Francis Maude has hinted that he could carry on as minister for the Cabinet Office even after stepping down as an MP in May, saying the job "doesn’t require a seat in the House of Commons".
It has been reported that Maude, who has decided not to run again as Conservative MP for Horsham, is looking to take up a seat in the Lords and therefore continue in the Cabinet should the Tories lead the next government.
He made light of those reports in a question-and-answer session at the Reform think tank this afternoon.
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“It has been pointed out that the job I do doesn’t require a seat in the House of Commons,” he joked.
“I’m actually the longest-serving minister for the Cabinet Office, probably for ever, and I love doing it. There’s plenty still to do. So celebrations might not be necessary.”
The comments came in response to questions on Maude’s record as the minister responsible for the civil service.
While he quipped that he would not be making any admissions of failure “on the eve of an election campaign”, Maude claimed there was still significant work to do to change the "culture" of Whitehall.
“The biggest thing still to do is absolutely about the culture change and it’s always the most difficult thing to do,” he said. “And in the civil service - which is a big, complex, very devolved, dispersed organisation - there have been plenty of people who’ve tried.
“It’s a very helpful general maxim that you don’t change the culture by trying to change the culture, you change the culture by behaviour changes and incentives changes. So we’ve a long, long way to go.”
He added: “What I find with the civil service is the deeper you go - and a very senior Whitehall official said this to me - the further you get from Whitehall, and the deeper into the organisations, the stronger the appetite for change and the greater the impatience with bureaucracy and slowness and the features that we’ve talked about it.”