Just months after stepping down from the most powerful job in Whitehall, Simon Case is building a public profile warning of doom and gloom across the world. Is it right that top civil servants take sides and scare the public after leaving office? And if he cares so much now, what did he do about it when he had the ear of successive prime ministers?
The headline was both alarming and a statement of the bleeding obvious. The next 20 years — said a man who was briefly a marine before a string of jobs in defence, the royal palace and for six prime ministers — will be dominated by conflict. Turn on the telly, take a peep at social media or graze the internet for a nanosecond this week and you’d struggle not to draw that conclusion yourself, without his PhD or civil service record. The world is, quite literally, on fire.
How does it help, then, to have him jumping on the bandwagon, urging us in a podcast to protect ourselves “from dictators and autocrats”? Short answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. He had his moment and missed it. On top of it all, he’s going to become a peer of the realm. This didn’t go down well with the Cambridge academic Peter Sarris, who wrote on X: “Talk about rewarding failure! Putting Simon Case — the worst Cabinet Secretary ever — in the House of Lords is a disgrace. And I was his Director of Studies!”
I’m far from the only one who overlapped with his time at No 10, yet has no recollection of him giving us a heads-up on what lay ahead. He was inevitably involved in our urgent efforts three years ago to arm Ukraine against Russia, but the key figures driving that were the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, and the prime minister, Boris Johnson. Two officials in Downing Street were indispensable; one a former commanding officer of the Special Boat Service, another a clear-sighted and creative academic seconded to government. There were others too who were mission-critical. Cabinet Secretary Case was in office but, in my opinion, not really adding much to the mix.
His suggestion now that the UK should consider a broader range of options for deploying its nuclear deterrent sounds sensible, and his early career focus suggests we should take him seriously here. But again, I’m wondering whether he ever brought this up when he had the chance on the inside.
The one that got away
What we do know is that he allowed the civil service to balloon by more than 90,000 extra staff during the pandemic and frustrated attempts to cut it back as we emerged.
Jacob Rees-Mogg chose a novel way of highlighting how few officials were back at their desks after the lockdown was lifted by wandering around Whitehall leaving notes on desks hinting he’d hope to catch them in on his next visit. Case could have helped bring them back in more diplomatically but did little — as I understand it — other than complain about The Mogg causing offence.
I’m confused to this day about how he featured in the most prominent partygate photo, but never got fined. Yes, that’s him in the shot with teetotal Rishi Sunak and birthday-boy Boris. They got a fixed penalty notice each because one person in the room wasn’t allowed to be there, a technical breach that the Cabinet Secretary by virtue of being in the same space might also have been guilty of.
Embarrassing revelations
Beyond that it’s worth recalling that Case had to commission Sue Gray to investigate the whole thing because he was prevented — by conflict of interest — from doing the job himself.
It had originally been his investigation until two news sites published claims about an event where he shared drinks with around 20 staff in his own office and a waiting room in the Cabinet office, though a spokesperson for the Cabinet Office later said “these allegations are categorically untrue.”
Civil servants, by the way, are managed by senior civil servants not ministers. Even the PM cannot hire, fire, promote or discipline a career official in No 10 — food for thought perhaps on whose failure of leadership meant that far more civil servants got fines than elected politicians. Yet the most shocking, depressing thing for me were the revelations to the Covid Inquiry of the bitter moans and bitching of this supposedly most professional of public servants during the toughest of pandemic times.
This was in a nasty, petty and misogynist WhatsApp group with Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, the self-proclaimed chief adviser and his shockingly under-qualified director of comms, slagging off the PM behind his back and engaging in an ongoing laddish character assassination of his wife, Carrie. Case said she was “the real person in charge” of the government.
“I can’t cope,” was one of Case’s most striking declarations, followed closely perhaps by, “I want to scream … and go home”. Not exactly the cool, calm professional at the helm, heeding Kipling’s advice to keep his head when all around others were losing theirs. With officials like that, who needs an opposition?
So I will read the next instalment from the ex-mandarin, but if he offers genuine insight I’ll be wondering again if that was shared when it could have been. Which might have meant we were all better prepared for the conflicts we now see all too clearly.
Guto Harri is a broadcaster former Downing Street director of communications
