My local café recently posted a job advert in the window, looking for a new barista. Management was looking for a few things in an ideal candidate: a few years of experience in the area, a food handling qualification, and flair for latte art.
Politicians, on the other hand, might have more power than a south London barista, but nowhere will you find a list of training required for the job.
Cabinet ministers find themselves reshuffled into departments they have no prior knowledge of and never thought they would lead. Backbenchers must scrutinise the government, but have been found to have a “widespread lack of knowledge and education” on issues as serious as defence, while only around half can answer basic statistical questions correctly. Permanent staff seem undertrained, too: many diplomats struggle to speak the local language, while there are complaints of too few subject experts in the civil service, which is largely staffed by generalists who move jobs before obtaining deep knowledge.
This is a relatively new state of affairs. Until 2010, there was the National School of Government — previously the Civil Service College — at Sunningdale Park, which described itself as the “business school for government.” On the political side, parties offered training to their members and candidates, with mass membership allowing for a high level of political education in the general population. Between 1948 and 1975, Swinton Conservative College taught courses to 54,000 students, including activists and agents. On the left, trades unions supported organisations like the Central Labour College, which trained miners, railway workers and others in political theory.
But the civil service school was closed in the austerity era, and with the collapse in party membership, the funds for these political colleges trickled away too.
Leaders are therefore less prepared for office than before, yet the job they are being asked to do might be harder.
They must wrangle with states that are larger than ever: a century ago, UK government spending was around a quarter of GDP. In 2024, it was 46%.
States are also more complex for any individual to understand, as power has been distributed to a patchwork of arms-length bodies and services contracted out.
They must also work in circumstances that are potentially trickier than before as states adapt to the reorganisation of global power, a technological revolution threatens mass unemployment and a crisis of meaninglessness makes citizens restless. For these challenges to be dealt with, they must at least first be thoroughly understood by our leaders.
Forgive me a paragraph or two that sound like an infomercial. Civic Future, where I work, exists to alleviate this problem. We believe that there are two ways to do this: in the immediate term, we can train our existing politicians and civil servants, and for long-term improvement, we can encourage talented people to come into politics and prepare them for the job.
We do both, offering intensive fellowships and leadership programmes to people interested in entering public life, as well as courses on specific policy areas, from education to crime and justice. We work to find talented people outside of the typical backgrounds of those in SW1, with recent cohorts including engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs and tech workers to learn about how the state functions. So far, we have trained hundreds of potential future leaders, giving them the knowledge they need to be effective.
Beyond hard knowledge, we also believe that character matters. We need leaders who are open-minded, so we take our fellows to Singapore, to see how a radically different — but highly effective — political system works. We need leaders who can work well together, so we gather in-person, and select people who foster and contribute to good conversations instead of dominating them. We need leaders who work for Britain’s national interests, so we make sure we train people in the unique history of our country and what she excels at.
We hope that doing this work might have multiplier effects. Not only are we producing a set of smart and capable future leaders, we are also helping to break the doom spiral that has persisted in British politics recently of poor leadership leading to enormous criticism, leading to politics seeming like a career unsuitable for the best and brightest. Participating in the running of the state should be among the loftiest and most ambitious goals of our smartest young people, not a running joke about incompetence.
Of course, it might take more than smart people alone to fix our political situation. Stephen Webb argues that ideas might in fact be more important than people in how well the state works, and a decent North Star could be capable of getting even mediocre politicians to effect great change. It is an interesting argument, and improving the quality of ideas in Westminster is important to us too — hence why we bring together 150 of the sparkiest people in politics each summer at our summit, and host regular events on great new thinking.
But what about in the absence of good ideas? Arguably, this is the state we have been in for a while: for a decade, neither of the two main parties in Britain have been able to create strong and coherent enough ideas to lead their own supporters in one direction, causing both to break down. A politician can no longer jump into a lazy river of good ideas and float towards success. They must swim on their own, often against strong currents. It might help if they at least knew where they were meant to be going, and how to get there.
Original picture of Northcote House in Sunningdale Park where the Civil Service College used to be based taken by ArticleSloth.
