What makes a great politician? | with Thérèse Coffey & Michael Gove

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0:17Michael Gove: Hello and welcome to this special episode of Coffeehouse Shots. With the Hoburn and St. Pancras by-election today and an MP soon to be elected, we thought it was an opportune time to share an extract from a conversation that we held at Conservative Party Conference titled Leaders of Tomorrow, How Can the UK Develop Politicians Fit for the Future? It includes contributions from our editor Michael Gove as well as Baroness Therese Coffey who held a number of cabinet positions herself. The conversation was organised by The Spectator in association with the Institute for Government and is chaired by their director of the IFG Academy, Vicky Elliott.

0:52Michael Gove: We hope you enjoy.

0:58Welcome, everyone, to this joint event with the Institute for Government and the Sectator at the Conservative Party Conference. We'll be talking about the leaders of tomorrow and how we can develop UK politicians fit for the future. But to kick us off, Michael, I'll come to you first. What are some of the key skills that politicians need and how can they be developed?

1:18Michael Gove: I think the key skills are patience, curiosity, stamina, and there are different routes that people take into politics. It's difficult to say that there is one prescribed or best route, but one thing that is striking is that in the past, the political parties had, as it were, their own house form of career development. So whether it was trade unions who were making sure that as people rose to the ranks, they developed not just negotiation skills, but also a broader understanding of how to influence politics. And in the same way, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Conservative Party had its own college for training people for political education.

1:58Michael Gove: No appropriate equivalent exists now. So obviously, local government is one of the best training fora. And then there will be people who will work in think tanks and NGOs who will acquire some of those skills. But what we have is a much more fractured landscape than was the case in the sort of post-war years. And that means that in some respects, there are more routes in and in other respects, it rewards those who are politically entrepreneurial. But it does mean that you will find that the cohesion, the solidarity that existed in terms of political education that we had right up until the 1970s is now absent.

2:40Very interesting point. Therese? So I think having a clarity of what you want to get done and the realisation that you may not be the best person to get that done, but to build a team and collaborate with others. I learned so much actually from Michael when he was my Secretary of State, but I learned things from every Secretary of State as well along the way, and that's how I ended up getting my blend. But I brought a different set of skills. I'd worked for Mars for 12 years after doing a PhD in chemistry. My big strength really is about analysis and going into the detail and asking the questions.

3:16And when civil servants are saying, you don't want that information, you want this other information, I then know I've hit a weak spot. So then I just keep digging and digging and digging until I eventually get the information, which normally exposes an issue. The other thing is about being generous with people. Not everybody has the perfect skills. It is about having a team. And I think there's an element where I know I'm weak. I'm weak on communication. So how I try and then articulate that or use others or get advice from others has been one of the things. It hasn't always worked. But I think I've also been able to bring things to others as well, helping them think through issues.

3:56So one of the big differences from business is that you go for your customers and you might try, you are trying to get some more, but you're trying to keep the ones you've got. That's a similarity. The big difference in politics, your customers who contact you, most of them don't want you. And you've got to keep your eye and keep thinking constantly about the people who never contact you. And particularly as an MP, that's about 99 % of the population. And as a government, it's not the people responding to the surveys. So it's those sort of broader visions that you have to do, which is different to business.

4:32Politics isn't always rational. It can be irrational at times. But if that's the mood of the public and that's what you're feeling, you have to adapt to that and work through it. It doesn't mean you have to do irrational things, but you need to reframe what you're doing. And that is the constant challenge of leadership in politics and why the transition from one area to another can initially be quite challenging and just have humility that you also need to learn your craft. Great. Okay, so having a plan, communication, good team around you. We've got some similarities in some of the comments there.

5:07Michael, I wanted to pick up on something there you said about the training grounds, including local government. You were Secretary of State and Department for Leveling Up. How transferable do you think the skills are for those in political leadership positions in local government, whether that's councillors or perhaps even mayors, as we're seeing an increase in strategic authorities, and the skills that you need to be an MP or a minister?

5:29Michael Gove: I think that they overlap to a huge extent. So I think probably, I was never a councillor myself, but I do think that those who have been in local government have the best preparation, the best apprenticeship for government for being a member of parliament overall. A point to be made about mayors by Kemi, which I think is fair, which is that it's slightly easier to be a mayor than to be a minister in that as a mayor, you are in the business of spending money without having to worry too much about raising it. And as a mayor, it is easier to transcend divisions, to be the person who is Lord Bountiful rather than the person who says no.

6:11Michael Gove: Nevertheless, any job where you are involved in allocating resources, making trade-offs, being accountable to the public is, I think, good preparation. And again, there are undeniably skills which people can acquire and hone in business which are transferable to politics. But again, as Therese pointed out, there are also key differences. And one of the most important differences is that in business, you can, up to a point, tell your employees what to do. And also in business, you can, if you find that your employees are not performing, performance management and indeed performance management act, you're fired.

6:54Michael Gove: it is more difficult in politics because you are leading a volunteer organization so everyone who's a councillor is a volunteer every other mp is a volunteer but also the party activists who secure your election who raise funds for you who knock on doors for you are volunteers i remember the first time that i was selected my constituency neighbor a lovely man called humphrey malins made two points to me. One of them is, he said, never ever lose your temper in public. Didn't always follow that advice. But the other thing he said is, remember, however frustrating and however disagreeable any of the people in your association may appear, remember they can always leave.

7:42Michael Gove: They are not your employees. They are not there to be ordered. They are there to be inspired, led. and thanked for what they're doing. And that applies not just to the people within your party organisation, it applies when you're a Member of Parliament, as Therese indicated earlier, to your constituents as well. And there it's an even more delicate relationship, because you have to show as a Member of Parliament consideration for people who didn't vote for you and who are hostile to your party and its programme, but part of politics is not just concentrating, as you would in business, on loyal customers and then potential new customers.

8:23Michael Gove: It's serving everyone. I know that sounds slightly pious, but it's just a political reality that some in business, not all, take a little bit of time to adjust to. Thank you. I think we will come to Therese then and pick up on that point about some of the skills you described at the beginning were perhaps useful in lots of different scenarios. But is there a difference between when you are in power or a minister and perhaps when you're in the Lords and holding people to account or on a select committee? Do you see differences there in how you might wield political power? So Michael and I have both moved up from the green end to the red end and it is a different ecosystem, to use a catchphrase.

9:04The key difference when you're in opposition, certainly in the Lords, is that you have to absolutely most of the time work in coalition if you want to defeat the government. And it's also about picking your battles on which you will do that. It's not the role of the laws that constantly frustrate the government on their manifesto, far from it. But it is to challenge. But I think it's also a different way of making sure that when you're in opposition, one of the things that i think business come and lobby you on different things they don't realize quite how little resource a shadow cabinet member will have compared to when they were running a department yeah tens of thousands of people trying to help them in different ways so there's uh it's it's just different and you have to just then focus whereas once if you're in government frankly you're responsible for pretty much anything and everything and even then you have to choose what you're going to drive.

10:04Michael is great at that. I picked probably too many things trying to push. But the key thing is about you have a smaller team when you're in opposition. And I think it's okay to not have to react to every single thing that's going on. But to take your time to think, I think this right way with the principles will be really helpful for every MP, every councillor, every want to be MP, to think this is how the lead of our party ticks and then to align yourself with that and blend in. It's not all about becoming our ticket, but just understanding this is how you're going to influence the person who is going to be the next prime minister of this country.

10:46So you need to think that through in a different way. And that's true for the shadow cabinet too. Michael, I'm going to come to you. When I was a civil servant and you were my minister, there was some discussion around whether or not officials should learn alongside ministers. We're expecting the new launch of a National School of Government and Public Services later this month. How might that work if it may include training for ministers? What do you think about the opportunities there are for officials and ministers to train together? Can that ever work?

11:14Michael Gove: Yes, absolutely. I think it's a very good thing. So I think the sharpest end of that, where ministers and officials should work together, is in scenario planning for the unexpected and the challenging. So both Therese and I, as DEFRA secretaries of state, had to contemplate what we might do in the event of floods or a biosecurity outbreak, a foot and mouth type. And we had Novichok, didn't we? And we had Novichok. We were both involved in the clear-up after the Salisbury poisoning. The single most important thing, I think, for ministers, particularly in those in departments which might be affected by crises like these and for civil servants is to war game through how to respond because the very first cobra that I ever chaired was in fact after the Salisbury poisoning.

12:04Michael Gove: I didn't know that DEFRA was the government department that was responsible for the clear after an incident like that. I presumed it would be the home office or the MOD or whatever and so I had to learn literally on the job not just what was the the nature of the cleanup operation that we were dealing with but how to chair a meeting, how to bring in people from Porton down, how to bring in people from MI5 and so on. So I think that every Secretary of State, certainly, or Minister of State in the relevant area should have that training. And I think it's also the case that for civil servants, there's some superb experience within the Cabinet Office and within some other government departments in dealing with these crises.

12:41Michael Gove: But there have been crises that have been fumbled in the past. So the initial response, for example, to Grenfell was both in the part of central and on local government, very far from ideal. The other thing I think also is people being aware, every individual minister will have their own style. Every individual department has its own character. But people becoming aware of modes of operation and then where the lines should be drawn. Because, again, another thing is, if you're a minister, you're given a, if you're lucky, on appointment, a short talk from the head of the Propriety and Ethics team, in which, you know, obviously, unless you're Peter Mendelsohn, you declare any potential conflicts of interest, you're given a clean bill of health, you're sent off to the department.

13:23Michael Gove: but there are as we've seen a number of areas where it just would be helpful to know both the small and the large questions so being told your minister your driver is available to you for these duties and these other things which you might not have thought of asking but under no circumstances should you consider using government resources for these practices that's a small but significant example but then more broadly how you work with officials what are the uh the best ways of asking tough questions in a respectful way that gets the most out of your team so i'm all for it there is one way of it is really understanding each other's language and how decisions get made or what gets measured what's important and the more that you know about that the better it's a bit like i always send a text to new ministers or I did for conservatives like the civil service don't understand parliament they don't like parliament because it takes you away from them and it's but you have to get that sort of building of what not exactly a common play of field but what what's what matters and how your time is going to be spent because it's easy to get sucked into all sorts of things but the same is true of working with local government yeah how the whole ecosystem works so Teresa with some reflections there I think about things maybe you wish you'd known when you started out?

14:45Is there anything else that you might like to share? As I say, I learned from, I became a PPS to Michael Fallon, I think 2012 for two years. And I did learn from people along that journey. Even, for example, Vince Cable, he would routinely after cabinet, the whole kind of ministers would get together and he would share that. And I took from that actually a very proactive way of how to communicate in the future or ask questions, just so again, we were on the same page and understanding and also knowing the difference of when you can't communicate what's a setting cabinet. Other things I wish I knew?

15:21Oh, there's loads. There's quite a lot about picking battles. I couldn't believe when I went back to Defra, it was in such a mess. And I had to have two meetings just to stop tampons being put in the gents' toilets. It was just, please just do this. We're not... And it's frustrating. So at times I perhaps didn't pick the right battle. And I think you still learn on the job at the time about what you can do. But the other thing that quite a lot of civil servants don't like is it's almost their code that ministers should not get involved in operational matters. And to some extent, that's reinforced by other aspects of both ministerial code and the civil service code.

16:05And this accounting officer approach. And I find it a little bit odd. and I like rewiring the state that Liu He and the Prime Minister put out but already I'm seeing it's not happening. One final question from me to the panel. In the UK we seem to have less of a culture of training our politicians certainly at a national level. Any reflections on why this might be and what we could do about it? Gosh, I was going to add one thing. The private office is exceptionally important and I learned from Michael on that as well but upgrading mine to a high level of management grade and saying you're not a postbox was absolutely vital.

16:42They were like my tentacles of the octopus across the department. And that's also critical in that regard. But in terms of training, I think a lot of it, I'm afraid, is either training on the job or bringing your business experience or getting brilliant advisors in. One regret I had was when we brought in consultants. Somehow they ended up reporting to their servants And I had to change that because there isn't the analytical capability across government. Loads of economists. But when you're trying to get into the detail of things, it was a brilliant special advisor who worked for me, not only in DDP, but also in health.

17:21And within a few weeks, having wrenched the data off NHS, we managed to start really identifying where the really problem hospitals were. And they were not the ones in the league tables. They were quite high in the league tables. and it was just like, something's not right here. So I think there's an element of that as well. But he is the man who really achieved so much in government. With Therese? It was good to work for you and with you.

17:49Michael Gove: Thanks, Therese. Thank you. Therese's point earlier about teams is absolutely true. You can only achieve anything as a Secretary of State if you have good ministerial colleagues and others with you. And Therese was fantastic to work with. The broader point about other countries. Other countries, for example, like Germany, have these sort of formal institutions. I talked about the things that used to exist in our parties in the past. So in Germany, they have these things called Stiftungs, which are sort of half think tank, half party organization. And they're all attached. You know, each of the principal parties have one.

18:24Michael Gove: So the CDU have the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and so on. these organizations are their sort of colleges for wannabe politicians and those around them in the UK we do have a an apprenticeship system for politicians but it's one that excites a lot of hostility and that is people who are special advisors and special advisors get a very bad rap in the media for all sorts of reasons and we can all think of examples of people who have confirmed the low opinion in which special advisors are held but it is also the case that it is a form of apprenticeship in how politics operates and Andy Burnham was a special advisor as were Ed Bowles and Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper and on the other side both David Cameron and George Osborne were special advisors in the past as were Claire Coutinho and Laura Trott so again I'm not inviting you to take a definitive view on all of those individuals but I'm sure all of you will think of at least one of them who's an asset at least one who's an asset to British politics so it is a route it's not the only route if a cabinet or shadow cabinet were composed entirely of people who'd been special advisors that would be a bad thing but it is nevertheless a sort of apprenticeship route in the UK.

19:46Thank you okay so if you could raise your hand if you have a question.

19:51Michael Gove: Thank you Steve Smith from Bristol we've spoken a lot about ministers is there a difference in the skills of a really good MP as opposed to a really good minister? So MPs versus ministers, of course, to be a minister, you either have to be an MP or a peer. But I think it's where you just vary significantly is you have to take the national approach as a very good minister. As an MP, you can choose to do that, or you can choose to be very parochial you can also choose to be a crowd pleaser and i have experienced a lot of that of when i was an mp mps nearby doing that but as a consequence you never knew what they stood for so i think it's at the end of the day you have to look at yourself in the mirror whether you're an mp or a minister have i done the right thing today what is it that i need to do better tomorrow you know you have to it's it's it's a so those those qualities are the same but i think if you can't think on a national level if you're not prepared to take difficult decisions if you're not prepared to be you don't set out to be loathed as a politician i assure you that but if you're not prepared to at times have some conflict then you're not going to make a very good minister?

21:09Michael Gove: The difference is that you can be a highly successful MP as a loner. It can be the case that you can be a thorn at everyone's side and a brilliant inquisitor and a maverick, but you can't succeed for very long as a minister unless you are to an extent a team player. How important is subject matter expertise in a minister? Should ministers be technocrats with direct experience of their portfolio? Or is their real value political judgment, leadership, and representing the public? One caveat I would enter. As a general rule, there are always exceptions. I would not have a soldier as Secretary of State for Defence.

21:50Michael Gove: I would not have a farmer as Secretary of State at DEFRA. I do think that, and so on, I would not have a doctor as Health Secretary. Because if you're the Secretary of State, you are not the Trade Union General Secretary for soldiers, farmers, or doctors you're thinking about the public interest if you do develop or have as a result of other work that you've done deep subject knowledge that's great in the department itself you will want to draw on that deep subject knowledge um uh the the main expertise that others have but i think it's vital that you don't have producer capture in that sense so the ideal is to have someone outside but who's in the role long enough to be able to go toe-to-toe with the BMA or whoever it might be and feel confident enough to disagree but to keep the public interest at the heart of things.

22:47All that remains is to me say thank you very much indeed for all those who've joined us in person in Birmingham today there will be a recording of our session on the Institute for Government website shortly if you'd like to listen back and I just would like to ask all of you here today to thank me, to thank our panel even, to join me. Thank you as well.

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