There are plenty of ways for Ministers to be bad.

A few muddle their private interests with their public duties. They claim costs they should not claim, pursue causes and decisions for people and businesses that have supported them, receive income and gifts they do not properly account for or should not have received. In extreme cases they commit crimes.

Many play politics instead of managing their departments and acting in the public interest. They think the way to deal with a problem in their department is to blame someone else, help a cover up or shunt the issue off to another Minister or department. If someone has a real problem the department could or should sort the Minister should not contribute to a long civil service delay in responding and should not allow out a cop out answer or a refusal to help.

Some bad Ministers are simply out of their depth. They read out civil service responses without understanding what has been written down. I remember sometimes in Opposition asking a Minister to explain a complex or abstruse sentence they had just read out. A bad Minister would wait for a reformulation from officials. If I was cruel enough to ask for that to be explained I was promised a written reply at a later date as they did not understand the civil service reformulation either. Sometimes the point I was making was that the prose was deliberately abstruse, ambiguous or wrong.

I remember serving on a Statutory Instrument Committee where a Labour Minister put before us a short SI setting out the annual housing grant monies by Council which needed Parliamentary approval. The Department was late with the SI owing to incompetence. I noticed immediately that the SI recorded all the full amounts of grant being paid but also had on it the statement that all amounts in the text were in £ millions. The lazy Minister and  all the officials had failed to spot that they were asking for approval for a total sum in excess of annual GDP! I proposed the Committee be abandoned and they came back another time with an accurate SI, as SI s cannot be amended in Committee under House rules. After anguished consultation the Labour Committee chairman and the government majority decided to just pass the wrong text!

A bad Minister either gets thrown out for bad conduct or leaves office with nothing positive to show for their period in office.

Mediocre Ministers go with the flow. Civil servants present them with issues to consider and problems to tackle. The Minister accepts the inherited policies and is guided by the submissions, often consenting to the civil service description of the problem and the preferred solution. The minister will let the civil service organise the diary which will shape the agenda and define the problems to solve in the way the diary master wants.

The advice has usually been through many hands, and a consensus has been reached. If options are offered the preferred solution will often run alongside clearly bad choices. The advice may suffer from being a compromise view. The Minister really needs to know the range of views and examine whether a different option could be better.

Quite often the best response will be to do nothing. The problem may be contrived or beyond government power to resolve. Any further intervention may make things worse. Doing nothing is an undervalued option, leading us to governments that over claim and underperform.

In recent years from Blair onwards there has been abuse of the power to legislate, with various laws  instructing the government itself what to do in the future. This is fatuous. An honest government can announce what it  is going to do and then over the years do it. It does not need to embed it in law. These so called laws never have clauses to impose penalties on Ministers and senior civil servants for breaking them. If the government finds it no longer wants to do what it said or is incapable of doing it it can anyway repeal the requirement.

Ministers are most wanted by officials when the department has made a major mistake. The Minister may have known nothing about it or the mistake may predate the Minister’s arrival  in the department. It will however be the Ministers job to explain the failure and remedial action to Parliament, and to take the blame. Internal review will always show no single official or small group was in sole and continuous charge. No- one is to blame and maybe a lack of resources caused the issue.

Jonathan Clark has sent me a copy of his new book on the Enlightenment. It provides a magnificent sweep of intellectual history over the long eighteenth century 1660 to 1832 and into the modern era. It considers the thought of England, Scotland, France, Germany and the USA.

Its central conclusion is that term The Enlightenment is one invented by twentieth century historians. There was no Enlightenment movement, and there were considerable variations of thought and intellectual interests over the decades studied and in the varied European and US geographies. When I wrote about some of the thinkers described here I tried to follow their views of what they thought and how they wished to describe their world. Jonathan does that brilliantly based on a fount of knowledge and scholarship for a wider group.

Those interpretations of our past which saw a progressive movement from superstition  to science, from belief to secular rationalism,  from feudal agriculture to the industrial and agrarian revolutions,  from   executive monarchy to democracy, sought to downplay other characteristics of the complex literature, natural philosophy and political debate of the period.

”Enlightenment” figures usually  placed themselves on the side of belief in their age’s struggle against atheism. They often sided with those who opposed widening the franchise and looked for sponsorship from landed wealth rather than from the new manufacturers.

It is still possible for historians to write golden thread history where England battles her way to great industrial wealth, scientific and technical advances, a better welfare system  and a democratic constitution with a full adult franchise.  All that is true, and today too often derided or taken for granted. It is important scholars like Jonathan reveal the complexity of the process and remind us most of the intellectuals along this carefully selected journey did not see it like that and did not belong to any modernising or Enlightenment movement. The great natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often wrote extensively  about religious matters or dabbled with alchemy as well as producing important breakthroughs we now call scientific.

Our constitutional theory is democratic. Civil servants advise, Ministers decide. Civil servants remain anonymous, putting their views to Ministers in private. Ministers defend the collective government decision in public which is a decision  relevant Ministers and officials have reached through discussion and email exchanges.

This means a good Minister can make a difference, can change policy and can offer informed leadership. It means mediocre and bad Ministers simply do what the officials or Number 10 tell them, and gives great opportunities to civil servants to block, subvert or delay government policies they do not like.

There have been too few good Ministers this century. Nick Gibb was allowed to stay in post as Schools Minister for a long period and did important work helping raise standards. He pursued the need to use synthetic phonics  as the best method to teach reading. One of the unsung achievements of the period of Coalition and Conservative government was a big rise in U.K. child literacy as a result. He handled those in the teaching profession and some officials who were hostile to this approach.

More recently Claire Couthino started to introduce some realism into the self harming energy policy that most officials and the Opposition parties favoured. The U.K. government overrode official advice to ban new oil and gas wells in the U.K. This crazy policy increases world CO 2 by forcing the U.K. to import more CO 2 intensive LNG in place of using U.K. pipeline gas. She started to abate other areas of self harm like the early ban on the sale of petrol and diesel cars and the premature phasing out of gas boilers.
Much of the last government’s policy was derived from the international Treaty based consensus on climate change, WHO  responses to the pandemic, EU regulation and the hopeless  forecasts and views of the Bank of England and OBR. We were governed in many areas by an official tyranny based on wildly wrong forecasts and an official consensus shared by the political Opposition that Ministers were unwilling to challenge. The new government will double up on the official consensus as they believe it all, especially the bits where it is obviously wrong.

Some think the lockdown consensus, the money printing bonanza, the pursuit of net zero whilst importing more from high CO 2 countries,  the mass migration policies and the rest are the ideas of a few influential billionaires. If only. These are policies shared by armies of officials, baked into global Treaties and pursued by many political parties.

It has rightly long been against the law to urge people to violence against others or to send out messages to people to join burglaries, looting or rioting. It is an offence to discriminate against people for their race or religion and to use hate speech against individuals or groups. Recent On line Harms legislation has underwritten that none of this must be done online, though it was already a crime whether you used the phone, a placard, a leaflet or an on line posting.

There are now those who want to widen the law to ban so called fake news. They argue that someone can circulate a wrong fact about an event which then whips up racial or religious hatred if it wrongly accuses people of a crime they did not commit. This is still covered by existing law if the resulting comment or stimulus to action is based on hatred and on their race or religion, using an invented and wrong fact to reinforce that ill.
Trying to ban all fake news goes far beyond necessary protections of people and property, and desirable crack downs over invitations to violence. It implies there is just one truth, that the authorities can judge that truth, and that any other statements are false. Life is not that straightforward.
If people and institutions cannot make false claims which they believe  to be true at the time much debate and discussion will be banned. A government moving  in this direction might end up breaking its own fake news law all too often.

Consider some of the statements the present government has made. They said they will build 300,000 new homes a year for 5 years. Many think that unlikely. If they  do not build 300,000 a year for the next two years does that make their comment fake news?

Then there is their aim to make the U.K. the fastest growing G 7 economy. It is true it was the first half of this year but most  official forecasts expect others to outperform over the next few years. Would that also become fake news?

When it comes to issues like climate change and net zero policies there are big disagreements.Is government saying only one view is allowed of all the complexities? When the Bank of England told us two years before inflation hit 11% it would be 2%, was that fake news?

Of course we need to keep the ban hate speech and stop people promoting criminal activity. Why aren’t all the communications of all the small boat vendors taken down and prosecuted? We must not ban different ways of reviewing the big issues like climate change, migration and the economy as disagreement about cause, effect and policy are fundamental to democratic debate.