Starmer's new Cabinet Secretary, sigh

[fanOfBen]

https://archive.ph/vPJLN
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/20/starmer-cabinet-secretary-staff-join-non-binary-book-club/

"As part of an annual review, she set the employee a target of joining the department’s “gender non-conforming book club”, where government workers supposedly read Middlesex, a 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides about an intersex American, as well as books about people transitioning gender, the source said."

And lots more.

Tbf, I don't think Fox or Truss would have been particular advocates of "non-binary book clubs". So I doubt DA was "saying whatever it is that powerful politicians want you to say at any time" during her stint at DIT.

I could be wrong though. Maybe Fox and Truss are secretly "woke".

the article even included a picture of her performance review, in which the new cabinet secretary had written on it that she needed to join a gender non conforming bookshop

This is the photo of the performance review. I can't see that written anywhere?

Encouraging staff to display their preferred pronouns? Fuck off.

Are those your preferred pronouns? They're very much mine if I'm not allowed sex-based. Fuck / off. Going to be fun in the interdepartmental memos.

If anyone asked for my preferred pronouns fuck / off would very much be mine. Once I'd stopped rolling my eyes and fixed them with a stern 'don't be so bloody ridiculous' look, that is.

Knowing what the civil service is like, most of this stuff emanates from some mysterious place where DEI bods in Cabinet Office meet representatives of staff networks, and through a convoluted process the Permanent Secretaries end up with inclusion objectives when the Cab Sec does their performance appraisal.

If those objectives in 2020 included doing lots of cringey Stonewall shit, knowing what Antonia is like, I'm sure she'd have wanted her department to be doing more cringey Stonewall shit than everyone else. A certain amount of competition comes into play, the same way that in 2022 even the most unlikely departments were dreaming up things they could do with Ukraine branding.

And then it filters down to Directors General sending round robin emails to their staff saying "What ho! Do you know it takes less than a minute to add your pronouns to your email signature, but it makes us a more inclusive workplace?"

There seems to be a lot less of this around Whitehall these days. There are the intranet articles saying things like "hey, it's Ramadan and you might want to be aware that some of your colleagues are fasting", but hardly anyone objects to that. Fewer pronouns on signatures too. I suspect a lot of this is that staff networks had got too big for their boots and were forced to tone things down a bit.

The Whitehall briefing war for and against her appointment is interesting, but I suspect it's got very little to do with "woke", and a lot more to do with personal ambitions and grievances.

The question remains: why does the primary focus of the civil service appear to be its own internal machinations and not the running of a functional country?

Fair question

The modern civil service is probably best understood by consulting that classic text on workplace relations, Carry On At Your Convenience. Update it a bit to include a subplot where Sid James is trying to win points as a Stonewall Diversity Champion, and you'd be nearly there.

That would be awesome 🤣 Carry On Indoctrinator

It's definitely carrying on...
https://www.thetimes.com/article/c395a420-c092-41af-ac44-0bb021f2d8c1?shareToken=3c985c847094bbe5356210ae5f7e646e

The Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team broke into a safe and destroyed the department’s copy of a historic bullying investigation into the new head of the civil service.

Tierney said he required the paperwork related to the original investigation to ensure McDonald had complied with the Radcliffe Rules on memoirs. The guidance, which dates to 1976 and is notoriously difficult to enforce, says officials must not “profit improperly” from their experience or damage “the integrity of government”. He ordered the break-in after apparently concluding nobody else internally knew the code. Simon Madden, the newly appointed director of the propriety and ethics team, who reported to him, is also thought to have been involved in the decision.

Tierney then disposed of the Romeo document. He is thought to have destroyed other files, including emails from alleged bullying victims and documents illustrating how the civil service leadership dismissed the complaints despite the finding there was a case to answer. Files related to other historic cases were also thrown away.

Literally jemmying into a safe to destroy evidence of her bullying and dodgy expenses. It's banana republic dictatorship territory and yet these are the holier-than-thou caste who denounce everyone else as nasty old bigots.

As an aside, do they really only keep paper copies?

And now the safe-breaker is in charge of the ONS which, if I recall, has its own issues regarding data, identity politics and ideological capture.

The Observer today is no less scathing. It's not even just the bullying but ' she is solely concerned about her brand '.

Then the money grubbing and extravagance. The government is doing some good things. But it seems they are unable to learn from mistakes. Get shot Mandelson and McSweeney and then import another time bomb.

I’d put good money on the Foreign Office still having a copy of Tim Hitchens’ report.

And Simon McDonald’s book was published about four years ago (I’ve read it), so why would they be checking now if he had complied with regulations? Simon McDonald managed to bring down Boris’s government over Minister Pincher. I’d suggest the government might want to keep him inside…

The "ethics" team broke into a safe to destroy a bullying report? This is beyond satire.

I just read that, too.

Pretty damning stuff - I rather suspect that AR will not be in post long.
Starmer appears to be running things as his own personal fiefdom.

Agree . Thatcher and Blair made some awful appointments. But they had the luxury of being popular at the time. Starmer's only plus , boring but a safe pair of hands , is turning into a minus.

The curious thing for me is the intensity of the briefing war. The Cab Sec is normally, and should be, a fairly anonymous figure.

Nor do I like the recent trend for incoming PMs to dump Cab Secs - Boris did it with Sedwill who he saw as Theresa's man, Starmer did it with Case who he saw as Boris's man, Starmer then appointed Wormald as basically a Starmer clone who was being undermined by the McSweeney people within days of starting the job.

Mark Sedwill is a pretty well respected guy, I would say. Case and Wormald get more mixed reviews. Antonia also gets mixed reviews - she was talent spotted and mentored by Jeremy Heywood, which still counts for something in Whitehall - but I can't think of a precedent for all this briefing trying to portray the incoming Cab Sec as some kind of cross between Cruella De Vil and Miranda Priestly.

There is a definite type of mandarin for whom Simon McDonald is their spirit animal, and it's not necessarily the type you want running things.

Yes it’s weird to see the Labour laundry on all this. It’s because Starmer is struggling.

There's a certain take on this government, which says: the government is basically doing well, what it needs is better comms and maybe yet another reshuffle of the No10 team.

That's not my take. My take is, the immediate problem is the man at the top can't do his job, and the bigger problem is that Labour don't have a credible alternative, and the even bigger problem is long-standing bad habits in government which means Whitehall is less and less capable of doing even basic government stuff. There's a definite "last days of Boris" aroma in the air.

I don't particularly like Morgan McSweeney, but I suspect the government will struggle without him, because he was the only person in Labour (except maybe Shabana Mahmood) who thought Labour should try to appeal to the median voter.

I wasn't a huge fan of Chris Wormald - I thought he was very much a case of Starmer appointing someone in his own image - but if you're the PM, you can't appoint a Cab Sec and then allow a briefing campaign against them almost immediately. Those briefings that Wormald wouldn't allow Starmer to do stuff just made Starmer look pathetic.

I don't know Antonia Romeo personally, but from professional knowledge of her I'd say she's highly intelligent and capable and expects results. Other people's recollections may vary. But she could be the second coming of Lord Haldane and not manage to make Whitehall functional.

There are much bigger problems than these individuals. The wrong individuals might make them harder to solve, but it's really about systems.

We live in a different world now @SionnachRuadh . I suppose if senior civil servants are undermined and their replacements are touted as some kind of wonder workers , you are courting the attention of the media. And if you are going to be eaten alive for a ticket to the Arsenal and a pair of spectacles , what do you think will happen to your new appointment who wants the tax payer to front up $150k to educate her kids privately. Especially given her ' previous '. It's not as if theres a shortage of experienced and very competent people at the top of the Civil Service, many of them women. Wonder if he regrets the constructive dismissal of Sue Grey at the behest of McSweeny?

Completely agree. It’s Starmer who is causing issues with all the people brought in.

If McSweeney could actually sell in toolmaker line to the public he was probably the biggest Svengali they had going.

Starmer is bristling and full of self assurance for some reason, but also not very good at the job.

Sue Gray is someone I know better and can speak to.

Starmer used to meet her at the weekly Perm Secs meeting when he was DPP and they obviously hit it off, and when he was thinking about having a chief of staff who could help him navigate Whitehall, she was the person he thought of, and he high pressured her into accepting the job.

There was a school of thought even then that she was the wrong choice, well connected journos like Tim Shipman will say that she'd never been a perm sec running a department, instead she had this weird troubleshooter role which wasn't an obvious fit for the chief of staff role.

My response to which is:

• Sue always wanted to be a perm sec running her own department, she applied for multiple roles and was convinced there was a boys' club blackballing her (I'd say not so much a boys' club as an old school tie club - there were plenty of female perm secs but not many who had joined the service at the bottom rather than coming in as high flyers)
• Being a perm sec doesn't obviously equip you to be chief of staff - Starmer could have appointed Tom Scholar and he'd have had similar problems

Anyway, having appointed Sue, what Starmer should have done is give her a brief to work to, some resources (not big resources, she's used to working with a small team) and an assurance that he had her back and he wouldn't tolerate briefing against her from McSweeney or anyone else. Instead what happened - and this is very Starmer - he appointed her and buggered off and she didn't hear from him for months on end.

Even if you thought she was the wrong person for the role, I think it's very telling that within a couple of weeks of McSweeney getting the job, having thought it would be easy, he was going around telling people that Dom Cummings was right about Whitehall dysfunction.

I'm a great believer in getting the right people in senior jobs, but the problems run much deeper. Whatever the issues with Antonia Romeo, she's the obvious person to go to if you want a break with the "computer says no" culture. Appointing someone Simon McDonald approves of would be a good way of ensuring that nothing ever changes.

And I don't believe there is anyone in government at the moment who really understands the long term problems of state failure or what to do about them.

Sue Gray took the fall for freebies and McSweeney for Mandelson. Starmer has form for throwing people under the bus to survive.

As the late Jeremy Thorpe once said, "greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life."