Confessions of a former Government adviser

These days I spend most of my time being critical of politicians and their advisers. It’s easy to find things to criticise, especially when the Tory leadership candidates are dredging up an apparently endless series of terrible ideas.

But at the back of my mind there’s always a voice reminding me how hard government jobs are. I know because I used to do one. From 2010-2013 I was a policy adviser to Michael Gove when he was Secretary of State for Education. This was a civil service role. I wasn’t a political SPAD (special adviser) but I had worked with Michael’s team before the election and he requested my appointment. I shared an office with the SPADs.

I much preferred being a civil servant as I wasn’t then, and am not now, a member of any political party. Indeed I had, until 2007, been a member of the Labour party. Gove gets a lot of criticism but I’ve always thought the fact he was prepared to appoint someone to this role who he knew wasn’t a Conservative reflects well on him. He was a good boss too: open to advice, and often listening to it, letting me range widely, work on what I wanted for the most part, and never raising his voice to me. He’s much more right wing than me on many issues but I enjoyed working with him. I wrote separately about my experiences working with Dom Cummings, who was a SPAD for most of the time I was there, but generally got on fine with him too.

Nevertheless I ended up leaving in February 2013. It was partly because I was fed up of politics. I deeply disliked the constant need to make up nonsense for the No 10 media grid; the hyperbolic language used to denigrate people who disagreed (“the blob” etc…); and increasingly found it hard to work with Dominic. I felt we could have achieved all our policy objectives – indeed done them a lot better – had we not constantly turned everything into a shouty fight.

I also left because I didn’t think I was doing the job very well. The longer I did it the more I doubted the policies I was working on and the more I realised the confidence I’d had at the start of our time in Government wasn’t merited. In the decade that has passed since I’ve realised, with increasing horror, just how many traps I fell into. This was largely due to my lack of experience – I was 28 in 2010 and had had a few researcher jobs. What the hell did I know about anything? But it was also because, at the time, I hadn’t thought much about my own decision making or psychology.

So this is a post of what, in retrospect, I did wrong. I’m writing it as a reminder to myself not to get too smug about other peoples’ policy screw-ups – given how many I made – but also in the hope that people who are now doing similar jobs, or will do so in the future, can learn from my mistakes. Especially as we’re about to get a new Prime Minister who will bring in a whole new team of advisers. The post is split into cognitive errors – misplaced biases or assumptions that led me astray – and practical errors, the ways I went about the job that I’d do differently if I ever did it again.