Kate Gross, a former senior civil servant and No. 10 private secretary to both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, died on Christmas morning, 2014, aged 36. She had been suffering from cancer for two years. In her final months, Kate had attracted attention and admiration as a fluent writer and profound thinker, via a beautiful blog, The Nuisance, and now a published collection of reflections, called Late Fragments. Between leaving Downing Street in 2007 and her resignation in March 2013, she spent five years as the founding chief executive of Tony Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), where her energy, organisation and creativity turned an idea into a successful and unique NGO.
Her life, and death, touched many, many people. Tony Blair has paid tribute to her work. Many who never knew her have been stunned by the beauty, bravery and unpretentious depth of her later writing – as a blogger, in newspapers and now, posthumously, as a published author. How can a piece for Civil Service World add to these impressive and heartfelt tributes? I was Kate’s colleague for just over a year in No. 10. Kate was a brilliant civil servant and I want to explain why.
“On PMQs days, she would race past my desk dozens of times to brief the prime minister. She was energetic, rigorous, probing, but always kind, understanding and friendly”
Kate started in the Home Office in 2000. After a stint in the Cabinet Office EU Secretariat and the No. 10 Policy Unit, she was promoted to the senior civil service (as probably its youngest female member) in the critical post of private secretary to the prime minister for parliamentary and home affairs in 2004. She excelled in the post, and was asked to stay on by Gordon Brown. Due to a variety of factors, she then took a career break that led to a Masters and subsequent work with AGI. But she returned to the civil service part-time in autumn 2013, using her insights to help BIS build a more diverse and confident leadership.
Talking to colleagues across her intense but tragically shortened career, there are striking themes. The process of preparing any prime minister for Questions is highly personal and incredibly important to that prime minister. It happens in real time and is hugely pressurised. It involves rooting around in the dustbin of government, asking departments to reveal those parts of the their agenda of which they are least proud, or forcing them to consider unpalatable perspectives on their flagship achievements. Kate’s approach was consistently and enjoyably collaborative. On PMQs days, she would race past my desk dozens of times into the PM’s study to brief him on a new angle or to answer a question he had raised. She was energetic, rigorous, probing, but always kind, understanding and friendly.
Kate’s formidable organisational skills (she self-deprecatingly called herself a control freak) and power of recall were as crucial to her work on PMQs as her ability to work with teams and departments. But these qualities were also vital for supporting two prime ministers on some of the highest profile and most intractable political questions of the day. Kate served in No. 10 across four home secretaries, and advised Tony and Gordon on issues from the 7/7 bombings to foreign national offenders to immigration with creativity, forensic accuracy and astonishing insight. She inspired deep confidence and great respect from the expert communities beyond the famous front door. It was thoroughly deserved.
Kate’s decision to join the civil service was not at all inevitable. She loved beauty in the written word, and looked for it in everyday life. She did not find much glamour on arrival in the civil service. But she found a strength of values to which she could relate and which she came to exemplify. Northcote and Trevelyan would have been delighted to find that their legacy was an official of her efficiency, objectivity, expertise and impartiality, even if surprised to find it represented by a young woman. Her drive to make people’s lives better – and her ability to do so – marked her out as exactly the sort of public servant we need. We are very sad to have lost her, but can honour her memory by promoting the values she stood for.
Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) by Kate Gross is out now, published by William Collins