Douglas Carswell's Blog

You can't do politics without a road map

Ted Heath came to office with a sense of what he wanted to achieve. But without knowing how to make it happen, he u-turned.   What began as the Selsdon agenda to decentralise economic control ended with a prices and incomes policy. 

A generation later, Tony Blair exhausted a mountain of political and financial capital, but without much real reform to show for it. As Jonathan Powell’s excellent book on life inside the court of Tony Blair shows, it wasn’t simply the intransigence of Gordon Brown that held up change.  Even when Blair eventually worked out both what he wanted to do with power – and how to make it happen – he was frustrated by the vested interests in Whitehall.

Today, Coalition ministers do have a sense of what they want to achieve – decentralisation, deficit reduction, localism, a bonfire of the quangos, power from the state to the Big Society. Yet it is far from clear they always know how to make it happen.

Making ministers accountable to a “star chamber” for their departmental spending hasn’t actually cut public spending. The bonfire of the quangos seems to have gone out. Elsewhere, there are mutterings from ministers that they pull the levers – yet nothing happens. The brightest aspirations seem to get bogged down. 

No one who has studied the fate of the Blair–Brown administration should be surprised at how the deformation professionnelle of Sir Humphrey Appleby can blunt even the most enthusiastic proposals for change.

The Coalition must recognise that its opponents are not Labour ex-ministers, but Whitehall. 

Ministers don’t need more Special Advisers or ex-management consultants in order to take on the forces of inertia. Nor the technocratic remedies peddled by the mandarins' favourite think tank – the Institute for Government. 

Instead, ministers need clearly developed ideas on how to make happen what they seek to achieve.  You can't do politics without ideas.

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