What value do Spads actually bring to various government departments? - David Behrens

Left to their own devices, Rishi Sunak, Theresa May and David Cameron would probably have laughed in the faces of the ‘special advisors’ who suggested those and a thousand other idiocies over the last decade and a half. That they allowed advice to overrule instinct demonstrates how little confidence they had in their own judgement.

But dispensing advice has become big business in the corridors of power. At the last count the government had 117 special advisers – Spads for short – at a cost of nearly £16m. That’s £136,000 each, on average. Some are high-profile, self-styled gurus like Dominic Cummings; most are backroom beavers scouring social media posts for hare-brained schemes they think will appeal to some or other demographic.

It’s the kind of production-line policymaking that made it possible for our current prime minister to have threatened to conscript every 18-year-old in the country and the very next week insult the remaining conscripts from a time we really needed them by walking out on the last big memorial they will see.

It also explains how he could have been briefed with clearly flawed figures on Labour’s tax plans before his first TV debate with Keir Starmer.

It won’t surprise you to learn that no qualifications are required to become a Spad. You just have to be able to make waffle sound like wisdom and maintain an endless, deluded belief in your own abilities. Spads are typically appointed casually on someone’s recommendation and while some of the appointees may have specialist expertise many will be barely capable of tying their own shoelaces.

Advisers are not a Conservative-only phenomenon but the haplessness of the present bunch is in a league of its own. In a government driven by expediency and not conviction, that’s not surprising.

Come July 4 there will almost certainly be a backlash against its snakes-and-ladders system of promoting and then forgetting policies on the throw of a dice. We may seek retribution by voting for Reform UK or Count Binface (which is the less credible?) or not voting at all but I’ve yet to meet anyone who wants more of the same.

On the Yorkshire coast, one quasi-governmental outfit can tell you already what the clamour for change looks like. The officials who ran the area’s ‘Business Improvement District’ were out on their ears last week after just 38 people in a pool of 600 voted to keep their services.

These BIDs, so called because absolutely everything in government has to be an acronym, were the invention of a previous generation of Spads during the Blair administration and were supposed to be public-private partnerships funded by a compulsory levy on qualifying businesses.

But they are as transparent as a chip shop window at frying time – and nowhere more so than here on the coast where the organisation was foisted on the community by councils using a wholly undemocratic block voting system. Hundreds of business people refused to pay the levies and many were taken to court.

The BID ballot can be seen as a harbinger of the bigger one to come. Indeed, if the options on July 4 were the same – re-elect the same people or elect no-one at all – the result would be a foregone conclusion.

And if ministers go the way of the coastal BID people, condemned to carry away their belongings in white boxes, their advisers will have to go with them. But they do seem to have a habit of bouncing back.

Dan Rosenfield, who left Boris Johnson’s administration with two fellow Spads after the lockdown parties scandal, was given a peerage when Johnson left office and promptly delivered a slap in the face to his old boss by refusing to sit on the Tory benches. Simone Finn, who served as Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, was similarly ennobled.

Cummings, the self-styled kingmaker who shambles about as if waiting for a bus, is also doing fine, or says he is. He’s trying to organise a new party to replace the Conservatives. Join the club, Dom.

If you met him at the bus stop and he offered you advice, would you take it? Not even Rishi Sunak would be that desperate.