So which political adviser and/or Whitehall official(s) have been talking with the FT’s resident ‘Rita Skeeter‘? In her notebook today she despairs of the British Prime Minister’s handling of the national security strategy:
Oh Gord! The new national security strategy that Gordon Brown, the prime minister, is due to announce on Wednesday – it is all about potential disasters – has proved a bit of a disaster itself. Its genesis has been marked by delays indecisiveness at the top, a total lack of funds and some glorious Whitehall squabbling.
The strategy, which will detail all kinds of threats from terrorism to pandemics and floods, is nearly six months late. The first draft was ready last October, but parts of Whitehall were distinctly unhappy. I am told that one section on flooding was written by a senior military man who did not bother to consult the flood supremos in the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
(Better gossip is that they forgot to include Britain’s nuclear deterrent in one draft)
Sue continues:
When the shouts of protest died down, a new version was produced in February this year – after due consultation. This did not upset anyone. Indeed it was so anodyne that some officials felt positively embarrassed. Advisers in Number 10 cut its length drastically. Mr Brown started writing his speech about it, which seems to have led to a series of further changes to the strategy itself as new ideas came to him. “It’s Gordon’s temperament,” sighed one Whitehall insider. “Only he can sort things out but he concentrates on matters of the moment and drops everything else. The result is that things big and small don’t get sorted quickly.”
So what will be included?
Right from the start there seems to have been no clear guidance from Mr Brown as to what the strategy was meant to achieve. It is expected to include plans for a new US-style national security council on which will sit the great and the good from the military and the intelligence services, but the council will report to a new cabinet committee, chaired by Mr Brown, and the old Cobra arrangements for dealing with emergencies will remain in place. All rather confusing, but the hope is that the council will make it easier to bang heads together and stop departments fighting their own corners. Hard to see how, say insiders. “Governments have always had to choose between spending on flood defences, for example, and armaments,” says one senior figure, adding that unlike the US security council, whose job is to prioritise spending, there will be no serious extra money for contingency planning.
Not sure that is quite the point. But what about Whitehall’s reaction to the document?
Some fear the new strategy will bring even more centralisation of power with Number 10, cutting other departments out of the action. There is even concern that top intelligence officials could become part of the prime minister’s team instead of serving the government as a whole. On this the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the dangers of that should be all too apparent.
Looks like paranoia is setting into Whitehall.
