Can universities help make government better?

A new group at King’s College, London, is bringing together political leaders, civil service mandarins and students to provide ‘institutional memory’​ for government departments

Lord Adonis, centre, with the last session of the Blair Years course at King's London in March, with (front row from left) William Keegan and me, visiting professors, and Dr Jon Davis

There is a lot of talk of “restoring cabinet government” at the moment. Theresa May has dispensed with David Cameron’s chumocracy, it is said, and she implied yesterday she is restoring traditional, “proper” procedures. She has even got rid of the sofa and armchairs in the Prime Minister’s office in 10 Downing Street, I am told, and replaced them with a glass-topped table and straight-backed chairs.

But one of the things that Jon Davis and I teach our students at King’s College, London, is that the traditional model of cabinet government is an academic fiction that has never described how power is actually exercised in Britain.

Dr Davis and I teach a course called “The Blair Years” for Masters students at the Policy Institute at King’s. Last term we had visiting speakers including Ed Balls, Peter Mandelson and Andrew Adonis (above).

The course is part of what I call the Davis school of ultra-contemporary history. The previous term, Dr Davis co-taught a course on the postwar history of the Treasury with Sir Nick Macpherson, the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, who was still in post at the time (he retired in the spring). Next year there will be a new module called “No 10 and the History of the Prime Minister since 1945”, in association with No 10 and the Cabinet Office, which will draw on the experience of people who have worked in Downing Street to explain how cabinet government actually works. I expect Dr Davis will teach that it is faster and more fluid than the text-book model, with most of the work done in a network of cabinet committees rather than at Cabinet itself.

Dr Davis is an academic entrepreneur who is building a remarkable centre of excellence at King’s. He and I first worked together at Queen Mary, University of London, where he and other doctoral students set up the Mile End Group with Professor Peter (now Lord) Hennessy to bring together academics, civil servants, politicians and journalists to discuss Westminster and Whitehall. It has now become the Strand Group at King’s. It is still sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which pays for events and supports one of the four doctoral students who help run the Group.

Many of those projects involve working with government departments. Eleanor Hallam is working on a PhD on Alistair Darling’s period as Chancellor, with access to Treasury files. Jack Brown is the first ever “researcher in residence” at No 10, where he is investigating how the 10 Prime Ministers between 1945 and 1997 used the building’s rooms and facilities.

Both are examples of how King’s is working with the civil service to improve its institutional memory. It was one of Sir Nick’s reasons for co-teaching the Treasury course: the high turnover of Treasury staff means that the lessons of economic history have to be re-learned. When Darling became Chancellor, for example, there were no senior Treasury officials who had been through a recession.

Not only did Sir Nick do some teaching – and a memorable inaugural lecture on the history of the Treasury since the second Dutch war of 1667 – but he gave Treasury officials time off to go on the course. “Understanding the past is essential to good economic policy-making,” he said. “I am glad a select band of Treasury officials have completed the course. They will provide better advice as a result.”

King’s is hoping to build up that kind of relationship with other departments and with No 10. Dr Davis and his Strand Group assistants have built a history website for No 10 about Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister, and another on Cabinet Secretaries that features interviews with all the living ones, including Sir Jeremy Heywood, the present Cabinet Secretary.

As a visiting professor at King’s and a friend of Dr Davis’s, I am biased, but I think what he is creating is something special. Our students say they appreciate it: they get the chance to hear in person from those who have been at the heart of government, whether it is Sir Dave Ramsden, the Treasury’s economic adviser, explaining how the decision not to join the euro was taken in 2003,

or Tony Blair himself, in conversation with Sir Michael Barber, who was the head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in Blair’s second term. (Michelle Clement, another Strand Group assistant, is writing a PhD on the Delivery Unit using Sir Michael’s diaries as her primary source.)

There is no better way of understanding recent history, or how government works, than hearing from the people who were there.

Dr Davis is rightly proud of the students who have passed through his powerhouse, once described by Andrew Marr as the equal of anything on offer at Oxford or Cambridge. His PhD students all started taking MAs under him. Today’s MA Apprentices undertake their MA at King’s, work with the Strand Group team and have the chance to do internships with Hewlett Packard Enterprises and with the Treasury.

Many of them have gone on to careers in academia, journalism and politics. One of them, James Jinks, was on TV this week being interviewed about the Trident decision as the co-author with Peter Hennessy of The Silent Deep: A History of the Royal Navy Submarine Service Since 1945.

I may be sceptical about trying to recapture an imaginary golden age of cabinet government, but I hope, as we look forward to the new term this autumn, that Theresa May’s Government appreciates the importance of using universities such as King’s to strengthen the institutional memory and administrative skills of its departments.

Applications are now welcome for Strand Group MA Apprenticeships 2016-17 by 1 August