Antonia Romeo has been given an impossible job

In normal times, the appointment of a new head of the civil service would have stirred little interest beyond Whitehall. Aside from the shattering of another glass ceiling, what with the first woman being given the role, Antonia Romeo’s arrival as cabinet secretary should have passed largely without remark. A moment worth celebrating, even if long overdue. But these are not normal times (whatever happened to them?).

Antonia, the fourth new cabinet secretary since 2016, has been followed into her biggest job yet by allegations that, during her time as consul general to the UN in New York, she bullied Foreign Office staff and misused expenses. One formal complaint from 2017 was investigated by a senior diplomat, but she was given the all-clear by her line managers at the Cabinet Office. By giving her the plum job, prime minister Keir Starmer sought to put any questions about her appointment to rest.

However, when The SundayTimes reported this weekend that the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team had broken into a safe and destroyed the department’s copy of a historic bullying investigation, it sounded like something lifted from the pages of a John Le Carré novel. I should declare an interest in that I know Antonia. We worked together in Whitehall when I was deputy cabinet secretary, and overlapped for a time in 2016, when she was in the Cabinet Office. I wish her well in her new role. The civil service needs a period of stability and for an end to the psychodrama surrounding the top job.

But no good has come from the undignified public war of words over Antonia’s appointment. For those watching closely, such as myself, there are troubling signals in some of the official briefings, not least the brittle insistence on speaking only of “formal” complaints. It is not uncommon for highly successful, ambitious and driven people on their way up to disregard their impact on others. None of this is incompatible with strong leadership — but it can’t be fun for those people (mainly women, it seems) who thought they were raising legitimate concerns, only for them to be dismissed in public. But this matters — because, while the cabinet secretary is not that relevant for the thousands of people working in government departments, the culture set by them is.

There is nothing wrong with having high expectations and demanding quality, with being impatient for change and driving your teams hard. Lord knows that is what is needed. But the ultimate prize is getting the best out of the people who work for you. For senior leaders, be they political appointees or officials, it is all too easy — under pressure — to cross a line into intimidation. Which then gets in the way of the job and the wider mission. Unfortunately, there is a Westminster and Whitehall pattern where it is also difficult for more junior people to stand up to power and patronage and to call out bad behaviour.

But the bigger challenge that Antonia will face is that the cabinet secretary role is simply no longer fit for purpose. Expectations are sky high, and the toolkit substandard. The job was created in 1916 in response to administrative and systemic failures that had been revealed by the First World War. Ministers would make decisions, and then nothing would happen. Imagine. At its heart, the role of cabinet secretary is to be the person in the room with a pen — capturing what was agreed, and then making sure something had been done about it before the next meeting. For an entire analogue century, it broadly worked. Until now it doesn’t.

This past decade, we have had almost as many cabinet secretaries as prime ministers. This is not healthy, and goes some way to explaining why governing in the modern age has got harder. Prime ministers in trouble often think that waving a magic wand and replacing the cabinet secretary — as Keir Starmer has done with Chris Wormald — will somehow fix things. There is a strong parallel with an electorate that hopes a change of prime minister will solve their problems. But swapping out one person at the top does not fix a troubled system.