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Corrected oral evidence: The UK’s constitutional safeguards

Oral evidence, 3 September 2026.

Lord O'Donnell

Sure. Let me give you the example of the 2010 coalition talks. In general, your point about legislation is a very good one, because legislation—I say this all the time—is very rigid and gets out of date very quickly. Trying to legislate for AI regulation, for example—oh my God. I like the idea of things like the Cabinet Manual. I like the idea of us producing something which said—again, against the possibility of electoral fragmentation and all those sorts of things—“Here are the rules of the game when it comes to an unclear result from Parliament. You have got multiple parties. What do you do?” I will be honest with you: I was making it up as I went along part of the time, because there was not a precedent. I did consult my predecessors, as any good Cabinet Secretary does. They are a very wise bunch, and they said, “Well, this has not happened before in the UK. There are some examples from the devolveds and from elsewhere”. Make it clear that it is the Cabinet Secretary’s job and civil servants’ job to continue to support the current Prime Minister until there is a new one—make that absolutely black and white plain—and that you are not prejudging any outcomes by doing that; that is what our system requires you to do because we need a Prime Minister in place. But there should be a requirement, as there is sort of in precedent, that if a big issue comes up during that time there will be some consultation with other party leaders. Secondly, when it comes to getting everybody around the table and they are coming up with talks about what they might do and all the rest of it, then there should be some rule about briefing. I made up the rule about briefing. We provided briefing to all the parties who are doing a negotiation on the rule that, if we gave it to one party, we would give it to the other. It was the same briefing, because it was an objective piece of Civil Service advice. It might say, “You are thinking of doing this. Curiously enough, that is illegal. You cannot do it. It is just a non-starter”, or “You would have to have primary legislation to change this”. There should be some rules about how the briefing goes on, and some rules about interaction with the sovereign—some process things, which will be really helpful, about how you do this. That document might not have legal status; that is a real question for the committee. Your collective knowledge around this table is such that it will be incredibly useful for you to opine on that and how to make that work, because it is very difficult to think of the future circumstances. When I was thinking about hung Parliaments, I thought about supply and confidence, and about varying degrees of coalitions. I did not think about multi-party situations.

Lord Bellamy

May I just, Chairman, follow up for a moment? I can see that it is quite important to have a record of what happened in that situation and to stress the things that were particularly important—that we should support the Prime Minister, we should carry on with the briefings, access and so forth. But as you yourself say, you were making up the rules as you went along, and it is rather difficult to legislate in advance for a situation thar has not yet happened, as it were.

Lord O'Donnell

There are things that we could say should happen. You talked about making notes of what is going on. Basically, another of my multiple failures was that, when the Conservative and Lib Dem negotiating committees were getting together to discuss their programme for government, I said I thought it would be very helpful if we had a civil servant in there to make a note of what they decided. Then two of the members of the negotiating team came up to me and said, “If we were to write a note on this, would it be FOI-able?” I said, “Well, everything’s FOI-able subject to public interest, so I cannot guarantee that it is not”. They said, “Thank you very much, Gus. No civil servants”. So it is quite important that we establish some precedents, like that having some formal notes of things is a good idea. You could at the same time say that there will be safeguards on these things, because it is obviously very politically charged. Let me give you a hypothetical that two parties come into a room and one party says, “Here are some things in my manifesto that would be really good to drop”, and the other party said the same, “because I had to put those in for various reasons. And I am going to blame you for dropping them and you are going to blame me and that’s fine.” That gets you to a very good outcome—but do you want that public?

Lord Bellamy

This document is still a document of convention rather than a document of legal force.

Lord O'Donnell

Most certainly. Yes. Absolutely. Putting it to legal force would be complicated.

The Chair

Just on that, are you suggesting amending the way FOI works in practice by law?

Lord O'Donnell

I have always had real problems with this. FOI has been brilliant in that what it has mostly done is got us to consider whether, if an FOI request came in, we would publish it. If the answer is yes, then why do we not publish it in the first place? But then there are issues about things like the discussion I just had where you would say, “Actually, can’t we have some proper exemptions for things, which will actually lead to better decisions and better outcomes?” The trouble is, all exemptions are subject to a public interest case test, which means that you do not know whether it is actually going to come out there or not. If you have got any uncertainty about this, then you can not have the civil servant in the room or you can do it all on WhatsApp. I am afraid it leads to a deterioration, in my view, in the quality of government.

The Chair

I call Lord Murphy, to take us in a slightly different direction now.

Lord Murphy of Torfaen

Fascinating points. You mentioned earlier the inexperience of new Ministers. My recollection of 1997, when I first became a Minister, is that, of the 100-plus Ministers, only six had been very junior Ministers millions of years before. Therefore, the role of the Cabinet Secretary and the role of the Civil Service generally was absolutely critical in forming the new Government and what we were to do. Incidentally, you mentioned FOI, and I was seriously worried about it when I was Northern Ireland Secretary, because of the implications of having negotiations and discussions and suddenly those being FOI-ed and I would be back to square 1 again. The point I wanted to ask you is about the role that you held as Cabinet Secretary, as being, in a sense, a constitutional guardian. Normally, we say that the House of Lords is the constitutional guardian, but I think the Civil Service, the Head of the Civil Service and the Cabinet Secretary could be classified as a constitutional guardian. We have talked today about the ways in which that could be formalised and the Cabinet Secretary being given formal powers. To be honest—this comes later on as well—the Cabinet Manual is a handbook, nothing else. It is handy and useful; it gives you precedents, so far as that matters—you can overturn it in a second—but there is nothing formal about it. As the Chair just said, whether that could be put in formally into legislation I do not know. But do you think that the role of the Cabinet Secretary as the constitutional guardian, including the sort of things you did in 2010, could be much more formalised than even it is at the moment in the Cabinet Manual?

Lord O'Donnell

Can I make two points? One is on your bit about Ministers and churn. When I had the access talks with David Cameron when he was the Leader of the Opposition, he went through all the things that he wanted to do in government, and we had that proper discussion. Then he said to me, “Gus, is there anything that you would want from me?” I said, “The number one thing I would like from you is Ministers to stay in post for as long as possible”. He said, “Okay, I hear what you say”. I do think that keeping Ministers in place for a long time is a good idea. You made a point about the constitution. David Cameron, in the foreword to the Cabinet Manual, says, “Cabinet has endorsed the Cabinet Manual as an authoritative guide for ministers and officials, and I expect everyone working in government to be mindful of the guidance it contains”. Mindful? That is all I could get. I pushed. Yes, I would love it to have stronger backing. It needs that. As Cabinet Secretary, I thought that I had a constitutional role to play. There were complicated issues such as returning justice and policing to Northern Ireland. There are huge amounts of constitutional stuff. I got involved in lots of constitutional issues, mostly behind the scenes. You do not have any formal powers. A good analogy was pointed out to me by somebody of whom you may have heard, Olly Robbins. He had a short break at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, where he did some very interesting work on the role of Cabinet Secretary, which I do not think he ever finished because he got called back to do other things. I would listen to him a lot. You would like there to be stronger powers, but his analogy was, “What is the Prime Minister’s power?” The Prime Minister has the power to sack members of the Cabinet and appoint his Ministers but, beyond that, we do not have a written set of formal powers for a Prime Minister, which is quite interesting. You look at formal powers for Cabinet versus Parliament. One of the debates that people will remember was about war powers in the Cabinet Manual. Some people were saying that the war powers bit should say that Parliament should be consulted before troops are on the ground. That never got in there. The Chiefs of Defence Staff were a bit wary about it slowing things down. There are some big issues which could be confronted. It is about anything that you could do to strengthen the role of the Cabinet Secretary in all this. He should be a long-serving and objective guardian, with the Australian thing about there being an explicit role for the Cabinet Secretary and the Head of the Civil Service in safeguarding the constitution such as it is. The problem for us would be, “What constitutes the constitution?” That might be very difficult, but at least it would be the kind of role where the Cabinet Secretary could say, “I think that you need to consult Parliament about that”. Lord Murphy of Torfaen:​ Very interestingly, you said earlier on that in 2010 you did what you did very successfully but that there had been no real precedent or historical example of that for donkey’s years or ever. All your predecessors from the Second World War until recently would have been used to a two-party system. That changed with the coalition but is changing even more radically now to a multi-party system. The role of Cabinet Secretary becomes much more significant in that situation. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ Yes. On taking the job, it did not cross my mind that I would end up in the middle of coalition talks. However, having done it once is useful. I did not have the privilege of being able to go to a Robin Butler, Andrew Turnbull or Richard Wilson to say, “Tell me what it was like”, because they had not done it. Hopefully I will be around and be able to. Lord Waldegrave of North Hill:​ Robert Armstrong had done a bit of it in 1974. Lord O'Donnell:​ Exactly. Lord Murphy of Torfaen:​ They will be coming to you now. Q19 ​​Baroness Hamwee:​ Can you say a word about the combination of the roles of Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service? We have been talking very much about the former. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ I was passionate about wanting to do both. I thought that the Civil Service needed someone who had the ear of the Prime Minister. That was the key to me. If you have a separate Head of the Civil Service, as we have done, they become “someone who’s in charge of HR and the Civil Service”. With Prime Ministers, it will go in the diary but nine times out of 10 it will come out of the diary. It will never happen. They do not get in there, whereas when you are Cabinet Secretary the Prime Minister needs you. There are conversations that you need to have with the Prime Minister. You should have a very strong relationship with the Prime Minister. You can say, “There are some issues about the Civil Service that I need to raise with you”. They might grumpily go, “Oh, okay, then”. There have been some real problems with how the Civil Service has been run that I did not manage to resolve. However, at least I had a chance to put my case. ​​Baroness Hamwee:​ Are you saying that it would be helpful to have a post-holder maybe half a rung down, heading the Civil Service with your ear? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ No. I would have Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service and then someone underneath that who reported to me—a chief executive officer of the Civil Service, someone with experience, a chief operating officer. Baroness Hamwee:​ That is what I meant. Lord O'Donnell:​ That works well. I was very lucky. I had good HR people working for me, but I also had a combination with Jeremy Heywood, who went on to be a great Cabinet Secretary. We managed things very closely. Jeremy would quite often be doing the day-to-day, “The Prime Minister wants this by nine o’clock”. I could sit back and do the strategic stuff. That works as long as the two of you completely trust each other. It also helps massively that you live around the corner from each other. You come in every day in the same government car and discuss what has been going on. Quite often when you are in that car, the Prime Minister would phone one of us to complain about the other one. You are then able to manage that situation quite easily. Q20 ​​Lord Jones of Penybont:​ As a veteran of coalition discussions in a political system where no party has ever won a majority, we never had civil servants involved because they would have been drawn into a world of politics that they should not be involved in. We would take advice from civil servants once something was proposed but not during the discussions. That is not what they are there to do. I was interested in what you said about the powers of the Cabinet Secretary being written down—written down as what? Would it be as one document? How would that be drawn up and who would approve it? Would it be on the face of a Bill, which gives it a sense of permanence? The inflexibility is granted but permanence would otherwise not be the case if it was a convention. Conventions can be thrown out the window. I have seen that done often enough with Sewel over the years. If it is included in secondary legislation, that can be changed by Ministers. Are we talking about creating a sense of solidity for those powers through primary legislation or through some other method? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ We did primary legislation for various aspects of CRaG. There are elements of this that you could put in primary legislation. You need to be very careful because of the points that many people have made about the need for flexibility. To take that minor point about access talks, the Prime Minister should be prepared to allow sufficient time for the Civil Service to interact with the opposition ahead of an election. That could be formalised. The presumption must be for the Prime Minister to do it. The problem is timing. One of the things that I dislike about our current system, which is not very democratic, is that the Prime Minister gets to fire the starting gun for an election. I was quite a strong fan of fixed-term Parliaments, which I know will cause different views. If you have a system where the Prime Minister can say, “We are having an election tomorrow”, what has happened to access talks? They have completely gone. There are some big issues that get brought up there. I have been through fixed-term Parliaments, which created all sorts of issues too. ​​Lord Murphy of Torfaen:​ If, as a Cabinet Secretary, you were confronted by the actions of a Prime Minister that were clearly historically unconstitutional, how far can you go before you resign? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ That is a good question. I was never put in that situation, fortunately. It is a personal issue. To me there are very clear demarcations where you would say, “Okay, Prime Minister, you can do that but, just so you know, I am going to resign”. Similarly, we have the power of getting a direction from a Minister. A Minister might say, “I want to spend on this project” and you say that it is incredibly poor value for money and a waste of time or that it gives money only to certain small groups that they want to support for political reasons. There are times when you would then say, “I need a direction for this”, such as on the value-for-money thing. If it was a big constitutional issue such as refusing to have an election, I would then say, “I am off”. ​​The Chair:​ I suppose that is the answer on the tension between protecting the constitution and advising the Prime Minister. Your option as Cabinet Secretary is to say, “If you do that, I will not be able to put up with it and I will resign”, which would create a huge story. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ Hopefully it would. You never know with these things, but that is your ultimate power. ​​Lord Jones of Penybont:​ If powers were on the face of an Act and a Cabinet Secretary wished to act in excess of those powers—or a Prime Minister wanted to prevent a Cabinet Secretary from exercising those powers—how would that be policed? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ That is a good question. There are various Select Committees that would look at these things, such as PACAC. I was called before multiple Select Committees. You would like to think that someone in Parliament would say, “That does not seem to be in line with the legislation”. As Cabinet Secretary, you would be saying in advance, “If you do this, someone’s going to notice and this will cause all sorts of problems”. The experience that we have of Prime Ministers who step over the boundary, mislead the House or whatever, is that those safeguards which we have do work. You are reliant on someone picking it up and making a point of it. There may be a case where a Cabinet Secretary would have to say, “If you do that, I am going to have to make it public that you have done this and that I disagree with it”. That, again, would be a nuclear option. Q21 ​​Lord Burnett of Maldon:​ If there is a legal obligation in legislation which anybody decides to defy, the option is for somebody to apply to a court and get an order. Lord Sedwill talked about something that was very public at the time—that the Prime Minister of the day was not keen to write the letter about Europe that Parliament had said that he should have written. It was written, so the issue did not result in legal proceedings. However, had there been legal proceedings, there would have been an order that it had to be written. Then one gets into an extremely difficult situation. The courts are brought into the political process. What do you do if a Prime Minister, as it might have been in that instance, defies the order of the court? Is it seriously to be contemplated that the court does contempt proceedings and puts the Prime Minister in prison? I would not wish to be the judge. We are talking about extreme examples which one hopes would never arise, but it does bring me back to my question of how central the integrity of senior politicians is in all this. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ I wish that these things never applied but they do. I will give you my example. You will all remember “cash for peerages”. Tony Blair was being investigated by the police. The police asked for all sorts of access to things which were wildly outside the remit. I was having to say no. We were getting into very difficult situations between what the police were saying that we should do and wanting to co-operate fully with them. There was the whole question of “We might arrest the Prime Minister”. You will know this much better than me, but I did talk to my colleagues about what evidence you need to arrest someone. It is quite low. I was amazed at how low that bar is. They were talking about arresting a serving Prime Minister. You do get into some of these things where you have to work behind the scenes and say, “Look, this is ridiculous. You cannot do this”. Ultimately, the courts do have a role but dragging them into this is the last thing that we want to do. ​​The Chair:​ In that example, you would like to think that the police who you were interacting with also felt some responsibility and saw things the way that you did. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ Ultimately, I think that they did in that they did not arrest the Prime Minister. ​​The Chair:​ It took them a long time to get there. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ That the question even arose was ludicrous. There were never any proceedings in that case. Q22 ​​Lord Bichard:​ At the beginning of this session, the Chair asked whether the constitution was under threat, under strain, and if so how. I am reflecting on that because we are all constitutional nerds in this room. This has turned into a conversation about processes, conventions, tensions and systems, which is not unusual. If you were to ask someone out there what the threats to the constitution are, they would probably come up with things such as interference with the electoral system, artificial intelligence and terrorism. Can you reflect again on that first question? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ You are absolutely right. I was taking it in a very narrow way. For me it is the growth of social media, the absence of objective news and how we now know that the algorithms work. You could talk to Nick Clegg about how they were set up because I think that he opposed it. They feed stuff to people. ​​Lord Bichard:​ That is exactly the sort of thing that I was thinking about. Are there others in that category? Lord O'Donnell:​ If I was talking about how to improve our democracy, I would start with strengthening the BBC. With BBC Verify, I would love there to be verification of all channels and news. I would love there to be stronger regulation. I have talked to Ofcom about this and quite often it says that it simply does not have the powers to do these things when I say, “This looks completely wrong”—that a programme has mixed up the presenters with the political actors and things like that. The big issue for democracy is people not caring. After the coalition was formed, on the referendum on the voting system, which might be a solution to some of these problems, the majority of people did not bother to vote. We are possibly about to extend voting to 16 and 17 year-olds. Where is the civics training? Where is the training for the people who are going to vote? Where is the political understanding? At the moment, most people are getting their political understanding, not, as in our day, from newspapers, but from social media. That is scary, the ability of AI and bots to influence things. In terms of risks to democracy, those things are by far the most important in my mind. It is having objective information. ​​​The Chair:​ That is a very significant statement—that social media is a major threat to how we run our affairs in terms of the constitutional things that this committee is interested in. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ Absolutely, I totally agree. ​​Lord Bichard:​ There is also the lack of citizenship development in education which we will come back to, I am sure. Q23 ​​Lord Waldegrave of North Hill:​ There are two kinds of democracy. We have a parliamentary democracy. You might argue that the rise of populism has been supported by those politicians who have referendums about everything. This is a crude comparison, but juries precede parliamentary democracy. When it came to whether we hanged someone, we did not allow it to be the lynch mob. We said, “Let’s have 12 people to look into this carefully”. That preceded democracy and arguably was the seed of parliamentary democracy. We now say, “We don’t want to bother with the 600-odd people whom we have elected to look into this. Their opinions are not important. We’ll have a direct referendum on it”. This feeds into the populism which you have been talking about, does it not? When we say “defend our constitution” it may be “defend our parliamentary form of democracy” that some of us are talking about. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ Yes. I do not like the idea of lots of referendums, especially about complicated things. If we had held a referendum on getting rid of the death penalty the answer would have been no if the polls— ​​Lord Waldegrave of North Hill:​ Let alone if you had a popular vote on whether to hang an individual person. The danger for parliamentary democracy comes also from the overuse of referendums. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ Yes. Curiously enough, I am not a fan of referendums. Q24 ​Lord Griffiths of Burry Port:​ Thank you for the lucid way in which you are explaining complicated matters. I am not a nerd; I am the sour cream put in just before the recipe becomes what you want it to be. However, I am probably as near to being an ordinary citizen as anybody could be. My problem regarding trust concerns when bodies such as this and others throughout this building, and at a greater distance, synthesise and distil their responses to the big questions that we are wrestling with and come to some kind of conclusion. Let us call that X. What happens once we reach a settled position—although it is very difficult to imagine coming to many settled positions in these fragmentary times? I did a lot of work once upon a time on Judge Atwell in the Court of Appeal, who managed with a plethora of precedents to get a principle that, in his view—I think it was a successful view—would pull these precedents together. It was called a duty of care. Once you have reached what feels to be the logical, obvious, humane thing to do, how do you get the message out to an untrusting population whose views are formed via social media? I have only just seen some of the ways in which important matters are dealt with there, but there is also a pretty vicious press. Yesterday the Prime Minister in Parliament tried to establish what he was calling a more optimistic and positive view of things. I do not form a judgement about that, but read the press today. He is pilloried for daring to say certain things that touched nerves, as political statements often do. I am not sure how you generate the trust for the wise outcomes of the processes that we are involved in during times such as these. It raises the question of governability. Your office would be in a key position. When I mentioned something like this to Lord Sedwill, he was very nice but said that the questions I raised would probably make a good discussion after dinner. Perhaps he is right, but my problem regards black kids in London, questions of migration that I deal with all the time at the Council of Europe, the movements of population, the injustices, the differences between the haves and the have-nots. These are the people whom I am dealing with all the time. How do you translate the wisdom of a body such as this and its related bodies into a conversation that engages the attention and aspires to engage the commitment of people such as those? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ You lead me to think of that famous Juncker phrase: “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it”. That is part of the problem that you are talking about. How do we engage people? This comes back to Lord Bichard’s point about civics. We need to spend a lot more time teaching people about this. We have got an obsessed Department for Education, for which certain exam results are what it is all about. Education is so much broader than that. It is important that we teach people what to trust and what not to trust. Politicians can have a big part to play in this—telling the truth, being objective, confronting difficult situations. We have gone through a long time of overpromising, underdelivering and not confronting what we all know to be the big issues. ​​Lord Griffiths of Burry Port:​ Are we not afraid of admitting failure when the processes that publicise these sorts of things hark back 10 or 20 years to when you said something and say, “Why are you now doing something different?” People do make mistakes and do grow and learn. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ It is almost the opposite. If you do not make mistakes, you are making a massive mistake. You are not trying things. If we are going to experiment in the world and have trials, then things are not going to work all the time. That is what really annoys me about some of the NAO stuff. We need to say to people, “Yes, it did not work. What did you learn from that? Are we doing something better now?” If we are going to do stuff that is innovative and that will work and get better value for money, we are going to experiment and there will be some mistakes. Grown-ups, most entrepreneurs around the world, have failed two or three times along the way. That is part of the learning process. In America that is completely accepted. We look on it as something terrible. I made loads of mistakes when I was press secretary, huge mistakes every day. You would see them in the papers the next day. However, you learn very quickly. That feedback mechanism is important. As long as we learn, I do not worry about making mistakes, but the public need to understand. It comes back to how to build trust with the public. You are right. You build trust with the public by doing what you say you will do, not overdoing it and all the rest of it. One of the paradoxes is this—and I do not know the answer to this question. I have lived in America twice. In America, if there is a problem and someone says, “Well, the Government should fix that”, they say that the Government are the last people who should do it. In the UK, if there is a problem there is a clamour from everybody: “Why is the Government not doing more about this?” They say that they do not trust government, yet they want government to do ever more. Q25 ​​​Lord Bichard:​ I have two points. First, the NAO has changed significantly since you were Cabinet Secretary and I was a Permanent Secretary. I declare an interest being chair of the NAO for six years during that period. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ I agree with you. You have improved but I do think that you could go further. ​​Lord Bichard:​ I am not chair now so you can be as rude as you like. My second point may be unfair, but I pick up on how you talked about politicians needing to fulfil their promises and be honest. It is officials as well, is it not? Whether that official is a civil servant or a police officer at Hillsborough, it is the state, which is represented by both politicians and officials, that we should be concerned about. Do you agree with that? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ I totally agree with that. When everyone talks about reform of government it ends up being reform of the Civil Service and I keep asking whether we can talk about reform of government. Is having nine Pensions Ministers in five years a sensible way to manage a long-run issue such as pensions? Can we have a Minister who has never been trained in decision-making during uncertainty making big decisions on day 1? ​​Lord Bichard:​ I completely agree with that. Lord O'Donnell:​ It is both. Lord Bichard:​ However, if you get half a dozen politicians in a room and ask them what the problem is, they will say that it is the Civil Service. If you get half a dozen civil servants, they will say that it is politicians. Somehow we have got to find some meeting point. Q26 The Chair:​ I want to move on to the role of Cabinet Secretary. You have talked extremely powerfully about the experience that you have built up. How do we ensure that future Cabinet Secretaries have the right training, expertise and background knowledge to take their responsibilities as seriously as possible? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ Part of the job of the Head of the Civil Service is to make sure that you have a system which trains people to be potential successors. When I was there, we created high-potential groups. We did all sorts of things to bring on people who were extremely able and ensure that they had the right backgrounds. I look back on when I came in as Cabinet Secretary. I had a massive hole in my CV. I had never done a delivery department. That is a big hole. I would have been a better Cabinet Secretary had I spent some time in DWP or the Home Office. Nearly all my career was Treasury. It is getting those people up who have experience of policy and development, who understand the broader role and can communicate with civil servants. When I left, I wanted Jeremy Heywood to be Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service. Jeremy did not want to be Head of the Civil Service, so we split the jobs and Bob Kerslake got it. That was unsuccessful but it was not Bob’s fault. You have to go up to the office in Glasgow and talk to real civil servants about real jobs in ways that they understand, to understand their problems. This comes back to my four Ps. I kept saying, “You should be proud and passionate about what you are doing. You’re helping some of the most disadvantaged people in the world. These things matter hugely to people”. Getting that connection with your staff is important. You learn things at the front line that you can bring back and can then say, “You realise that this policy is not working because of A, B, and C”. Those things are massively important. Q27 ​The Chair:​ Can we finish off with the Cabinet Manual, which is being updated? What are the changes that you would like to see? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ First, the bit about Cabinet Secretaries and their appointment is pretty thin and could be looked at again. It is only two paragraphs. I did not want to have a Cabinet Manual that the Cabinet Secretary oversees that was all about the Cabinet Secretary but that should be a bit bigger. Also, there is the stuff on war powers and on things post Brexit rather than us being a member of the EU. There needs to be an update for the coalition talks and what has been learned from them. There needs to be an update on what we have learned from Covid. There is a lot that could be brought up to date. War powers would be another one. We tried to get interaction. Ultimately, this is the Prime Minister’s document. The Prime Minister could just put a line through things. There is a question about who owns this. It does have to be the Prime Minister and the Cabinet who own it, but there should be a requirement for a new Prime Minister to think about whether the old Cabinet Manual is the one that they want to live with and whether they want to make changes, particularly if there is a change of Administration. ​​Lord Waldegrave of North Hill:​ On the ownership point, how the Public Accounts Committee works is quite a good precedent. I lived through the Pergau Dam incident, where the Foreign Secretary wanted the money spent. The Public Accounts Committee correctly said that it was not value for money. That was out in the open. That is not a bad model, is it, if one could produce a model like that? ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ That is right. It was Tim Lancaster at the time. That was a very good example of how the system should work. ​​Lord Waldegrave of North Hill:​ You can imagine being responsible to this committee or some such committee. ​​Lord O'Donnell:​ Yes, with a manual that said, “You have got to follow this or you will come before a committee such as this to explain yourselves”. ​​​​The Chair:​ I think there we will end the formal session of this meeting. With everybody’s agreement, we will call the public session to a close.