Lessons from my time in government
Jim Babylon
Four months.
That is how long I served as special adviser to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, before being handed my P45.
A part of me wishes I was still back in there, fighting to deliver change. But the truth is that Tony Blair was right when he said that when you are in there pulling the levers nothing really seems to happen. Paul Ovenden was also right when he repeated this claim in his own flurry of press appearances. There’s Lee Cain, who has made the same point at some length, and of course Morgan McSweeney. Keir Starmer has also said precisely the same thing. John Bew, again, treading over familiar ground. So when I share my exhausted insights about the civil service grading system, I am doing so following a rich canonical tradition.
My lodestar, of course, is Dominic Cummings. Who was also right when he threw a tantrum about his previous employers, and has now managed to set himself up as a figure in the media, with a profitable Substack, and even got a film made about how brilliant he is. So with that in mind, and without any further ado, here are some of the lessons I learned while I was in government.
Lesson One: State capacity
If there is one disconnect between what Westminster cares about and what normal people I speak to think about, it’s delivery. They don’t want thinking about big ideas, they want results. But because they live in the real world, and have mortgages and jobs to worry about, they don’t have time to think about what they want to be delivered, or how it should be delivered. Real people have no idea that the carpets in Number 10 are very rarely hoovered, or that civil servants have to pay for their own choccy biccies. They still think of the civil service as a sort of Rolls-Royce, man of Whitehall and the White Heat of technology that Wilson spoke about.
Here is something that we can all agree on. There must be many, many, many more special advisers. Perhaps 10x as many as we have now. And they must all be paid much, much more money, and given a lot more power. We need to open these appointments up to people with tech. You might think that banging on about the need for Businessmen to have a good bloody go at it is pub bore dribble but I can also deploy the phrase ‘domain specific knowledge’.
Lesson Two: Selling state capacity
Knowing how to build state capacity is only one part of the picture. You also have to sell state capacity to an all-too-sceptical public. If you try to get the average idiot to read a think tank report which says there must be more professional opportunities and better renumeration for people who write think tank reports, they will tell you to leave them alone.
You’ve got to bring the public with you. You can’t just talk about state capacity, you’ve got to know what you want to do with it once you have it. Take an example. Lets say that I use Grok to make a lewd, antisemitic image of Luciana Berger. How quickly could the British state impose a digital curfew on my mobile device? The answer to that question, which I cannot give you because of the Official Secrets Act, would shock you.
Picture this, if you can. You are eating pie and mash at Felixstowe port. A buxom wench wearing a union jack apron dabs a bit of gravy from the corner of your mouth. There are Dogs everywhere, but no dangerous ones. There is no graffiti on the tube. The truth is I’m a sort of anglo-futurist myself.
Lesson Three: De Gaulle
Charles De Gaulle was French. He was known for pursuing the national interest obsessively. His first action when he became leader was to announce that the business of government is ‘not a game of cards’. He stewarded his country through a time not dissimilar to our own, successfully fighting land wars against several European powers simultaneously before losing it all on an invasion of Russia during the Winter (there’s a lesson there). For his first one hundred days in government he set out a clear list of fixed, discrete priorities around energy security, critical minerals and reform of government procurement. He also banned Arabs with oblong heads from playing music out loud on the Paris metro.
What would Charles De Gaulle do if you made him leader of Britain today? As a first priority I suspect he would increase spending on Defence to 3% of GDP. He would then deploy that kinetic force to pursue our unshakeable foreign policy commitments to Israel and the United States, directly challenging the likes of Vladimir Putin and Iran in order to give America the breathing space it needs to contest the Pacific with China. Interestingly, the lesson of De Gaulle is that we should pursue the exact foreign policy we are already pursuing.
Then a proper domestic agenda. Gentle density. HS2. He’d generate AI pictures of wide, sunny avenues, and tweet them out. The Oxford-Cambridge Arc. He’d certainly tear up whatever environmental regulations there are which obstruct us from building Nuclear power plants. Ever seen that video with Nick Clegg?
Lesson Four: Integration
I’ve alluded to integration several times in this piece, but its time to confront this difficult question head on.
What do we mean when we talk about integration? For me, the greatest evidence that Muslims have failed to integrate is that not enough of them are voting for the Labour party. Indeed, very few Muslims are voting for the Conservative party. And even on the fringes of politics, I challenge you to find me any British Muslims who are voting for say Reform. Or even Advance UK. How many British Muslims will be standing as National Rebirth councillors at the local elections in May? Very few, I should think.
I won’t leave the Muslims alone until they are indistinguishable from the average White Briton in every respect except race. They will drink cups of milky tea and vote, proportionally, for parties which want to carry out mass deportations. They will not be allowed to have any views on foreign policy either, because that stinks of antisemitism.
Ban the hate marches.
Muslims will be made to do the Haka on St George’s Day.