The government is a shambles and it will take more than Boris Johnson’s winning charm to run effectively

Editorial: Whatever the problems in government, the Tories have a huge majority, and that gives the prime minister time to improve its performance. But how will he do it?

Gavin WIlliamson has been under fire over his response to the A-level results fiasco

This government has to lift its game. There is cross-party agreement in that, for if there is one area where the opposition and the Tory backbenchers march together, it is in challenging the administrative competence of the cabinet. The MPs know it. The civil service knows it. The country at large knows it. These people are not very good at their jobs.

There is the particular problem of Gavin Williamson, secretary of state for education, and the botched response to A-level results. As we argued in the editorial yesterday: “Mr Williamson’s handling of this issue has confirmed beyond doubt that he is out of his depth. He had five months’ notice of A-level results day, but still failed to prepare adequately, rushing into a panicky, last-minute response when he saw the problems in Scotland.”

But unfortunately this is not just the problem of one weak minister. He was chosen by the prime minister. There is a problem of his judgement in making the appointment. The result has been “the damaging impression of an incompetent government at the mercy of events”.

Running an effective government requires a multitude of skills. Boris Johnson has many of them, not least that he can win elections. The opinion polls suggest the Conservatives are still ahead of Labour in the polls, though the margin varies from nine points in a Survation poll to three on an Opinium one. In any case, he has a huge majority and that gives him time to improve his performance. How can he do so?

First he has to improve the quality of the cabinet. There is talent in the party, particularly in the junior ministerial ranks. There will be talent among the new intake of MPs, though this takes time to become clear. So improving the cabinet, making appointments on the basis of competence rather than (sometimes questionable) loyalty must happen in an autumn reshuffle. Sacking people is the easy part; nurturing clever but inexperienced MPs is tougher.

Next, he has to rebuild the government’s relationship with the civil service machine. There will always be tension between a new government, eager to push aside old administrative practice, and the established practice of civil servants. Some departments, notably the Home Office, have underperformed for many years. It was a Labour minister, John Reid, now Lord Reid, who in 2006 famously described it as “not fit for purpose”.

Ironically the expression, now applied to many other organisations, was coined by a senior civil servant – as Lord Reid subsequently revealed.

However frustrated the government may feel with the civil service, and however justified that frustration, it needs its help to get anything done. Learning how to use the government machine is learning how to govern.

There are structural problems that have existed for many years, for example over the application of IT and over defence procurement. But these are not solved by sacking civil servants or indeed ministers. What is needed is the long, hard slog of figuring out why the wrong decisions are taken and what needs to be done to improve the quality of decisions in the future.

It is all very well for Dominic Cummings, the PM’s chief adviser, to warn of a “hard rain” about to fall on the civil service. That was the key phrase in Bob Dylan’s great protest song of 1963. But Mr Cummings’s job is not to protest about the government. He is supposed to be helping run it.

Boris Johnson is very good at front-of-house. He is the maitre-de-table who greets the diners like long-lost friends, shows them to the window table, hands out the menus and goes back to welcome the next party. But he does not run the kitchen – and currently the kitchen is a shambles. His backbenchers know it. They are, so to speak, the waiters who have to serve the ill-cooked meals and listen to the complaints. Mr Johnson has to find people who can run the kitchen, and he has to do so fast.