SerpApi.Org
As a parting gift to the nation, Sir Keir Starmer has given a peerage to Sir Chris Wormald – the cabinet secretary he hand-picked, then sacked.
Wormald was the shortest-serving cabinet secretary in history. He has already accrued a taxpayer-funded pension of up to £125,000 per year, and trousered a £260,000 golden goodbye in February. But in Whitehall, the rewards for failure are infinite.
Nothing in Sir Chris’s record is worthy of a seat in the legislature for life. Our outgoing prime minister tasked him with “the complete re-wiring of the British state”.
Within six months, sources in Starmer’s team branded Wormald as “insipid”, “disastrous” for reform, and a blocker to work around. Less than a year later, he was out of the door.
Even the usually doe-eyed Institute for Government delivered a crushing verdict, declaring that Wormald “failed in the tasks he was appointed to complete” and left No 10 “underpowered” and the Cabinet Office “bloated”.
The irony is that anyone who’d worked with Wormald could have seen this coming. For much of my time at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), he served as permanent secretary.
I observed a man who was a master obfuscater. Never content with answering a question with one word when he could use ten, Wormald offloaded responsibility to NHS England, and fixated on matters of presentation.
He spent hours rewriting responses to media queries, preferring to pontificate about how policies would be perceived, rather than addressing the impact they’d have on patients.
From the blasé attitude he exuded, anyone would have thought DHSC was a well-oiled machine that could be left to run itself.
When waiting lists were at record highs, and the social care system was on its knees, Wormald was busy tossing a rugby ball around his office and refusing to tackle meaningful reform.
Leaving aside the criticism he’s received for supporting herd immunity, his handling of the pandemic was nothing short of disastrous.
Patrick Vallance’s contemporaneous concerns about the “operational mess”, “inefficiency” and “lack of grip” inside DHSC were reported by the Covid Inquiry.
Even Wormald’s own staff called his department “an ungovernable web of competing parts”. By this time, he’d been running DHSC for almost four years.
Good leaders take responsibility for their mistakes, but like all good bureaucrats, Wormald retreats behind process.
The counsel representing bereaved families described his inquiry evidence as “an object lesson in obfuscation, a word salad – so many, many words, so very little substance”. That’s the Chris Wormald I know.
After the pandemic, failure continued unabated. Last year, the chairman of the Commons’ public accounts committee accused Sir Chris and NHS England’s leadership of “some of the worst complacency” he had ever seen. He excoriated their “disregard for basic principles of sound financial planning” and “stale platitudes of incremental change”.
During Wormald’s tenure as permanent secretary at the Department for Education, the National Audit Office accused the department of failing to meet Parliament’s accountability requirements and producing financial statements that contained “material and pervasive” errors.
As is the norm in Whitehall, Wormald was allowed to fail upwards. After eight years of his leadership, an ally of Wes Streeting defined the health service’s culture as “pointless paperwork, stodgy process and a severe lack of urgency”.
Yet, the Labour Party wants to reward the man who helped run it with £371 of taxpayers’ cash for each day he turns up to the Lords. It’s no wonder they’re polling at less than 20 per cent.
The public are sick to the back teeth of a public sector where failure comes without consequence.
Wormald would have been the first former cabinet secretary to be denied a peerage, but none of his predecessors failed so spectacularly.
By ennobling him, Starmer has revealed that for all his talk of change, he is a defender of the rotten status quo. Arise Lord Wormald, expect verbose speeches and not a lot else.
