Government

Harold Wilson's policy-makers

G.W. Jones

In the British system of government the Prime Minister is part of a collective executive, the Cabinet, of which as chairman he is the most important single member. If he wants to achieve anything in government, advancing a policy for example, he needs personal assistants, since the other members of the Cabinet — who are his colleagues not his subordinates — are not just the instruments of his will.

If a Prime Minister acted simply as a chairman of the Cabinet his resources would be largely his personal persuasiveness. If he did not overcome his isolation he would not know what was germinating within the departments or be able to develop alternative views. He would face virtual faits accomplis when departmental proposals appeared on the Cabinet agenda for its approval, and he would be powerless to ensure that departments were implementing agreed decisions.

In the past, Prime Ministers relied on an occasional personal aide introduced into No. 10 Downing Street, like Harold Macmillan's John Wyndham or Edward Heath's Douglas Hurd. This March Mr Wilson took a major step in strengthening the assistance available to the Prime Minister. He invited Dr Bernard Donoughue, a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, to be the Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister and head of the new Policy Unit. For the first time in British peace-time history a Prime Minister had decided to establish a systematically organised personal bureau. The nearest parallel was Lloyd George's 'secretariat,' housed in new buildings in the garden of No. 10 Downing Street — the 'garden suburb.' Formed in 1916 it was a group of specialised secretaries, of varied experience and training, on whom the Prime Minister could depend in any matter requiring his personal attention and intervention.

Winston Churchill came close to creating something similar in the second world war. In 1939 Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, asked the Oxford physicist Professor Lindemann, as Lord Cherwell was then known, to form a statistical unit and generally be his adviser. When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 the unit was transformed into the Prime Minister's Statistical Section. Its staff, mainly of economists, was concerned not just with collecting statistics; it drew conclusions from them and made policy recommendations. The group was essentially personal to the Prime Minister. It knew the sort of thing he wanted to know and how he liked it presented. Its loyalty was to him and to no one else.

Dr Donoughue is thus the third academic to head a Prime Minister's unit. Born thirty-nine years ago he attended a secondary modern and a grammar school in Northampton, took a first in history at Oxford, and then at Nuffield College gained a doctorate for his thesis on 'British Politics and the American Revolution,' which was later published as a book. After a fellowship at Harvard he worked on the editorial staff of the Economist and the Sunday Times, and as a Senior Research Officer at Political and Economic Planning wrote pamphlets on wages policy in the public sector and on trades unions. Since 1963 he has lectured at the LSE where he was an influential Academic Governor. He was the co-author of a history of the Labour Party and of the recent official biography, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician. He was a member of the Sports Council (1965-71) and of the Chester Com

mittee on Association Football. For years he has been active in the Labour Party and was prominent in the Gaitskellite Campaign for Democratic Socialism in the early 'sixties. He was associated with the Jenkins wing of the party until the last election campaign, when at Transport House he became a close adviser of the Labour leader.

He has been given leave of absence from the LSE for a year in the first instance, and is now a temporary civil servant on the establishment of the Civil Service Department and in rank is somewhere between an under secretary and a deputy secretary. He directs the Policy Unit which is located with him at No. 10 Downing Street. Dr Donoughue personally selected the members of the Unit, and their appointment was approved by the Prime Minister. The criteria for their selection were that: (1) they should be specialists in an area of domestic policy of particular importance for this Labour Government, (2) they should have had experience of serving in Whitehall, and (3) they should have sympathy for the Government, although they may not have been Labour Party members. Five of them are titled Policy Advisers: (i) Mrs Catherine Carmichael (48), Lecturer in Social Work and Social Administration, University of Glasgow, formerly (1964-67) Adviser to the Scottish Office on Reorganisation of Scottish Social Services, and a member of the Supplementary Benefits Commission. Her field is social policy and Scottish affairs. (ii) Andrew Graham (31), Fellow and Tutor in Economics, Balliol College, Oxford. In the 1960s he was with the Government Economic Service as an Economic Assistant at the Department of Economic Affairs and as an Economic Adviser at the Cabinet Office. He specialises in energy problems as well as broader economic policy.

(iii) Richard Graham (35), Manager, Domes' tic Trunk Services, British Airways — he was responsible for the introduction of shuttle services on domestic trunk routes in the United Kingdom. He was formerly an Economic Adviser with the Government Economic Service and head of the branch which dealt with civil aviation. He specialises in public enterprise, and especially long-haul transportation.

(iv) Richard Kirwan (35), an economist from the Centre for Environmental Studies, and formerly (1966-69) an Economic Adviser with the Ministry of Transport's Economic Planning Directorate. He specialises in urban affairs: land, housing and transportation.

(v) David Piachaud (28), Lecturer in Social Administration, London School of Economics and Political Science, and formerly (1966-68) an economist at the Department of Health and Social Security. His field is social policy and income distribution.

There are two others in the Unit: a Research Officer, Adrian Shaw (26), who (1973-74) was a research assistant to Mr Wilson as Leader of the Opposition, and wh'o now works directly to Dr Donoughue, and an Assistant Policy Adviser, Gavyn Davies (23), an economics research graduate from Balliol College, Oxford, who assists Andrew Graham.

All in the Unit are on the staff of the Civil Service Department as temporary civil servants; they have been positively vetted, and their appointments lapse when the Government falls. Dr Donoughue, Mr Kirwan, Mr Shaw and Mr Davies are full-time. The others are part-time, which means in effect about four days a week, thus enabling them to keep a foothold in their previous occupations, delivering some lectures and taking classes that could not be dropped at the moment they were called to the Unit. The cost of their salaries over a year is an estimated £35,000.

The function of the Unit when it was first announced was to "assist in the development of the whole range of policies contained in the Government's programme, especially those arising in the short and medium term." It was also to be "concerned with ideas on policy which are not currently covered: 'minority' reforms, matters falling between departmental boundaries, or those which are the subject of worthy but unsuccessful Private Members Bills."

After three months its role is clearer. Dr Donoughue sees all papers flowing into Cabinet Committees and the Cabinet; he spots items on which he wants his staff to report; he gives the papers, together with his own remarks, to the appropriate member of the Unit, who later returns a brief to him. Dr Donoughue concentrates on aspects that the civil service and busy ministers might miss. He is there to help the Prime Minister as custodian of the party's manifesto by ensuring that the political values and policy priorities of the Labour Party are injected into proposals for government action. He considers the party and political implications of policies. He might draw the Prime Minister's attention to a divergence between ministers, to a course of action that might provoke trouble inside the party or damage the party, to a department that seemed to be slow in .bringing forward proposals to fulfil the party's objectives, and to topics in which the Prime Minister had a continuing personal interest and on whose development he wanted to be kept informed. The Prime Minister cannot follow everything that the Government does: his Policy Unit seeks to alert him and focus his attention on items in which he ought to be involved. Mr Wilson sees the role of Prime Minister as a captain of a football team, playing at centre-half, and he needs to know when to push the ball to a particular forward or to move up the field and score himself.

The service provided by the Unit to the Prime Minister is, political, party-oriented and personal. When Dr Donoughue receives the brief from his staff, he conveys his views to the Prime Minister in written memoranda for the overnight box or during frequent conversations, during the day. He is with the Prime Minister daily for an hour or so, over a meal or relaxing in the evening when in addition to discussing current events they can just gossip. The Unit does not just react to officialmemoranda. It has direct contact with the departments. Dr Donoughue will clear with a Permanent Secretary that a member of his staff may talk to a departmental official or sit on a departmental committee, and members of the Unit have their own informal contacts with .younger civil servants in the departments.

It had been considered that the Unit would : co-ordinate the policy advisers appointed to help ministers in their departments. But it became clear that such an idea was impractical, since the prime loyalty of each adviser was to his own minister and in any case the advisers varied greatly in their experience, expertise and in the functions they performed. However regular contacts are maintained with such advisers where they seem the best channel of communication on a particular policy matter.

The Unit has not replaced the Central Policy Review Staff under Lord Rothschild. When Mr Wilson became Prime Minister there was speculation that he might close down the CPRS, which had been set up by Mr Heath, but it was asked to continue. It is quite different from the Unit. Located in the Cabinet Office it serves the Cabinet as a whole, engages in more long-term studies and takes a longer time over its enquiries, whereas the Policy Unit serves only the Prime Minister, is much more short-term and' concentrates on political aspects.

Mr Wilson has also to serve him some full

time civil servants in the Prime Minister's private office. Since 1965 there have been five Private Secretaries. The Policy Unit, however, enables the Prime Minister to receive advice from a group who are committed to him personally and to the government of the day, without any of the inhibitions that may restrain the officials of the private office, who are in Whitehall for life, with loyalties to the civil service, and perhaps anxious, not to alienate present or future Permanent Secretaries. Some commentators have long argued that the Prime Minister needs a proper department. A few loyal 'irregulars,' they argue, will find their influence limited, since they will lack knowledge of Whitehall procedure and find themselves blocked by the departments. In the past, political advisers have found themselves rejected, enveloped or worn out by the civil service. Far better, it is said, to create a bureaucratic organisation to serve the Prime Minister. A recent suggestion was to merge the Civil Service Department and the Cabinet Office, together with the CPRS, to form a Prime Minister's Department. However, the present system of Prime Ministerial assistance is flexible and easily adaptable to the changing requirements of Prime Ministers. The establishment of a formal, structured department may in fact reduce the personal power of the Prime Minister. An ad hoc and personalised system serves only him, whereas a department, especially if large, may develop a view and momentum of its own; and to control it he may have to acquire another set of personal assistants.

In February 1973 Mr Wilson told Richard Crossman in a television conversation that he was in favour of a Prime Minister's department, but he observed: "The bigger the No. 10 machine the more he's got to read and the harder it is for him to keep his eye on the main problems." Dr Donoughue's Unit enables the Prime Minister to keep his eye on the political aspects of the main problems, without burdening him with a department.

G. W. Jones is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science.