A special adviser who really was a ‘weirdo’ too far

One thing we ought to remember at the outset when examining what we may come to know as the Andrew Sabisky affair, who abruptly resigned last night, and the Svengali personality of Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s special adviser: some of this is really nothing new. For more than a century, ever since the days of David Lloyd George, prime ministers, in particular, have called on the formal or informal, and the paid or unpaid services of any number of “irregulars”. They are people which might fit the description of “misfits and weirdos”, a sort of small auxiliary force offering different voices and views. Rarely have they been viewed with anything less than suspicion by the permanent civil service. Some “advisers”, stretching the point, happened to be the spouses of premiers, those with strong views of their own and whose influential pillow talk perhaps had some impact on the life of nation; Denis Thatcher, Cherie Booth, and maybe Carrie Symonds, might be such.

There have always been some weirdos and misfits with odd opinions around No 10; prime ministers attract them, and some prime ministers are attracted to them.

Let us pluck one example. If Johnson styles himself on his hero Winston Churchill, then we have a ready, albeit imprecise, precedent for Cummings/Sabisky in one of Churchill’s wartime confidants and his official scientific adviser; Frederick, or Freddy Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell. “Churchill’s professor” he was called, among many less complimentary sobriquets for this unusually well-connected Oxford academic physics. I can’t do better than the dry assessment of his Wikipedia entry: “A brilliant but arrogant intellectual, who quarrelled sharply with many respected advisers. His contribution to Allied victory lay chiefly in logistics. He was particularly adept at converting data into clear charts to promote a strategy. But despite his credentials, his judgment about technology was often flawed. He tried to block the development of radar in favour of infra-red beams. He discounted the first reports of the enemy’s “V” weapons programme. He pressed the case for the strategic area bombing of cities on a false premise about the impact of such bombing on civilian morale.” Apparently, Lindemann “held the working class, homosexuals, and blacks in contempt and supported sterilisation of the mentally incompetent”. Familiar ring, there.

Lindemann was the ”data scientist” of his day you might say, and, as it happens “The Prof” was also keen on eugenics, then fashionable. In all conscience, though, it has to be added that eugenics is discredited nowadays, and it is not a sign of intellectual prowess or maturity in this country for the likes of Sabisky to write, as is reported: “'If the mean black American IQ is (best estimate based on a century's worth of data) around 85, as compared to a mean white American IQ of 100, then if IQ is normally distributed, you will see a far greater percentage of blacks than whites in the range of IQs 75 or below, at which point we are close to the typical boundary for mild mental retardation.” No employee of No 10, since the war, has gone on record with anything quite like that.

The issue is broader, though, than Sabisky. What is happening now is some distance away from even the most centralised and controversial Downing Street advisers of the past. In the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain employed an adviser who acted as a virtual alternate foreign secretary, Harold Wilson surrounded himself with a band of independent-minded economists distrusted by the Treasury, while Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown all employed advisers who ran the media operation, especially as a sort of political powerhouse. Thatcher, like Johnson, even lost a chancellor (Nigel Lawson) to a row about the conflicting and publicly leaked advice of her own personal economic adviser, Alan Walters. (It was in that crisis, in 1989, that the meaningless mantra “advisers advise, ministers decide” was coined.)

Every premier likes to keep an attack dog around them. Some were famous in their own right: Marcia Falkender (Wilson), Bernard Ingham, albeit technically a career civil servant (Thatcher), Alastair Campbell (Blair) and Damian McBride (Gordon Brown). Their qualities and achievements varied, but all bent the existing conventions and structures.

The first formal definition of a special adviser, was issued by Wilson in 1975 as the system was being extended from No 10 to most cabinet ministers (the trend now being thrown into reverse gear).

Wilson argued that the pressure of work on ministers made it difficult for them to “carry out his departmental and political responsibilities and at the same time sustain a detailed analysis of all the various nuances of policy ... he finds it increasingly difficult to play a constructive part in the collective business of the government as a whole. On the other hand, the career civil servants “can become isolated from changes of mood and structure in our society."

Therefore: “The political adviser is an extra pair of hands, ears and eyes and a mind more politically committed and more politically aware than would be available to a Minister from the political neutrals in the established civil service. This is particularly true for a radical reforming party in government, since 'neutralism' may easily slip in to conservatism with a small 'c'.”

Who could object to that? Well, by the 1990s the special adviser (Spad) system had become rather different to how it was originally conceived, as their numbers ballooned, they proliferated across the whole of government, they spoke to the media and started to take more of an active role in policy. Still, outside the No 10 gang, they were, to an extent, kept “in their box”.

What is new now, at least in peacetime, is that Johnson and Cummings seem set upon setting up a kind of parallel civil service based on spads. They are doing this, firstly, by taking over HM Treasury, via the special advisers being made to respond to Cummings and by the appointment of a more pliant, subordinate chancellor of the exchequer.

A small revolution occurred during the reshuffle last week. We now have a small guerrilla army of spads across Whitehall reporting to the spad-in-chief, Cummings. Whatever job title they hold, they are now undertaking politically-driven policy work in No 10 – work traditionally, and properly, done by departmental teams. Thus, for example, official policy over the future of the BBC is not being run through the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, but via the brain of Cummings, as expostulated to the Sunday press. It is not obviously a better way to be running Britain, but it makes it simpler to “punish” the BBC for its political coverage.

Tax, borrowing and spending plans now rest in No 10, not No 11. Again, that may end in some fiscal tears.

This centralising power grab is about the creation of a kind of alternative civil service, parallel to the real thing, to formulate and implement policy. This is different to previous innovations such as No 10’s Central Policy Review Staff (under Edward Heath in the 1970s) or the No 10 policy unit (under Blair in the 1990s and 2000s). These new moves are far more ambitious than anything seen before, because of their scale and because of the way the (previously) most powerful department of state, the Treasury, with the power of the purse is being subsumed under No 10.

It is not what civil servants like to call a “MOG” – routine reorganisation of departments, moving the deckchairs with no discernible purpose or effect. It is something much closer to a more permanent system of US-style administration officials to oversee government projects. It is not difficult to imagine them soon being granted as much power, if not more, than the most senior of the permanent secretaries. Such changes are eminently responsible by a future incoming government (Conservative or otherwise) determined to do so, though the temptation would be great for any premier to adopt the Johnson-Cummings centralised machinery of government and use it for their own ends. (Just think of what a Corbyn/McDonnell government would have done with it.)

Sabisky’s brief tenure may not turn out to be significant – a weirdo too far you might say. Yet the radical reforms now being implemented are here to stay, or for at least the life of the Johnson government.