As part of the media tour to promote her latest book, Ann Widdecombe has inevitably been discussing her views about the current Conservative Party and one of the comments she has made is to question the relative in-experience of David Cameron in his role as party leader. Cameron first became an MP during the 2001 election and he was elected party leader shortly after the 2005 election. The irony of someone publicising a book whose title pivots on her time on Strictly, criticising Camerons lack of experience seemed to go unnoticed by the various interviewers.

I recall the impact of the coalition Government arriving in post in 2010, as much for the impact on the work of friends within the civil service as on the public space. After 13 years of a Labour Government I was unable to do a comparison with the impact of the transition from Major to Blair as I had no personal contact with civil servants at that time. Anecdotes don’t make good case law, but they should not be ignored either. In one case an expensive training resource commissioned by the Labour Government was summarily trashed by the incoming Minister, with no consideration given for the make do and mend that the Government began to impose on the same department weeks later. £100,000’s of CDs and DVDs along with printed material were put into skips by the people who had worked long hours a few months earlier to deliver the package on time and within budget. In another case an event that was to involve young people from across the world coming to London to meet British children at the end of a successful initiative was cancelled at very short notice. The catering and hotel rooms had all been paid for, no money was saved and the civil servants that were intended to ensure the event ran smoothly instead spent long hours on phones and at computers explaining why the young people could no longer come to the UK. Simply because an incoming Minister took the line that it was ‘Not Invented Here’, and then years later the Prime Minister is sent to try to encourage some of the same young people to come to our Universities!

One of the blogs I follow is called ‘A Dragons best friend’ and this week the blogger wrote about the need for incoming Ministers to receive training in order to meet the expectation of the people who have elected the Government. The blog along with the links that are provided make for interesting reading. There is a fascinating article by the Institute for Government written in May 2010 before the coalition was formed pointing out that all new Ministers need to be trained in advance of taking up office, and in order to achieve this incoming PMs should delay appointing their cabinets. Three years later the Governments Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has produced a report that also comes to the conclusion that training is needed and recommends that this is begun a year before an election. The Institute for Government reference recaps on an article from the Daily Telegraph where Christopher Hope writes: “One former Cabinet minister told the institute: ‘The largest thing I’d run before this was my constituency office of four people – now I have a department of tens of thousands and a budget of billions.'”

With barely 20 months to go before the next election becomes the only thing that any politician is going to focus on, there is time to set this in place, but not much to spare. There are many creative ways of ensuring that Ministers do not do stupid things, although I suspect that the two examples above are about a wilful desire to be in charge, training only works (as the Committee report acknowledges) if the people who need to learn, are willing to be taught. Perhaps we should also consider if the system itself needs a change. Could we learn from the American system and hold our elections 3 months before the end of the Parliament? That would enable a meaningful handover and for lessons to be learned by incoming Ministers before opportunities and money gets wasted through ignorance!