Henry Newman was special adviser to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and director of the OpenEurope think tank.
On his first day in office, Keir Starmer’s Downing Street briefed the press that the Prime Minister used his inaugural Cabinet to tell his ministers what he expects of them “in terms of standards, delivery and the trust that the country has put in them”.
That didn’t last long. Yesterday, The Times’s Leader accused Labour of running a ‘Chumocracy’, saying “the Government has left itself vulnerable to accusations of cronyism”.
Four of Starmer’s senior ministers, including the Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister, have appointed political staffers into civil service roles and, in each case, the individuals seem linked to donations to ministers.
First, there’s Ian Corfield. Corfield donated £5,000 to Rachel Reeves. He was later made a Director in HM Treasury. The de facto regulator of Whitehall, the Civil Service Commission, has let it be known that they were unaware of Corfield’s donations when they approved his appointment.
The rumour inside Government is that the Chancellor failed properly to declare her financial relationship to Corfield. That is extremely serious. Under pressure from journalists, government sources have tried to play down Corfield’s role. They now claim his role is to organise a business conference in October.
It will be interesting to see if the original application to the Civil Service Commission to approve his job specified such a short-term role, or if that was a panicked response to scrutiny. I suspect the latter.
Next, there’s Emily Middleton. Peter Kyle’s department has apparently appointed Middleton to a Director General role. That’s a senior position, responsible for large teams and significant budgets. The entire Prison Service is run by one Director General.
Middleton was a Labour Together staffer and worked for Peter Kyle before the Election. Her position in his office was funded by Public Digitalm, her company, as a donation in kind to Kyle of over £65,000. So, an ex-partner in Public Digital was handed a senior role in the department to whose Secretary of State her former firm had donated. That’s murky. As is the fact that, despite Middleton’s posting on her LinkedIn about her new role, it’s still not on the department’s webpage.
Then there’s Jess Sargeant. Jess was appointed as a Deputy Director in the Propriety and Constitution Group, despite having worked for Labour Together immediately before the Election. The Cabinet Office has confirmed to me that she is still in post, despite rumours to the contrary, and she will work on ‘constitutional reform’ – a policy area under the purview of Nick Thomas-Symonds. Thomas-Symonds received donations from…yes, you have guessed it…Labour Together just before the Election.
Finally, I can reveal that the scandal now extends to Angela Rayner’s department. Her department has appointed several new civil servants with political backgrounds (potentially half a dozen). This includes Haydon Etherington, who the Mail revealed worked recently for Labour, and Ben Wood – a Labour candidate in a 2021 by election, who spent the last six years working for Labour.
There is also Rose Grayston, formerly of Generation Rent and the New Economics Foundation. Grayston’s LinkedIn seems to have been recently updated to remove this reference to her time at Labour Together. Labour Together also donated to Angela Rayner, potentially drawing the Deputy Prime Minister into the donation and cronyism scandal.
In each case, the Ministers may have breached the Ministerial Code. The Code requires a Minister scrupulously to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest between their financial interests (which must include a donation) and their actions in government (such as asking for certain staff to be appointed). Did each Minister make sure their departments knew about any financial links to the individuals they appointed?
But beyond the donations aspect of the scandal, many of these appointments are unprecedented. Take Middleton. I cannot think of any person appointed as a Director General whose immediate previous role was in a politically partisan campaign group.
In the case of Jess Sargeant, her role is in the Propriety and Constitution Group: the heart of the Cabinet Office and the very team in charge of upholding propriety and ethical standards in Whitehall. To have a political person doing a role there crosses a rubicon.
I am in favour of more external Civil Service appointments. On my Substack, the WhitehallProject, where I have detailed the ongoing cronyism scandal, I have argued that the Government would be better if more people were brought into official positions from business, academia, and other backgrounds, and if more civil servants spent part of their careers outside Government.
Previous Governments have brought in a limited number of individuals to serve in Whitehall. A small subset of these had political backgrounds. But, in every case I can think of, their roles were confined to speechwriting, diary management, strategy advice, or working as a Policy Adviser. They were not embedded in the hearts of their departments.
These appointments happened at the start of the Coalition when a limit on special advisers (temporary civil servants with a license to be political) was strictly enforced. Over time, the Conservative government expanded the number of special advisers. The new Labour Government should have made each of these individuals a special adviser.
It’s a statutory requirement for the Civil Service to be politically impartial. That means it serves the Government of the day, but – critically – must retain the ability to serve a Government of a different political complexion. It is impossible to argue that Jess Sargeant, for example, could be acceptable to a future Conservative administration. So Labour is undermining the status of the Civil Service.
With a total lack of transparency around these appointments the individuals named may represent the tip of the iceberg. Ministers have taken to the airways to claim disingenuously that no one is suggesting rules have been broken. Multiple ministers may have breached the requirements of the Ministerial Code, undermined the statutory impartiality of the Civil Service, and used taxpayers’ money to offer plum positions to political fellow travellers.
What is clear is that it is impossible to argue that this Labour Government is living up to the ethical standards it promised in Opposition. Instead, within its first 100 days, it has already shown a greater propensity for spin and cronyism than even its New Labour predecessor.