The Civil Service has a new head: Cabinet Secretary, Antonia Romeo. The first woman to be appointed. Most of the commentary on her appointment, though, has focussed on personalities, and speculation about why her predecessor Chris Wormald left office. Many followed by asking if Antonio Romero was the right person for the job, with plenty of briefings about allegations of bullying behaviour in a previous post. Without, it has to be said, very much proper analysis of what “the job” actually is, or what it should be about.
The role of Cabinet Secretary is quite a complex and fuzzy one – different occupants, under multiple Prime Ministers, have interpreted the role in quite flexible ways. I’ve met half a dozen of them over the years, although I wouldn’t claim detailed expertise on them personally and I only ever formally interviewed one. But this is not post about individuals and personalities. It’s about the role, or rather roles, that a Cabinet Secretary can play in government. And what role the current Prime Minister may want the new Cabinet Secretary to take on.
But first, here’s one I prepared earlier… Last year I wrote for ConSoc about the various roles of the senior civil service under the new Labour government. I used a simple model I developed some years ago to frame the discussion. Here is a quick reminder:
The counsellor (looking upwards). Senior civil servants are supposed to be the main source of policy-advice to their elected political masters. ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ falls within this role.
The chief executive (looking downwards). Most senior roles include an executive function – managing ‘their’ organisations – some of which are quite large and many of which deliver services directly to the public, businesses and others.
The cooperator (looking outwards). Government is increasingly complex and requires cooperation – within government, across the public sector and beyond to business and civil society – to get almost anything done.
The conservator (being looked at). I’m grateful to the late US academic Professor Larry Terry for this term. It means the role of upholding the constitutional, legal, and moral rules of government (sometimes against elected politicians).
Of these four roles the one that probably interests our current Prime Minister most is the second – the chief executive. Sir Keir Starmer, speaking to the Liaison Committee in December 2025 said that “My experience now as Prime Minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”.
If the PM expects his new Cabinet Secretary to be the person who fixes the levers of state so they work better and faster, then unfortunately that is very unlikely to happen. Firstly, the chief executive role is probably the weakest of the Cabinet Secretary’s roles in our system of cabinet government. Their role mirrors that of the Prime Minister’s as ‘first among equals’ in the cabinet, but in this case it’s the assembly of permanent secretaries. With even less power over other perm secs than the PM has over his or her cabinet colleagues.
Whilst other permanent secretaries are very much the CEO of their departments, a Cabinet Secretary is much less so. Their role is much more like the co-operator role described above, herding their perm sec colleagues in the required direction, if they can.
There is potentially a much broader co-operator role for the Cabinet Secretary. Only about 10% of the UK’s public sector workforce are in the Civil Service. And even some of those are now working for devolved governments in Wales and Scotland (NI has its own, separate, Civil Service). So, when government wants to get things done it mostly involves working through a plethora of other tiers of government and arms-length bodies. Something Sir Keir Starmer complained about in his Liaison Committee evidence.
Few of the 14 previous occupants of the Cabinet Secretary role have really recognised, much less practiced, the need for co-operation with the host of other public bodies that deliver public services. To be fair, this has largely reflected the policy and practice of central government, who have tended to operate in a lever-pulling, command and control, manner towards the wider public service.
One attempt to meet this problem was made in the period of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government. From 2011 to 2014 the position of Cabinet Secretary (the counsellor and conservator roles) was separated from the Head of the Civil Service. Sir Jeremy Heywood was Cabinet Secretary and Sir Bob Kerslake – who had extensive local government experience – was drafted in as Head of the Civil Service.
This was clearly an attempt to deal with what has often been called the “implementation problem”: that senior civil servants, and especially the permanent secretaries and Cabinet Secretary, spent too much time looking upwards and not enough looking down towards implementation. A problem first recognised under Margaret Thatcher in the 1988 ‘Next Steps’ report, and echoed today in the current Prime Minister’s “the levers don’t work” complaints.
Some of us warned at the time (in evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee in 2011) that this separation would not work and probably compound the problems of turning policy into action. It was abandoned before the end of the Coalition Government, with Sir Jeremy Heywood recombining the roles.
The counsellor role of the Cabinet Secretary – giving policy advice to the Prime Minister and the cabinet of the day – is shrouded in secrecy. So much so that relatively little is known about it – even from memoirs (most Cabinet Secretary’s have not written them). But regardless, it’s pretty clear that several recent occupants of the post have been short-lived: the last three were in post for only two, four and two years respectively. Since the role was created in 1916, the usual time-in-post has been around 8 years or so, and often across several Prime Ministers. This suggests that, for whatever reason, more recent Prime Ministers have quickly found fault with cabinet secretaries. Whether that is about policy-advice or implementation, or both, is unclear.
The final role is even more secretive, and requires making sure elected politicians stick to the constitution, conventions, laws and rules. This, in particular, includes giving constitutional advice to the Monarch, where in certain circumstances the so-called “golden triangle” of officials – the Cabinet Secretary, the Prime Minister’s Principle Private Secretary (PPS) and the King’s own PPS – advise the Monarch what do. This includes, for example, on who to summon to form a government in the event of a hung Parliament.
There have been two recent elections – 2010 and 2019 – where this could have been an issue. And the (as it turned out unconstitutional) prorogation of Parliament in 2019 was an occasion when it might have been expected that the Cabinet Secretary and others in the golden-triangle might have provided advice to the then-Queen. There is no evidence this happened, though, which could be seen as a failure of the conservator role.
The process of appointing a Cabinet Secretary – since the role was created in 1916 – has always been something of a ‘black box’. What happens at the time only becomes a little clearer much later on, if at all. There was some attempt in the period roughly from the middle of the New Labour Government (1997-2010) until the fall of David Camerion (2016) to try to make appoints of the Cabinet Secretary and other permanent secretaries more formalised and transparent, involving other actors besides the Prime Minister. Since the illness of the late Sir Jeremy Heywood brought his stint as Cabinet Secretary to an untimely end in 2018, though, the subsequent four appointments (Mark Sedwill, Simon Case, Chris Wormald and now Antonia Romeo) have been much less transparent and appear to have been much more personal to the Prime Minister. This also applies to the manner of their leaving.
The current Prime Minister’s use of the ‘lever’ metaphor strongly suggests that he may see the need for a stronger helmswoman at the wheel of the ship of state. If so, a cautionary note from history is worth considering:
The history of post-war British Cabinets has been a continuous story of people trying to do too much, believing that they had power over events which in fact they lacked, treating national circumstances as entirely within their control and twirling the wheel on the bridge as though every move would produce an instant response in some well-oiled engine-room below.
David Howell, 1987, cited in Peter Hennessy, Whitehall, 1989, p300.
It remains to be seen how the new Cabinet Secretary will interpret her position and the emphasis that will be given to each of her four roles. This will also be shaped, of course, by this Prime Minister, and possibly by whoever follows him. The indications are, though, that both he and she will be placing a lot of emphasis on getting things done.
Colin Talbot.
Colin Talbot is Emeritus Professor of Government, University of Manchester. He also has relationships with the Cambridge Judge Business School and the Federal Trust. Colin has worked extensively with all levels of British government and public services, including being an advisor to two House of Commons Select Committees and appearing as an expert witness over two dozen times in both Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh Assembly. He has also advised more than a dozen other governments, from the USA to Japan.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.