How many special advisers does it take to change a light bulb?
By: Gavin Freeguard
Tags: UK Politics, Uk Government, Special Adviser, British Government, British Politics

Review of ‘Special Advisers: Who they are, what they do and why they matter’ by Ben Yong and Robert Hazell (Hart). Originally published in The Political Quarterly, Vol. 86, №4, Oct-Dec 2015. The definitive version is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com. More on special advisers on the Institute for Government website.

‘Spad’ is one of the punctuation marks of anti-politics polemic, near onomatopoeic in the way it is spat out. This abbreviation for special advisers — temporary civil servants appointed directly by ministers — breaks up many a sentence about the decline of trust and increase in incompetence that supposedly define our democracy. And it brings down a sentence upon those doing the job: ‘a huge menace to democracy’ (Tam Dalyell), the ‘Hitler Youth’ (Peter Oborne), ‘the Achilles heel about this government’s neck’ (Michael Heseltine), ‘the rent boys of politics’ (Ken Follett) and ‘ranked somewhere alongside paedophiles in the lexicon of media opprobrium’ (Tony Wright) — all quoted by Andrew Blick in his history of special advisers, People Who Live in the Dark. The Spad synecdoche is Brownite bruiser Damian McBride, bad-news-burying Jo Moore (Moore’s actual quote was that it was a ‘good day to bury news’, rather than the oft-misquoted ‘bad news’) or fictional ‘Iago with a BlackBerry’ Malcolm Tucker: malevolent, Machiavellian, and forever manipulating the media.

‘Iago with a BlackBerry’: The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker. Photograph from PR Week.

Special Advisers: Who they are, what they do and why they matter provides a welcome corrective to this image. Ben Yong and Robert Hazell (with Constitution Unit colleagues David Laughrin, Peter Waller, Max Goplerud and Anna Sellers) shine a light on those ‘people who live in the dark’, as Clare Short put it, providing both a valuable overview and illuminating detail about the reality of special advisers. (They steer clear of the word ‘Spad’ except where used by others.) They answer four questions: why special advisers are appointed, where they come from (and where they go), what they do, and how their effectiveness could be improved. Having reviewed the evidence, the authors consider special advisers ‘indispensable to the way Whitehall works’ despite still being ‘treated as a transient phenomenon’: ‘[t]hey matter for positive, not negative reasons.’ This conclusion is quite distinct from the more populist view that special advisers are ‘at best a necessary evil and at worse a waste of public funds’.

Why appoint special advisers? According to one politician:

‘[T]he burden of modern government as developed in our country, the immense volume of papers, the exhausting succession of departmental committees, of party gatherings and meetings with outside interests make it almost impossible for [a minister] to carry out his departmental and political responsibilities and at the same time sustain a detailed analysis of all the various political nuances of policy.’

Those pressures have increased since Harold Wilson wrote that in 1974, through the changing nature of the British state, the media environment and revolution in communications, and the heightened expectations of the public (and ministers). As a result, Tony Blair more than doubled the number of advisers in 1997 to 73. But special advisers do more than help ministers to deal with overload: they are appointed for their ‘political nous rather than their technical expertise’. They don’t have the political restrictions of most civil servants; they do have the political history and links such that one Secretary of State said ‘[i]f they didn’t exist, you would have to invent them’. Coalition presents its own political challenges — there were 98 special advisers in October 2013, the government having sensibly dispensed with an earlier pledge to reduce the number.

In terms of who special advisers are, the authors have performed a valuable public service in not only collecting but publishing online the most comprehensive database of special advisers available. It may not be perfect in all respects (Cabinet Office records give different numbers of Policy Unit staff, for example), but we get a succinct, well-presented account of the stats. Special advisers are slightly older than the ‘teenybopper’ stereotype, with a median age of 33 upon appointment; more women have been appointed over time but are still in the minority; the number coming from a political background has increased with every administration from 1979 (part of a general shift away from business and academia towards politics and think-tanks); roughly 80% of them have an Oxbridge or Russell Group degree; and around half serve three years or less (usually with just one minister). After that, fewer than most people probably expect seek election in their own right: 12% stand, 10% are elected. But that 10% can expect a fast-track parliamentary career, with 80% of them making it onto the frontbench.

So much for the who’s who; what of the ‘what’? Despite the job often being defined by what it is not — by exemptions and limits — there is a long list of what it is. According to Yong, special advisers operate ‘as an “extra pair of eyes and ears”, as confidantes, experts, policy wonks, spin doctors, deliverers, apparatchiks, commissars or bag carriers’ and as ‘emotional as well as logistical support’. Andrew Blick, in his book, breaks them into ‘policy expert’, ‘presentational aide’ and ‘political counsellor’. Nick Hillman, in his Institute for Government pamphlet, In Defence of Special Advisers, classifies them as ‘policy wonks’, ‘spinners’ and ‘bag carriers’. Dominic Cummings blogs that ‘project management’ took up most of his time. And we could add political entrepreneur, bruiser, feather ruffler, kite flyer and cannon fodder. Chapters consider the job in the round as well as the communications and policy-making roles in more detail, giving a sense of the reality of the job and how it fits into government. This includes recognition that ministers and the Civil Service value special advisers — the ‘great majority’ of interviewees on both the official and adviser side were ‘generally comfortable’ about how everything worked.

But things could work better. The authors propose recommendations around greater professionalism (better management of special advisers), recruitment (proper job descriptions, more open recruitment, use of Prime Ministerial veto to ensure minimum quality), support and supervision (mentoring and clear management), induction and training (mandatory), and transparency (numbers, names, functions and cost). These thoroughly sensible recommendations are aimed less at the ‘accountability gap’ — ‘no one can effectively be held accountable for political advisers when things go wrong’ — than a ‘responsibility gap’, ‘in that no one is responsible for ensuring that things go right’.

Many might think these recommendations simple, and obvious for any organisation. But they are likely to be difficult to achieve given the pressures and practices of politics. Too often, politics is seen as so different from any other profession that entirely different rules apply: because of the nature of the job, the highly personalised roles, the overload, the stakes, the expectations, the public exposure, and the relentless and ever-contracting news cycle. Too often politicians are disciples of what John Dos Passos proclaimed the ‘gospel of energy’ — a belief that action in and of itself offers salvation and hours worked virtue, rather than actually stepping back, thinking about what you want to achieve and how. It should not be good enough to say ‘but this is politics, and politics is different’. Indeed, the pressures of the job and the enormity of what is at stake should make basic organisational practice — strategy, management, performance measurement — more important, not less. These debates will only intensify over the next few years: ministers are now able to build extended ministerial offices, and the Institute for Government and IPPR have argued ministers should be able to appoint more expert advisers (in return for greater transparency and accountability).

Trying to make sense of ‘the number and variety of people who thought they had a right to ask something of me’: former special adviser, Giles Wilkes, in his report for the Institute for Government.

The job of special adviser is, according to one, ‘a drug’: an exciting, important role where you can achieve more than many junior ministers. But it can also be a lonely and difficult place: where personal space disappears under the tyranny of the BlackBerry, that buzzing, blinking pocket panopticon; where your best work and your very being are subsumed into and entirely at the whim of another; where you plan to be working flat out but often end up working flat out on something completely different; where you are constantly torn between the needs (and judgements) of your minister, your department, your government, your party, the media and the public; and where the lack of training and basic organisation leave you underprepared for the experience. This also applies to political advisers in Opposition and parliamentary researchers on all sides; given the increasing percentage of special advisers coming from these ranks, this may be a subject deserving separate treatment.[1]

In the final chapter, Robert Hazell writes that ‘This book has been about the effectiveness of special advisers, but behind every page has been the wider debate about the effectiveness of ministers’. If special advisers are vital to the effectiveness of ministers and government, then ministers and government are vital to the effectiveness of special advisers. Any further increase in numbers means ‘the political parties and Whitehall will need to grasp issues about their recruitment, support and management, career structure and professional development which have been ignored for too long’. But politicians also matter in our perception of special advisers. Rather than artificial discussions — from all parties — about capping numbers, politicians need to follow this convincing and readable book in being honest about who spads are, what they do and why they matter. Far from ‘Spads’ being the anti-political problem, it is the partisan pettiness and unwillingness of politicians to explain the need for them — an unwillingness to stand up for politics — that is more likely to lead to a loss of faith.

Institute for Government. Gavin Freeguard was political adviser to Rt Hon Harriet Harman QC MP.

[1] (February 2020) The original draft of this review referred to Sadie Smith’s article, ‘The vulnerability of political staff should worry us’, in Total Politics as ‘giving a useful overview of some of the basic parliamentary staffing issues’. A lot more has been written since.