Ministers reflect Lord Maude June 2016 2 Francis Maude – biographical details Parliamentary History 2015-present: Conservative Member of the House of Lords 1997-2015: Member of Parliament for Horsham 1983-1992: Member of Parliament for North Warwickshire Government and Opposition Career 2015-2016: Minister of State for Trade and Investment 2010-2015: Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General 2007-2010: Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office 2005-2007: Chairman of the Conservative Party 2000-2001: Shadow Foreign Secretary 1998-2000: Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 1997-1998: Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and Shadow Deputy Prime Minister 1990-1992: Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1989-1990: Minister of State for Europe 1987-1989: Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Trade and Industry) 1985-1987: Assistant Whip (HM Treasury) 3 Francis Maude Lord Francis Maude was interviewed by Peter Riddell and Nicola Hughes on 1st June 2016 for the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect Project. Nicola Hughes (NH): You first became a minister in the ‘80s. What was your experience of coming into government like then? Lord Maude (LM): I was given a departmental job. I had been a whip and a PPS [Parliamentary Private Secretary] before then, very soon after getting into the House at all. So I received a phone call, actually, because I was up in my constituency, in Warwickshire. I didn’t even know what job I had been given. So she [Margaret Thatcher] said, ‘I want you to go and be Parliamentary Secretary in the DTI [Department of Trade and Industry]’ and I said ‘Well, lovely, thank you, really pleased.’ I was 31 or 32 and a bit scared, frankly. I just about worked out that the job I had been given was Michael Howard’s job, which was fabulous – one of the best junior minister jobs in the government. So I didn’t really know which office to phone up. It was very funny actually – I had guessed it was Michael, so I found Michael’s office number and phoned it. Someone answered the phone and then I heard her saying ‘What is the name? What is his name?’ [laughter] I said, ‘That is me – I think!’ The best preparation you can have is to be PPS to a busy minister who lets you get involved. I was PPS to Peter Morrison [then Employment Minister], who was a hugely detail-oriented, hands-on and very effective minister and when I was his PPS he basically said to me, ‘Here is my diary, you can come to any meeting you want’, which was fantastic. So I had a real insight into how government worked. Then as a whip, I was in several quite busy departments, and you get a good sense, a better sense there of how it is all working – otherwise you have to pick it up as you go along. Things were a little bit more collegiate then, I think you talked to other ministers more than people do now perhaps, because you had more evenings in the house, so there was more gossip, more chat. So you pick up more in that informal way, but I had no formal induction at all. NH: And if we fast-forward to 2010, of course then the party was coming in from opposition; most people hadn’t had the chance to be whips or PPSs before. So how did you think about induction for your ministerial colleagues at that point? LM: Well, we did some induction, but it wasn’t immediate. We did some here at the Institute for Government [IfG] and we came back and did some more – and actually, I organised a formal induction session every reshuffle after that. I think departments have got better at providing some formal induction into the departments, but that is a little bit different from preparing people for what they are going to experience as a minister. Peter Riddell (PR): What were the lessons you drew from your experience in the 90s, from when you were in charge of the 2009-10 preparation [for government] and implementation? LM: Good question, what lessons? I think it is useful to have some induction. Because in ‘87, I came into a departmental job when the Thatcher government was well under way and the Civil Service was – while not necessarily reconciled to – at least acquiescing in the fact that we were there to stay. So in 2009-10 we knew we needed to do more on induction. I was reasonably familiar with what Labour had done before ’97, and so we organised the contacts with permanent secretaries in a much more systematic way than had been done before. I oversaw all of that, and with the implementation unit we set up, we prepared implementation plans. 4 Ministers reflect PR: But how successful do you think it was in terms of – you say implementation plans, in terms of preparing your colleagues, particularly those who hadn’t been ministers, who hadn’t been around in the Thatcher years, for office. And when you look back now, six or eight years later? LM: It beat the hell out of what had been done before, but it was still gravely inadequate, because a lot of people had absolutely no idea what to expect. I think it was much worse for the Lib Dems, who weren’t even expecting to be in government. We had done preparation sessions with the IfG and Michael Bichard, who was then running it, basically said ‘We think it is totally in the national interest for you guys to be as well prepared as you can be and we will do anything to help. Tell us what you want us to do and we will do it.’ So that was very, very good and I think so much better than anything that had happened before – but it was still thin and not everyone, by any means, attended those sessions. Of course, you also had a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who had never been ministers, although they had been in government as special advisers, which does give you a big advantage because you know a bit about the dynamics, the structure and how things work. I remember when we had the first session here, which was probably not until September, and I thought it was important that it got presided over by a senior minister, so I was there throughout all of these induction events. I remember one of the very good Lib Dem ministers – Nick Harvey1 – who was very funny, saying ‘I felt like I had been dropped by parachute, deep behind enemy lines, with no means of contacting anyone, no idea what the strategy was, no idea what I was meant to be doing!’ PR: I actually remember his saying that. We have interviewed him for this series, actually. NH: And between the two periods, what were the big differences or changes you observed in Whitehall, in government? LM: I think the Civil Service had deteriorated really quite a lot. Not in terms of ‘laziness’ and that Blair politicised it, as people normally say – he didn’t politicise it and my concern with the Civil Service has never been that it’s been politicised. It still has some brilliant people, absolutely some of the best civil servants in the world, who are capable of doing some amazing stuff. What also got better, which most ministers would not see, but has been my interest, were the functions: you had people who had at least some commercial or financial background in those roles – whereas 30 years before, it would have been generalist civil servants who were told ‘It’s your turn to be head of finance.’ So all of this was a little bit better than it had been. However, I think the habit of giving very robust, candid advice to ministers had deteriorated a lot in those intervening years of Labour governments, and that is a cultural thing. PR: Not to do with the capability of people, but because of the changed environment over those 13 years? LM: I don’t know what it was – I absolutely don’t know why. There is a lot more parading of the importance of, you know, speaking truth under power and values and all that kind of stuff. But in terms of actual behaviour, the way people behaved was – it sounds like I am criticising everyone, inevitably I am not, the balance was just different. Civil servants had got much less good in the intervening period at accommodating difficult people, people who are a bit quirky, a bit maverick, maybe a little bit eccentric or disruptive. And during a period when disruption has moved from being a bad word to being a good word, the Civil Service contains a lot fewer people who are disruptive in that good sense. 1 Nick Harvey, 24 June 2015, Ministers Reflect Archive, Institute for Government, Online: www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/ministers-reflect/person/nick- harvey, Accessed: [Download Date] 5 Francis Maude PR: I mean on that – it is very interesting – how did your views of the civil service evolve in 2010 and 2015 particularly, during that Cabinet Office period? LM: They went downhill a lot. Although again, I have to say that at every stage there were some brilliant people who worked for me and I saw some superb civil servants – in fact I was mocked by some of my colleagues, in the run up to the election and soon afterwards, for being a fierce advocate for the existing system. I have said in the past that the idea of a permanent, impartial civil service is an excellent one, that it has served the country well and that all you need is good ministers to make it do what you want it to do.