I think it’s worth reflecting on how most of the decisions in Whitehall get taken. Ministers don’t usually get every possible combination of choices; having set the general direction of travel, they are later presented with recommendations with just enough wiggle room to allow them to apply their imprimatur. It’s typically unelected officials who prepare those recommendations, with inputs from think tanks, academia and professions (teachers, lawyers, military etc). When a minister has ideas that run against conventional Whitehall and professional thinking (Gove, Williamson, Patel spring to mind as obvious examples) it tends to upsets the smooth running of the machine, causing everyone to get very upset about it and criticise the (elected) ministers for upsetting the applecart. So is democratic input to the system welcomed or not? To my mind it is a bit rich to criticise Cummings on the basis that he is ‘unelected’ when his principal interest seems to be getting other ‘unelected’ folk to develop policies and offer choices that better reflect the democratically-elected ministers’ priorities. And since he is a personal appointment of the PM, I would hazard a guess that he is rather better attuned to those priorities than unelected people such as Mark Sedwill and before him Jeremy Heywood, who exercised a very great influence indeed over proceedings during their respective tenures.
Too much democratic input can be a bad thing, don’t get me wrong. I was amused by a Defence Select Committee last year where good old Mark “ne-Francois pas” spent the best part of 10 minutes lambasting the MOD for the lateness and failings of the A400M, brandishing anonymous emails of complaint about it he’d received from service personnel and warning that the Department needed to learn its lesson, only to pivot without a flicker of ironic self-awareness to lambasting the MOD for having selected the E-7 Wedgetail without a formal competition against a ‘only exists on paper’ European AEW offering
. A politically-appointed adviser offers a middle ground between the unelected bureaucrat and the grandstanding politician: potentially a good thing.
In that context I am very interested to see how Cummings’s views on procurement can be squared against the political pressure which will inevitably be applied to support UK industry. For if the political direction is to pump money into the bottomless pit of BAES et al in the name of economic stimulus, DE&S will have little choice but to act as a complicit middle man and the services will find it harder to buy off-the-shelf, which is exactly the opposite of what needs to happen to break the MOD’s ‘gold plating’ habit. It might be that Cummings has as much work to do on ministers, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury as he does on the MOD and service chiefs. If he can expose some of the vested interests and slay a few sacred cows, I for one will be cheering him on.