With his ‘government of chums’, Cameron’s stumbled upon a good idea
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Version 0 of 1. Has appointment to the privy council become the poor man’s knighthood? Such is the conclusion that many have drawn after the election to Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council of Ed Llewellyn, David Cameron’s chief of staff, and Lord Feldman, the Tory party chairman. Barring a scandal of the sort that brought down Jonathan Aitken, their names will for ever more be prefixed in print with those eight magic letters: “the Rt Hon”. In an era of status anxiety, especially for those prone to such neurosis, appointment to the council is an easy way of scratching the itch. Related: Civil service unions attack high salaries for Cabinet advisers In this case – inevitably – it has added lustre to the notion that Cameron, the opposition leader who so deplored Tony Blair’s “sofa government”, has replaced it with a government of chums. Llewellyn is a fellow Old Etonian and long-time friend of Cameron: during the coalition years, the PM was known to snap at cabinet ministers who dared to question his chief of staff’s judgment. Feldman was on the Brasenose College tennis team at Oxford at the same time as the future prime minister. It is true that Cameron has had to be imaginative in his use of patronage. His instinct is to leave ministers in post for as long as possible – he has the same chancellor, home secretary and work and pensions secretary that he appointed in 2010, and only made a change at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office because William Hague politely insisted that he was ready to leave frontline politics in 2015. To signal his gratitude to George Osborne and hope that he may be the next Tory leader, Cameron gave him the additional title of first secretary of state: a mostly honorific status that nonetheless marks out the chancellor as the PM’s deputy when he is out of the country and, as much as any title can, his dauphin. In Cameronland, such signals mean a lot. The Tory partnership with the Lib Dems between 2010 and 2015 compounded Cameron’s ability to spread the privileges and perks of office around. So he has, for instance, expanded the category of those who “attend cabinet” without being fully fledged cabinet ministers: Lady Anelay, minister of state at the Foreign Office; Priti Patel, minister of state for employment; Anna Soubry from business, and five others. All are now PCs – privy counsellors – too. Feldman was on the Brasenose College tennis team at Oxford at the same time as the future prime minister The ceremony of admission to the council is memorably if sardonically described in Alan Clark’s diary for 1991, amid grumbling at his failure to be elevated to the Lords or get a “K” (for “knighthood”): “I stepped forward, knelt awkwardly on the stool (bloody difficult), held up the Testament in my right hand, and the dear old boy read out the oath. ‘I do,’ I said, firmly. I rose, advanced another ten feet diagonally to another stool, bowed, knelt, took the Monarch’s hand and ‘brushed it with my lips’; rose, bowed, back into line.” Like much in the British constitution, the council is archaic and creaky, but has somehow retained an aura that bewitched Clark, even as he sneered. Now, 24 years later, Lord Feldman attends “political cabinet” ex officio as Tory chairman, and so his appointment to the privy council is not surprising. Llewellyn’s elevation, on the other hand, was always bound to raise eyebrows. Membership is not meant to be a consolation prize for those awaiting higher honours, or a means of showing political gratitude after an election victory. Historically, the council is a link between monarch and subjects, a body of which the cabinet is the most significant sub-set. Most of its members are parliamentarians, but not all: the two archbishops of the Church of England and the bishop of London are members, as are justices of the supreme court, and other senior judges. Representatives of Commonwealth countries sit on the council. The crucial, under-acknowledged point is this: the sovereign may appoint anyone to the body over which she presides. At the heart of this minor squall about patronage lies a surprising lesson. There is no inherent obstacle to Cameron advising the Queen to appoint Llewellyn: no prohibitive convention stopping him making this recommendation to the monarch. For what it’s worth, my own contact with the PM’s chief of staff over the years suggests that he could be a potentially useful asset to its various committees. Llewellyn, a patriot first and a Conservative second, has an extraordinary depth of geopolitical knowledge, having worked for Chris Patten in Hong Kong and Brussels, and Paddy Ashdown in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The privy council is not a representative assembly: it is, at least in theory, a resource of expertise, wisdom and practical experience. To see it reduced to a club providing gongs to Friends of Dave would indeed be a demeaning spectacle. But there is no reason why every single new member from Westminster should be a career parliamentarian. Isn’t it ridiculous, for instance, that Gus O’Donnell, cabinet secretary from 2005 to 2011, and Sir David Richards, formerly chief of the defence staff – both now in the Lords – are not also PCs? Sometimes, good ideas are stumbled upon quite by accident. |