Sinister Top Trumps: Cabinet Office vs Stasi
One of the first pieces I wrote for TLM was a piece in which I compared the Cabinet Office with East Germany’s Stasi. I thought I was being rather puckish, pointing out that the Cabinet’ Office’s 700-strong HR department must inevitably be packed with narks and control-freaks.
“This is surveillance overkill of historic standards. In 1989, Wikipedia tells me that East Germany’s secret policy, the Stasi, employed 91 thousand people full time, with a further 173 thousand unofficial informants. So that’s 264k Stasi for an East German population of about 16 million, or one for every 60 Germans. Ha - the Cabinet Office could teach them a thing or two! But let’s accept that the Stasi’s official headcount shrank as the files got burned in East Germany’s last days. Official German estimates are that the Stasi had about 500,000 informants: that would get you to one Stasi for every 27 East Germans.
“Does this matter? Yes it does, and not principally because it suggests a colossal waste of money. Rather, it tells you how Britain is actually run. Once again, it’s communist regimes which teach the lesson: in China, the Party controls by controlling who gets to occupy what position. They don’t call it HR, they used to call it the general administration bureau, and its job was to allocate the spoils. Its word was certainly more important than law.
“My guess is that this is what the Cabinet Office’s HR empire is used for: to encourage, to discipline, and to direct. They are the mandarin’s outriders in tooth and claw, with the tools and motivation to make or break careers depending on the vigour with which their boss’s commands are executed, their dislikes checked, opposed, dismissed. All that information, after all. . . .”
I wish I had been wrong. But what we’ve witnessed from the Cabinet Office since then proves it: the Cabinet Office is precisely the sort of sinister organization bent on checking and subverting democracy that any good old-style communist regime would love. Or fear.
Exhibit 1: Sue Gray. Your New Boss. Where does one start?
Sue Gray was a Second Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, and then from 2012 director-general of the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team. That’s right, she was the Cabinet Office’s ethics supremo, positioned to pass judgement on what and who’s right, and what and who’s wrong in government. So naturally, she headed up the government enquiry into ‘Partygate’ - which was tasked to determine whether Boris Johnson was fit to be Prime Minister having been offered - and refused - a piece of birthday cake during lockdown. (Surely, this can’t be right?)
In January 2022, her judgement fell: there was "a serious failure" in the standards of leadership, and things happened which were "difficult to justify.” Her full report was made public in May and by July Britain’s Prime Minister was gone.
Nine months later, it was announced that Sue Gray had accepted a new position as chief of staff to the Labour Party’s Keir Starmer. Perhaps she genuinely could not see that her grasp at a pivotal position in the opposition party would throw the harshest light on her role in dispatching Johnson.
More likely she didn’t care. Whitehall knows the sneer of cold command works wonders. So she subsequently refused to cooperate with the government’s enquiry into her own behaviour. Just because she judges other people’s behaviour doesn’t mean her own should be judged. Conveniently for her, this meant that the enquiry’s findings would be kept away from public eyes ‘in order to maintain confidentiality towards an individual former employee’ according to Simon Case, head of the soi-disant civil service.
Sue Gray, Cabinet Office Supremo. Never stood for office, never elected, seemingly responsible to no-one. The PM’s boss. Your boss. If Keir Starmer isn’t terrified of her, his colleagues will already be so, if they have any sense.
Exhibit 2. Suppression of Dissent
The Cabinet Office is not an organ of state much given to publicity, so when someone like Sue Gray breaks cover, it’s an rare chance to see how they operate. So let’s take a look at what people have said about her modus operandi. BBC’s Newsnight, which I imagine will be scrubbing the record right now, back in 2015 claimed that she was "notorious… for her determination not to leave a document trail", had advised special advisers how to destroy emails through "double-deletion" and made at least six interventions "to tell departments to fight disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act". And political journalist Andrew Gimson wrote: "All power to the Civil Service is her modus operandi. She owes her allegiance to the permanent government and the deep state."
Very Stasi.
So you’d expect the Cabinet Office would help subvert public discourse during the pandemic. The government set up a Counter-Disinformation Unit CDU’s to identify and monitor individuals unhelpful to the lockdown cause - from Oxford epidemiologist Prof Carl Heneghan to Molly Kingsley who campaigned to keep schools open. Aided by AI, the CDU passed the results to the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit (RRU) to deal with ‘purported ‘experts’ issuing dangerous misinformation.’ The RRU passed its concerns on to social media, with a Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum joining civil servants with Facebook, Google, BBC etc. Posts were removed, discussion suppressed, names and reputations blackened. Etc.
Very Stasi.
In passing, let us note that the BBC was complicit in these efforts. Amusingly, the BBC says it was involved in the Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum in an ‘observer capacity only.’ Which tells us all we need to know about the BBC as a journalistic enterprise. No genuine journalist would have passed up such a massive story.
Exhibit 3. Outside the Tent, Pissing In
In the end, those bent on guiding and/or suppressing public opinion face a problem: eventually someone with nothing more to lose might spill the beans.
The Cabinet Office is no exception, and the more accustomed to untrammelled and unquestioned power it becomes, the more likely a mis-step. How many enemies can you make before the blowback arrives?
And so we come to the bizarre tangle that is the Cabinet Office’s attempts to make sure the enquiry into the government’s response to the pandemic doesn’t get the information it needs.
This is complicated only because it is so utterly bizarre. In December 2021 PM Johnson set up an enquiry into the first year of the governments response to the pandemic, choosing Baroness Hallett as chair. Baroness Hallett ordered the Cabinet Office to provide unredacted WhatsApp messages for the enquiry. The Cabinet Office flatly refused, and that refusal prompted the enquiry to seek legal compulsion. The Cabinet Office in response sought a judicial review to limit the enquiry’s remit. Meanwhile, Mr Johnson says he has handed over everything already to the Cabinet Office, and is perfectly prepared to hand everyone over directly to the enquiry. At which point, the noise from the Cabinet Office was that if he did that, he might find himself losing Legal Aid fees.
It is already clear that there is a great deal to hide about the government and administrative response to the pandemic. That much is already clear from the actions of the CDU and the RRU etc. It seems inevitable that if the light is ever allowed to shine in on the Cabinet Office’s activities, it will be hugely damaging for it as an institution. Doubtless, the Cabinet Office will gloss this as being hugely damaging for Britain’s governance. So it must be stopped: the darkness must prevail.
Darkness must prevail.
The acknowledgement that Britain’s civil service is no longer the ‘Rolls Royce’ service it loved to tell us about has come late. Lacking the administrative capacity to achieve positive results, it concentrates on ‘demand management’, hoping to choke off demands for public goods by an ever-evolving set of taxes, fines and bans. The senior managements of departments are unable or unwilling even to ensure their staff turn up for work, so productivity plummets without recovery. One imagines that most energy now is directed towards an unending arm-wrestle between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. Meanwhile, the purpose of ensuring that the policies of the democratically elected government are, where possible, pursued, is hardly even given lip-service. Britain is governed disgracefully, and it’s not just because the Conservative Party is itself disgraceful.
Actually, I don't think I do have a particularly well-developed sense of self-preservation. Rather, my career has been punctuated regularly by running foul of the sometimes very powerful. In one case, I upped sticks from Hong Kong after I was targeted by a laser on my chest shortly after writing something someone didn't like. A senior bod then took me to lunch and suggested my health would benefit from pursuing my career elsewhere. Etc etc. So I absolutely don't mind causing trouble (let's see if I get a tax audit in the near future, courtesy of the CO).
But I don't trust outright anger, no matter how preposterous our leaders are. And I do believe we have a duty to optimism. When change comes, it won't come via the barricades. And I've already sold all my furniture!
True or false: if you abolished the Cabinet Office, and employed a former MI5 or MI6 officer to set up a small team (no larger than 10) to take care of the security matters for which the CO is reponsible, and employed a small (no more than 30) team to take care of Civil Service HR, and then brought all the departmental Permanent Secretaries under the control of the PM, the country would run more efficiently?