Arthur Reynolds: The civil service will prepare ‘day one’ briefings for Burnham’s new ministers but nobody’ll read them

Arthur Reynolds is a journalist, a former civil servant and government speechwriter.

Changes in leadership animate Whitehall like nothing else. With Andy Burnham set to become Prime Minister and carry out a swinging reshuffle in 10 days’ time, officials will be scrambling around to prepare for their new masters.

In my six years on Whitehall, I witnessed this process eight times, and it reveals everything that is wrong with the modern civil service.

Even the most obscure teams in each department spend hours contributing to ‘day one briefing packs’ for new ministers. These tomes are hundreds of pages long, riddled with jargon, and full of indecipherable statistics. Despite the department’s most senior officials poring over their contents and writing twee cover notes advertising how wonderful their work is, I am convinced not a single minister read them.

I never bothered to make that point internally, because I know the answer I would have received: “But that’s the process. It doesn’t matter if they read it, we’ve done our bit.”

From replying to every rambling letter from a member of the public to advertising jobs nationally when an internal candidate is already nailed on for the role, our civil service excels in work for work’s sake.

So much behaviour around a reshuffle is performative, designed to maintain the illusion that our bureaucracy is a ‘Rolls-Royce machine’. A flurry of notes is passed between departments to relay how a minister likes their coffee, their go-to lunch order, the font they like for speeches, whether their submissions should be single or double-spaced. All vitally important information that couldn’t possibly be gleaned by asking them.

Officials believe they are smoothing the way for their new bosses, when in fact, they are infantilising them. As Liz Truss has observed, the position of a minister – particularly a junior one – is akin to that of a child emperor: their smallest personal preferences are pandered to, but their ability to change the country is practically zero.

As Andy Burnham’s charges are set to find out, this Whitehall charm offensive belies a desire to control the course of policymaking. As I have written about elsewhere, reshuffles and changes of government are perfect opportunities for bureaucrats to resurrect policies their last boss killed off.

From cutting the winter fuel allowance to introducing the family farms tax, many of Keir Starmer’s most unpopular policies were Whitehall plans the Conservatives resisted. Burnham’s team should keep their guard up and avoid surrendering decision making to the ‘experts’.

But he has had less than a month to prepare for government, and has pledged to honour the 2024 manifesto. His devolution revolution, meanwhile, will have had no visible effect on voters’ lives by the end of his term. That leaves continuing Starmer’s stodgy social democracy as the only path available.

The public are not fools.

They will not hear a Prime Minister with a northern accent and think all the country’s ills are solved. Coupled with the inevitable implosion of Reform, this leaves the next election in play.

As absurd as this might have sounded a matter of months ago, the Conservatives have the opportunity to return to government in some form. They’re ahead of Labour in the polls and trail Reform by little more than the margin of error on data taken before the George Cottrell affair fully unravelled.

Kemi’s patient, policy-first approach is looking wiser by the day. The Conservatives can only avoid Starmer’s fate by making a bulletproof plan and imposing it on the Whitehall machine.

Legislation to break up Blairite structures that put power in the hands of unaccountable quangocrats should be prepared ahead of time and enacted in the first 100 days. So too should measures to revive drilling in the North Sea and scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty – the legal basis that underpins the DEI state.

Resistance will inevitably come from the permanent bureaucracy. That’s why the Conservatives must not be shy of borrowing ideas and bringing in experts from the outside.

Reform has suggested replacing Whitehall’s permanent secretaries – the officials who, in effect, run government departments – with political hires who support its programme. This is a common-sense proposal. And it’s not like Reform hasn’t adopted ideas from the Tory right on leaving the ECHR and rolling back net zero.

Candidate selection, though, offers a chance to differentiate from both Reform and Labour. The former hasn’t lived up to its rhetoric on bringing in outside experience, as the disastrous choice of Robert Kenyon to contest the Makerfield by-election demonstrated. The latter has proved that a party made up of ex-charity workers, lobbyists or political staff cannot meet the mood of the nation.

Professional politicians who know how to work the system have a place, but we need entrepreneurs and innovators who can transform it too. The local champions who made up much of the 2019 Conservative intake won’t make reforming ministers.

Faced with a new Labour leader who’s accustomed to a complete lack of scrutiny, and a Reform party whose only electoral asset is mired in scandal, there is a real chance Kemi Badenoch could become Prime Minister after the next election.

She should plan accordingly and prepare to do battle with Britain’s bureaucracy.