The House | Burnham’s ban on spads speaking to journalists is absurd and unworkable

Prime Minister Andy Burnham speaking to the media, August 2, 2026 (PA Images / Alamy)

4 min read11 min

In a meeting in the 10 Downing Street pillared room just days into the Boris Johnson administration, his new chief of staff Dominic Cummings struck fear into the heart of the new cohort of newly appointed special advisers like me, summoning us for a meeting at precisely 7.55am that Monday morning.

“If you leak, you will be marched from your desk by the head of security at your department, your pass will be taken off you and you will be sacked,” thundered Cummings.  “You have no rights.”  The leaked words duly appeared in The Times the next day.

With perhaps a tad less directness than we spads became used to from Cummings, the Burnham administration has made clear it wants a “collaborative” government, free from leaks and hostile briefings. But similar consequences will ensue should the rules be broken, as set out in a letter to senior civil servants and ministers jointly authored by First Secretary of State Louise Haigh and Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo.

Elements of this letter are both ridiculous and completely unworkable. Most impractically, special advisers, unless media-facing, are banned from speaking to journalists. This belies the entire way that Westminster works and cuts off a very useful source of information flow in both directions. It also indicates Burnham lacks faith in his policy spads.

As a journalist-turned-spad-turned-journalist again, I have been on both sides of the divide. As a media spad, I trusted the policy spads I worked with to speak to journalists responsibly and speak with one voice from our department, and indeed government. 

Brilliant policy spads I worked with such as Liam Booth-Smith, who later went on to be Rishi Sunak’s chief of staff, would freely speak to the media, brief them on policies and talk about stories. He would always tell me what he had said, who he had spoken to and why. I trusted him, he trusted me and our Secretary of State trusted us both. He also had far more detailed policy knowledge than I did. I would occasionally ask Jonathan Caine at the Northern Ireland Office, an expert on the relevant policy for decades, to help me brief a journalist, many of whom he had known far longer than I had.

The Burnham policy also fails to acknowledge the day-to-day reality of Westminster. Take Will Straw, the new chief of staff at the Treasury. He was actually an HMT press officer at the start of his career, has run large organisations such as the Remain campaign and The King’s Trust and knows dozens of journalists personally through a two-decades career in public life. Is he simply going to ignore Laura Kuennsberg when he next sees her at a drinks event at the Institute for Engineers?

Getting information conducive to helping the political process is something both media and policy spads have done since the role was set up in the 1960s. There are leaks and there are leaks.  Some can be very helpful to an administration. Reinventing the wheel now will not work; it will cause resentment and it undermines the role of policy and parliamentary handling spads. Spads also carry out many briefings that are not known to Cabinet ministers and nor should they be.

When things get tougher down the line for the Burnham administration, leaks and hostile briefings will undoubtedly occur. Their brutality and consequence will be far greater once spads have decided they have nothing to lose.

Trust is fundamental to how a government operates. If you don’t trust the spad, get rid of them.  Attempting to gag spads on day one will not work. With trust internally, an administration can at least have a chance of being successful.

Peter Cardwell is a presenter on Talk and the author of The Secret Life of Special Advisers, which is about his career in the May and Johnson administrations working in four departments for four Secretaries of State. His second book, Political Animals, is out in paperback on 1 September