How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't

"This came out in 2023. It’s a good read, written in a really engaging style. It’s kind of an outsider’s guide to how the British government actually works. What do ministers do? What do civil servants do? What do backbenchers do? What happens in the House of Lords? What’s a select committee? It’s a very instructive book, but told in a very engaging way, and focused not just on how things work, but what the impact of the way they work is. The reason I put it on this list, Sophie, was for its opening chapter. He starts off with the story of a minister in the Cameron government, Chris Grayling, who took over as the Justice Secretary and—a little bit like the Universal Credit story—launched into an ideologically motivated privatization of the probation service. It’s the idea that ‘all these civil servants in the probation service can’t be doing a good job, if we put it into the private sector, it’s bound to be better.’ It was an unmitigated disaster. It took many years to unpick, at the cost of major societal damage. But he tells that story absolutely brilliantly. It inspired me to work really hard to tell these quite complicated stories in a way that the general reader would understand. I don’t think we should expect our ministers to come in full of knowledge. We don’t want them to run the projects. We want them to make the big decisions. But we have this fast turnaround in the departmental officials too. It’s not just about knowledge. These projects, typically, for a short one, take a decade from the big first decision to do something, to actually finishing it. And if you have—charitably—five ministers in that time, but it could be eight, and you have four or five delivery leads in the government department, no one gets to know each other well enough to trust each other. So the relationships are never strong enough to build the momentum to carry you through difficult times. So yes, he’s absolutely right about that, and I’m sure that it isn’t only major projects that suffer from this problem."