Many observers have watched the Labour government’s first 11 months and struggled to understand what drives it. Sir Keir Starmer is uncharismatic and inscrutable, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has struggled to disprove Newsnight editor Ian Katz’s accidentally public and damning 2013 description of her as “boring snoring”. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, a product of the trades unions, shows heart and spirit, but, for Downing Street, is too often off-message.
There is another force at the heart of government, who understands how power works and knows what success looks like. Step forward, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 60-year-old Wolverhampton South East MP Patrick Bosco McFadden.
Pat McFadden’s reputation as “the real Deputy Prime Minister” is so commonplace it is a Westminster punchline for Opposition politicians and cabinet colleagues alike. His influence is not set out in 72-point print, and his official duties sound dry: he is responsible for “supporting delivery of Government’s priorities”; for “national security, resilience, and civil contingencies”, including state threats and major issues like cyber security; and for public appointments.
McFadden is the senior minister in the Cabinet Office, “the corporate headquarters” which “ensure[s] the effective running of government”. This gives him oversight of the management and reform of the civil service and political and constitutional changes, as well as — this phrase could hardly be more Blairite-coded — ”the effective development, coordination and implementation of policy”.
Dig a little further. Much of Whitehall’s real work is conducted through the cabinet’s structure of committees. There are seven main committees, including the National Security Council, and McFadden sits on five of them, chairing the Home and Economic Affairs Committee and acting as deputy chair of the Union and Constitution Committee. He also chairs the National Security Council’s sub-committee on resilience. Retentive minds will also recall the much-vaunted Mission Boards (growth, clean energy, safer streets, opportunities and health): each is chaired by the relevant departmental head, but McFadden is deputy chair of every one of them.
One more province in this formidable bureaucratic empire is the UK’s relationship with the European Union: this was moved from the Foreign Office within weeks of the government coming to power, and is managed directly by McFadden’s junior minister, Paymaster General Nick Thomas-Symonds (who also sits on the only two cabinet committees of which McFadden is not a member).
McFadden’s background is central to his role in Starmer’s government. He is a fixer — although he rejects the word as somehow class snobbery. A quiet voice in the ear of the powerful. He was a policy adviser and speechwriter for John Smith as Leader of the Opposition, then to his successor, Tony Blair. In 1997 he became one of just 18 Downing Street special advisers, and from 2002 to 2005 was the Prime Minister’s Political Secretary, one of Blair’s key lieutenants.
In 2005, McFadden was elected to Parliament, and exactly 365 days later he was appointed a minister — in the Cabinet Office. He survived the transition to Gordon Brown’s premiership, then, as if he could learn no more about the arts of political management, from 2008 to 2010 he was Peter Mandelson’s deputy and House of Commons spokesman at the sprawling Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
How does McFadden’s power manifest itself? He is regularly described as “the most influential politician you’ve never heard of”. It is not policy direction, though as National Campaign Coordinator he was critical to the “derisking” of Labour’s manifesto, so much as a desire for control and discipline.
McFadden is impatient with accountability, and he does not suffer fools gladly
There is a snapshot in his immersion in the addictively shadowy world of security and intelligence. The Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Lord Beamish, recently criticised McFadden and the Cabinet Office for endangering its oversight work by failing to provide adequate resources. McFadden is also embroiled in a dispute with the Chair of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, Matt Western, refusing to allow the National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell, to give evidence on his work in the role.
McFadden is impatient with accountability, and he does not suffer fools gladly (or at all, some say); he longs for efficient government, saying last year that Whitehall should “think a little bit more like a start-up”. He has also gradually occupied a power vacuum: Rayner is politically too distant from the Prime Minister to be an effective day-to-day deputy, Reeves is floundering at the Treasury and other ministers—David Lammy, Ed Miliband, Jonathan Reynolds, Liz Kendall, Lisa Nandy—are choking on their own portfolios.
Sue Gray, Starmer’s Chief of Staff, lasted 93 days. Her replacement, Morgan McSweeney, is seen by some as — and I suspect cultivates the image of — a dark Machiavellian genius. But his Gründungsmythos as conqueror of the BNP in Barking in the 1990s has been questioned, and the Workman has hardly transformed the government’s performance or perception since succeeding Gray last October. He may be trusted by Starmer, but what can he point to as his achievements?
McFadden’s influence, on the other hand, goes deep. To a degree unprecedented since the Cold War, the news is dominated by national security. We have seen a Strategic Defence Review, debates over resilience, overseas territories, conscription, cyber security and the work (and oversight) of the intelligence agencies. The man in charge of the Cabinet Office is rarely far away.
Blairite, post-Blairite, pragmatist? Labels are a distraction. The bare bones of the government, reform-minded but dirigiste, devout in believing in the state as a force for good and dismissive of scrutiny, are all there. And they are all McFadden.
