Andrew Gilligan: Fundamental change in how government works, is no longer a theoretical debate it’s become essential work

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Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak 
Until last week, the campaign for wholesale change in the way Britain is governed was real and growing, but still a bit formless, a bit lacking in momentum.
It was groups of people meeting in medium-sized rooms. It was Substacks, newspaper columns, conferences on post-liberalism, conversations in think-tanks. The crisis wasn’t yet great enough: unlike in the Seventies, the rubbish is still being collected, the lights are still on and plenty of people are doing fine from the status quo. The steam was jiggling the saucepan lid, not boiling over the sides. Until last week.
America’s upending of its eighty-year Nato security guarantee, if that’s how it turns out, has brutally exposed the (harsh word trigger warning) decadence of Britain and the rest of western Europe. You need not agree with everything Team Trump said about us at Munich – and I do not – to recognise that we’ve dismantled much of our defence, indulged social forces which divide and weaken us, subsidised millions of our citizens not to work and imported other countries’ citizens instead, tolerated economic stagnation; and that we are, as a result, vulnerable to whatever fate stronger folk have in mind.
We should be worried, even frightened. But we might also thank the Americans for making us face the truth – and just perhaps creating the political space for the necessary but difficult reset which Britain has avoided so far. Now we have to rearm, what price the triple lock?
As a Downing Street adviser to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, I saw and was frustrated by aspects of the British state’s failure up close. This column will try to explore some of those failures  – of the system, of the civil service, but also of politicians and political appointees like me – and to report on possible answers which the Conservatives and others could offer.
Having those answers, or at least being seen to look for them, may also help a mainstream right-wing party like the Tories cope with the unpredictable second-order effects of Trump. Will the European hard right and far right be turbocharged by Washington’s new embrace? Or will Trump actually help incumbents and the centre-left – as in Canada, where his threatened trade war has triggered a patriotic surge that may save the Liberal Party?
Either way, the Conservatives could suffer.
As Kemi Badenoch has said, policies without a plan are not policies – they’re just announcements; and that is one of the reasons we and now Labour have struggled in office. Badenoch’s chief of staff, Lee Rowley, has reportedly drawn up a plan in three phases, each lasting a year: admit mistakes, then build credibility as a party that can govern, then a policy phase.
Consciously or otherwise, it echoes Margaret Thatcher, whose first major statement of principles, The Right Approach, came only in October 1976, 20 months after she became leader, and declared that it
“contains neither popular promises designed to win elections nor a host of detailed proposals which rapidly changing circumstances might soon render irrelevant. A party which seeks to deserve to govern must set out frankly and realistically what it believes it is actually capable of achieving in government.”
But life moves faster now than in 1976; and, as others have said, today’s Tories start from a far worse position than Thatcher. Rowley’s sequence sounds sensible, but the timeline feels rather long, especially after last week.
Outside the party, there are what one observer calls “lots of little Project 2025s,” a reference to the work in Washington done by the Heritage Foundation to prepare for the Trump administration. Project 2025 was both a conservative manifesto and – more importantly – a manual for how to get it done in government.
Perhaps its most famous insight, dating back to the first of Heritage’s “Mandate for Leadership” exercises before the Reagan administration took office, is that “personnel is policy.” Getting sound people who are good leaders into the right jobs can make a huge difference.
The Tories might think about creating what Alfred Sherman, one of Thatcher’s policy gurus, called a “Territorial Army of advisers,” teams including both politicians and supportive, credible, experienced subject-expert outsiders – eventually, hundreds of them – who would work together to draw up plans for every area that needs fixing.
They would anticipate objections and difficulties, work out how to deal with them – and would then enter government, if they wished, to implement the plans alongside the ministers. Some of those people are themselves opinion-formers. They could lend the Tories not just expertise but policy credibility, something necessary but difficult to establish from opposition. (Thatcher, incidentally, never took Sherman’s advice, making few political appointments and largely working through the civil service. But the civil service was better then.)
Should we go further? The parliamentary pool is small, so could we recruit non-MPs directly as shadow ministers? Could that signal a partial break from politicians discredited by their service in the last government? Putting non-politicians in political jobs often doesn’t work, but there are some hybrids who could pull it off: Andy Street for shadow business secretary, anyone?
None of this is without problems, clearly. Non-politicians would be harder to control. There might be conflicts of interest. Non-MPs couldn’t handle business in the House. It will be hard to recruit the likes of Street, given the party’s current prospects, and even harder to pay them.
But at the very least, the Tories should now be creating a corps of lower-level sympathisers who can be deployed in the institutions, including Tory lawyers to fight all the other lawyers who will be ranged against us. (A personnel database of candidates for jobs was at the core of Project 2025.) And they should be working on how to recruit and manage candidates and the parliamentary party, one of the most obvious failures of recent years – selecting sane people, with stable personal lives, and doing so early; giving every current MP who wants one some kind of meaningful job to do.
Not all of Project 2025 would work here. Its language was strident and aggressive. Some of the American right’s greatest hits, such as abortion, tariffs, and a curious love for dictators, have little traction in the UK. A lot of people in Britain’s respectable middle aren’t happy with how the place is run: the right should try to enlist them, not alienate them. Indeed, a lot of Project 2025 didn’t even work in America – Trump had to distance himself when the Democrats tried to make it an election liability for him. But key people from it are now inside the Administration and several of its main ideas are being implemented.
The question for the Conservative Party – and the one which might distinguish it from Reform – is whether it is a nostalgia project, an easy answers project, an empty promises project, another hopes-raised-and-dashed project; or whether it is a governing project, able to show a convincing purpose of getting the country off its decline track, making promises it can keep – and with a proper governing plan to keep them, both exercising power effectively and reclaiming it from the administrative and legal parts of the state.

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