GO’D predicts coalition will last until 2015
Sir Gus O’Donnell, who retires on new year’s eve after six and a half years as Cabinet secretary, says he expects the coalition to last the course, a full five years.
In a farewell interview today with me for Channel 4 News, Sir Gus – the real-life Sir Humphrey – said there were always “contingency plans” ready should the coalition fall. And recent days have seen big strains between coalition partners over Europe, of course, but Sir Gus says his experience of relations between the parties suggests they’ll last until the next election, now legally set for May 2015.
“My reading of the coalition – the relationship between the prime minister and the deputy prime minister – is probably that’s when the next election will be… You have to do contingency planning, but I think that our main scenario is that we go through to 2015.”
Sir Gus also said that the advent of the coalition meant there had been a return to a more formal style of Cabinet government, with more written records, more structure, and a bigger role for civil servants in the decision-making process.
“Yes, there are more Cabinet committees now, more process,” he says. “There is more Cabinet government now.”
And he adds: “There are certainly a lot more [decisions] going through the home affairs committee, chaired by the deputy prime minister [Nick Clegg], which deals with a lot of the work of government… I think it’s been very good for the civil service in the sense that there are more papers, more Cabinet committees, so hopefully we are moving towards better evidence-based policy-making, certainly.”
Sir Gus said he had urged David Cameron whilst he was still leader of the opposition before the election to have greater ministerial continuity in government, and avoid the regular reshuffles of recent prime ministers.
He’s delighted that Cameron seems to have complied with that advice so far.
“The Institute for Government did some work showing that the average ministerial tenure was something like 15 months,” says Sir Gus.
“I mean, if you’ve got long-term reform policies – look at the welfare reform agenda, for example. – it’s really good to have a minister both there thinking about, creating that policy, and the implementation of that policy. That’s sometimes where we go wrong, is where you don’t worry enough about implementation. So longer tenure, I think, is a very good thing, irrespective of who’s in government.”
O’Donnell explained that his experience of Black Wednesday in 1992, working for John Major on the day Britain fell out of the exchange rate mechanism, alongside David Cameron, had greatly influenced his work on the euro whilst working for Gordon Brown in the Treasury during the Blair government. And he’s relieved that whilst he was at the Treasury, Brown and Blair kept Britain out of the euro.
“We thought: ‘This is a really important decision. We a need to do the most detailed piece of evidence-based analysis to weigh up the pros and cons.'”
“And I feel very happy with the decision, made by ministers at that time, on the basis of that evidence, that they decided not to join, and I’m very pleased about that.”
“And I think if we were going into the new year and we didn’t have the flexibility of having our own exchange rate and our own interest rate, life would be more difficult.”
Sir Gus also proudly claims to have achieved greater diversity within the civil service during his time in charge, citing the fact that 50 per cent of departmental permanent secretaries are now women.
Yet Sir Gus’s successor as Cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, is another white man. As is his other successor in the now-separated job as head of the civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake.
Next month Sir Gus O’Donnell will formally join the House of Lords as Baron O’Donnell of Clapham, where he’ll sit alongside four living predecessors.