A weekday account of who moved desks, which sources agree, and why a style guide never gets a holiday
Friday, a Reshuffle Seen From the Stationery Cupboard
Every reshuffle produces two stories. The first is the one on the news, with arrows and photographs of people entering a famous black door. The second is the one nobody films: a junior member of staff in a corridor carrying a box of name plates and trying to remember which of them still applies. I wrote the first kind of story at the time in my reshuffle diary on who is in, who is out and which source says what. Today I want to write the second kind.
The even-handed approach to a reshuffle is to treat every claim as a claim until two independent sources say the same thing in the same week. That rule has saved me from more embarrassing corrections than I care to count. A rumour that three newspapers repeat has usually been told by one person to three newspapers. I check the first sentence, then the person who gave it, then the person who benefits.
The Seventh in Ten Years
The arrival of a new Prime Minister is a good moment to remember how many we have had. I counted them in a diary entry on the seventh Prime Minister since 2016 and the weeping style guide, and the number still surprises me when I say it aloud. Seven in a decade means the typical office holder has a shorter tenure than the typical sourdough starter in a London flat. The style guide on my shelf has been revised so often that its spine has the soft look of a book that has been asked to change its mind.
It is worth saying, in fairness, that a high turnover does not belong to one party. Every side has contributed to the count, and every side has explained at length why its own departures were principled and the others were chaos. Voters, I notice, do not tend to keep the distinction. They remember the number, not the explanation.
What the First Cabinet Said to Itself
My account of the first meeting of the new government is in a note on what the new government told itself at its first cabinet: cost of living, fiscal discipline and the instruction to show your workings. That last item is the one I would frame and put on the wall of every department. A government that shows its workings can be argued with, and a government that can be argued with is, on the whole, a better government than one that cannot.
Saturday, the Countryside Reads the Same Papers
People in towns assume the countryside lives on a different political planet. In my post bag, the argument in a farmhouse kitchen is exactly the argument in a Clapham kitchen, only with more mud and a better view. If you want to see the range of views, it is all there. farmer.gripe collects the complaints, which are many and precise. farmer.republican and farmer.democrat give each side of the American argument its own front gate, which seems the right way to run a political conversation: separate entrances, shared car park.
For the trade press view, farmpress.org is the place that remembers a harvest report long after the Westminster news cycle has moved on to something shinier. And for those who want to see how rural borrowing is discussed, there are corancher.loan, okrancher.loan and txrancher.loan, three corners of ranching finance where the word “interest” has no ambiguity whatever.
The Welfare Nudge
Meanwhile the London Prat ran a headline that captured the mood on the back benches rather neatly: Labour MPs Need Gentle Nudge on Welfare Reform. The word “gentle” is doing a great deal of lifting there. Anyone who has watched a Whip’s office at work knows that a nudge in Westminster can be applied with the force of a small tractor. The even-handed observation is that every governing party in my lifetime has needed such a nudge at some point, and every opposition has called it a revolt. The choice of noun depends entirely on which bench you are sitting on.
The Drawer of Name Plates
Back to the stationery cupboard. The drawer I mentioned at the start holds, I am told, plates for offices that no longer exist, plates with titles that were merged, and at least one plate for a department that was created and abolished inside a single financial year. It is the nearest thing Whitehall has to an archaeological site. Each plate is a small admission that government is a human arrangement, made of paper, brass and optimism.
I like the drawer because it keeps the whole business in proportion. A reshuffle feels enormous on the day. A decade later it is a name on a piece of brass in a box. What survives are the decisions: the roads built, the rules written, the numbers that either added up or did not. That is the part worth writing down carefully, and it is why I keep a diary and not a scrapbook.
Tomorrow I turn to the question of Whitehall efficiency targets, which have a habit of becoming new departments. Until then, I wish the new office holders well in finding their toilets, their staff, and their briefing packs, in that order.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, Newsthump keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/