PopCon's resident renaissance man Swift explains the facts of life about Labour's 'mission-led government'

Way back in February 2023, Keir Starmer  introduced the concept of a mission-led government to a the world. Five missions, expressed in fairly vague terms (look them up, Swift can’t trouble to type them) would transform Britain. Woo-hoo.

Lots of the bien-peasants immediately swooned over this idea. The Institute for Government, which functions as a discreet mouthpiece for the things senior civil servants would like to say but can’t, thinks it’s a topping idea. Polly Toynbee, a sucker for anything technocratic and Labour, got very excited.

Swift - a former civil servant hisself - medium level, bad at it - has his suspicions that this is not such a brilliant scheme after all.

Let’s start with one odd thing. Presumably Sir K didn’t just decide on this in the bath one chilly February morning. After all, he’s got inside knowledge, having been a sort of civil servant and also employing Sue Gray - apparently as terrifying as Grendel’s mum in Beowulf - whose Cabinet Office career was a finishing school for what the pen-pushers call machinery of government changes. Then he had over a year to refine and plan.

Yet this careful consideration has so far led to the appointment of just one official to lead ‘mission control’ (yes really) on clean energy. Chris Stark is going to be ‘turbocharging’ (again really) this process.

But that was on 9 July. Since then, silence.

Put to one side the ridiculousness of a civil servant pretending to be Tom Cruise and turbocharging anything. Never gonna happen. Anyways, Ed Miliband has already turbocharged his department, unfortunately in completely the wrong direction, but at least there’s no doubting who is the organ-grinder and who the simian assistant here.

Where are the rest of these human dynamos? OK it’s been summer, but still. Wasn’t this government going to be maniacally active from the moment the starting gates swung wide open?

Swift can tell you, dear readers. He actually knows what’s happening, not on the basis of insider info, but from his long experience of Whitehall.

These missions are now mired in department turf wars. Energy was pretty easy. One department, one fanatical minister, job done. But when the other loosely-expressed missions are examined, hey, it’s not so simple. The machine doesn’t like cross-departmental working. Ministerial accountability gets muddled. Committees have to be set up. Confusion reigns. Who will take the blame if inconvenient facts get in the way? Who will claim the credit for a lucky hit?

In short, if the new government can’t even identify the figureheads who are supposed to implement this daft idea, it’s a sign that there are rumbles deep under the placid surface. There’s a reason we have departments, however useless they can be (hello, Home Office) - they tell you who’s in charge of the rattling train.

This delay is nothing to do with malignant civil service obstruction. Officials like this government, not because they are politically biased (although some are) but because Labour believes that public sector intervention is a good thing on every issue, and so do civil servants. It’s their raison d’être, their esprit de corps and every other French cliché Swift can summon to mind.

Gazing into his crystal ball, Swift can see the hazy shape of four years hence. The Mission Control balderdash will still survive in fossilised form. But power will seep back into proper departments and ministers - where it belongs. The Treasury will plant its immense jackboot on any missions that suggest lots of spending. It will win every time.

And then one day, dear readers, we will wake up and discover that it was all a dream.