How a New Labour guru wants to achieve ‘ambitious and challenging things’ for a Tory government

One of Tony Blair’s top advisers is now helping Boris Johnson, and has written a book about the kind of advice he is giving. John Rentoul spoke to Sir Michael Barber

Boris Johnson in a B&Q in Middlesbrough yesterday, trying to ‘level up’ the country (Getty Images)

Sir Michael Barber, who advised Tony Blair on how to make public services work better, is now back in 10 Downing Street, trying to help Boris Johnson deliver the changes he has promised. I spoke to the former head of Blair’s delivery unit this week about advising prime ministers and about his new book, Accomplishment, which sums up the lessons he is trying to apply at the heart of government.

One of the reasons he wrote the book, he says, is simply that it is “fascinating to see this pattern of accomplishment occurring again and again, whether it’s Picasso painting Guernica, or Tony Blair reforming the education system, or Justin Trudeau reforming Canada, or Galileo looking for the mountains on the moon and proving Copernicus right, or Jane Mellor, a brilliant scientist, learning about gene expression”.

But another reason is the need to understand how to overcome the obstacles to worthwhile achievements. The subtitle of the book is “How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things”. He says: “While the argument is that anybody can accomplish these great things, nobody should be under any illusion that it’s easy – I write about Dennis Bergkamp practising kicking the ball back and forth against the wall and how long it took him.”

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In that sense the book is a sort of motivational self-help manual for would-be high achievers, but it is also a guide to what we can expect Sir Michael to be advising the government. “If you read Boris Johnson’s speeches, and he did some interviews over Christmas and the new year, he sets out a pretty clear agenda of what he wants to achieve once the pandemic is over: making progress on net zero and green energy; levelling up the country and uniting it; and getting people back into work. So the agenda is there,” he says. “What they need is to build the capacity in the civil service and the government to deliver that agenda in the remaining three and a bit years of the parliament.”

How does working for the Johnson government compare with his work for Blair, or his work in Canada, Australia and Pakistan? “Two things that struck me as significantly different from the Blair days, which are not to do with people and party politics, they’re to do with the changing nature of government. One is: it’s really striking that in the Blair delivery unit we were focused on health waiting times, school test results, making the trains run on time and reducing crime – those fitted neatly into one department each.

“What’s true now is that the priorities are all interdepartmental. Net zero is several departments; getting people back to work is several departments. And that mirrors what I’ve seen in Canada and New South Wales, where the goals being set by leading politicians are rarely single-department issues. In Canada it’s carbon pricing, green energy, equity and diversity, and building infrastructure across Canada. In New South Wales it’s reducing childhood obesity, and one of their targets is ‘towards zero suicides’. That’s a big change from 2001.”

The second big change, he says, is that foreign policy used to be a separate domain from domestic delivery. “Now if you take the agenda – vaccines, 5G, digital, net zero – in each case there’s a major domestic policy commitment, but each has got huge foreign policy implications.”

Several of Johnson’s other targets, however, are firmly domestic and are an echo of the New Labour pledges that Sir Michael worked on 20 years ago: the manifesto promises of more nurses, more doctors and more police. Here, as he reinvents the wheel, Sir Michael is keen to focus on what the targets are for: “It is clearly the case that more police officers are needed, and I think it is a really good target. But then there’s the second question, which is what difference is that going to make? In the end you want them to actually do things that help reduce crime and make people feel safer.”

Trying to restore the NHS to the glory days of the late New Labour period, when extra resources and some reform cut waiting times and raised patient satisfaction to record levels, has been made harder by the coronavirus crisis. But Sir Michael is undaunted, and points to an unexpected effect of the virus in encouraging change in the NHS: “One of the things that’s interesting about the pandemic – obviously there’s the backlog, but there’s also been some great innovation happening. People won’t go back to doing things exactly as they did before. GPs are doing appointments on Zoom, which saves time and gets more people through, so there’ll be lots of innovations that need to be built on, to provide the opportunity ultimately not just to recover from the pandemic but to do better than we’ve ever done.”

Sir Michael is one of the less-sung heroes of the New Labour period, a quietly inspirational leader who has thought more deeply than most about how to make government work. When he talks to our students at King’s College London, he delights in teachable paradoxes. (“The whole point of setting a target is to distort activity,” he explained once.) His books, Instruction to Deliver, How to Run a Government and now Accomplishment are full of unexpected insights and personal anecdotes. This latest book covers a broader canvas, telling stories about high achievers from the fields of sport, music and science as well as politics.

But it did make me wonder, do you not have to be an exceptional individual to achieve exceptional things? As an exceptional individual, Sir Michael has an unusual answer: “The truth is, given the challenges facing humanity which I come to at the end of the book, like climate change, the digital explosion and genetic engineering, there’s a lot of things we collectively as humanity need to think through, so the need for accomplishment is as big as the opportunity for accomplishment, and I hope it’s not about exceptional individuals – or maybe it’s about everybody being able to become an exceptional individual.”

Sir Michael Barber’s book, Accomplishment: How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things, is published by Allen Lane, £16.99