As a new set of ministers get used to government, their private secretaries will be crucial in helping them find their feet. Historian and former senior official Alun Evans discusses the changing role of private offices
She was famous for her ability to cope on just four hours sleep a night, but even Margaret Thatcher sometimes needed a catnap. Often she dozed in the back of her ministerial car – prompting officials to commission a special headrest to protect her from injury while asleep. But on one unfortunate occasion, after a particularly long meeting of European Community leaders, she fell asleep during a bilateral meeting with Irish prime minister Garret FitzGerald. Thankfully, her private secretary was on hand.
FitzGerald looked at Thatcher’s long-serving private secretary for foreign affairs Charles Powell, wondering how to proceed. Powell suggested that the taoiseach carry on, making all the points which he intended to make, which Powell would dutifully write down. They would then simply wake the prime minister up to make a joint press statement.
Powell worked in No.10 from 1984 to 1991, becoming in that time “one of the most powerful officials in Britain” according to The Intimacy of Power, a newly released book exploring the history of private offices in the last five decades.
The story of Thatcher’s catnap “shows how much she trusted Powell, but also how much he knew exactly her mind,” says Alun Evans, former senior civil servant and author of the book. “That’s very rare – it explains why he stayed [in Thatcher’s office] seven years and also why, bizarrely, she threatened to resign rather than lose him.”
The bond between Thatcher and Powell was rare in its nature – he notoriously became an influential and even a semi-political adviser, rather than a traditional private secretary – but it is far from the only example of how the relationship between a minister and their private office reflects and elucidates the workings of government.
Evans is well qualified to discuss the nature of these relationships. Not only did he complete his doctorate on the history of private offices (his PhD forms the basis of his new book) but he also worked as principal private secretary for three secretaries of state over the course of his career.
Alongside this, he has spent time working in the Cabinet Office where he observed closely “the most consequential private office” – namely that of No.10 – and he has, over the last decade or so, interviewed dozens of officials and the politicians they served to better understand what he terms the “unseen junction boxes” of government which connect ministers to their departments, and each other.
Through these interviews and archive research, Evans describes the general tasks of a private office – from diary management to organising red boxes and minuting decisions; explores the sort of people who have filled the top posts; and chronicles how these roles and structures have changed since the time of Churchill.
Along the way Evans has reflected on the qualities that make for a good private secretary (the ability to “work equally well for ministers of completely different political complexions” is key, he tells CSW) and what makes a successful private office. But he doesn’t see his examination of private offices as strictly prescriptive. For one thing, it is the flexibility of private office structures which has allowed them to adapt to things like the arrival of special advisers in the 1960s, or the informal working style of the New Labour team in the 1990s.
“We can’t go back to the 1950s when the civil service was dominant,” Evans says, “but it is still quite useful to see how things used to operate when the civil service was totally in charge, and to understand the benefits and disadvantages.”
Despite this caveat, it’s clear that Evans sees plenty to lament in the most recent developments that he writes about. The chapter covering 2010-2022 is titled “An Institution in Decline” and in the book’s introduction, he writes of Martin Reynolds, Boris Johnson’s PPS and organiser of the notorious bring-your-own-bottle party in Downing Street: “How was it that, during Partygate, the most senior civil servant in No.10, responsible for maintaining standards and the integrity of the office of the prime minister, ended up proposing a social event that would drive a coach and horses through the national guidance then applying to the activities of every citizen in the country?”
Given the recurring importance of individuals and their relationships in shaping how government works, CSW wonders how Evans views the balance of people and structures in Partygate. Was it just a case of the wrong people in the wrong place? Could things have been different if there were strong structures around those people?
“You have to be careful of saying structures can sort it out,” he replies, though he’s “instinctively sympathetic” to the argument. He goes on to say that he sees three factors which have led to the recent decline of the private office in No.10. Firstly, the fact that the last three prime ministers have each brought in their principal private secretary from a previous job, rather than retaining the existing No.10 PPS for a period.
“If you quickly pick someone who’s your mate, to paraphrase, you will not get candid advice”
“That, in my view, is totally wrong,” he says. “Not because they aren’t good people, and there may be something good in ministers showing loyalty to officials rather than blaming them, but if you quickly pick someone who’s your mate, to paraphrase, you will not get candid advice. You will not have someone, to take an extreme example, who will say: ‘These parties are verging on the illegal, you cannot do them, and they will look so bad if they get in the media’.”
In a reshuffle of his top team last week, new PM Keir Starmer replaced Elizabeth Perelman – the first female PPS in No.10, who was appointed by Sunak in 2022 – with Nin Pandit, who is now the second.
A second, related shortcoming is the recent degree of churn among private office staff, so “you don’t have the weight and knowledge that people will bring in if they have been in a job for five years”. Finally, he points to the growing number of special advisers in No.10, noting that the most recent Cabinet Office report on special advisers listed 41 under the prime minister. “This is not me saying the civil service is wonderful,” he adds. “I’m all for special advisers – they bring in a great amount of expertise, and ensure that the private office and civil service don’t become political. But you’ve got to get the relationship right, and if you have 41 spads in No.10 and, say, 10 or 15 people in the private office, the balance is gone.”
He also notes the growth in spads in certain ministerial offices is largely happening in an informal way – the official rule is still that there should be just two per cabinet minister. “But if you look at that Cabinet Office report, some ministers have four or five,” he says. “If you’re going to grow the numbers, that’s fine – some departments need more than two. But do it formally and openly.”
Has his decade of research and writing changed Evans’ view on his own time in private office? “I think I could have, should have, involved myself more in some of the policy issues. I believe it’s quite important for the private office to be more than just a post box: you do want a sort of challenge to policy officials, as long as you don’t end up with the private office making policy – the risk that you will end up with two sources of policy within a department is why I’m opposed to the idea of extended ministerial offices.”
He strikes a similar note when asked what he hopes those in government will take from his book. “I hope a minister might think ‘Am I using my private office to its maximum extent? Am I getting the balance of my private office, my official, senior officials, etc, and my special advisors working as creatively as possible?’” he replies, “and then I would hope that a civil servant, either one who was in the private office or thinking of going into it, would ask ‘What can I add to make it a more useful experience, both for me and for the minister?’”
“I’m all for special advisers – they bring in a great amount of expertise, but you’ve got to get the relationship right”
Despite the final chapter’s gloomy reference to a “declining institution”, Evans ends his book with an optimistic note. Private offices have always attracted the best civil servants “and will continue to do so”, he writes. Staffed by these talented people, the private office has adapted to many political contexts and been “for the most part” a benefit to the British constitution. “With flexibility, change and a recognition of the nature of today’s politics, it can remain so for many years to come.”
Speaking to CSW a few weeks after the election – and before Sue Gray's departure as Starmer's chief of staff – Evans is more specific about the big challenge for private offices at the moment: how well can they adapt to the new government?
“I think because Starmer was a civil servant and Sue Gray knows what’s going on, it should be easier than it has been under some transitions,” he reflects, but “the thing that private offices need to be wary about is trying to please ministers. You want to show you’re supportive, but ministers still want challenge, and it’s the duty of private secretaries to provide that.”
As well as documenting the history of the private office, Evans explores the role of private office experience in a high-flying civil service career (in 2020, 56% of departmental perm secs had private office experience) and analyses the backgrounds of No.10 PPSs since 1945. Unsurprisingly, the post-holders have been mostly men, mostly white, mostly Oxbridge graduates and mostly came from the same home departments of Treasury and the Foreign Office. Most have already had private office experience, or worked in No.10 in a different role.
One notable exception was Ken Stowe, who acted as PPS for three prime ministers in the 1970s, starting with Harold Wilson. Stowe was a working-class, grammar school boy who was a senior official in the health and social security department when Wilson chose him to join No.10. During his interview, Stowe protested to Wilson that he’d never been a private secretary, and had never worked in the Treasury. “The more he said that, the more Wilson wanted him,” explains Evans. “Wilson didn’t trust the Treasury, so he picked someone with, on the face of it, no relevant experience. It turned out to be a brilliant pick.”
This wasn’t the only time a prime minister’s distrust of different departments shaped his private office. In 1972, Edward Heath empowered his principal private secretary Robert Armstrong to negotiate with European officials during original talks to join the Common Market, for reasons Evans discovered while interviewing Amrstrong for the book.
“I knew that he had been involved,” Evans says, “but it was only when I [interviewed ] him that he said: ‘Heath didn’t trust the Foreign Office, so he asked me to do the negotiation.’ That’s quite something, actually, for a PM to say, so I went down to the archives and found a whole file, in which Armstrong noted ‘The prime minister asked me to negotiate personally with Pompidou officials and not to let the Foreign Office know’.”
“Nowadays,” Evans notes somewhat wryly, “that instruction might be on a WhatsApp message, rather than actually filed at Kew.”
The Intimacy of Power: An insight into private office, Whitehall’s most sensitive network, is published by CSW’s sister company Biteback