It seems that Blairite ‘sofa government’ has been transformed into coalition ‘telephone government’, with policy decisions made during Sunday night calls between David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Surely, there’s a better way
It was all going to be different this time - or so we were told. Far fewer special advisers so that ministers and officials were clearly in the lead and not sidelined. Far more decisions in Cabinet and less second-guessing from No 10. A return to what some academics think is the gold standard – Cabinet collective responsibility – and no more of that old Blairite ‘sofa government’. And indeed a whole set of machinery was set up so that the coalition would work, and that LibDem and Tory arguments would be sorted out. Officials were very happy with this new situation– or so the briefings said.
But thanks to some good detective work from the Constitution Unit we now know that the real action happens not in a well minuted, well attended arena where things are thrashed out between colleagues, but in a Sunday evening phone call between just two people, the Prime Minster and the Deputy Prime Minister. And while the sofa may not be Dave’s thing, we now also know that the other key meeting is on a Monday between the two top men and a very small group of their key officials and advisers.
Is this a surprise? Probably not. To a degree such informal mechanisms will always be important. The centre of government feels a need to drive policy, to sort out key disagreements away from the glare of a full and leaky Cabinet, to give coherence to the plethora of different initiatives emanating from the government machine.
But maybe these methods lie behind some of the problems the coalition is now having. These weaknesses are transparent and clear on the NHS where policy seems to have been made in an extraordinary way, first welcomed by all sides of the coalition before turning into an unseemly fight to see who can row back the quickest and take the most credit for so doing.
But perhaps more important is the economy. Here it is as though the rest of the government is just waiting and watching to see if the Chancellor’s gamble on cutting deep and fast in the hope that the private sector takes up the slack, pays off. The rest of the Cabinet feel like spectators, not participants. That is dangerous. It means that not all departments are swinging in behind the effort and it also means that if things go wrong the blame will not be shared.
So maybe it is time for Cameron and Clegg to think of a different bit of machinery to change that atmosphere. As I outline in a recent article for Political Quarterly, the National Economic Council was how Gordon Brown attempted to do this and on the whole it worked pretty well in getting the country through the financial crisis and economic recession with much less damage than many anticipated.
One of my conclusions is that such a machinery of government innovation probably only works in a crisis – but a few more quarters of sluggish growth and that is exactly what it might feel like to the coalition.
