Like so much of the British constitution, the job of cabinet secretary isn’t defined in law and constantly changes depending on the holder of the office. But to all intents and purposes it is vacant at the moment, and that is a first—and a problem.
It’s not just that Simon Case is presently on indefinite medical leave. Long before that—at least since the decline and fall of Boris Johnson during Partygate—he had ceased to play a major role across government. And that is a real issue for today’s listless and low morale civil service, of which Case is in managerial charge.
When the office was established by David Lloyd George in the depths of the First World War, the job of cabinet secretary was literally to act as notetaker and decision-logger of the cabinet. There had previously been no officials present at meetings of the cabinet and the only record of its decisions—which was not made more widely available—was the prime minister’s letter to the monarch after each meeting.
Lloyd George took over from Asquith after the disasters of the Somme and the Dardanelles in 1916. There was a serious prospect of Britain losing the war, and its old-world informal methods of government, which continued largely unchanged under Asquith even during the war, were partly to blame. One of Lloyd George’s immediate changes was to give Maurice Hankey, who acted as secretary and progress-chaser for the cabinet’s key defence committee, the same role in respect of the cabinet.
Hankey went on to hold the job for more than 20 years, professionalising the operation of the cabinet for the 20th century. Under him a Cabinet Office was established, which became a co-ordinating machinery for the government at large as well as a secretariat for the cabinet and its committees. These were then decision-making bodies, and not merely the registry of decisions largely made elsewhere as they are today, so this really mattered. He also played a key role in linking the prime minister to the “deep state” of the security services, a role which has continued ever since. As part of the job, Hankey became a personal adviser to Lloyd George, and to a lesser extent to his less presidential successors in the 1920s and 1930s. This prime ministerial advisory role has been played by most cabinet secretaries since, and is far more important than any formal role they might play in respect of the cabinet.
Jeremy Heywood, who tragically died five years ago, was the last holder of the office to be a close adviser of the PM, and this is certainly not a role played by Case vis-à-vis Rishi Sunak. Case has been a weak adviser since he was appointed by Boris Johnson, or perhaps more accurately by Dominic Cummings, who was anxious not to have a cabinet secretary who might threaten his own role in Number 10.
Case has significant experience of working with the security services, from his time as a senior official at GCHQ, and has done a perfectly good job of maintaining their functional relationship with the government. But in terms of wider Whitehall clout, he has no previous experience either of the Treasury or of running a major government department, which were the customary backgrounds of cabinet secretaries. His previous job as private secretary to Prince William was hardly a training for anything much beyond infighting and ceremonial glad-handing.
In the turbulent court of Boris Johnson, and the 49 days of Liz Truss, Case played some part in making Number 10 function at all (when it did), particularly during the Covid lockdowns. Under Sunak and his more orderly team in Number 10, he appears essentially as a hangover: kept in office because he is weak, but with no close relationship of trust or confidence either with the PM or his advisers.
However, since the beginning under Hankey, the cabinet secretary has played a key second role beyond the cabinet and prime minister: that of leader of the civil service. Not every cabinet secretary has taken the title, and the Treasury has always played a big role in the management of the civil service through its control of the purse strings. The Cabinet Office and its officials also keep the machine running. But where there has been strong central leadership of the civil service—both in delivering for strong prime ministers and in shaping and defending its own structures, ethics and independence under PMs strong and weak—cabinet secretaries have been to the fore. Edward Bridges under Churchill and Robert Armstrong under Thatcher are key examples, driving forward the machine under strong PMs while maintaining its integrity.
Here again, Heywood was the last substantive leader of the civil service. And his last great act was to cajole the machine and its most able people, however reluctantly, to deliver a just-about-workable Brexit under Theresa May.
For a time, the civil service leadership void was partially filled by Johnson and Cummings. Together, they completed Brexit—in a far worse way than envisaged by May/Heywood. Beyond that, Johnson constituted an assault on civil service values and propriety, while Cummings took against many of its top leaders, including Case’s predecessor Mark Sedwill, who left hurriedly in 2020. But not much has improved since Johnson/Cummings in terms of civil service drive and morale. Case’s failure to stand up for Tom Scholar, the Treasury permanent secretary fired by Liz Truss on her third day in office, was in retrospect an especial low point, signalling the storm to come.
So in 2024 there will in all likelihood be both a new government—and a new cabinet secretary. As in 1916, the new leaders of the state—both the prime minister and the cabinet secretary—have a massive task to rebuild a crippled machine, and it can’t start a moment too soon.
