I love Rory Stewart’s memoir about being a politician; its one of the best books I’ve read about British politics. Among his many observations about the dysfunctionality of government is that ministers typically know nothing about their briefs prior to taking their jobs, and don’t stay in post long enough to get any command. There may be worse examples than Education, but I doubt it. The advice is to the newest Secretary of State for Education is simple: before you do anything significant read my dad’s last book, and spend a week talking to some of your predecessors (particular recommendations below).
Now some facts:
{ 13 comments }
Matt Lister 07.22.26 at 10:53 am
an average of about 16 months each
Do you think this is because people don’t really want this job, and hope it will lead to somewhere else (and so, if that doesn’t look likely, leave it), or because it is extremely and intrinsically difficult, and so both hard on the person and likely to be bad for their career, even if they would like very much to do well at it, or because it’s where you send someone who you have to give a job, but don’t really like, or something else? (I guess the most likely answer is “a mix of those things, plus some other things”, but I am curious as to what you think the most common or main reason is, if there is one.)
Harry 07.22.26 at 2:32 pm
People who get the job tend to be on their way up, so they do want it, but don’t really want to keep it (and two of the exceptions, Keith Joseph and Michael Gove were people you didn’t really want in it!). I think most cabinet level jobs have the following feature: you can be very good, do them well, and then get sunk by something that you really don’t have much control over, and that is certainly what happened with Estelle Morris (who resigned, claiming she wasn’t good enough to do the job, because she is humble and has excessively high standards for herself). But I also think PMs don’t take it seriously in the way they take Defense, Justice, and Health seriously (these seem, to me, to be a similar level of importance), and so see it as a ministry through which they can cycle people. (I’ve just checked, though, and there have been 38 Secretaries of Health since 1944 (and 38 terms), so really not much different).
engels 07.22.26 at 5:04 pm
UK also had 6 PMs in the last 10 years: a similar throughput, if school maths isn’t letting me down.
Given the incessant changes of direction, ineffectiveness might well be a blessing, for teachers and maybe the rest of us too.
Adam C Roberts 07.22.26 at 5:53 pm
The minister has to handle primary and secondary education in the UK, which is where the majority of voters are engaged (as parents), but also has to handle tertiary education, where I work, and where the challenges and difficulties are very different. The UK university sector is in dire states at the moment, and none of the recent secretary of states for education have a good record where it is concerned.
Harry 07.22.26 at 7:01 pm
Actually they only have England to deal with now — education is devolved to the nations. Tertiary is extremely challenging, and much more unlike primary and secondary than any prospective Secretary of State understands. By and large the cabinets’ experience of tertiary is of the most elite parts of higher education, and that is where their SPADs and policy advisers come from and/or are located. The university sector (the dire straits of which could be mitigated, though only mitigated, by some simple, politically cost-free, measures like not counting international students as immigrants) aside, when they talk about FE and vocational education you get the feeling that you are back in the late 1970s, except that in the late 1970’s ministers didn’t have 50 years of groundhog days to learn from.
Harry 07.22.26 at 7:08 pm
This might not be a popular take, but I liked Angela Rayner as shadow secretary, not just because she is very smart and capable and from Stockport (all plusses in my view), but also because leaving school at 16 gives her a distance from the education system that enabled her to see it more clearly. I don’t want to suggest she’s in the Barbara Castle stakes (who is? possibly AR actually, but I’m not suggesting it!) and the analogy is highly imperfect, but maybe not spending too much time in school is to the education brief as not driving is the transport brief.
D. S. Battistoli 07.23.26 at 5:21 am
Harry @2:
I believe the best test for your thesis would not just be how many people have been health, education, defense, or foreign minister, but how many people have occupied those posts and subsequently occupied another cabinet post that is more senior. For people who occupied a given post <24 months before a change in majority control in the commons, you could also look at whether they subsequently occupied a shadow-post more senior. Anyway, that’s a rough sketch of what might be a more robust test, though it might exclude people whose ambition exceeds their reputation.
Alex SL 07.23.26 at 10:13 am
The theory in politics is, to my understanding, that the lack of expertise in members of cabinet doesn’t matter because they can rely on career bureaucrats to provide advice. That only works, of course, if they are willing to listen to the bureaucrats when the latter say “what you are trying to do cannot work”. We saw how that went with Brexit, but the same applies to education ‘reforms’. The idea that experts are the Deep State and trying to prevent the obviously good thing from happening is very popular today, especially with the kind of voter who also believes that most of the taxes go to a line item conveniently labelled “unnecessary government waste”.
But there is a broader problem here, beyond the highest level of government. The higher up you go in a corporation or in public service, the more expertise is considered fungible or perhaps even entirely irrelevant. There are people who go through roles in the C-suites of a Silicon Valley startup, a research agency, and a publisher; others may have been union leader, then career politician, and then become university president after losing an election. Is a startup co-founder qualified to lead a research agency? Is a politician who was shadow minister for welfare qualified to lead a university? Of course not. They have no clue what they are doing beyond adding “disrupted the last organisation I led” to their LinkedIn profile.
I do not believe that people at that level even understand the concept of being qualified for a role. What they judge each other on is knowing the right people, saying the currently required buzzwords (blockchain! AI! quantum!), keeping the plebs in their place, and not being gauche enough to point out each other’s past failures. The really dangerous aspect of this is that they may think that everybody else is also fungible and start managing, downsizing, or restructuring the organisations they are leading under that assumption. This leads to the callous firing of employees who have highly specialised skills or carry decades of irreplaceable institutional knowledge.
Not that it matters to those alleged leaders, because even if they leave chaos behind, they will easily get the next equivalent role. Because, as mentioned, all that matters is knowing the right people, and that they do.
superdestroyer 07.23.26 at 10:16 am
Education administration and policy are where politicians go to end their careers since doing education policy and administration requires one to deny that people fall long as S-curve. Most of the ambitious one’s know to get out of education as quickly as possible while doing as little as possible.
Sophie Jane 07.25.26 at 9:29 pm
Might be nice to have one who doesn’t want schools to systematically misgender and harass trans kids too – but that’s hardly likely under the current Labour leadership
engels 08.02.26 at 11:07 am
I liked Angela Rayner… because leaving school at 16 gives her a distance from the education system
By this logic, Gillian Keegan would be the G.O.A.T., which I think is at least questionable.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/gillian-keegans-worst-gaffes-schools-30865077
engels 08.02.26 at 11:19 am
Albeit not to Gillian Keegan.
engels 08.04.26 at 9:29 am
As someone who used to live in a council house* Angela Rayner understands the importance of affordable housing… for AIs.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/04/brick-lane-redevelopment-approval-datacentre-london
before she bought it, sold it for a profit and avoided capital gains tax
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