In early September fresh off the back of participating in an interview session on the same theme at George Freeman’s deeply impressive Big Tent Ideas Festival, the Conservative Party’s International Development Secretary, Penny Mordaunt, published a mini-essay entitled ‘The twelve new rules of politics’ on ConservativeHome.

It’s a thoughtful, zesty and optimistically-framed intervention that added further weight to her stature as a rising star on the liberal centre-right of the party. Here’s my take on it.

Some felt it was a soft ‘setting out of the stall’ in terms of being a primer on her ethos, character and priorities to help bolster her profile and appeal ahead of a possible leadership bid when the next contest gets underway.

While it’s entirely possible that a talented, pro-Leave, next generation MP like Penny could look to run at some stage, I actually felt this was a genuinely well-intentioned intervention to try and help stimulate both flagging spirits and intellectual renewal within a beleaguered party that has had little to cheer since drifting away from the optimistic, liberal centre-right  terrain staked out by Cameron.

Penny’s background is interesting – you get a clear sense that while life has given her knocks on the way, she’s a relentless optimist with a knack for thinking creatively in difficult circumstances.

In the essay she sets out reflections from discussions with a variety of change-makers she’s worked with over the course of holding 5 different ministerial portfolios in government.

She pitches her 12 new rules of politics in language that’s reminiscent of feisty 21st century business strategy and popular psychology books. This is not meant critically – we need a bit of verve and clear direction, quite frankly.

In her essay there are 2 key  golden threads that consistently run through the narrative:

1. The power or potency of optimism, if properly harnessed, targeted and communicated, with good situational awareness, to change lives by crowding in support for change.

2. The importance of seeing leadership as showing, not telling – inspiring others through deed and behaviour,  bringing them onboard to participate in driving change and then empowering them to make it.

I won’t go through each of the 12 rules in detail, but I will pick out a few of the most interesting and just provide some thoughts.

Rule 2: Don’t let your resources frame your ambition. If you do you’ll never deliver what is actually required. You have more resources than you think because, if you let them, others will help.

This is interesting – and very evocative of Cameron’s emphasis on seeing good public policy as being about more than budget earmarks and headcounts. If an idea is good, it will catch fire and more resources can be unlocked. As a party we used to argue the UK needed to embrace a post-bureaucratic age at both national and local level in the way it governed. Somewhere along the way we’ve lost this spirit of endeavour and become very staid between the trammel lines of what the senior civil service deem to advise us is sensible.

Rule 3: Articulate a mission to create an effort. Because people want to help, to come together and to get stuck in. Explain what it is that, together, we need and want to achieve. And, critically, explain how it contributes to the greater good, for example why greater productivity will benefit the workers delivering it.

This is an important point – at present it seems to me that we communicate as a Government in a pretty haughty, preachy tone about how we will deliver a country that works for everyone through top-down policy and management silos.

In the case of our Industrial Strategy to bolster productivity, responsibility for its communication to the business community and the electorate lies with Greg Clark, a technocrat’s technocrat with no panache or verve to communicate an enticing vision for how this will grow the national and give voters a bigger slice of it.

Where are its major proponents on social media? Where’s are the voices in the small business and start-up community who are evangelizing about the support for technology clusters its meant to provide?

We’re nearly a year into May’s refreshed Industrial Strategy and I believe 3 out of 5 Conservative Party members would struggle to tell you much about it, let alone the wider electorate. If it feels remote, top-down and utterly safe, it won’t help us to overcome the populist pitch of Corbynomics.

Rule 5: Be alert, to the past, the present and the future. Data and evidence drive policy.  But history, situational awareness and imagination must too.

& 

Rule 6: Plans – bad, planning – good. Get on with it. Don’t wait and write a strategy, just make a start. Learn as you go. And ensure you are prepared – the most underrated leadership quality.

These two rules echo the outlook of David Cameron’s former strategist Steve Hilton. While there’s obviously important qualifications or caveats to make to this kind of logic, in both rules are there are the nubs of strong points.

Too often it does feel like we communicate as a party of technocrats. When we promote what we’re doing on social mobility we do so by writing in the language of think tanks and widening participation professionals pointing out progress in terms of the participation rates of people from lower quintile POLAR3 data set cohorts.

Michael Gove exemplified the spirit of rule 6 in the way he pushed forward landmark reforms to schools and the qualification system.

He wasn’t cavalier – he’d worked out by and large what he needed to do in Opposition to get free schools off the ground, and he pushed through hard resistance from one of Whitehall’s most notoriously defiant government departments to make it happen, getting the necessary legislation on the statute books within months of the coalition being formed and over-ruling the Whitehall  machine’s playbook of delaying tactics to commission the New Schools Network charity, founded by his former adviser Rachel Wolf, to start priming the first wave of schools while the Bill was still being debated.

Gove also knew you could get a lot done without a full White Paper – he got the ball rolling in practice on preparing for qualification reform and a major national curriculum review rather than intricately preparing a White Paper rationale for them. The White Paper came later and set the reforms in a broader context, but he communicated his intent early on and didn’t over-promise.

In stark contrast Andrew Lansley after rashly promising no top down re-organisation of the NHS in the build-up to the 2010 General Election then proceeded to over-egg his clinical commissioning proposals as the biggest transformation project in the history of the NHS. He over-promised, put too much faith in the weight of his White Paper, and did too little to bring his own party and cabinet colleagues with him on the journey. He put too much faith in the efficacy of a ‘detailed plan’ and didn’t think to show that his reforms could work on a piloted basis initially.

Rule 7: The West needs to get its mojo back.

Here she argues that we’ve become too circumspect in standing up for democracy, capitalism and free trade in particular and too complacent about how much society esteems scientific advances, the rule of law and property rights.

She rightly argues we have to do far more to volubly defend the systems, values and institutions that has made the West so successful, and give people a sense that further technological changes can make our lives better and our country stronger.

Rule 10:  New power must get out of its armchair.

She argues that we need “active citizens” not just “expert citizens”. She argues that while the Big Society had its successes, they were often the exception rather than the norm. She has a good line about the route to changing the world being to get people to do more than just write letters via 38 degrees. I think this is important – we were too bashful after 2010 in making a positive case for volunteerism and for social enterprise. We didn’t do enough once we became the party in government to lead by example in terms of getting Conservative Party members to step forward and lead social action projects.

Rule 11: Seriously small government. 

She argues that Whitehall needs to embrace new ways of getting things done – becoming more agile, nimble and less centralised in the way it develops and manages policy. She argues that it’s still too wedded to a traditional, very prescriptive, risk adverse way of commissioning services and evaluating their success.

She wants to see Government shrink in the next decade, and for it to become much better at doing the essentials well. Amen.

What next?

This is a good encapsulation of the kind of spirit we need to embrace once we get the monkey of the Article 50 negotiations off our back and refresh our strategy under a new Leader.

I think Penny’s part of a very promising generation of 2010 and beyond intakes who have a lot to offer our party. I hope she doesn’t see this intervention as a one-off foray into the national debate about where our party and country needs to go.

We need more optimistic cases in this vein for what Conservatism should do and stand for in the 21st century.

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