Chris Wormald is the most important man you’ve never heard of. And if reports in this morning’s papers are accurate, you will never get to hear of him, because Keir Starmer is about to sack him.
Wormald is the Cabinet Secretary and Britain’s most senior civil servant. In effect he is the Government’s chief executive, tasked with implementing the Prime Minister’s agenda and ensuring the sprawling Whitehall machinery is whirring efficiently in support of his mission and programme.
But as has become apparent, Sir Keir no longer has a mission, or agenda, or programme – or even the slightest idea of what his continued presence in Downing Street is meant to be achieving. So in time-honoured fashion, he has reportedly decided to give one of his most senior aides the boot in another desperate attempt to deflect responsibility for the implosion of his benighted administration onto someone else.
According to sources, Wormald is to be ousted by January.
On paper he is the perfect patsy. A career civil servant, with an unflashy leadership style, and is viewed by Starmer’s political inner circle as eminently expendable. One negative briefing recently described him as ‘insipid’. A cabinet minister haughtily dismissed him with the poisonous observation: ‘If you want to do drastic reform of the state, you don’t appoint someone whose grandfather and father were both civil servants.’
But many of those who have worked closely with Wormald paint a different picture. As the senior advisor at the Department of Education when Michael Gove was trying to drive through his reforms, ministers at the time credit him with quietly but effectively removing obstacles placed in his path by the notoriously obdurate educational ‘Blob’.
As one told me: ‘He’s an effective Whitehall fixer. He’s not a revolutionary. But he has the ability to see round corners. If you set him a task, he’ll get his head down and do everything he can to fix it.’ Another minister said bluntly: ‘When the killer zombies invade, I’d like Chris Wormald at my back.’
But Wormald is not going to be manning the barricades when the zombies arrive. The political undead of Team Starmer will see to that. As one senior Government official observed: ‘It’s pretty disgusting, but it’s not surprising. This is the established Keir Starmer playbook. Someone’s appointed. Then something goes wrong, and a scapegoat is needed. So the negative briefing begins. And then after a few months, they’re sacked.’
Even by Starmer’s standards, the public evisceration – and impending defenestration – of Chris Wormald is cynical and transparently self-serving. He was appointed only last December, with Sir Keir gushing: ‘He brings a wealth of experience to this role at a critical moment in the work of change this new Government has begun.’
But with Starmer and his government pushing new levels of unpopularity, and his ministers and backbenchers sharpening their knives for a leadership challenge, another sacrifice is required. So where Wormald was once a font of wisdom and insider know-how, now he is framed as uninspired and obstructive. As one former colleague remarked: ‘Starmer knew exactly what he was getting with Chris. It’s ridiculous. It’s like buying a dog, then complaining when it starts barking.’
What else should we expect? He has been in power for just over a year. The PM is already on his second Chief of Staff, his third Communications Director and is about to ditch another Cabinet Secretary after just nine months. Last week, I observed that the spectacle of the Prime Minister forlornly trying to claim credit for the Gaza peace deal made him the John Terry of British politics – basking in successes that aren’t his. Now he’s looking more like the Evangelos Marinakis of politics, chopping and changing his staff with more chaotic abandon than Nottingham Forest’s erratic chairman.
And that’s before we even get to Wormald’s proposed replacement. His touted successor is Baroness (Louise) Casey, most commonly described as a ‘Whitehall troubleshooter’.
Yet in truth she’s more Whitehall’s most senior ‘stater of the bleeding obvious’. When something in Government falls apart so spectacularly ministers can no longer hide their failings, Casey is the person they call in to give the impression they are finally doing something to clean up the mess.
Examples of her recent work include identifying that there had to be a national rape gang inquiry after all, and a 2023 report that delivered the stunning revelation that the Metropolitan Police contains some racists, sexists and homophobes.
But Casey has one quality that sets her apart. She’s a close personal friend of the Prime Minister. The Cabinet Secretary is supposed to be politically neutral. But Keir Starmer – the same Keir Starmer who regularly berated Boris Johnson for supposed cronyism and for corrupting civil-service independence – doesn’t give a fig about that.
The fact is that Casey turned up at Sir Keir’s count on election night to applaud his victory, openly stated she would be happy to serve as a minister in his government – and told the Daily Mirror: ‘We’re at least going to have a different government next year… God-willing in my view, a completely different government under a Labour administration. It’s what I feel, it’s what I think and we are so desperate and need it as a country.’
None of that matters now. Because Starmer has now decided he has to throw Chris Wormald and what’s left of his principles out of the balloon in one last frantic effort to stop himself plummeting to earth.
And like all the other attempts, it will fail. Because Chris Wormald is not the problem. Maybe his critics are right. Maybe he is not the man to drive through dramatic, radical reform of our national institutions.
But that is not what Britain is crying out for at the moment. We are a nation in crisis. The Prime Minister should not be dreaming up grandiose plans for how to ‘re-wire how government works’. He should instead be demanding a ruthless, narrow focus on how to stop the boats, kickstart the economy and bring order to the streets.
Which brings us back to the fundamental issue. Keir Starmer hasn’t got a clue how to do any of those things. And he never will.
As we now know, governing was never part of Sir Keir’s plan. His political project began and ended with victory in 2024. Indeed he didn’t even really have a plan for fighting for that victory. His strategy rested almost entirely upon the Conservative Party handing him the keys to Downing Street on a silver platter.
So it doesn’t really matter who Starmer appoints as his Cabinet Secretary. It could be Louise Casey. It may just as well be Casey Affleck. Whoever is handed the role is destined to suffer the same fate. They will be appointed, exploited, traduced and then dumped.
As one senior government insider told me: ‘At the heart of this is hypocrisy, weak leadership and a lack of vision’. They weren’t talking about Chris Wormald. They were talking about his Prime Minister.
