Francis Maude, who shadows Liam Byrne on the Cabinet Office brief, has had a long political career – and, like most political careers, it has not described a straight line. Elected to Parliament in 1983 and at first a member of the Thatcherite ‘No Turning Back’ group, by 1990 he was financial secretary to the Treasury. But he lost his seat in ’92, and didn’t rejoin the Parliamentary party – ironically enough – until the Labour landslide
of 1997.

Made William Hague’s shadow chancellor, he backed Michael Portillo against Iain Duncan Smith in the 2001 contest and ended up on the backbenches. There, he positioned himself as an arch-moderniser – and on David Cameron’s election in 2005, the party seemed to have caught up with him. A stint as chairman saw him leading a serious attempt to ‘decontaminate’ the party’s image; the rank and file weren’t happy, though, and in 2007 he retreated to shadow the Cabinet Office minister.

So Maude is a political veteran – and one who has in his time upset many top Conservatives. His socially liberal views and push for party modernisation, in particular, irritate the right; in 2002, he undermined party leader Duncan Smith by defying a three-line whip to vote in favour of allowing same-sex and unmarried couples to adopt. On the civil service, though, he generally takes a small-c conservative stance that will please many top officials.

“The fact that the centres of government in Treasury, Cabinet Office and Downing Street have become so powerful is very damaging,” Maude told Civil Service World at last year’s Conservative conference. “Permanent secretaries should not see the cabinet secretary as their boss; they should be responsible to their ministers. The cabinet secretary will still be the head of the civil service [under the Conservatives], but departments must be empowered to get on with the job”.

However, any Tory government will be split between the rhetoric of decentralisation and the leadership’s need to push its agenda through government. Last month, the Times reported that David Cameron and George Osborne intend to strengthen the cabinet secretary’s ability to hold officials to account for performance against targets, in accordance with advice from think tank the Institute for Government.

Maude’s preference for a return to greater departmental autonomy, then, may not survive the uncompromising calculations of government. On the subject of external recruitment, though, he’s held a clear line. Asked about the topic at Tory conference, he replied: “At the risk of sounding like a golden-ager, I think the traditional model can work very well. I’m not against bringing in people from the private sector, but you need to be sure that those in key positions are the right people to deliver what you need.”

This, it seems, represents a qualified acceptance of the professionalisation agenda. “We welcome the development in recent years of professional streams”, he said in a January speech, calling for finance directors to be given “the same sort of status that the chief financial officer would have in the private sector”; they should be “centrally involved in all policy and spending decisions”.

On procurement, too, Maude has called for greater professionalisation. “We’ve yet to develop enough in-house expertise in commissioning and in having outside providers deliver public services,” he told Civil Service World last year. “Currently, too many departments use outside consultants to run procurement exercises”.

So some external recruitment may be necessary – but Maude wants to see the civil service developing its own talent, particularly for top roles. “I’m very much in favour of greater interchange with the private sector and the civil service at a more junior and middle-ranking level,” he told Personnel Today in June, arguing that wider experience could be imported into the upper ranks by encouraging top officials to take secondments with “a sense that you won’t lose your place on the civil service career path, so you could come back in at a much more senior level.”

On the subject of special advisers, consultants, and the growth of public relations and communications professionals within government, Maude has always sounded hostile – despite his leader’s background as a ‘spad’ in Nigel Lawson’s Treasury. Just last month, he criticised in Parliament the “corrosive” effect of some spads on the “quality and integrity of government”, and called for the Constitutional Renewal Bill to include provisions to “place a cap on their number and reassert in law that their role is to advise ministers and not to direct the civil service”.

Indeed, Maude has consistently called for civil servants to reassert their place at ministers’ sides. Earlier this year, he wrote a piece for Public Service magazine that criticised Labour for being suspicious of the civil service – a wariness that, he said, “led to excessive reliance on special advisers, most of whom had no experience of implementing anything”; this, in turn, led to “policy ill-thought through and riddled with risk.”

So policymakers should do well with Maude at the helm – but press offices, perhaps, less so. Maude has complained about public investment in communications, advertising and marketing; he sponsored a Commons business motion in May last year that “condemns the excessive increase in the Government’s spending” on communications and “notes with alarm the increasing number of civil servants employed as press and communications officers”.

Back offices may also fear a Conservative victory. Maude told Personnel Today that “it’s not obvious” that shared services schemes are working well: “We are ready to outsource,” he said. “If shared services are started and run in-house, you will always have turf difficulties over who will run it. But if functions are outsourced, the turf difficulties get removed and you are more likely to have a better outcome”.

Other reforms under a Maude-led Cabinet Office are likely to include throwing open most recruitment competitions to external recruits, encouraging more well-judged risk-taking, incentivising individual civil servants to seek efficiency savings, and finally pushing through a Civil Service Act to enshrine in law the civil service’s independence.

Maude’s most important current role, though, is his job as head of the ‘implementation team’, which – under the management of Nicholas Boles, former chief of think tank the Policy Exchange – has ring-mastered meetings between the shadow secretaries of state and departmental permanent secretaries. The team is also working with the Institute for Government to train Cameron’s inexperienced shadow cabinet in the complexities, considerations and techniques of life as a minister, and building a legislative timetable centred around Michael Gove’s flagship education bill.

As the series of Conservative/civil service meetings move down from the shadow cabinet/permanent secretary level to introduce more junior would-be ministers to their prospective teams, Maude has again become a key player in the fortunes of the Conservative Party. “Francis has been leading an effort across all our shadow teams to prepare people for being ministers,” says shadow foreign secretary William Hague. “I wasn’t in government in the 1970s, but as far as I know this is the most comprehensive preparation of people to be ministers that any party has ever embarked on.”


CV Highlights

1953     Born in Oxford, the son of former Tory minister Lord Maude
1977     Starts work as a barrister
1983     Elected MP for North Warwickshire
1985     Made a government whip
1987     Becomes a minister in the Department of Trade and Industry
1990     Made financial secretary to the Treasury
1992     Loses his seat, and moves into business as a director and adviser on privatisation
1993     Selected as director of the Deregulation Task Force
1997     Elected to represent Horsham; becomes William Hague’s shadow chancellor
2001     Runs Michael Portillo’s leadership campaign, then rejoins backbenches
2002     Chairs new think tank Conservatives for Change
2005     Made party chairman by Michael Howard; retained by Cameron
2007     Moves to Cabinet Office role