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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The Art of Delivery ventures inside 10 Downing Street at the turn of the millennium to unveil how Tony Blair's government successfully transformed the public services we value most. Though the Blair government had a huge mandate, there remained fundamental challenges to success – not least the Blair–Brown rivalry, which manifested itself in a proxy war over the direction of public service reform. Nevertheless, over four years, the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, led by Sir Michael Barber, upgraded the way in which the British government implemented improvements to the NHS and the education system. It also represented a watershed for how Prime Ministers engage with the real-world delivery of their priorities. Until now, much of this narrative has remained untold. Based on brand-new research and analysis, Michelle Clement uncovers the full story, drawing on 600,000 words of Sir Michael Barber's unpublished, handwritten private diaries as well as exclusive interviews and government papers. Filled with revealing insider detail, this is a human account of what it takes to effect change from behind that famous black door.
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“Packed full of insight, colour and impressive detail, this book will be studied for years to come by civil servants, politicians and anyone who wants to understand what makes good governments succeed and why they sometimes fail to deliver.”
Ed Balls, former Cabinet minister
“This is a special book. Not only does Michelle Clement possess a rare gift for making the entrails of government fascinating; she has another precious talent: for persuading key players to tell her everything and to hand over their documents. As long as there are people interested in the Blair years, this book will keep both its inherent vitality and its importance for future governments striving to reform Whitehall.”
Peter Hennessy, Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London
“A compelling and clear analysis. Combining sharp insight and subtle nuance, Michelle Clement chronicles how the Blair government sought to galvanise the machine to modernise public services that had fallen into disrepair. The story Michelle tells is often close to the bone. She paints a picture of how that government painstakingly acquired the know-how to make transformation possible. This book is required reading for those interested in effecting change today.”
Alan Milburn, former Health Secretaryii
“Understanding public service reform is the key to understanding the Blair government, and this book is the key to both. Michelle Clement writes with flair and clarity about the creation of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and its work, capturing the uncertainty, wrong turnings and political tensions of the period. The result is a superb account of the development of a new way of thinking about public services and its maturing into a successful method of service improvement. This book is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how to make public services work better.”
John Rentoul, chief political commentator,The Independent
“Michelle Clement’s book is both timely and insightful. Tony Blair’s New Labour government, though ambitious and eager to make progress, ultimately learnt through trial and error. Michelle’s book, based on new research, reveals the unvarnished story of how we learnt the art of delivery and transformed the quality of public services. I highly recommend this book to those at the sharp end now.”
Sally Morgan, former political secretary to Prime Minister Tony Blair
“‘Deliver or die’, as Tony Blair put it. Michelle Clement has given us the definitive account of how Blair and his guru of deliverology, Michael Barber, revolutionised modern government. With fascinating insider detail and valuable insights, Michelle shows us the ups and downs of refocusing the government machinery and bending it to the Prime Minister’s will.”
Simon Case, former Cabinet Secretary
iii
THE ART OF DELIVERY
THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW THE BLAIR GOVERNMENT TRANSFORMED BRITAIN’S PUBLIC SERVICES
MICHELLE CLEMENT
v
For my mum and dad, who devoted themselves to our family and in doing so left their own motherlands (in Scotland and Pakistan). They instilled in me a deep curiosity for life. For my husband, whose creativity and capacity to listen inspire me every day. For my five siblings, the first ‘decision makers’ I sought to understand, who remind me of the whole of which I am part. Thank you.
vi
Contents
Foreword
BY SIR MICHAEL BARBER
Michelle Clement has written a book which is an important contribution to contemporary history – well-written, well-researched and fascinating. As a character in the story, I am obviously biased, but, given the numerous attempts to replicate the story Michelle tells, I think the ‘fascinating’ is justified.
Immediately after his 2001 landslide election victory, Tony Blair asked me to set up for him a Delivery Unit that would bring real discipline to implementation and delivery of his domestic policy priorities. He had learnt from his first term and the campaign he had just been through that the public liked the agenda he had set out but were frustrated that so little had changed on the ground. Where were the results?
He said the electorate had given him ‘an instruction to deliver’ and passed the instruction on to me.
In education there had been some progress in the first term and the challenge Blair set me was: could we apply the discipline of delivery we had shown in education to other domestic policy priorities, such as health, crime reduction and transport?
Working closely with Blair – he was totally committed to delivery xthroughout his second term – that is what the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit did over the next four years.
Neither Tony Blair nor I knew at the time that what we developed was a significant innovation in how governments could work. Over the years that followed, numerous governments across the globe sought to emulate what we had done. Some did so in a shallow way: the organisation chart included a delivery unit, but it lacked the focus, the rigour, the processes and the persistence to make any real difference. Often, too, a so-called delivery unit didn’t understand the culture needed to succeed. And sometimes the leader didn’t make the commitment to delivery that Tony Blair so clearly did. But there have also been many governments that learnt deeply from our experience and succeeded. These governments learnt both the science and the art of delivery.
This is what makes Michelle Clement’s book so important. She has told the story of the original PMDU and explained how it developed both the science and the art of getting things done. In order to do so with such depth of insight, she has, like all great contemporary historians, interviewed all the key players involved, including the PM, Cabinet ministers and top civil servants. She has also interviewed some of the PMDU team. In addition, Michelle was able to draw on many available documents. She also had access to one unique source.
Over the four years in which I set up and led the PMDU, I kept a diary: at the end of each busy week, I spent hours writing up what had happened and what I had learnt, often drawing on scribbled notes I had made during meetings. When Michelle embarked on this project I lent the diaries to her, hundreds of thousands of handwritten words, completely uncensored.
I personally have never read my diaries (though I have used them xito check the accuracy of my own memory when writing my own books). What that means is that, while I wrote them, Michelle is the only person who has actually read my diaries She alone has decided what to include from them and what not to.
I should add, as Michelle will testify, that while I was interviewed for her book like everyone else, at no point have I sought to influence how she tells the story or the judgements she reaches. It’s her book and hers alone.
There has never been a time in history when the need for governments to deliver on their promises has been more important than now. Cynicism about politics, politicians and government has grown, is growing and needs to be diminished because it is dangerous. If people lose faith in the whole political system, inevitably they will turn to populist propositions which, while they sound plausible and attractive, are in fact unworkable and destructive. We see exactly this occurring in many places around the world.
Effective delivery alone cannot reverse these disturbing trends – but it is equally clear that they cannot be reversed in the absence of delivery.
Michelle’s book, in addition to being an excellent contribution to contemporary history and a good story, is an instructive text for anyone who wants governments in future to deliver results that citizens see, feel, benefit from and perhaps even appreciate! In short, here you will find a great read and a foundation for optimism.
Sir Michael Barber Author of How to Run a GovernmentJanuary 2025 xii
Chapter One
An Instruction to Deliver: Reforming Britain’s Public Services
It is June 2001, you are the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and you have just won a historic second landslide victory at the polls but the growing rivalry with your second in command, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, threatens to derail your ambitious domestic plans for government. What do you do? You decide to create the first ever Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit. But what difference can it possibly make, given the fraying tightrope between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor?
Fast forward six months: Prime Minister Tony Blair’s right hand official, Jeremy Heywood, tells the head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit: ‘You’ve massively increased the power of the Prime Minister without damaging any relationships.’
This is a book about how Sir Michael Barber, who designed and led the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, crafted an art of delivery which transformed the quality of our public services. Whether you are a citizen, policymaker, public servant or politician, the NHS, schools, crime prevention and public transport systems are the public services we use every day. This book offers a story that is yet to be told, one that gives us an understanding of our own shared 2history. It seeks to unveil what it really takes to govern from No. 10, in a way that makes a real difference to citizens who use and fund public services.
Since the turn of the century, the British government, and increasingly governments around the world, have sought to develop new frameworks to pursue the implementation of their reform agendas. Despite the fact that previous governments and Prime Ministers have long had programmes to ‘deliver’, there was a step change during Tony Blair’s premiership when the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) was created, in June 2001. Sir Michael Barber was made Blair’s chief adviser on delivery. The decision to create such a role, and an accompanying unit, was only taken after much prime ministerial anxiety during Blair’s first term in office.
The Labour Party won the 1997 general election with the biggest parliamentary majority since the Second World War. Nevertheless, two years into his first term, Blair had become dissatisfied with the slow pace of progress on delivering public service reform – which was central to his mission. Despite the major success of constitutional changes such as the partial reform of the House of Lords and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, Blair later suggested that he ‘largely wasted his first term’.1 In 1999, speaking to the Venture Capital Association, he complained of having ‘scars on my back’ as a result of trying to modernise public services.2 Blair’s rhetoric was arguably a reflection of his own frustration at the challenge of learning how to govern both effectively and boldly. Prime Ministers really do have to learn on the job! During Blair’s first couple of years as Prime Minister, he was still deciding how to make his public service reform agenda more radical. By 2000, he had recognised that in relation to ambitious public service reform ‘he had to deliver or die’.3 In the 2001 general election, New Labour 3won a second big victory, which gave Blair a renewed mandate to govern. Shortly afterwards, Blair told the British people that he took the result as a ‘mandate for reform … an instruction to deliver’.4
Towards the end of the first term Blair and his advisers looked to the progress being made in education reform, and a key individual delivering this change was Michael Barber. From 1997 to 2001, Barber was chief adviser on school standards to David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment. On taking up his position in the (then) Department for Education and Employment (DfEE), Barber set up and headed the Standards and Effectiveness Unit (SEU). The Permanent Secretary of the DfEE, Michael Bichard, accepted that his department ‘as then constituted, could never deliver what the new government would require’.5 Through the new unit, Barber’s aim was therefore to ‘change the culture of the department as well as implement the schools reforms’.6 His approach to implementing these reforms won him respect and good relations with many ministers and civil servants – a hard task for any political appointee working in Whitehall. Indeed, Blair told Barber and the SEU team that they were ‘true pioneers’.7
By the beginning of 2001, Barber had made the unusual transition from special adviser to civil servant, with a view to pursuing further roles within the department. As a direct result of making progress in education, Barber was asked by Blair’s team to propose a design for a ‘delivery unit’. After discussion with Blair’s closest political advisers and civil servants, Barber was formally asked to establish the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit shortly after the 2001 election. As historian Anthony Seldon noted, ‘Blair decided to import his [Barber’s] unit and its methodology wholesale into his own empire.’8 From 2001 to 2005, Barber led the PMDU.
The PMDU was created with the aim of monitoring and 4accelerating the delivery of the Prime Minister’s public service reform priorities in major policy areas including education, health, transport, crime and asylum. These policy areas encompassed many of the key public services that citizens used regularly and which needed improving after decades of underinvestment and too little focus on raising the standards of services provided. Thus Blair and his government chose to ensure that over the course of the parliament they would focus on targets that made a difference to the daily lives of citizens. These included reducing waiting times in Accident & Emergency and for elective operations, improving the numeracy and literacy skills of school pupils, reducing crime and getting trains to run on time as well as increasing the numbers of nurses, doctors and teachers.
The Delivery Unit mainly worked with four ‘delivery departments’: the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Health, the Department for Transport and the Home Office. Throughout Blair’s government, there was a second centre of power to the Prime Minister – the Treasury under the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. A significant source of growing tension between Blair and Brown was the very policy areas where the new Delivery Unit was tasked with building consensus and achieving progress. To be effective, the PMDU had to develop and maintain good relations with No. 10, the Treasury under Brown, Cabinet ministers, special advisers and senior civil servants in the relevant departments. No other prime ministerial unit had such a challenging mission. Under Barber’s leadership, the Unit was broadly able to do this. This resulted in the PMDU being institutionally part of No. 10 and the Cabinet Office and physically based (for the most part) within the Treasury, working closely with Treasury officials to 5align the Unit’s targets with the Treasury’s own performance measurement framework – public service agreements (PSAs).
Three key elements of Barber’s original design brief proved useful throughout his tenure. First, there would be ‘rigorous and relentless focus on a relatively small number of the Prime Minister’s key priorities’.9 This meant that Blair and his government were required to identify and adhere to a clear set of domestic objectives – something that had not happened in the first term. Second, Barber decided to keep the Unit small, which allowed it to be agile when developing a delivery method and culture. He was also keen to avoid it becoming a large bureaucratic unit overseeing an even larger bureaucracy, which some Whitehall units had tended to do, leaving them vulnerable to budget cuts and making them more cumbersome to manage. Third, the initial design tied in the Prime Minister’s time, the most valued resource in Whitehall, to the delivery of priorities by introducing stocktake meetings. Every two to three months for each priority area, the Prime Minister would meet with the relevant Cabinet minister and Permanent Secretary, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Treasury officials and the PMDU team led by Barber to discuss the delivery status of each target. This ensured that the Prime Minister was regularly engaged with the work of his Delivery Unit. The stocktake proved to be a powerful forum for collective discussion and accountability, chaired by the Prime Minister.
The Delivery Unit introduced a new level of accountability within the Civil Service for the delivery of specific targets such as requiring hospitals to treat 98 per cent of A&E patients within four hours. Whitehall civil servants had not previously been held accountable for such specific delivery targets, supported by a delivery framework led by the Prime Minister. Successive Cabinet 6Secretaries and Permanent Secretaries accepted and advocated the need to focus on delivery, especially given the huge increase in funding for public services such as the NHS. The PMDU approach to delivery was seen as controversial by some who thought it exacerbated top-down policymaking from No. 10 to departments and contributed to a target-led culture – the journalist Simon Jenkins argued that the Unit disempowered departments.10 Peter Hyman, a key strategist to Blair from 1994 to 2003 and head of the Prime Minister’s Strategic Communications Unit from 2001 to 2003, has written on the ‘delivery pains’ of Blair’s first years in government. He explained that ‘focusing on “delivery” – with the introduction of numerous targets – was controversial’ but that it was intended to improve Labour’s reputation on spending.11 A further reason for Blair’s explicit focus on delivery was ‘to change the culture of the Civil Service away from just policy formation … and instead [to focus] on tangible results’.12 Hyman characterised Barber as ‘one of the most impressive and talented people I worked with in government. Quietly spoken but authoritative and reflective.’13 Yet Hyman still questioned whether this would be enough.
[I was] sceptical at first that he [Barber] would be the man to bang heads together in Whitehall and drive through delivery, but his relentless focus on outcomes and his collegiate way of working with departments, as well as his close working relationship with Tony, ensured that he was just about our most effective operator.14
In four years, as head of the PMDU, Barber developed an approach which the then managing director of public services in HM Treasury, Nicholas Macpherson, named ‘deliverology’.15 Deliverology 7has become a tool valued by central and local governments and global organisations. The former president of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim began his tenure (2012–19) by discussing the ‘emerging science of delivery’ aimed at better understanding not ‘what to deliver’ but ‘how to deliver’.16 Since leaving government, Barber has further developed his science of delivery – the processes and structures to accelerate results.17 This book examines what the present author has identified as the ‘art of delivery’.18 The art of delivery is the other side of the proverbial delivery coin: in short it is the shared history, deep understanding of political context and ability to build cooperative relationships which lubricates the machinery of government. Without an understanding of the art, the science of delivery is ineffective. One could loosely compare the science and the art of delivery to the established foreign policy concepts of ‘hard power’ and ‘soft power’ developed by Joseph Nye, American political scientist and former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. Hard power can manifest as military capability, that is, using explicit force to achieve a result; whereas Nye’s definition of ‘soft power’ is ‘the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments’.19 Through the course of this book, Barber and the Delivery Unit’s ability to accumulate and apply a version of ‘soft power’ will be shown to be essential in sculpting the art of delivery.
In 2005, after Barber left government, the PMDU was remoulded and its workload diversified and expanded, eventually being absorbed into the Treasury during Brown’s premiership. Yet Barber’s legacy can be traced beyond his departure. After the formation of the coalition government in 2010, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron abolished what remained of the Delivery 8Unit, seeing it as too associated with New Labour and a tool of big government. Looking back, Cameron’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne questioned Cameron about ‘drinking’ the Conservative Party’s ‘own Kool-Aid that No. 10 was too big, that Tony Blair had made it too presidential. We got rid of the Delivery Unit … and then essentially have to recreate it.’ In response, Cameron admitted, ‘That was a mistake. We did believe our own propaganda about an inflated No. 10.’20 In 2011, Cameron set up a similar body called the Implementation Group, which later became known as the Implementation Unit (IU). It had the task of ensuring the implementation of the Prime Minister’s and deputy Prime Minister’s policy priorities. Barber’s legacy had once again become a valued resource for a new government. Efforts to support and stabilise working in coalition resulted in the dilution of power and depoliticisation of the centre of government, which meant that the IU operated on the basis of reduced authoritative power. In 2011 Michael Gove, then Conservative Secretary of State for Education, sought to appoint Barber as Permanent Secretary in the Department for Education but he was unsuccessful.21 This demonstrated the value of Barber’s expertise across the political spectrum. Twenty years after the original PMDU was set up, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson commissioned a review from Barber on his government’s capacity to deliver. Subsequently a new Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit was formed in early 2021 to manage the post-Covid pandemic domestic priorities of the government.22 The Johnson Delivery Unit continued to be utilised by his successors after he resigned in 2023. But the advent of four Conservative Prime Ministers between 2016 and 2024, each with their own priorities, created instability in the system of government. On 4 July 2024, 9Labour won a general election for the first time in nineteen years. The new Labour government under Sir Keir Starmer ran their campaign on a plan to galvanise government around five long-term ‘missions’. As part of this mission-driven government, Prime Minister Starmer quickly created a new Mission Delivery Unit, with career civil servant Clara Swinson as its head. Swinson had been a pivotal member of the original Delivery Unit under Barber, and in the intervening years had remained in the Civil Service taking on senior roles in the Department of Health. Alongside the new unit, Starmer appointed Liz Lloyd as Director of Policy, Delivery and Innovation. Lloyd had been Blair’s longest-serving adviser (1993 to 2007), rising to deputy chief of staff in 2005. After leaving government in 2007, she built a successful career in finance and global development, most recently at British International Investment. Completing the delivery triangle, Michael Barber was appointed as the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Effective Delivery (on a part-time basis). More than two decades after it was established, the Delivery Unit model remains instructive for governments of the day.
In June 2015, speaking to the Strand Group at King’s College London, Blair explained that Barber’s approach with the PMDU was ‘quite revolutionary, more so than we realised at the time’.23 Since leaving government, Barber has advised more than fifty countries on delivery of domestic policy priorities, including Canada, Pakistan and Malaysia, as well as global institutions and companies.24 In doing so he has tested and adapted ‘deliverology’. Beyond his book Instruction to Deliver: Fighting to Transform Britain’s Public Services, there has yet to be a comprehensive, independent and rigorous study of the PMDU from 2001 to 2005. This book represents the first study of Barber and the PMDU with the added 10and crucial dimension of first-hand access to Barber’s private and extensive unpublished, handwritten diaries. That resource provides lessons on how the PMDU worked in practice – it enables one to garner new and detailed insights into how and why the PMDU was created, what challenges Barber encountered, and how he and the Unit responded to them. This book is also a lens through which to view wider themes related to how government really works in practice – the power of the Prime Minister, the role of the Civil Service in public service delivery, and media spin versus substance.
During New Labour’s second term, the Delivery Unit under Barber began the huge task of shifting the psychology of government towards innovative methods for effective delivery. This book offers new insights into how a government can improve results across the most important areas of public service provision.
BARBER THE MAN
As Prime Minister, Tony Blair set the scope and detail of his public service reform agenda alongside key Cabinet ministers but it was Michael Barber whom Blair entrusted to build an effective unit to ensure it actually happened. To make sense of the approach Barber developed, it is helpful to look back at his life and experiences prior to 1997.
Michael Barber was born into a Quaker family. His father, Christopher Barber, was a pacifist who spent much of the Second World War driving medical supplies across China. He was an accountant by training and chairman of Oxfam from 1983 to 1989.25 Barber’s mother, Anne, read medicine at the University of Oxford, and was one of the first women admitted to Barts Hospital as a clinical student.26 Barber recalled that as a child his mother taught him about equality.27 He would later draw ‘deeply’ on his Quaker upbringing 11during his time in government.28 Britain’s public services and public sector embody many Quaker principles – challenging injustice through peaceful means and speaking truth to power – and thus Barber’s choice of career aligned with his family background. He attended an independent Quaker school, Bootham in York, where he developed a passion for history and, incidentally, was taught by the father of his future colleague Jeremy Heywood.
The popular and political culture of the era in which Barber grew up shaped him. He characterised himself as a ‘student radical of the 60s/70s grown up to be hard-edged because positive change depends on it’.29 The late 1960s and 1970s were decades in which Britain experienced the deepest lows of relative economic decline, and successive governments of both political hues tried (and largely failed) to lift the country out of this intractable economic quagmire. The country was beset by energy crises, sterling crises, debt crises and major trade union strikes – immortalised in the collective memory by the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent. In the decade that followed, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government launched an economic strategy which helped to put the economy on an upward trajectory, though this came at the cost of high unemployment. Her industrial policies had a damaging impact on communities which relied on manufacturing and mining. In 1974, Barber went on to read history at the University of Oxford where he developed an admiration for historic Labour Party ‘heroes’, including Aneurin Bevan, who as minister of health (1945–51) played a central role in creating the National Health Service.30 Barber was active in college politics and was elected president of the Queen’s College Student Union.31 He trained as a teacher in the late 1970s, and taught history and English in secondary schools in London and then Zimbabwe. 12
By the mid-1980s, Barber began to see ‘active politics as a way to change the world’; he became a Labour councillor in Hackney (where he lived) from 1986 to 1990.32 As a councillor, Barber found that his weekly surgeries were regularly focused on housing complaints. But he was largely ‘unable to get the bureaucracy’ to resolve these issues.33 He also joined the National Union of Teachers (NUT), where he worked on policy and research and engaged with the Conservative government of the day.34 In the late 1980s, he was elected chair of education for Hackney; in this role he engaged with Labour shadow ministers including Jack Straw, who at the time led on education.35 During the 1987 general election, Barber unsuccessfully ran as the Labour Party parliamentary candidate against incumbent Conservative MP Michael Heseltine in Henley-on-Thames. In 1993, he began working at Keele University where he was made professor of education before moving to the Institute of Education at the University of London two years later. Barber described his career up to this point as in the ‘borderlands’ of various roles within the education sector.36
During the summer of 1994, Barber was asked to advise on a speech on education that Tony Blair was due to make as part of his campaign to lead the Labour Party.37 Blair won the leadership election in July 1994. As an education expert, Barber was then invited by Blair’s head of policy, David Miliband (whom he had known for a couple of years), to advise on Labour’s education policy. Barber met Blair for the first time in January 1995, and he was struck by how open the agenda was and how committed the new leader was to making education his top priority.38 In a paper for this meeting, Barber set out two principles which underpinned his professional approach then and now: one, ‘intervention should be in inverse proportion to success’; two, ‘standards matter more than 13structures’.39 The following year, Barber was asked to write a paper on what Labour’s agenda for a second term might be. He argued for ‘a radical shift of power and direction from producer to consumer’.40 This was in line with the emerging New Labour ethos. From this point onwards, Barber became regularly involved in advising Miliband, David Blunkett and Blunkett’s chief policy and press adviser Conor Ryan.41 During this time he continued to give speeches on the education sector. In one lecture at Greenwich Town Hall, he challenged the complacent culture that he believed had developed within the teaching profession, whereby failure was accepted:
For too long, it has been a powerful strand of the culture of this country that failure in education is inevitable and, like the poor, it will always be with us … We, as educators, might be expected to be in the vanguard of a campaign to challenge this poverty-stricken culture. In fact, all too often we reinforce it.42
This blend of Quaker upbringing, 1970s student radicalism, political experience as an inner London Labour councillor dealing with local and often intractable issues, and diverse roles in the education sector on the frontline and in devising policy, as well as an appreciation of historic Labour Party figures who had helped build the welfare state, came together to produce the Michael Barber who helped to craft the education strategy for a first-term Labour government. Andrew Adonis, special adviser to Blair and later minister for schools, described Barber at the beginning of the Blair government as a ‘brilliantly can-do and insightful London university education professor’ with experience that meant ‘he knew every crevice of the political as well as educational mountain he was climbing’.43 Clara Swinson, a civil servant who worked for Barber in the Delivery 14Unit, noted the impact Barber’s educationalist background had: ‘Fundamentally, his background was as an educationalist. It was about learning, it was about “What’s the current position? What can we do better? What can we learn from that kind of learning as an organisation?”’44
Once New Labour was elected in May 1997, Barber found himself ‘taking responsibility for the implementation of the policy strategy’ which he partly developed.45 In 1997, Blunkett as Secretary of State for Education appointed Barber to become head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit (SEU) in the DfEE. The SEU became a sizeable unit, focused on school standards reform, particularly numeracy and literacy. The implementation of the National Literacy Strategy was one of the main successes achieved in the first term.46 Leading the SEU was a formative experience for Barber: ‘I found myself learning how to manage not just officials, but also the system as a whole.’47 He encountered civil servants who lacked a belief in their ability to achieve ‘visible change’.48 The SEU taught Barber lessons that he would be mindful of when it came to the PMDU. For instance, by the end of 2000, the SEU became ‘too large’ (around 300 people) and the ‘widening span of responsibility’ meant that he was ‘no longer on top of the detail’.49
In early 2001, Barber formally became a senior civil servant, an uncommon move for a political appointee.50 This perhaps demonstrated his dedication to education reform and indicated his intended career path after the election. Barber, however, was not a career civil servant. He believed that the New Labour education policies had ‘brought a new set of values to education reform in which diversity, co-operation, equity and commitment to tackling disadvantage were given priority alongside the market values of the 15previous government’.51 In 2000, he outlined his commitment to delivery in the first term and beyond:
Having set high profile national targets and established clear objectives for the end of the present Parliament, the government has to ensure it will be held to account by the people for the delivery of those outcomes. Politically, this is either bold or foolhardy, depending on your perspective. Our view is that the risk is worth taking because it helps to create a performance culture and ensures sustained focus … People are impatient for change and suspicious of politicians who cannot demonstrate that they are delivering what they promised.52
The following statement, also from 2000, on the components of successful education reform was indicative of Barber’s later approach with the PMDU:
Whether we succeed will, in the end, depend on whether we are able to sustain our focus and maintain the drive for change, whether we are capable of resolving the dilemmas that arise regularly in any process of complex change and whether we are able to convince teachers and the wider public that much higher standards than have ever been achieved before are not only possible in theory but also achievable in practice.53
These insights into Barber ‘the man’ provide an indication as to why he was supportive of public service reform, his own ambitions, why delivery mattered to him and his personal experience of what it takes to deliver domestic reform in government. When it comes 16down to it, government is run by the people for the people, and so in seeking to understand how it works it is crucial to understand the protagonists and their relationships with one another.
THE DELIVERY UNIT IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit was in many ways a distinctly new invention. But several prime ministerial units were created in the twentieth century to improve the effectiveness of government which resonate with the PMDU. One can go further back, as academics Andrew Blick and George Jones have. They note that in December 1873, Prime Minister William Gladstone asked his private secretary, Algernon West, for evidence of the India Office’s poor performance.54
LLOYD GEORGE – GARDEN SUBURB, CREATION OF CABINET OFFICE AND SECRETARY TO THE CABINET
Upon becoming Prime Minister in December 1916 during the Great War emergency, David Lloyd George introduced reforms that transformed the machinery of central government. He created the Cabinet Office, the position of Secretary to the Cabinet and his own Prime Minister’s Secretariat. The Cabinet Office originally emerged out of the War Cabinet Secretariat, which was formed to provide administrative support to the War Cabinet and later to the Cabinet. The modern-day Cabinet Office is now the overall coordinating department of central government, primarily providing administrative support to the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and Cabinet committees. 17
The powerful Civil Service role of Secretary to the War Cabinet, which became Secretary to the Cabinet (commonly known as Cabinet Secretary), was established and the position has continued thereafter. The holder not only takes the minutes of Cabinet meetings but is also one of the most senior advisers to the Prime Minister. The first holder of the post was Sir Maurice Hankey, who held the position for twenty-two years, until 1938. In the words of Sir Robert Vansittart, a senior British diplomat, Hankey ‘progressively became secretary of everything that mattered’.55 Since the 1980s, the position has often been fused with the role of head of the Home Civil Service.
The Prime Minister’s Secretariat, known as the Garden Suburb (due to initially being housed in temporary huts in the garden of 10 Downing Street), was staffed by a small group of advisers to Lloyd George, each with their own policy area. Its role was never clearly defined.56 The note announcing its establishment on 5 January 1917 explained: ‘The Prime Minister has decided, with a view to keeping himself in close touch with the several Departments, to establish a Department in connection with the Office of the First Lord of the Treasury.’57 It formed part of a new highly centralised machine organised around the Prime Minister, rather than the Cabinet, which helped Lloyd George bridge policy and politics in wartime. Though the Garden Suburb was described as a department, it operated as a secretariat and at its peak was made up of six members of staff.
In March 1918 the head of the Garden Suburb, political scientist W. G. S. Adams, noted the role and impact of the secretariat. The staff created ‘free and informal’ relationships with departments ‘to help the departments in getting matters to the attention of the Prime Minister when they were of urgency, and, as far as possible to arrange and prevent matters from pressing upon the Prime 18Minister’.58 Adams explained that it had been ‘possible to do a great deal in the way of securing settlement on points upon which there was doubt, if not dispute, and of helping to bring people and bodies together who would benefit by closer relationship with one another in their work’.59 The Garden Suburb provided a channel for the Prime Minister to communicate and loosely monitor priorities, and to assist in joining up departments to create common goals. After the war ended in 1918, the Garden Suburb was scaled down and eventually abolished; the purpose of the secretariat would, however, re-emerge in future premierships.
WINSTON CHURCHILL – STATISTICAL SECTION
When Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, he brought with him a unit known as the Statistical Branch which he had set up a year earlier as First Lord of the Admiralty. The unit became known as the Statistical Section and was headed by Churchill’s good friend the physicist Professor Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell). Again, this prime ministerial unit was created during war, when efficient monitoring and coordination of outputs was essential. The Statistical Section was staffed by around twenty people, including economists and civil servants. Churchill found it helpful that complex questions could be resolved in quantitative terms; moreover, he was suspicious of the statistics produced by departments of their own activities and so wanted independent appraisal.60 Weekly charts were produced which showed the state of aircraft production, the losses and new building of ships, the output of tanks and guns and the availability of coal stocks.61 The main channel of power between the unit and the Prime Minister was through notes from Lindemann to Churchill, roughly once a day.62 The Statistical Section did not survive the change of government in 19July 1945 but like the PMDU, it provided the Prime Minister of the day with reliable information and data about the implementation of policy decisions. Both units, sixty years apart, faced struggles in obtaining data from departments and both were aided by the Cabinet Secretary (of the day).
EDWARD HEATH – CENTRAL POLICY REVIEW STAFF
In 1971, Edward Heath’s government created the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), known as the ‘Think Tank’, to fill a gap at the centre of government. It performed three main functions: early warning of major issues affecting the government’s objectives, ‘keeper of government strategy and scrutineer of selective policy’.63 The latter two functions were where it had most success. Heath retrospectively defined its mission as ‘If not think the unthinkable, then at least express the uncomfortable.’64 It was located in the Cabinet Office and the formidable businessman and scientist Lord Rothschild was appointed as its first chairman. It was later led by economist Kenneth Berrill, then businessman Robin Ibbs and finally by merchant banker John Sparrow. Like the PMDU, it was staffed by a small team. The CPRS had around twenty people at any one time, consisting of a mix of civil servants, academics and businesspeople. This was similar to Barber’s later approach with the PMDU. Heath, who was often hostile to the Treasury, created the CPRS in part as a challenge to the Treasury’s monopoly; its relations with the Treasury were not harmonious.65
Despite being a relatively small unit, the CPRS focused on broad and disparate issues which changed from year to year. In 1972, its portfolio included ‘unemployment and inflation, energy and raw materials, resource allocation, growth and declining industries’.66 It did not initially consider intelligence or foreign affairs issues. The 20CPRS strengthened the power of the Prime Minister, not least through the ‘clarity of information’ it provided.67 The PMDU’s expertise in gathering data to assess performance echoes this. Heath’s successors, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, kept the CPRS in place and found it useful, but Margaret Thatcher disbanded it in 1983. Interestingly Sir Richard Wilson, Cabinet Secretary from 1998 to 2002, compared the CPRS, which he called an ‘intellectual powerhouse’, to the PMDU.68 The CPRS was, however, more functionally akin to the Strategy Unit that was set up during Blair’s second term. In 1970, Heath also set up the Programme and Analysis Review initiative, which operated outside the Treasury to review existing government programmes, with a view to cutting unnecessary functions and bureaucracy. There was, however, a lack of political will among ministers to cut any major functions of government.69
HAROLD WILSON – POLICY UNIT
In his first period in government, from 1964 to 1970, Harold Wilson brought in the first modern-era peacetime paid special advisers. Since then they have been a permanent feature of government. In 1974, when he became Prime Minister again, Wilson set up his own Policy Unit within No. 10 to provide more politically attuned policy advice on short- to medium-term issues. This too has continued to be a model for all Prime Ministers to the present day. It has typically been headed by a special adviser and staffed by a mix of special advisers and civil servants. Prior to 1974, the Civil Service had been the main supplier of policy advice, certainly since the First World War. The innovation marked the desire of a Prime Minister who wanted to engage ‘much more deeply’ in departments.70 For example, Wilson used the ‘fledgling but quickly influential Policy Unit to 21combat Tony Benn’s interventionist industrial strategy’.71 This was demonstrably true for Blair too. The Policy Unit did not have a set methodology, and each Prime Minister subsequently shaped it to match their agenda. The Policy Unit strengthened the centre of government, particularly the office of the Prime Minister. Though both the Policy Unit and the Delivery Unit had to command the confidence of the Prime Minister through effectiveness, there are no clear parallels between the ways in which they operated.
MARGARET THATCHER – EFFICIENCY UNIT
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher appointed Derek Rayner to advise her on efficiency and he quickly created the Efficiency Unit. Rayner had been joint managing director of Marks & Spencer and had advised Heath’s government on defence procurement. The unit was staffed by civil servants and Rayner purposely kept it small because a larger organisation would ‘add to bureaucracy rather than lessen it’.72 This is a principle from which Barber learnt. The Efficiency Unit produced ‘scrutinies’, whereby it conducted in-depth studies of specific aspects of government and then suggested solutions to issues that it had identified, with the aim of improving efficiency. Thatcher made it clear that she supported the scrutinies, which carried weight in Whitehall.73 Rayner said ‘the purpose of scrutinies is action, not study’.74 Again, this is a distinction that Barber later made with the PMDU priority reviews.
Rayner left the Efficiency Unit in 1982 and was succeeded by Robin Ibbs. Ibbs wrote the 1988 report ‘Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps’, which led to far-reaching changes within the Civil Service. It suggested the creation of a multitude of executive agencies with responsibility for operational delivery, which would have significant powers related to budgets and hiring. 22These agencies would perform executive functions that were then managed within Whitehall, and this would result in a slimmed-down Civil Service. Thatcher accepted the Next Steps recommendations and within a few years dozens of agencies had been created, employing tens of thousands of people. Early agencies included the Vehicle Inspectorate, HM Stationery Office and Companies House.75 Next Steps did not, however, resolve the issue of operational delivery capacity within Whitehall departments. Such capacity would become important as taxpayers, citizens and politicians increasingly came to expect higher standards of public services. Meeting these expectations and addressing the gaps in capacity would become the focus for the Delivery Unit.
JOHN MAJOR – CITIZEN’S CHARTER
In 1991, John Major launched the Citizen’s Charter to improve public services and make them more responsive to the service user. It was the focus on the citizen as the customer of public services that was most radical. The scheme established individual charters for public services which set out standards that the user should expect to receive. The charters would act effectively as a contract between service providers and service users.76 The implementation of the Citizen’s Charter was poor and the initiative was not accompanied by investment in public services. Despite this, it did ignite a shift in thinking whereby citizens had the right to expect improved standards of public service delivery.77
This brief history of prime ministerial units provides a basis for understanding how the Delivery Unit fits into a range of twentieth-century prime ministerial changes to central machinery of government. With hindsight, one can see that elements of these 23reforms were also present in Blair’s Delivery Unit: the centralising approach of Lloyd George’s Cabinet Office and the explicitly prime ministerial focus of the Garden Suburb, the independent data-gathering of Churchill’s Statistical Section, the early warning system that Heath sought through the CPRS, the politically attuned nature of Wilson’s Policy Unit, the effective scrutiny of policy provided to Thatcher by the Efficiency Unit and the citizen’s right to high-quality public services proposed by the Citizen’s Charter.
THE DELIVERY METHOD OF THIS BOOK
The approach taken for creating this book builds on a foundation forged by pioneering historians of British government. My former lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, Professor Peter Hennessy, a journalist turned academic, has been developing an approach to the study of British government since the late 1980s. Both Whitehall and The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 have been instructive books in unearthing how British government – both its political and its civil servant components – work in practice. Secondly Professor Jon Davis, also my former lecturer down the Mile End Road, has built on the Hennessy style of contemporary history using dozens of interviews with prominent politicians, civil servants and special advisers to piece together a comprehensive and balanced account of Blair’s premiership. His Heroes or Villains? The Blair Government Reconsidered was co-written with John Rentoul, chief political commentator for The Independent and visiting professor at King’s College London, who though very much still an active journalist has been teaching students about ‘The Blair Years’ for fifteen years.
The following three factors have guided the formation of this 24book – policy, process and personality. In seeking to evaluate Barber and the Delivery Unit’s art of delivery one must understand the policy that was being pursued, the process by which the decisions were taken and policy implementation was tracked, and the personalities of those who were undertaking the policy development and delivery – their working style and how they engaged with each other. This book focuses on the critical points of uncertainty where policy and process decisions and events arose, which were of fundamental importance to the success or failure of the Delivery Unit. In the words of Peter Hennessy, ‘The job of the historian is to put back into the past the same uncertainty we feel today about the future – an indispensable requirement.’78
This book has benefited from an invaluable resource, not yet in the public domain: Michael Barber’s private diaries. Barber handwrote his diary each week during his time as head of the PMDU. He kept the diary because he recognised the value in the vantage point he would have during a critical period – trying to deliver major public service reform – and this would be of historical importance, at the very least for his own record. Moreover, Barber is a historian by undergraduate training and an author of books that are based upon his own professional experiences. As part of conducting the research for this book, Barber’s diaries from 2001 to 2005 have been transcribed by the present author and total almost 600,000 words. This project therefore represents a unique opportunity to conduct research with a new, rich in-depth resource. In utilising Barber’s diaries an appropriately critical perspective has been maintained. Findings from the diaries have been cross-checked where possible and multiple viewpoints have been considered. The diaries also contain hard copies of some documents such as email exchanges and delivery updates. 25
In his diary entries, Barber would consider the events of each week with particular attention paid to his relations with senior politicians, advisers and civil servants, significant meetings or conversations that took place between himself and the aforementioned individuals, issues that had arisen or that he thought might arise, and potential solutions that he was contemplating. There were also regular reflections of his own standing with key individuals within government, and throughout much of the period Barber worried about being sufficiently ‘in the loop’ so as to maintain the importance of his own role and the effectiveness of the PMDU. From his viewpoint, he would often comment on the conduct of government and the state of relationships between the main protagonists of the Blair government. The Barber diaries thus provide an unprecedented week-by-week insight into how the Blair government developed, debated and delivered major public service reform.
The government papers from Blair’s premiership have begun to be released at The National Archives, but given that they are not yet fully released they have not been used for this book. Reports by House of Commons select committees provide a wealth of analysis and primary sources, as do the minutes of evidence, which are publicly available (and often understudied). Media articles from the time inform the story, and help to identify uncertainties that are often lost with the passage of time. Published memoirs from central figures offer crucial detail and analysis from the time that may not be recorded in official documents; nevertheless they are subjective and present only one part of the story.
Interviews have been conducted by the author with several relevant senior civil servants, Cabinet ministers and special advisers,79 to establish how events transpired, who was involved and what factors were significant in success or failure. The overall interview 26process was conducted based on an assessment of what is missing from existing publications in terms of content and perspective. There is a gap in the published literature on the Treasury vis-à-vis the Delivery Unit, despite the huge uncertainty as to whether a close working relationship could be formed and sustained. Securing interviews with prominent Treasury figures was therefore of fundamental importance in providing a new and balanced picture of how Barber and the Delivery Unit worked with the Treasury.
WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW
To date many prominent New Labour figures have published their recollections and reflections on all or some of their time in government. They include Andrew Adonis, Ed Balls, Michael Barber, Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell, Alistair Darling, Peter Hyman, Peter Mandelson and Jonathan Powell. These books of New Labour politicians and advisers are immensely beneficial in cross-referencing important decisions, policies, personalities and crises as well as providing some insight into Barber and the Delivery Unit throughout the period.
In his autobiography, A Journey, Blair did not discuss the PMDU in detail though he did mention its creation, its ethos and its success. On the Delivery Unit’s style of working, Blair wrote: ‘It would focus like a laser on an issue, draw up a plan to resolve it, working with the department concerned, and then performance-manage it to solution.’80 He explained that ‘the concept of the Delivery Unit was Michael’s idea’; ‘it was an innovation that was much resisted, but utterly invaluable and proved its worth time and time again’.81 In his role as Prime Minister, Blair reflected that ‘in domestic policy, changing public service systems inevitably meant getting into the 27details of delivery and performance management in a radically more granular way’.82 From his viewpoint, the ‘problem with the traditional Civil Service was not obstruction, but inertia’.83 He did, however, identify the strengths of the Civil Service: ‘It was and is impartial. It is, properly directed, a formidable machine.’84
We now know something about the beginning, middle and end of the story of how the Blair government created a delivery unit to transform the quality of public services that we use each day, but much still remains a mystery. The forthcoming story will be about how it was done in real time, not a glossy overview devoid of uncertainty, challenge and failure. To my mind, this is the value of history, to feel something of what it was actually like to be there. 28
Notes
1 T. Blair, Institute for Government, 28 June 2010, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/evening-tony-blair accessed 28 May 2019.
2 Quoted in M. Barber, Instruction to Deliver (London: Methuen, 2008), p. 46.
3 Barber (2008), p. 47.
4 Ibid., p. xvi.
5 Ibid., p. 30.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 39.
8 A. Seldon, Blair Unbound (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 40.
9 Barber (2008), p. 48.
10 House of Lords Constitution Committee, ‘The Cabinet Office and the Centre of Government’, January 2010, p. 15.
11 P. Hyman, 1 out of 10: From Downing Street Vision to School Reality (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 171.
12 Hyman (2005), pp. 171–2.
13 Ibid., p. 175.
14 Ibid.
15 Barber (2008), p. 70.
16 J. Y. Kim, ‘As Prepared for Delivery’ speech, World Bank, 12 October 2012, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2012/10/12/remarks-world-bank-group-president-jim-yong-kim-annual-meeting-plenary-session accessed 19 June 2015.
17 M. Barber, ‘The Science of Delivery’, Mile End Group, Queen Mary University of London, 29 January 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaF84du_zUE accessed 29 May 2019.
18 Michael Barber and Tony Blair briefly referred to ‘the art of delivery’ in 2013 at an event at the World Bank. There has been no detailed explanation or historical study published by Barber, Blair or any academic to date on how Barber and the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit created an ‘art of delivery’ from 2001 to 2005. Barber et al, ‘Delivering Results – A Conversation with Jim Yong Kim, Tony Blair and Michael Barber’, 10 April 2013, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2013/04/10/delivering-results-conversation-jim-yong-kim-tony-blair-michael-barber accessed 16 April 2020.
19 J. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), preface.
20 G. Osborne, E. Balls and D. Cameron, ‘Inside Number 10: David Cameron – The First Six Months’, Political Currency podcast, 2 January 2025.
21 J. Rentoul, ‘Gove (fails to) recruit another Blairite’, The Independent, 24 March 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110326053551/http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/03/24/gove-recruits-another-blairite/accessed 6 June 2016.346
22 M. Clement, ‘The new No10 Delivery Unit has the potential to turn Boris Johnson’s rhetoric into real world outcomes’, The Independent, 29 June 2021.
23 M. Barber and T. Blair, ‘How to Run a Government’, Strand Group, King’s College London, 11 June 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5GuPdD2cOk accessed 24 August 2015.
24 M. Barber, How to Run a Government (London: Allen Lane, 2015) Kindle Edition, Loc 42.
25 Leader, ‘Chris Barber Obituary’, The Times, 20 August 2012.
26 Ibid.
27 M. Barber Diary, 3 August 2005.
28 Barber (2008), p. 4.
29 Barber Diary, 26 June 2004.
30 Barber (2008), p. 6.
31 Ibid., p. 5.
32 Ibid., p. 7.
33 Ibid., p. 9.
34 M. Barber Curriculum Vitae, 2009, https://www.hse.ru/data/2009/11/20/1227763095/Michael-Barber-CV.pdf accessed 8 May 2019.
35 Barber (2008), p. 11.
36 M. Barber, Interview with author, 2018.
37 Barber (2008), p. 22.
38 Ibid., p. 23.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 26.
41 Ibid., p. 23.
42 Ibid., p. 25.
43 A. Adonis, Education, Education, Education: Reforming England’s Schools (London: Biteback, 2012), p. 27.
44 C. Swinson, Interview with author, 2023. In September 2024, Clara Swinson was appointed head of the Mission Delivery Unit in Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
45 M. Barber, The Learning Game: Arguments for an Education Revolution (London: Indigo, 1997), p. 11.
46 G. Mulgan and A. Lee, ‘Better Policy Delivery and Design: A Discussion Paper’, Performance and Innovation Unit, January 2001, http://www.civilservant.org.uk/library/policy/2001_piu_better_policy_delivery_and_design.pdf accessed 3 February 2016.
47 Barber (2008), p. 33.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., p. 38.
50 Barber Diary, 18 March 2001.
51 M. Barber, ‘The Very Big Picture’, Improving Schools 3 (2000), p. 5.
52 Barber (2000), p. 14.
53 Ibid., p. 17.
54 A. Blick and G. Jones, At Power’s Elbow: Aides to the Prime Minister from Robert Walpole toDavid Cameron (London: Biteback, 2013), p. 82.
55 P. Hennessy, Cabinet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 17.
56 J. Turner, Lloyd George’s Secretariat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 193.
57 Parliamentary Archives, Lloyd George Papers, LG/F/74/2/3, Cited in, A. Blick and G. Jones, ‘A century of policy advice in No. 10’, No. 10 History Blog, 5 January 2017, https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/01/05/a-century-of-policy-advice-at-no-10-part-one/#_ftn1 accessed 10 August 2018.
58 Parliamentary Archives, Lloyd George Papers, LG/F/74/10/4, Cited in, Blick and Jones, ‘A century of policy advice in No. 10’, No. 10 History Blog, 5 January 2017, https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/01/05/a-century-of-policy-advice-at-no-10-part-one/#_ftn1 accessed 10 August 2018.347
59 Parliamentary Archives, Lloyd George Papers, LG/F/74/10/4, Cited in, Blick and Jones (2017).
60 G. Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 200.
61 Best (2003), p. 201.
62 Blick and Jones (2013), p. 181.
63 J. Davis, Prime Ministers and Whitehall 1960–74 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), p. 121.
64 Davis (2007), p. 120.
65 Ibid., p. 113 and p. 131.
66 Ibid., p. 128.
67 Ibid., p. 129.
68 Barber Diary, 17 November 2001.
69 J. Campbell, Edward Heath: A Biography (London: Random House, 1993), p. 315.
70 Davis (2007), p. 162.
71 P. Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 369.
72 C. Haddon, ‘Reforming the Civil Service – The Efficiency Unit’, Institute for Government, 2012.
73 Haddon (2012), p. 8.
74 Ibid., p. 7.
75 Hennessy (1990), p. 625.
76 House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, ‘From Citizen’s Charter to Public Service Guarantees’, July 2008.
77 Hennessy (2001), p. 515.
78 P. Hennessy, Distilling the Frenzy: Writing the History of One’s Own Times (London: Biteback, 2012), p. 19.
79 See full list of interviews in Bibliography.
80 T. Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010) Kindle edition, Loc 6838.
81 Blair (2010), Loc 6838.
82 Ibid., Loc 6824.
83 Ibid., Loc 1112.
84 Ibid., Loc 4441.
