Christmas Quiz. What will Theresa May be looking for in a new First Secretary of State?

While most of us will have had a relatively relaxing festive season, the Prime Minister will have spent a least a proportion of her time pondering what to do after disposing of Damian Green as her First Secretary of State. Mr Green was an able and well-liked figure within the Conservative Party with whom she had been friends since their time at Oxford University together and he was loyal to her personally, yet drawn from a different part of the Conservative spectrum (the most liberal end), and he knew he had next to no chance of succeeding her if she fell under the proverbial bus. He was also regarded as highly competent and reliably sane as a minister (a disturbingly rare combination). It will be hard to find these qualities in whomever she appoints next, if she makes a like-for-like selection.
Does she have to have one?
She is under no obligation to do so. The position of ‘First Secretary of State’ is a strange one. It was invented in 1962 as a supplemental title for Rab Butler who had just become the Deputy Prime Minister (only the second figure to hold that title after Clement Attlee from 1942-1945). One might have thought it was pretty obvious that if a person was called Deputy Prime Minister then they were the first Secretary of State but apparently the additional emphasis was deemed to be essential. Yet barely a year after it was created, the position was abandoned when Mr Butler became the Foreign Secretary.
It was revived by Harold Wilson, who deployed it to indicate who was to be considered the de facto Deputy Prime Minister (but he never formally selected a de jure one). After his defeat in 1970, however, the ‘office’, if one can describe it as such, went it to cold storage for 25 years until John Major rediscovered it and bestowed it on Michael Heseltine in 1995, again as an addition to his becoming the Deputy Prime Minister.
Tony Blair dropped it in 1997 and entitled John Prescott as his Deputy Prime Minister but in 2001, for reasons that not entirely clear, brought it back again as an augmentation to the status of the Deputy Prime Minister. Gordon Brown, to start with, abandoned it again and did not elevate the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, to the standing of Deputy Prime Minister (which really irked her apparently) but in 2009 awarded it to Peter (the Lord) Mandelson in addition to his roles as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the (Privy) Council. This rendered his official designation a staggering 34 words long and placed him on 35 of the 43 Cabinet committees and sub-committees (and must have irritated Ms Harman even further).
In 2010, in an innovation, David Cameron opted to have both a Deputy Prime Minister (Nick Clegg) and a First Secretary of State (William Hague), who kept it even after he shifted from the Foreign Office to be Leader of the House of Commons in 2014. After Mr Hague left the Commons in 2015, the moniker was transferred to George Osborne. It disappeared when he was sacked in July 2016, only to be revived for Mr Green 11 months later.
So, she could well not bother with appointing a direct successor. There are, though, reasons to think that she will stick with it. This is because the sheer weight of Brexit on 10 Downing Street and the Government at large is such that there is a strong case for delegating part of the burden of the rest of domestic policy elsewhere.
The latest version of serving as the First Secretary of State has three aspects to it. The first, and by far the most important even if the least visible externally, is being a member of, and often either chairing or being on hand to chair, some 15 Cabinet committees and sub-committees. The second is being the so-called ‘Minister for the Today Programme’, the person sent on radio and television as the spokesperson of the administration. The third is deputising for the PM at Prime Minister’s Questions when Mrs May herself is absent. If there is a new Mr Green, it is likely that he or she will assume essentially the same responsibilities as he held for six months.
What factors will influence any choice of successor?
Whether the person concerned could actually do the above three roles with any plausibility will be the principal consideration (hopefully) but there are at least three other political considerations. The first is the extent to which the Prime Minister wants to preserve the present balance of the Cabinet between the old ‘Remain’, ‘Reluctant Remain’ and ‘Leave’ camps within it, or perhaps deliberately indicate a switch in the balance of forces in the aftermath of the agreement with the EU earlier this month to move on to a discussion of the transition and the long-term relationship.
The second element is whether Mrs May wants to use the existence of this vacancy in her team to have a wider rather than narrower reshuffle of her team or, alternatively, keep change to a minimum. The third is the extent to which she is comfortable or not having a FSOS who is perceived to be a credible alternative to her, or even a rival to her, as Prime Minister in a way that Mr Green was not seen as.
Who are the contenders?
The favourite with the bookmakers is Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary for the past five years. There is a logic in this. He is viewed as a capable minister, a safe pair of hands and a solid performer on the airwaves and in the House of Commons. He would be different to Mr Green, nonetheless, in that while the former FSOS was a staunch Remainer who continued to believe that Brexit was a terrible idea, Mr Hunt is a former Reluctant Remainer who has definitely defected to be a Latecomer Leaver since the referendum result was known. Choosing him would shift the balance at the top of Cabinet. He is also a viable contender to become party leader. All of this may count against him in the end.
There are a number of other candidates available. If Mrs May wanted to keep the current balance in Cabinet, select a person with whom she was very comfortable, confident of their loyalty (even though they could be a successor to her) and open the door to a wider reshuffle then she could tap Amber Rudd to move from the Home Office to be her de facto Deputy. The office she vacated could then, in theory at least, be offered to either Philip Hammond or (more likely) Boris Johnson on a raw ‘take it or walk out’ basis on the notion that it was sufficiently senior a berth to be hard to decline.
If the Prime Minister wanted to achieve much the same but without the slightest risk of appointing an individual whom the media would assert could succeed her then she may well select Greg Clark, the current Business Secretary, who is popular with colleagues but not regarded as a Prime Minister in waiting. He has the further virtue of sitting on almost all the Cabinet committees concerned already.
There are quirkier angles open as well. If the PM wanted both to indicate an evolving view on Brexit and to protect her own back then she could reach for Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary. He was a Leave supporter at the referendum and has been a close acquaintance for almost 30 years and is again considered to be solid with his brief but not cast of prime ministerial timber. Much the same would be secured by anointing David Davis, but whether now is the time for a new Brexit Secretary is debatable (and he might fancy himself as PM).
If loyalty is prized above everything else and she wants a person who would definitely not be a rival to her then an intriguing outside bet would be Patrick McLoughlin, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chairman of the Conservative Party, whose appointment would make sense if she emphatically did not want a wider reshuffle to occur. The drawbacks with him are that he would not be a compelling Minister for the Today Programme and, like her, he is politically tainted by the calling and the conduct of the 2017 election campaign.
Plenty to discuss, therefore, over the turkey and sprouts in the May household at this Christmas.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA