ALBA - Unofficial Forum

Picking a Cabinet is not as easy a task as you might think. You probably imagine that it’s a process of trying to match skills to roles, but that is only part of it. Mostly you end up managing egos, acvoiding bruised feelings where you can, balancing the intenral politics of your administration and so on.

For all these reasons I can sort of see why John Swinney has announced the Cabinet he has announced – but I cannot feel like this is a far-sighted move but it really does feel like a significant mistake. In fact I think this is a mistake in a number of different directions, and that fact that it looks like it looks does not portend well for the near future.

First, let me show you what I mean by ‘it’s not all selecting the best person for the job…’. Perhaps the most surprising move here is making Jenny Gilruth Deputy First Miniser. This struck me as odd because it is almost universally accepted that Gilruth has been pretty dire at education. And it’s not only that she is dire, it’s that she has been dire in a particular kind of way.

Where there have been bumbling Cabinet Secretaries before and others who were just clearly not up to the job, Gilruth’s failures were different – she was largely absent. Talk to people in the education sector and they will tell you that if there was a place to hide and a decision to duck, that’s where you’d find her. She has been as passive as senior politics gets.

So what is it that makes her Deputy First Minister material? I think it can only be a process of elimination. The obvious choice for seniority (asssuming they wanted a gender split) was Angela Constance, the obviuous forward-looking candidate Mairi McAllan. Now as it happens both are friends of mine, but my guesswork here is not based on me having spoken to either about this.

Knowing Angela my guess is that she flat-out didn’t want it. And in Mairi’s case we’re talking about a comparatively young woman who has just had her first child. It would hardly be a major surprise if she wanted to add to her family over the course of the next couple of years. You don’t really want a DFM on maternity leave.

Realistically, that leaves two options – and I wouldn’t have picked Shirley Ann Sommervile either… But it does not look like a powerful or confident or forward-looking appiontment. And it is only the start of a series of decision that don’t look impressive.

The second is giving Gilruth the finance brief. She taught Modern Studies, not Maths. She doesn’t have a reputation as a number-head. And since she was a passive and largely absent Minister at education I think we now have a situation where Finance is not run politically at all. Certainly under Shona Robinson you knew it was the officials making all the decisions, and that now looks permanent.

Effectively, Scotland can’t produce a qualified Finance Secretary so has de-democratised the role. That is an enormous worry. The least bad option would probably have given it to Ivan McKee, but he is just not leadership clique and leadership clique doesn’t trust non-leadership clique with key jobs often.

So finance is whatever officials say it is, Jenny will read out the brief for our benefit and Ivan will move up to Cabinet on a ‘public service reform’ brief. Ivan is a friend too and I know he is sincere about this role, but it is enormously risky to give ‘the minister for losing people their jobs’ a highly-visible Cabinet role.

Unless they can come up with a coherent logic of reform – not just what to cut but how to run things differently – it is hard to feel like shining a spotlight on a process which causes you more pain the better it works is anything other than bad judgement.

But if you really want to see where this reshuffle breaks down, you need to look at the health-justice switcheroo. This screams out ‘bad decision-making’ to me. Very simply, Constance was arguably quietly running the most effective portfolio in government. There were plenty of missteps, but I have heard from a number of sources that what she has been trying to do is coherent, well thought-through and fairly well administered.

Meanwhile Neil Gray is so far out of his depth at Health that he had to be hooked for the sake of all. But it is a stupid mindset that says ‘here’s one person doing well over here and someone else doing badly over here – let’s get the bad person doing the thing that runs well and the more effective person doing the difficult thing and then both will turn out great’.

First, this underestimates the ability of Gray to screw this up. Constance had an agenda and that is what made her effective in the role. I doubt Gray does. But more importantly, does Constance have an agenda in health and can she deliver it? There is a good chance the answer to that is no. So now you’ve sustained the career of a failing minister and taken a pretty effective minister and almost guaranteed that she will sink.

In Swinney’s head this is probably being framed as ‘win win’, and I bet it hasn’t occurred to him that it could be ‘lose lose’. That they’ve kept an oil industry staffer at climate change would appear to reflect the fact that Swinney gives no priority whatsoever to climate change in his politics. The manifesto was least credible in its climate section.

What else they don’t care about screams out from this – social care was meant to be the big defining mission of the last parliament and now (having royally screwed that up) it isn’t even referenced in the cabinet portfolios. Talk big, fuck it up, make it totally disappear and then pretend your care issues have gone away? Bet that works…

Most interesting is giving Stephen Flynn economy. I’d been wondering if we’d see any evidence on who the preferred successor to Swinney would be and if Flynn had got a ‘spiky’ brief that might have suggested he wasn’t the chosen one. But economy is as cuddly as it gets and there really isn’t much to do but listen to whining business figures and sign off Scottish Enterprise press releases, so he may well get space to do what he does best – talk.

Then again, it is going to be a grim five years economically so this brief could actually turn into a horrible trap. It’s early to tell. But what we can also tell is that Mairi McAllan isn’t exactly on the way down. Of the major briefs, education is likely to be as pain-free as they come – as we saw, Gilruth held the post for three years, didn’t do any work and still got promoted.

The biggest disappointment for me is housing. This is clearly another ‘talk big’ area they seem to wish they hadn’t raised expectations over. It isn’t even a year since housing was in such a crisis that it needed its own cabinet portfolio and its own high-profile minister. Now it is tucked away somewhere in Shirley Anne Somerville’s brief. That isn’t where you put things you care about.

And that’s it. Local government doesn’t get mentioned in government briefs (another Somerville-as-long-grass punt that one). Culture is shunted to education like the unwanted child it has been since the parliament was established. International relations appears not to have survived the reverse Midas touch of Angus oh-his-name-is-slipping-my-memory-already.

And perhaps most glaringly, independence is page one, line one of the manifesto (it wasn’t, it was in a half title page as a slogan) but doesn’t merit any kind of brief. I don’t know from any of this who is pretending to do constitution. That’s ‘brave’ internal signalling which will go down well…

Swinney didn’t have much to work with but he’s still managed to assembled a lacklustre cabinet in a lacklustre way. Say what you like about Sturgeon, she had a personal mission (mainly her own self interest) and she was good at signalling it. What is Swinney for? What does any of this mean? Is the height of his ambitious to be remembered as a sort of pleasant middling guy who didn’t do anything dreadful?

I fear he’s becoming like a reverse Tardis – the more you explore his inner reality, the less voluminous it appears. There just isn’t a lot of there there. Can he really ‘kindly uncle’ his way through five years? Will the media let that absence of ambition stand? Will his own party? Scotland as a whole?

I think they are kidding themselves on. It is why I’d have done it completely differently. I would have made it look like a fresh start. I’d have brought Gethins and Thewlis into government, and possibly Alyn Smith. To be clear, I rate Thewlis, see Gethins as yet another uninspiring technocrat less sophisticated than his reputation and Alyn Smith is mostly a blowhard.

I don’t think they’d have been better, but they’d have been new, different, probably not worse and definitely change. Cabinet Secretaries no longer run things, they just rubber stamp what officials give them. There has to be someone more compelling at rubber stamping bad policy than Shirley-Anne Somerville.

Or let me put that another way – if you have two possible cabinets, both mediocre, both out their depth, but one looks fresh and new and the other looks paralysed and complacent, I’d have gone with fresh and new, little persuaded as I am that it would have been much better.

As it stands, Scotland has no political direction at all and it feels like the politicians have given up, so the beancounters are now in complete control. I find it hard to think that there isn’t something better I could be doing with my life than watching this all unfold over the next few years.