Bad Ministers = Bad Transport?
Maybe it’s my natural interest in politics (I was a politics student after all) but in two of my first three episodes, I’ve ended up talking to my guests on The Freewheeling Podcast about the number (and quality!) of transport secretaries.
My first guest, Simon Calder, described Andrew Adonis as one of the only transport secretaries he’s worked with to actually care about the brief. In my third, I spoke to Andrew Adonis himself.
We chatted about the remarkable fact that there have been 23 different Transport Secretaries in the 39 years I’ve been alive; meaning the average transport secretary didn’t even reach their 2nd anniversary.
I asked Andrew why this was. Interestingly, the answer was not about transport, but about ministers.
Very few ministers generate new ideas of their own. Most of them see themselves as managing. Most people who hold ministerial jobs leave no legacy and they're entirely forgotten.
Listening to him talk, you get a real sense that most ministers are only interested in the “plotting and conspiring” and “the job of seeing that we win a vote by 30 as opposed to 10”. He notes just how rare it is for ministers to actually seek to change anything:
Our Governments are quite large with about 120 ministers. And in most governments, there are only a handful, who were transformational change agents. And I think we need more of those.
If we want better ministers, we need a wider range of talent becoming ministers:
I think we need more people who aren’t engaged in the day to day business of political management.
Looking at our current incumbent, Simon Calder is not complimentary about Grant Shapps. He feels that that transport secretary should be
Huw Merriman, Chair of the Transport Select Committee, who definitely does care about it, knows a lot about it and if we had a different Prime Minister and a different level of competence in Government, Hugh would be in with a chance.
Meanwhile, Andrew Adonis had some interesting words about the man he describes as the second most powerful politician in transport, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. While full of praise, it’s notable that this praise is for political arts more than strategic thinking. Does that make for a strong Mayor of London?
Sadiq was a very good friend of mine, there was nobody better political management and Sadiq was absolutely in the thick of it. And it was very, very important to me, spending about half my time seeking to do really big transformational infrastructure planning, that my number two in the House of Commons was day by day doing the In the Thick of It type of stuff. Though, let me immediately say that Sadiq is a very nice guy. So he's not like Malcolm Tucker in his personality, but in terms of his ability to twist arms and know what's going on in, Sadiq was absolutely on top of it.
Sadiq Khan, arm twister
If you want to know the only other transport secretary of the last three decades to be praised by either of my guests, you can listen to Andrew Adonis here and Simon Calder here…
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