The former cabinet secretary and head of the civil service on relations between ministers and officials, dealing with public criticism and his most enjoyable roles
Who?
Dr Simon Case joined the civil service in 2006, fresh from studying for his PhD under renowned Whitehall historian Prof Peter Hennessy. After posts in the Ministry of Defence, Northern Ireland Office and Cabinet Office – including leading the team overseeing delivery of the 2012 Olympics – he moved to No.10 as private secretary to David Cameron in 2012. In 2016, after stints back in the Cabinet Office and at GCHQ as director of strategy, he became principal private secretary to the prime minister.
In 2017, Case became director general for the UK-EU partnership at the exiting the European Union department, and later went on to become DG for Northern Ireland and Ireland. In 2018, he left the civil service to become Prince William’s private secretary, returning on secondment in May 2020 to co-ordinate the Covid response as a permanent secretary at No.10. Within a few months, he had formally become a civil servant again when he took on the cabinet secretary role, which he held until he stepped down for health reasons at the end of 2024.
Where?
Searcy’s Bar and Brasserie at Surveyors House, Westminster. Elegantly done British classics in refined surroundings, a short stroll from Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament.
We ate
Roast pumpkin and beetroot with pine nuts and sultanas; fillet of cod with shellfish sauce and Morecambe Bay shrimp; chicken supreme with brandy sauce and colcannon.
We discussed…
Anthony Seldon’s description of the cabinet secretary as “the nation’s chief worrier”
I would say that’s pretty accurate. As cabinet secretary, people ask you: “What’s at the heart of your job?” Well, the reality is, there will be 10 things going wrong. You’ve only got the time to deal with three of them a day. A good day is when you pick the right three. A bad day is when you pick the wrong three.
His proudest moments as a civil servant
Unfortunately for CSW readers, the proudest moments I ever had were on projects that still remain classified. But there are some that I can pick out. One of the very first things I did as a civil servant was to work on the 2006 white paper on the renewal of our nuclear deterrent. I’d not that long before completed a PhD on nuclear matters. It was my first really big project, and I think back with enormous pride on taking home the finalised white paper that Tony Blair, as prime minister, had announced at the dispatch box. Looking at his statement, you could point to parts and say, “Well, I did that bit.” It was that realisation – that as a civil servant I could do things which were of real strategic importance to the country.
It’s not uncommon for civil servants, at some point in their career, to become jaded and disillusioned. I think that often starts to happen when people can’t see the connection between the work they’re doing day in, day out, and real-world outcomes for government or the people of the country. I hadn’t planned to spend long as a civil servant but that project was one of those things that, very early on, got me hooked.
His most enjoyable roles
There are a few times that really stand out because it felt like the whole team was in harness. One was in counter-terrorism: I led a joint US-UK programme mandated by the president and the prime minister to fix a particular set of problems and risks that had emerged. It was amazing to feel the UK apparatus and then the inter-agency might of the US pulling in the same direction. Being an international team made it really very special.
A second one was when I worked on the Olympics and ended up running, briefly, the Olympic Secretariat. It was the last eight or nine months before the Games. We spent our time managing a whole range of issues, including G4S security guards suddenly disappearing and various bits of the M4/A4 infrastructure that now, every time I drive past them, give me PTSD as I remember the maintenance work that was being done and the worry over whether it would be completed on time. It was a team made up of private sector, public sector, local government and central government officials, in the bunker under COBR, which ran for months. We had to form the team and create our own culture and ways of working. And in the end, once the Games had started, the most difficult things that we had to deal with were utterly trivial compared to what we’d prepared for. But that was a special time. As a team we felt totally immersed in the Games, but of course we consumed relatively little of them, other than via TV screens in that bunker under 70 Whitehall.
The final time was being in Downing Street from roughly 2012 to 2016. The team was amazing, a great group of civil servants, fantastic special advisers, working with a prime minister who’d set clear direction. I remember that with real pride and sort of fondness, too. I’ve worked at the official-political interface many times, but that time stands out because it felt like a seamless team between political and official groups. There was a supportive culture: I know what your job is; I know what my job is; I’m going to trust and support you in doing yours; you’re going to trust me and support me in doing mine.
“I still to this day believe there were people better suited and better qualified to do the job. Most of them are now extremely grateful that I ended up with it”
His hardest day at work
It would probably have been during the autumn of 2020, just as the second wave of Covid was building. There were many difficult days then. We could see the data about transmission growing, the Covid cases, the hospitalisations beginning to rise. First thing each morning, we would gather with the PM and others to look through the data coming through from the NHS. At the same time, we knew an awful lot more about the damage of full lockdowns, as we were beginning to see the clear evidence of the damage done in society, the economy and in public services. So other meetings in those days would be about how on earth we would deal with unemployment, how we would get businesses back up and running, how we would deal with the rapidly growing backlogs across all of our public services. So facing the grim reality of another wave of Covid, whilst also knowing what further damage we would likely do with another full lockdown, made for some very, very hard days.
Whether the relationship between ministers and officials is broken
This is one I’ve thought a lot about, and obviously it was one of the key issues that constantly cropped up during my time as cabinet secretary. The first thing I would say is, I think there is a lack of understanding of the history that sits behind some of this. If you talk to serious people who were around in the time of Thatcher, for example, there were moments when it did not feel like those at the very top of politics had much time for the top of officialdom. And, again, I think people are probably choosing to forget what Gordon Brown did to the Treasury on his arrival in 1997 [sidelining top official Terry Burns, who retired the next year].
Of course, the difference between what’s happened more recently and then is that in 1997, changes were made over a few months, but the thing I think you have to reflect on is: is this fundamentally new, or is it the execution that’s new? Of course, the execution is extremely relevant to this debate, but I would still push back on the idea that friction between ministers and officials is new. Read Jock Colville’s diaries about Winston Churchill and you’ll see it. And while it’s true that the narrative coming from politicians about civil servants feels like it has grown consistently more hostile, I would also observe that the civil service itself, through various actions – many of them unauthorised – has become more vocally critical of ministers. I think that’s something else that’s not often focused on.
There are a whole bunch of reasons for that, including the way the media works today and societal changes around deference and those sorts of things. So while it’s not new, it has become much sharper, which therefore makes dealing with it much more public and much more accusatory than it used to be. Fixing this is something that requires determination from both the political and administrative classes – otherwise it won’t get fixed.
Whether the role of cabinet secretary should be split
My view is yes. I’ve argued it many times, including as part of the interview process for having the job, but I didn’t win the argument. It is – particularly in the context of crisis, which seems to have been our permanent state for the best part of a decade – too difficult to be the chief implementer and the chief adviser, and then also to be the person who is spending their whole day worrying about the health and direction of an organisation of half a million people. The two things require quite different skill sets.
Now, of course, those two things must be absolutely and intimately linked, which is always the argument as to why you can’t split them: that nobody will listen to the head of the civil service if they’re not cheek by jowl with the prime minister. But, of course, there’s no reason why the head of the civil service themselves can’t be a very senior adviser to the prime minister. That’s not difficult to arrange.
There are some of my predecessors who will admit in private that they were mostly head of the civil service and not cabinet secretary, because they didn’t have close relationships with prime ministers. They weren’t in the room for the big moments of advice or decision. They focused on the head of the civil service job and other people in and around No.10 were the senior advisers. People talk about it as if – “My God, that would be unconstitutional, historically wrong.” But for very large chunks of the existence of this job it was, in fact, split.
Misunderstandings about the cabinet secretary role
The first is the belief that you’re head of a partial – as in, the opposite of impartial – organisation. At the moment, that commentary mainly comes from the right, but probably for the majority of our history, it was coming from the left: the idea that the civil service is incapable of impartially implementing the will of the government of the day. I can see where this comes from. For example – no matter how right and well-meaning you think they are – if you have a civil service trade union launch a judicial review of a decision taken by the democratically elected government on a matter of significant public concern, it’s not then surprising that the government starts to think: “These people are obviously blockers and are unwilling.” People always used to say to me, “Isn’t the job of the cabinet secretary fundamentally to uphold the civil service code?” Now, the civil service code doesn’t say that; neither does the cabinet manual, but I would ask them what the civil service code was, and they would list the values. They rarely explained to me the civil service code itself, which says that civil servants are there to support the government of the day to develop and implement policy.
“It is – particularly in the context of crisis – too difficult to be the chief implementer and the chief adviser, and then also to be the person who is spending their whole day worrying about the health and direction of an organisation of half a million people”
Often our job is to point out the reasons why something won’t work, but a good civil servant will always propose a different way of doing it. And in doing that, you need a good relationship with the prime minister and other ministers to give good advice, both welcome and unwelcome. The other, more common, assumption is that the civil service are arbiters of matters of legitimate political debate. For example, during an election campaign, there is now a common habit of either the government wanting to push the cabinet secretary or permanent secretary forward to make the government’s case in some disputed area, or the opposition writing to the cabinet secretary or permanent secretary and saying, “Won’t you agree with me that this is totally outrageous?” Sometimes it may be a point of fact, and you can deal with that. But a lot of the time, it’s actually a matter of genuine parliamentary debate. Somehow you’re seen as the keeper of the right answer, which of course you’re absolutely not.
Whether he regrets taking the cabinet secretary job which, at the time, he said he didn’t want
I still to this day believe there were people better suited and better qualified to do the job.
Most of them, and they know who they are, are now extremely grateful that I ended up with it. It was never particularly my ambition to be cabinet secretary, and I still play over the conversations that I had with current and former colleagues at the time when they said, “You really need to put in for this because you’re the right person to do this now.” I was saying no to start with: “No, what about X? What about Y?” Then after several days of it I said, “All right then.” And I still think, “Gosh, how my personal history would have been different if I’d just held out a little bit longer…”
His advice to 2020 Simon Case
There are lots and lots of things that you’re aware of after the fact... I have found, in the weeks since I stood down as cabinet secretary, that I have been able to formulate far more answers to the problems of government than I ever seemed to be able to when I was in the job. That is two things. It’s time and space to think but secondly, what I’ve enjoyed is having time to speak to a number of people both within and outside of government, in the private sector and internationally.
The conversations that I’ve had have been so enlightening and so interesting, but of course it’s hard to make time to do those things, especially when you’re in the middle of a crisis, because you are just trying to put one foot down in front of the other to make sure you don’t fall over.
But even during Covid, it was helpful to make that time. This seems a strange thing to say, but I will be forever grateful that those terrible circumstances nevertheless put me into a world in which I spent so much time talking to Chris [Whitty, chief medical officer] and Patrick [Vallance, the-then chief scientific adviser]. They’re both enormously impressive individuals who I would put in charge of anything, anywhere. I have such deep regard for them. So there were times when we would find a moment to think and say, “Hang on, have we missed something here?” We didn’t do it enough, but it was great when we did, and I think it’s so important.
How he dealt with public criticism
You have to work out what matters and what doesn’t. I came from working for the royal family, where one of the many mottos is “never complain, never explain”. And the reality of being cabinet secretary is you have a very limited platform for explaining. Occasionally you get your voice – I chose to give a lecture once a year, and there are select committee hearings. But it’s difficult because so much criticism is driven by a media narrative. What you know on the inside is: “That’s not true, it has come from an inaccurate account.” But unfortunately, you just have to accept it. It is frustrating, though, and that was one reason I established the [internal] Civil Service Weekly newsletter – so we could talk to each other about the good things going on.
Whether he could have done more to publicly defend the civil service
I would always ask, “How does that help? How is that going to achieve the outcome that we’re looking for?” And that outcome is: getting more regard and support for the civil service from the political classes. How does responding in public deliver that aim? When we’re complaining about them taking it public, why would we fight fire with fire? Our job is to talk to them in private. One very frustrating instance was the infamous Jacob Rees-Mogg notes [when the then-Cabinet Office minister left notes on empty desks saying, “Sorry I missed you” as part of his campaign against hybrid working]. Of course, that was brought to my attention very quickly. So what you do is, you speak to the prime minister immediately, and the minister. You say, “This is not acceptable, stop it.” It never happened again. That was how you deal with it. How, exactly, does it help to go public and act like a trade union leader?
Trade union leaders operate differently and there’s a couple of them who do it incredibly well and very thoughtfully. And there are one or two people, like former cabinet secretaries, who can take to the airwaves to give an insight. That, in my view, is a better way of doing it. We debated it a lot around the permanent secretary table. Three or four times come to mind when we gathered people together and said, “How do you think we should address this?” There were always one or two voices for “attack is the best form of defence”, but in the end the majority view was, “If we start behaving differently in quite a fundamental way, effectively making ourselves a separate entity to the government of the day, are we not, in fact, starting to break our own values?” There were times when I did get very fed up and decided to swing – I think notably once at a select committee. And, actually, the sky didn’t fall in. But it was more out of frustration than a considered plan.
Criticisms around his lack of experience running a big department
I have only ever heard that criticism put forward by a very narrow subset of people, and never from anybody who’d been cabinet secretary or worked closely with one. The overwhelming majority of cabinet secretaries have never run big departments. No prime minister I’ve ever heard of, including in their memoirs, ever said, “I wish my cabinet secretary had run a big department.” I have more commonly heard a criticism, from other permanent secretaries and politicians, of cabinet secretaries who’d never worked in No.10 and therefore had no idea how the centre worked, so they didn’t know what their job was.
Changes to the regular “Wednesday Morning Colleagues” meetings of the permanent secretaries, and claims he had a bad relationship with perm secs
I never heard that complaint from inside government. Most of those permanent secretaries I had known for a very long time – we’d been friends and colleagues, including through difficult times. I came into Wednesday Morning Colleagues – in fact, it was my very first one ever – and said, “This is what I do know how to do, this is what I don’t know how to do. This is how I would like us to operate.” So that’s how we operated. We did 360-degree feedback, which came from permanent secretaries and was gathered anonymously by non-executives. More often than not, the feedback was, “It’s fantastic, Wednesday Morning Colleagues is now being used to talk about real issues, rather than it being another version of the Civil Service Board.” We were talking about the big challenges to the civil service, rather than a contest between permanent secretaries to demonstrate who could be cleverer.
“While it’s true that the narrative coming from politicians feels like it has grown more hostile, I would also observe that the civil service itself has become more vocally critical of ministers”
What I did, at the request of the heads of department, was to create a new regular meeting for just those colleagues, while continuing to have a full group with everyone at permanent secretary rank. The heads of department said, “First of all, there are now so many permanent secretaries it’s hard to fit them all in a room, and secondly, we need a space where we can have frank conversations as the leaders of departments.” I believe that model is continuing. Of course, some of the feedback you’re describing from the outside would come back to me, and what it proved was that we’d judged this correctly, because if some people were going outside and moaning about it, they were exactly the sort of people you couldn’t trust to be in the room. We did actually have a leak from Wednesday Morning Colleagues and we needed to deliver a strong message that it was unacceptable. Chris [Wormald] and Tom [Scholar] delivered that message – they said “we’ll lead the charge”. We never had a leak from HODs.
His new role as independent chair of the Barrow Delivery Board
Barrow-in-Furness is a special place for a number of reasons. It’s the home of production for our nuclear submarines – we built the first-ever British submarine there over 100 years ago. So it’s almost a national strategic asset, and personally I’ve also known it for many years through holidays in the Lake District. Just over two years ago, as part of more general work on defence and nuclear, I took a team of officials up to look at what more we could do to increase the productivity of the submarine factory and make sure the next fleet of submarines came out on time. That rolled into what we called “levelling up” work, because when we looked at productivity in the factory, inevitably, we started to look at the lives of the people who worked in the factory.
The regional team did a deep dive for us, and through that we discovered what I think were some of the most shocking, and quite frankly shameful, statistics in the United Kingdom. At BAE Systems, you had workers in some of our most highly skilled, highly paid engineering jobs in the country. Yet on all of the deprivation metrics – worklessness, health issues, educational standards, drugs – Barrow was the worst, or nearly the worst, in the country. It made no sense. The major part of the economy in Barrow was, in effect, guaranteed, but it wasn’t making a difference to the town. So I, and all the officials involved, became determined to correct this national wrong and put Barrow back where it belongs. To take all of Barrow’s pride and energy and change its fortunes for the future. We founded Team Barrow and got ministers – first under the Conservatives and then under Labour – to sign up for a 10-year, £200m transformation fund.
This mattered enormously to me, so it was really nice – as I was going out of the door as cabinet secretary – to be asked by that group of ministers: “You’ve been at the heart of this, will you carry on doing it in your afterlife?” I was very, very happy to say yes.
Shifting to one key focus after the cabinet secretary’s wide-ranging role
I absolutely love it, I have to say. At the heart of it, the methodology is very similar to working in No.10 or being cabinet secretary, which is: you can only achieve what you want to achieve through teamwork. But being able to focus, in a slightly obsessive way, on a single challenge with a 10-year time horizon… I couldn’t welcome it more.