Look, I told you. Governance matters…

I freely admit that I do “bang on” about governance quite a lot in these (mostly) weekly pieces. And that might well be because I’m a bureaucrat and the sort of person that reads constitutions so that I know what my remit is and what the rules are. But I also know that mutual respect, even when you disagree, and a mind open to enough honest doubt to accept that you might not always be right, tends to produce better outcomes.

But it tells you a lot that the Conservative response to the Raab fiasco is to both blame the civil servants who complained about him and to propose reforms that are likely to lead to even worse ministerial decision making. Appointing a bunch of your mates to run a section of the machinery of state is likely to lead to one or more of three things:

• corruption – who awards contracts matters, and if you strip out enough checks and balances, you end up with VIP channels and all that that entailed during the pandemic

• group think – if your job depends on patronage, you’re not likely to tell your boss something they probably won’t want to hear

• instability – the current life expectancy of a minister in post appears to be not much longer than a mayfly with, for example, ten Justice Secretaries in the past decade, so is an incoming minister likely to keep their predecessor’s private office? And what does that mean for institutional memory?

The reason why Northcote Trevelyan matters in the first place was that it overcame the effects of patronage in the first place, introducing “core values of integrity, propriety, objectivity and appointment on merit, able to transfer its loyalty and expertise from one elected government to the next”.

Mess with that at your peril…

Might political history be made in the Gipping Valley?

You might not have noticed, but the Greens launched their national campaign for this year’s local election across the River Gipping from Creeting St Peter, where I live. Why Stowmarket, I hear you ask? The answer is that Mid Suffolk District Council is their number one target in England and it’s entirely possible that they could form a majority administration. They need six gains for control, and three from the Conservatives to be the largest group, in which case, the prospects of a Green/Liberal Democrat administration loom large.

And, having seen how the ward by ward contests have panned out, if you want to vote out the Conservatives around here, the best choices are mostly pretty obvious. Labour barely exist here, the Liberal Democrats are contesting only thirteen of the thirty-four available seats and the Greens have more candidates than the Conservatives (twenty-nine to twenty-eight).

There will be lessons to learn, regardless…

A country gentleman takes up his quill

You wouldn’t expect a vacancy to arise on a Federal Party Committee within the first four months of its term, especially from the directly elected members, but we have already had our first resignation, from Federal Council, under somewhat unusual circumstances, whereby a decision to run against official party candidates has led to a “jump before being expelled” scenario.

The result is that your correspondent has been called upon to return to organisational harness. You may not have heard the last of this. At least, I’m hoping that you haven’t, given my past record…

And so, on with another Monday!

* Mark Valladares is the Monday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, the newly elected member of Federal Council and a re-elected Parish Councillor in Creeting St Peter.