really personally don’t believe in, you don’t have to do it; you can do something else. I’m not going to make you do something that you have a fundamental moral objection to.”

But he did believe in it. “My point on that was: you can only have a diverse, inclusive multicultural society if there are rules about who comes in, and they’re enforced.”

Even if people don’t believe in everything a government does, however, Sir Michael argued that a clear vision helps: “Treasury officials told me that in the 1980s, it didn’t really matter what problem they were working on, or whether the prime minister was focused on it yet, because they knew, when she did focus on it, the question she was going to ask was: ‘How do you make a market?’ They had an organising idea, and it does help to get the job done.”

That Sir Michael is prepared to work for the current government confirms that there is some overlap between Johnson’s domestic policies and those of New Labour – particularly higher spending on public services. It certainly does not suggest that he has a “fundamental moral objection” to Johnson’s policies.

And the return of the guru of deliverology tells us something about how New Labour has changed the Conservative Party. David Cameron was opposed to the delivery unit. “He saw it in opposition as a centralising thing,” said Sir Michael. “Which isn’t necessarily wrong. Obviously if you make a prime minister more effective, in one sense that’s centralising. It doesn’t need to drive centralising policies; you could use it, and indeed we did use it, to devolve power to academies and primary care trusts in health. So it’s not necessarily centralising, but that’s how Cameron saw it, and so he came in and abolished it.

“Then if you read his memoirs, he says, looking back on that time, we didn’t get it all right; it was a mistake to abolish the delivery unit. So he didn’t think he needed it; then realised he did need it, and set up the implementation unit instead. At one point I had a conversation with one of his team, who said, ‘That’s all very interesting, how you did that; do you think we could set up that process and set up a new unit and give it a different name?’ I said, ‘Yes, you could do that,’ so they set up the implementation unit, and it did good work for a while.”

In fact, the implementation unit was short lived, at the end of the Cameron government, but its director was briefly Simon Case, who is now the cabinet secretary and head of the home civil service. “So, that’s the story of that,” said Sir Michael. “And the fact that Boris Johnson has asked me to do a piece of work for him on how to deliver suggests that when you get time to reflect as prime minister you realise that something like that is very helpful indeed.”