This is what it looks like. After 14 years, it’s hard to even recognise it. It seems bizarre, exotic, kind of alien. But this is how serious government behaves. This is how it makes appointments. These are the criteria it uses in decision making.
As the list of ministerial selections came in, it was possible to feel a deep sense of relief washing over you. You could almost sense this dead weight being lifted off your shoulders, a tension just behind the eyes that we lived with for so long we’d almost forgotten it was there.
The primary qualification for a ministerial position in the last few years was not experience, but rather the opposite of it: a complete ignorance of a subject area at best, and an active hostility towards it at worst. We had to watch as culture secretary Nadine Dorries learned that Channel 4 does not receive licence fee money. We had to sit on our hands as Brexit secretary Dominic Raab admitted he “hadn’t quite understood” the importance of the Dover-Calais crossing.
Suddenly, literally overnight, everything has changed. Know-nothings have been replaced by people with expertise. Ignorance has been replaced by specialism. Incomprehension has been replaced by deep domain knowledge.
Richard Hermer KC was made attorney general, a role once populated by people like Victoria Prentis and Suella Braverman. He brings decades of experience in public, private, international and domestic law, having appeared in several landmark cases in the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.
James Timpson was made prisons minister. He was previously chair of the Employers Forum for Reducing Re-offending and the Prison Reform Trust and has run several innovative schemes to help offenders in the Timpsons company, the most important of which was simply to hire them, as part of a consistent structured programme for rehabilitation.
Sir Patrick Vallance was given the role of science minister. He was previously a physician, clinical pharmacologist and chief scientific adviser to the British government, not least during the Covid years, when he became a household name during regular press conferences.
Hilary Benn was given the role of Northern Ireland secretary. He has spent the last few years looking at Brexit trade issues in bone-crunching detail, as chair of the Brexit select committee and as co-convenor of Best for Britain’s UK Trade and Business Commission.
You have to pinch yourself, but it’s true. People who actually know what they’re talking about. People with experience of the thing they are governing. People who understand the complexity, the law, the regulations, the lived-in reality of the policy area they’re in charge of.
It’s worth noting that Keir Starmer has recognised one of the key benefits of the House of Lords here. Most European political systems allow the elected leader to insert people with outside expertise into government. So does the US. That’s why the person in charge of defence in Washington will sometimes be a five star general, while in the UK we get Gavin Williamson. In the UK, the prime minister has to pick from members of parliament. This typically restricts them to the Commons, which obviously has a narrow talent pool and limited real-world experience.
The only way to sidestep the problem is to give someone a lordship, which is what Starmer did in the first three of these cases. It’s not a very good way of doing it, but who cares? It works. It’s a decent enough workaround. Watching the new Prime Minister exploit it is satisfying and encouraging.
Experience does not only come in professional form though. It can also come through life itself. If you look higher up the ministerial ranks, this is the type of experience you encounter. Angela Rayner is a housing secretary who has actually lived in social housing, having grown up on a council estate in Stockport. Bridget Phillipson is an education secretary who has received free school meals when she was a pupil herself, having grown up on a council estate in Tyne and Wear.
This type of lived experience is not just important for knowing the reality of their policy area. It’s also a core element of how people can perform with a high degree of competence. If Starmer continues to replicate his shadow Cabinet team in office, Sutton Trust research shows he will have one of the most comprehensively educated Cabinets in history, with 84 per cent having attended comprehensive schools and six per cent grammar schools. That compares to 60 per cent of privately educated Cabinet ministers since the Tories took office – with the exception of Theresa May’s administration, when the proportion fell to 30 per cent.
This type of educational background provides a completely different type of leadership. Government by the privately educated supplies people who succeeded because of the wealth of their parents. Government by the state-educated provides people who had to struggle to succeed – who worked their way up through grit, determination, and smarts, who have a higher average degree of competence. This is the true promise of meritocracy – not just what it does for the people involved, but what it achieves for the society around them, by having the most qualified people secure the most influential positions.
It’s been eight years since Michael Gove said that the country had “had enough of experts”. Well, we tried that and it didn’t work out. It left this nation in ruins. Now Starmer is trying a new experiment: government by people who know what the hell they’re talking about, either through specialist expertise or life experience, or both.
Strap yourself in. We’re entering one of the most exciting and hopeful periods of British politics in our lifetime. And good God alive, it couldn’t come too soon.