Lord Bob Kerslake is the man who is quietly preparing Jeremy Corbyn to take on the role of Prime Minister.
Kerslake, a former head of the Civil Service under Prime Minister David Cameron, has been called in by Labour strategists to groom Corbyn, a veteran backbench rebel who has had no government appointments or ministerial experience during his 34 years as an MP.
He has already enlisted a group of senior ex-mandarins to help Labour prepare for power, and says his role is to advise Corbyn and his team about “what to expect in government” and “how particular policies might be implemented and what the issues are that they might have to think about.”
But who is this “kingmaker”? He is a 62-year-old former local council administrator who rose to lead the Civil Service from 2012 to 2015 before being appointed by Cameron as an independent cross-bench peer in 2015. Earlier this year he was appointed to head the inquiry into the Manchester Arena terror attack.
Although he is not a Labour peer, Kerslake has already conducted one review for Corbyn of how his office should function, and another for Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell on how Treasury should interact with other government departments.
Before joining the civil service Kerslake received a knighthood for his services to local government, spending eight years on the London Borough of Hounslow then a further 11 years as leader of Sheffield Council. His list of achievements is impressive with a series of senior roles with health and housing bodies, making him well-placed to tutor Corbyn not just on how governments function but more specifically on healthcare and housing needs across the country.
Kerslake, who is not being paid for his role, says Corbyn and the Labour Party are doing the “right thing to take steps to prepare for government.”
Learning the Ropes
“It is what oppositions should do”, he said. “They are serious about preparing for government and therefore how they might implement what they want to do.”
The Labour leader and his team had impressed him as serious people whose more left-wing ideas were “quite radical” by British terms but not out of the ordinary elsewhere in Europe.
“It is not unusual for some of the things they want to have run by the state being run by the state in other parts of Europe,” he said.
“The comparison is quite illuminating. What might seem to some ‘blimey that looks completely outlandish’ is already happening in other places. Germany, for example, rightly or wrongly, doesn’t have a major student fees system. Just because it is a very different path that this country has been on for the past 30 or 40 years we should not assume therefore that it is sort of completely new and has not been done anywhere else”.
Kerslake was asked by the Sunday Telegraph if he could see Corbyn actually becoming PM. “Yes, of course in any democracy you can see that people can become Prime Minister,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you see it as a possibility if they have received that level of votes and support? ”
“In a number of ways this country is in quite a bad way and we should be honest enough to acknowledge that. None of this is to be a doomsayer – I am actually a naturally optimistic person. The country does need a hard look at the policies that it has worked under for quite a long time. The two main political parties are actually coming to the same conclusion – that we need a break with the past, a revisiting of how the economy works.”
Kerslake has known Chancellor John McDonnell since he was chairman of the finance committee of the Greater London Council in the 1980s and says he finds McDonnell “businesslike” and “genuinely keen to receive advice”.
At the Labour Party conference Corbyn told his supporters the Labour Party had become “ a government-in-waiting,” insisting ”we are ready for government.”
And in a bid to present the party as a “different type of government”, the Labour leader added: ”I promised you two years ago that we would do politics differently. It has not always been easy. There’s quite a few who prefer politics the old way. But let me say it again: we will do politics differently. And the vital word is ‘we’.”
by Bob Graham
The post Politics: The ‘Kingmaker’ Tutoring Corbyn to Be PM appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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