A false economy

Before bankers and freeloading MPs took over as Britain’s villains du jour, special advisers were viewed as dimly as any species of public life: shifty puppet-masters who spun to voters and charged them for the service. In the giddy early days of the coalition, the promise to limit the number of these political appointees in government seemed to capture the twin moods of austerity and “new politics” quite neatly.

The decision has been privately cursed by ministers ever since, however, who liken it to unilateral disarmament. Many find themselves isolated in their departments, short of staff who are both able and committed to the government’s reforms.

All this was eminently predictable. Special advisers (“spads”) are not just media handlers, but allies against bureaucratic resistance. The best are authors of policy; the rest are at least their masters’ eyes and ears in a civil service averse to change. Any government needs them. A coalition that is trying to decentralise power in education, policing and healthcare, while also subjecting the state to unprecedented openness and transparency, needs lots of them.

Hostility to spads is part of an unthinking reaction against everything to do with new Labour’s style of rule, including “sofa government” and supposed authoritarianism. The problem with this view is the assumption that, left to itself, Whitehall is the purring Rolls-Royce of myth. It isn’t. As well as profound strengths—analytical rigour, institutional wisdom—it has serious flaws, including excessive caution and a lack of creativity. Spads help to mitigate those problems. This may amount to “politicisation” of the civil service—but it is not obvious why this is a bad thing, at least in controlled doses. It would be a strange democracy that elected governments and then left them under-equipped to get their way over the state machine.

The real problem with spads begins when they stop being spads. Increasingly, their journey from the backrooms to parliament and then on to the commanding heights of Westminster is too easy. Britain now has a political class as narrow as France at its most énarque-ridden. An outright ban on spads becoming MPs would deprive parliament of a lot of talent: the current prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, as well as their opposite numbers on the Labour benches, are former advisers. But requiring a five-year gap between leaving a spad post and standing as an MP would encourage career politicians to spend that time doing something else.

Even during their peak under Labour, there were only 84 spads. Cabinet ministers are generally limited to one or two. For the sake of good government, there should be more—perhaps four per cabinet secretary. The sums involved are a tiny share of public spending (the spad payroll for the first year of the coalition should come to around £5m, according to cabinet office figures). That said, taxpayers deserve more accountability for their money. Merely publishing the names and salaries of spads, as is currently done, is not enough.

Special advisers should be nominated by their parties and approved by the House of Commons public administration select committee, which should be allowed to grill them on their experience and ethics in open hearings. The extra spending on these unloved apparatchiks will still be resented, of course, but limiting their number is proving to be a false economy.