It’s Christmas come early for many Labour MPs this summer as they look towards the party’s improving poll ratings and, at last, a leader with vision. Not a moment too soon either for a party touted as dead in the water after May’s local election results. But before they’ve even finished putting up their stockings and singing “Glory to the newborn King”, the tinsel will need taking back down.
Because even if Burnham, for now, skates by, making short reels of pork scratchings, or answering softball questions from Laura Kuenssberg, he’ll very quickly have to face the same barrage of crises that beset every Prime Minister. Be it car bombs and foot and mouth for Brown, Brexit and COVID for Johnson or war, civil and otherwise, for Starmer. Peacetime today, it turns out, doesn’t count for much.
None of this is to say Burnham wouldn’t be able to handle whatever comes up. He’s likely to be able to handle that issue, whatever shape it takes. Competence is not the question. The question is what handling each of those crises costs Burnham; not in skill but in time. Time spent dashing from site to site, fire to fire is time spent not coordinating a government, not setting direction, not deciding what the country should look like in three years rather than three days.
And Burnham will be doing all of this from a building that was never built for it. This sense of siege, of constantly firefighting or confronting the next crisis, is exacerbated by the building of No.10 itself. Fundamentally, it is not fit for purpose. A Georgian townhouse, surrounded and overshadowed by the Whitehall palaces of the Cabinet and Foreign Offices, it was never envisioned to be the seat of a modern executive, still less to compete with departments with over 2,000 people.
The cramped corridors and ornate drawing rooms, whilst evocative of the 300-year-old history of the place, also render it unsuitable for housing anything like the machinery a modern government demands, severely limiting both the amount of space and the number of staff a Prime Minister can call his own. And Prime Ministerial solutions to the problem of Downing Street tend to be haphazard, from Lloyd George’s garden suburb, temporary huts thrown up to house his extra staff, to Blair’s Policy Unit, bolted on rather than built in.
The result is what you’d guess. Ineffective operations, built on inefficient means, in pursuit of impermanent ends. After all, how can a Prime Minister set direction for a decade from a building with fewer staff than a mid-sized department? How can he out-plan the Treasury when he can’t out-staff it? How can any unit, however well-intentioned, outlast the man who built it if it was never given the standing to survive him? Small wonder, then, that Prime Minister after Prime Minister complains of pulling the levers of government, only to find most of them disconnected.
Devolution solves a different problem: how far Whitehall reaches, not whether the centre directing it has the capacity to do so. The office of Prime Minister needs its own department; not a patch, not another here-today-gone-tomorrow “delivery unit” or Behavioural Insights Team, but a permanent department with statutory footing. A department that can, and will, outlast the Prime Minister it was created by and can meaningfully compete with the goliaths of Whitehall, such as the Treasury, the Home Office or the Foreign Office.
What would be the result of this? It would mean the Treasury no longer holds all the leverage in budget negotiations, because the department would have its own settlement, rather than capacity begged, borrowed, or reallocated from the Cabinet Office whenever a crisis needs bodies pulled from strategic work elsewhere. It means a genuine career civil service track with officials who have spent decades building expertise in how government actually joins up, rather than special advisers and secondees who arrive with one Prime Minister’s agenda and leave with them. And it means real scale: enough people to plan as seriously as the Treasury plans, rather than a No.10 permanently outmatched by the very department it’s supposed to direct.
Burnham is not destined to fail. No Prime Minister is. But the test of his premiership won’t be whether he makes it through the short-term crises that fill the tabloids and broadsheets; the real test will be whether he spends this rare stretch of goodwill patching the same undersized machine every one of his predecessors patched, or finally does what none of them found the will to do. Right now, nothing is burning. That is precisely the moment to build because once something is, the same building, the same thin staff, and the same short runway that have defeated every Prime Minister before him will start defeating Burnham too. The blueprint is sitting there, unbuilt, waiting for a Prime Minister with the nerve to spend his goodwill on something more permanent than himself.
References:
- No.10 staff numbers (~250): https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/no10-downing-street
- Working with No.10 / unit structure (Policy Unit, Behavioural Insights Team context): https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/working-number-10
- Lloyd George’s Garden Suburb: https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/01/05/a-century-of-policy-advice-at-no-10-part-one
- Brown, Glasgow Airport/London car bombs, June 2007: https://www.npr.org/2007/06/30/11630460/glasgow-attack-linked-to-london-car-bombs
- Brown, foot-and-mouth and other early crises: https://www.museumofpm.org/prime-ministers/gordon-brown/