Reorganising Whitehall, the sign that a government is fresh out of ideas

Boris Johnson’s decision to create a superdepartment is more out of hope than experience, writes Sean O'Grady

PM says his merger has ‘megawattage’ to energise British interests (Reuters TV)

In Whitehall, with a weary contempt you can almost sense, they call it a “MOG” – when a government fresh out of ideas (pathetically) decides to try to invigorate itself by reorganising the “machinery of government”. Nothing of substance usually attaches to such rearrangements of the bureaucratic furnishings, and none is expected by the officials closest to the changes of brass nameplates and notepaper. They just get on with it.

Many think that of the decision to fold the Department for International Development (Dfid) to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Much trailed, the departments already share ministers of state, and the aim of better promoting the British national interest is well known. Will the new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), led by Dominic Raab, break the pattern of pointlessness?

The only memorable MOG in recent decades was when Gordon Brown became prime minister and wanted to create a new Department for Productivity, Enterprise, Innovation and Skills, which would have been known under the snappy and virile acronym PEnIS. It was dropped, but whether it was called the Department for Trade and Enterprise, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy or indeed the PEnIS, it has made little difference to the trend rate of UK growth.

Past exercises in having “overlords” for clutches of ministries, large departments such as the old Department for Health and Social Security (DHSS) or John Prescott’s Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions mostly failed to deliver their fabled synergies and streamlining. Such ideas have come and gone in cycles, like the fashion for flares or Doc Martens.

More out of hope than experience, then, Boris Johnson did his best to try and sell the merger of his new “superdepartment” as possessing vast “megawattage” to energise global British interests, FCDO.

Yet the prime minister only sounded half-convinced by the scheme, and some of his arguments sounded like the FCO was just fed up with Dfid giving mixed messages to foreign governments and spending too much money on countries of little strategic value to the UK.

Mr Johnson hinted at a return to the mind of “tied aid” (ie to orders from British companies), now internationally frowned upon. Mr Johnson even complained about how much more of the Overseas Development Agency was being devoted to Commonwealth states (and former British colonies) such as Zambia and Tanzania rather than the likes of Ukraine or Bosnia. Perhaps inadvertently he thereby confirmed that the British priority for overseas aid will henceforth be about geo-political and security considerations rather than development and the UN Millennium Development Goals which were dismissed as outdated. A few tributes to its hard work and dedication on Ebola, Syria and polio and Dfid was given its last rites. No longer would it be what Mr Johnson called “a giant cashpoint in the sky”.

More than most, Dfid, and its predecessor, the Overseas Development Ministry (ODM) have been subjected to such pointless reshuffling. The ODM was created by the Labour government in 1964 as a separate Department with its own cabinet minister, the dynamic Barbara Castle, so that it would have the status and freedom to do its job better. In her words, “as a guarantee that overseas aid was no longer a charitable donation from rich to poor, but as an essential motor to works development”. It was based on a Fabian pamphlet published in 1960. The job, still part true today, was to economically support some of the newly independent states that had previously been overseen by the Colonial Office, because some poorer former bits of the British Empire such as Malawi and Guyana simply couldn’t function without aid in some form.

The ODM, remained a separate department until it was pushed back into the FCO in 1970. It then re-emerged in 1974, was taken over again by FCO in 1975, where it stayed until it was rebranded and relaunched under Clare Short as Dfid when New Labour arrived in 1997. The promise was made to push aid spending up to the UN target of 0.7 per cent of national income. That was eventually reached under the Coalition government in 2013.

Throughout that time Dfid/ODM continued its work and the pattern was that it would usually fail to live up to the best hopes of it, be perpetually vulnerable to cuts in public spending (though less so since the budget was ring fenced by David Cameron in 2010. Some ministers such as Castle, Short, Chris Patten, Hillary Benn and (briefly) Rory Stewart were effective or capable. Yet, in the inimitable words of the historian Peter Hennessy, “Labour salves its conscience by recreating it as a separate ministry, usually, though not always, with its minister in the cabinet, in the full knowledge that the returning Conservatives will return it to dominion status within the FCO”.

Its largest commitment was traditionally to India. As a result of India’s rise to economic superpower status, including a space programme, and stories of scandals the aid budget has come under increasing attack from the media and the political right. In an imaginative move. Theresa May appointed Priti Patel to run it in 2017, even though Patel had advocated abolishing the Department and later secretly discussed with Benjamin Netanyahu using British development aid to help fund Israeli field hospitals.

The Conservative manifesto of 2019 stated: “We will proudly maintain our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on development,” which seems firm, though of course no provision was made for a steep drop in the economy. What is still unclear is how much no-strings aid to the poorest countries will soon be switched to more politically useful ends in, say, Eastern Europe.

More distantly there is the prospect, linked to Dominic Cummings and some Tory MPs such as of going further, and cutting right across archaic departmental lines to create task forces within even bigger combined industries. In this scenario the Foreign Office, Dfid, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Trade would be melded or mashed together into one strategically coherent, albeit tricky to manage, grouping. Soon we may see the arrival of FCDOMODDIT. That would be the MOG to end all MOGs.