BEHIND the black door of 10 Downing Street, civil servants and aides have been set a new benchmark: the pub test.
How will they react personally, down the Dog And Duck, when their friends and family hammer them for Government decisions they don’t like.
Lefty human-rights-lawyer-turned-PM[/caption]
If they can’t push back when even their nearest and dearest complain about cuts to benefits and foreign aid and the slashing of Whitehall budgets, then perhaps they need to toughen up a bit.
The test is clearly needed when you look at Labour’s battle to bring down the rocketing welfare bill that is forecast to hit £70billion annually by the end of decade.
There’s barely a whiff of cordite in the air and already rumours of U-turns, climb-downs and softening are coming in thick and fast.
Even suggestions of a freeze, let alone a cut, have been met with howls, some of them emanating from Sir Keir Starmer’s own Cabinet.
And things are only just warming up.
Tony Blair used to talk about the scars on his back from public sector reforms but frankly he wasn’t trying to do it with the nation’s overdraft maxed out and the UK teetering endlessly on recession.
Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement in a week and a bit will make for a painful hour or so for all those doe-eyed newbie Labour MPs who didn’t come into politics to be hatchet men and women.
Plenty of squealing
While the dangle of a reshuffle in May will keep some of the more ambitious ones sitting on their hands, the giant 2024 intake are beginning to find their voice and there will be plenty of squealing.
It remains to be seen if No10 will hold its nerve — but eight months in, some in that place have woken up to the scale and size of the problems facing the Government and how it works.
And they are realising that to beat the Whitehall Blob and change the country enough, at a re-election winning pace, means that things will need to get bloody.
So great was the concern that wrecking officials would leak their plan to abolish NHS England, the number of people brought into the process was kept to a tiny handful, under the secret title Project Romulus.
From a random codename generator, I’m told, rather than a nod to the mythical Roman who killed his obstructive brother — but it is fitting.
It was a good start but there’s plenty more to do.
I hear there is a memo sitting on the Prime Minister’s desk drafted by one of his strategists that has made some officials wince.
It sounds quite up my street, including going even further on cutting back the scale of Whitehall, a whole load more quangos up for the axe and ending the “compensation culture” of government.
A Trump-style war on diversity, equity and inclusion hiring across the public sector has also been suggested.
Instead of endlessly hand-wringing about minorities, civil service recruitment would focus on getting more working-class people into good jobs.
What’s not yet clear is whether the PM is one of those people that really gets it, and how much stomach he really has for such fights.
Yet for the lefty human-rights-lawyer-turned-PM to be even considering disavowing parts of the European Convention on Human Rights — namely the “right to a family life” that is endlessly abused by bogus asylum seekers — would suggest Starmer is on quite the journey.
After a shaky first six months talking down Britain, crippling small businesses and setting up endless reviews, the PM is certainly now talking a better game.
“We don’t want a bigger state, or an intrusive state, an ever-expanding state,” he claimed last week.
“Politicians chose to hide behind a vast array of quangos, arm’s-length bodies and regu-lators — you name it.”
Nice words, slightly tarnished by the fact Labour has already set up 27 new bodies including GB Energy, the Fair Work Agency, the Regulatory Innov-ation Office — and who can forget the Solar Taskforce.
My personal favourite remains the new Office for Value for Money, headed up by the old boss of HS2 that has gone a squillion quid over-budget for half the length of the original route.
So while NHS England’s abolition was a big bang, why stop there?
Next on the list should be the nascent Independent Football Regulator before it does some serious damage.
It is an idea that I hear has been considered at the very top.
Throttling cash cow
There is growing concern in No10 about how Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is handling the process, with football industry sources also complaining she has delegated much of the work to juniors.
Whitehall whispers even say she’s been known to spend just two and half days a week in her department, with Premier League figures struggling to secure a meeting.
At the launch of another quango, the UK Soft Power Council, Nandy name-checked the Premier League as a jewel in Britain’s crown.
But warnings that the regulator risks throttling that cash cow continue to fall on deaf ears.
While there are noble aims of getting the big clubs to help fund the little clubs, it’s not clear why that needs to have a regulator for ever.
A deal between the Premier League and English Football League is not beyond the wit of man — but once that’s done, then what?
The regulator won’t just stop regulating. It will create new and tedious ways of justifying its existence and all those fat pay cheques.
It’s what happens every time.
There’s an open goal to be taken there in scrapping the whole thing before much-needed investment flees.
Yes, there will be some shouting, but I suspect it’s one that our footie-mad PM could pass the pub test with.
THE bookies had a good run at Cheltenham last week, but I don’t know what odds you could have got on a trackside tete-a-tete between Nigel Farage and David Cameron.
Nearly a decade on from Cameron’s premiership-wrecking defeat to Farage in the Brexit referendum, spies tell me it was all very cordial when the ex-PM ran into the Reform UK leader on Gold Cup day.
No such kiss and make-up for ousted Reform MP Rupert Lowe, however, who was also on the course.
