Projecting power

How to organise centres of government

I wrote a piece on how centres of government could be better organised about a dozen years ago. It was obvious the centre of UK government wasn’t working well. Many others looked anachronistic too, often overwhelmed by the tyranny of the urgent rather than the important, and obsessed with tactics rather than strategy.

So the piece drew on lessons from good examples around the world, and a diagnosis of what Prime Ministers and Presidents need in an often turbulent world, surrounded by social media and distrustful publics and ever more complex systems around them.

The piece resonated with some leaders, and I then worked on implementing some of the ideas with several centre-left and centre-right Prime Ministers across Europe (all of whom went on to be pretty successful), and it also influenced a restructuring of the European Commission.

But none of its ideas was implemented in the UK. Now it reads like a critique of what went wrong under Keir Starmer’s first year. The paper highlights many of the things that often go awry when centres of government aren’t designed right or are missing key skills – a damaged relationship with the public; wrong timescales; lack of strategy; poor implementation; 20^th century media operations in a 21^st century social media environment and more.

We can’t afford government to be done in amateurish ways. Serious options need to at least be considered. I had intended to update the paper as it now seems likely there will be a fundamental overhaul of the centre of government after the errors of the first year. But apart from dialling up a bit more on AI and social media I couldn’t see much that was out of date so I’m resharing it here. It fits well with the broader agenda of ‘strength without weight’ since the ideal is a centre that is capable but not flabby.

The usual UK approach to thinking about reform of No 10 or the Cabinet Office is to interview lots of ex-ministers and ex-civil servants and then attempt to synthesise some conclusions. I think it’s better to learn from global experience, to work from first principles, and to take account of contemporary tools that are often different from those a generation ago. That’s what this paper attempts and hopefully it may be useful in many contexts.

The full paper can be found here: https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/rewiringthebrain.pdf