In praise of plumbing

Why British politics' lack of interest in how things work explains why many things don't

Governments need to be good at three very different things. One is poetry – the big narratives, concepts, and phrases that give them definition and help answer why they are there. The second is the prose: the policies, laws and programmes that are what they do. And the third is the plumbing: the tools and methods that turn promises into results and are how government actually works in practice.

I’ve spent much of my life as a bureaucrat, and am now a professor in an engineering department. So although I’ve often worked on questions of imagination, vision and strategy I’m also interested in the boring questions of plumbing: the organisation of roles, structures, processes, money and data that make the modern state work.

But I’m increasingly struck by the absence of much interest in the plumbing either amongst politicians or in the media in the UK. You might say that’s just because plumbing is boring. But I don’t think that’s quite it.

In the case of ministers the avoidance of plumbing probably reflects the fact that so few have ever run anything. Backgrounds in law and politics mean that they have rarely had to worry about anything more than small teams (there are a few good exceptions, but not many). The result is lots of rhetoric about rewiring the state, or AI, but a glaring absence of plausible plans. Nigel Farage – who promised £150bn in efficiency savings - is an extreme example, but not really such an outlier.

The pattern is just as clear in the media. I can’t remember when I last saw anything serious about the ‘how’ of government in any of the broadsheets, or in magazines like the New Statesman or Spectator. Their centre of gravity is literary. On the rare occasions they turn to how governments work they commission writers to provide very broad brush commentaries untarnished by experience or deep knowledge.

DOGE exemplified the problem. There has been a flood of commentary on DOGE since it was announced, usually combining attack, horror and justified mockery. But it’s hard to find in this, or in the river of commentary columns that fill the media, any suggestions about what a government should do about efficiency and waste (which is one reason why I wrote this on ‘DOGE done better’).

When Boris Johnson was Prime Minister I wrote about the harm done by the ‘Spectator clique’ who then ran Britain. They prioritised words over action, witty commentary over deep understanding: a stark contrast with all the fields where Britain excels, from business and arts to science and sports, all of which take implementation seriously. And because so many of the decision-makers and advisers couldn’t be bothered to do their homework and think through how their ideas might be implemented (Dominic Cummings and Steve Hilton were prime examples of this syndrome), the quality of government deteriorated.

I hoped things would improve after the election. But I’m not sure they have. In the civil service, there have been many attempts over the years to make practical implementation a higher priority. As far as I can tell, things might have gone backwards: working well with Ministers and drafting White Papers may now be a better route to promotion than achievements in the real world.

And in the political class, there are probably fewer people than ever with experience of running things as opposed to commenting on them.

I think this is a problem for our political culture and for Britain’s future. It fuels an unhealthily distrustful relationship between ministers and civil servants: in private, and sometimes in public, ministers are contemptuous of civil servants, and civil servants are equally contemptuous of ministers.

Britain gets wonderful writing and a lively literary culture – but not very good government. Intellectuals know that they are much more likely to thrive with comfortable detachment, offering general commentary and critique, rather than getting their hands dirty with raw politics or social movements, let alone the practicalities of government (the London Review of Books is an extreme example of this, a ‘dinner party’ view of politics that’s elegantly untroubled by too much engagement with the real world).

Social media also amplify the trend: vivid images on TikTok count for more than credibility, let alone plans. As the US President exemplifies, if what you say matters more than what you do, you might as well appoint Fox News presenters to the Cabinet.

I would love to hear any editors justify why they are so uninterested in questions of plumbing. Perhaps they just think their readers will be bored. But we know that getting the plumbing right is vital to business; vital to infrastructure; vital to the practical challenges of using and not misusing AI; and vital to winning wars.

It’s surely not impossible to make it interesting. But at the moment this is a hole in our public discourse that contributes to the sullen mood of a country where too many things simply don’t work well.