The most powerful woman in Britain

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0:37Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Oscar Edmondson. I'm joined today by Tim Shipman and James Heal. Now, Tim, the headline of your piece in the magazine this week claims that Antonio Romeo, the Cabinet Secretary, is the most powerful woman in Britain. Can you explain why?

0:53James Heale: Oh, she's the Cabinet Secretary, which is always in a powerful position, or it can be, depending on the person who occupies the post. And I think this is probably the first article I've written solely about a Cabinet Secretary since Jeremy Haywood was around, which is kind of significant. Antonio Romeo has gone in there. She's grabbed herself a seat in the outer office outside the Prime Minister's study. She has written her own job description, which has been signed off by two Prime Ministers. And it was reported earlier this week that she is also working on plans to give herself legal powers to overrule permanent secretaries in other government departments and sort of enshrine that in law.

1:32James Heale: So this looks on the face of it a little bit like a sort of personal power grab by Dame Antonia. Look, she is a doer and someone who makes herself useful to her political masters and Andy Burnham needs a doer, frankly. I think everybody agrees that she's more significant, she's more in the loop. She is someone whose advice is listened to by politicians in a way that her predecessor, Chris Wormald, never was. And I think she is, you know, she's certainly the most significant cabinet secretary as far as we can see since Hayward. And if she gets her way with these extra powers, she could, at least on paper, be the most powerful.

2:13James Heale: Now, power is a kind of it's a bit of it's a bit like water. It sort of flows where it flows. And in a sense, it doesn't really matter what the formal rules are. but anyone who has watched yes prime minister knows the proximity to the action is the key to it and most cabinet sectors you sit in an enormously grand office in 70 white hall which bluntly by the time you've walked through the back corridors of downing street through the connecting door and and do all that it's probably a solid four five six minute walk to actually get there it's a long way away and even jeremy hayward was a long way away he was obviously spent quite a lot of time with tony blow and others you know in in the the seat of power but this was a you know this is a cabinet secretary who understands power and is is exercising it and why what the piece tackles is why is she doing this beyond personal aggrandizement i think the interesting thing is that the civil service kind of realized that they have got something to prove as well the political class is very familiar now with the rise of populism reform and farage doing very well and basically saying all the sort of big traditional parties have failed in government and i think the civil service is very conscious that it is part of that problem and that it needs to get better at what it does so dame antonia has set up a review what else that's what whitehall loves to do but as you would also learn from yes minister yes prime minister you never set up a review unless who know what it wants to find.

3:43James Heale: And I think we're getting a flavour of the kind of power that she wants to find. And the phrase she is using is that this is the last chance for the civil service. And bluntly, if they don't make officialdom work for Burnham and achieve what he wants, then I think they realise that Labour will lose power and that the next people through the door would likely be reformed, who have already announced that they wish to scrap the post of Cabinet Secretary and politicise the civil service. So this is partly about delivering for the elected government to the day and it's partly about arse covering. James, I mean, a cabinet secretary with sort of bolstered powers could potentially put a lot of people's nose out of place in number 10.

4:23What do we know so far about the dynamic between Antonio Romeo and Burnham and how happy that camp really is?

4:29Tim Shipman: Well, I think two things, one of which is from Tim's excellent reporting, is that it's a pretty good dynamic. and second of all you have the outcomes which is you know by definition Andy Burnham would not be empowering her if he did not think that he had the right man or in this case woman for the job and so I think that they very much think that to evolve power to give away power we must first accumulate it in one sense and then in order to give it away I think every great dictator has ever been has promised the first and then failed to deliver the second but we shall see I mean Antonio Romeo obviously was the longest serving permanent secretary at the time of her appointment she was very much seen as the antithesis of Chris Wormald her predecessor in the role You've gone from a New York to a Tigger in one sense.

5:06Tim Shipman: She's promising a good game. She's talking about, obviously, this review, but she's also got to, obviously, set up Number 10 North as well. And I think Tim's right to say that this is the last chance saloon. You've got two parties on the right, both of whom have different critiques. Danny Kruger very much shares the worldview of Dominic Cummings, who said that the Cabinet Secretary is 100, potentially even 1 ,000 times more powerful than almost all the Cabinet in terms of getting things done, and he wants to split up that role. I think the reason for that is partly because actually it's two roles.

5:34Tim Shipman: It is the cabinet secretary, but also the head of the Home Civil Service. And effectively, you sometimes have cabinet secretaries who are torn between their responsibilities. They're often more of a servant, as it were, than actually the head of the civil service. And I think that can lead to a neglect sometimes of that kind of speaking to that mass institutional workforce. Of course, it's not just reform-making critiques of the Cabinet Secretary, it's also the Conservatives as well. And I wonder, I think that a lot of Conservatives have their nose put out of the joint by the actions of some of the civil service between 2020 and 2024.

6:01Tim Shipman: You've got in Alex Burkhart, the newly promoted Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party, someone who's the Cabinet Office brief. He's someone who's been very critical of the Blairite political machinery and the Brownite economic structures that the civil service now represents post-1997. So I think that Tony Romeo is very much reflecting the view that she has to make the civil service work for politicians, make this government a success tacitly, and also, I think, put a bit of spirit back in the civil service. I mean, they've been really bloodied and bruised in recent years. You can see this in kind of internal morale polls and seeing how things are going in terms of the opinion surveys they do occasionally.

6:36Tim Shipman: but also you look at the lack of talent coming through at the just below SCS level, some of the people coming in to replace these permsecs. And also I think there's an unfortunate element, which is that the permsecs have themselves become quite political figures. So I think that if we do have politics, it has to work in this way before we formally politicise it and rip up some of the Northcott-Revellian reforms that have governed the system, which now seem to be coming apart somewhat. And Tim, you mentioned there that Antonio Romeo has been allowed to effectively write her own brief. Do we know what that expanded brief really entails?

7:06James Heale: Well, the interesting thing is she's setting her own objectives to achieve this, this and this. And my understanding is that that was all run past Keir Starmer and was kind of signed off. Burnham has had a second look at it and I don't think anything's being taken out. I think if anything, things are being added that will give her the ability to shape policy. The line in it that excited most attention was that she would be the principal policy advisor to the prime minister. Now, I think there's a lot of members of the cabinet who might think that in their areas, at least, that that was the case.

7:41James Heale: And, you know, bluntly, there's normally a head of policy in Downing Street who might think that that was their job. I think people around her say that's pretty unremarkable, actually. It's basically the role that the cabinet, you know, the cabinet secretary is ultimately there. You know, in the old days, the cabinet secretary was a secretary. They sat in the cabinet, they took the notes and they went off and said, this is what's been decided and this is what we need to do. it's a much more kind of management role now a delivery role so i don't think she thinks that's terribly remarkable but it certainly puts in black and white something that you know sometimes might be less best left sort of in opaque terms the other interesting thing in when i was researching this piece and putting calls in you know the original report that kind of prompted me to get into this in the times kind of said that she she's looking at legislation as a result of you know the outcome of this review my understanding from talking to people around her is that actually she's less she doesn't think there necessarily needs to be legislation and one former man doing i spoke to she said well you'd be stupid to ever put it in law because if you put it in law it can be straightforwardly repealed by the next lot and it can also it also just sort of creates a target on the civil service and you say look look at all these powers we've accrued why would you write all that down.

8:56James Heale: The dark arts are best exercised in the dark, bluntly. And senior civil servants who know how the world works, it's probably better for them to sort of exercise their powers when no one's looking rather than write it all down and say, look at us over here. That would be an absolute red rag to Danny Kruger, who is in charge of reform's plan for government. Danny Kruger's view is that Andy Burnham's analysis that Downing Street is both too big, but not powerful enough is correct, but he says what is needed is that ministers should be empowered and the Prime Minister should be empowered. What he seems to, what Burnham seems to have accepted is Romeo's kind of interpretation that she ought to be empowered.

9:34James Heale: And that's one way of doing it. And there's a lot of suspicion in reform world that this is a sort of civil service attempt to bind reform's hands and see off attempts to bring in more politicisation, and more outside officials and all the rest of it. And frankly, the civil service should focus on delivering for the government today to prove that it's worth its while. My understanding is that that's exactly what Romeo thinks as well and that really the only solution to the civil service surviving in anything approaching its current form is to show that it works. And, you know, she's told colleagues that I want the next prime minister, whoever it is from whatever party, to say, why wouldn't I want this great civil service machine?

10:16James Heale: But I think privately she acknowledges this is not the Rolls Royce that it once was. And it's not the sort of world class entity. She's very into AI. She wants to, you know, she's already introduced performance related pay. I think there's, you know, there's an appetite to try and deal with the fact that a lot of useless people tend to be promoted up. She'd quite like to see them removed. And one telling anecdote about what I think she wants from this is not a Rolls Royce, but a different vehicle. I'm told in a meeting a couple of years ago on a previous effort at civil service reform, she sort of took one look at it and thought it was all a bit underpowered and rubbish and said, well, what will bring me is a Ford and I'm a Ferrari girl.

10:57James Heale: So what she wants is a sort of lean, mean machine. But it's also quite a telling quote, obviously, because she's regarded as quite glamorous and a little bit racy by the standards of most stuffy old mandarins. She makes a lot of people uneasy and it's a bit of a Marmite character herself. But my sense from talking to mandarins and ex-Mandarins is that even people who aren't personally that fond of it kind of accept the analysis that this is a sort of bit of a last chance of the civil service and they all need to pull together. And I conclude this piece by noting Nigel Farage's quote that when he was handed the five million quid by Christopher Harbourn, he told, I think, Nick Ferrari, of all people at LBC News, that if he wanted to spend it on a Ferrari, he would do.

11:36James Heale: Well, the question for Farage really is, were he to become Prime Minister, would he be buying a Ferrari? or would it still be a crap to have on Ford? Farage's views of Fords have passed me by thus far. Well, while we're on car talk, we should put in a word for our brilliant sub, Debs, who put the headline Alfa Romeo on your piece. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the most perfect headlines I've ever seen. It's just perfect. She is the ultimate alpha female in Whitehall. And yeah, you can't improve on that. I sent her a note of commendation thanking her very much. Normally you get headlines and, you know, it's the preserve of writing journalists to say well I don't write the headlines it's not my fault that they put this stupid headline on something and then just occasionally a perfect one comes along and it's a it's a joy to behold thank you so much Tim thank you James and thank you for listening

12:47We'll see you next time.

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