Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown has compared Sir Keir Starmer’s plans for an inner cabinet of just four people to way the Chinese Communist Party governed the country in the latter days of Mao Zhedong’s rule.
Mr Brown – who succeeded Tony Blair in 2007 – was commenting on the current Labour leader’s proposal regarding an executive cabinet of just four people.
If Labour is elected at the general election later this year, the “gang of four” would consist of Sir Keir, deputy leader Angela Rayner, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, and Pat McFadden, Labour’s National Campaign Coordinator, according to a report in The Times.
They would formulate decisions which would then be presented to the wider cabinet – but Mr Brown, who served as Mr Blair’s Chancellor for a decade before getting the top job, was highly sceptical about the practicalities.
Speaking yesterday at the Institute for Government (IfG), which published the report on which Sir Keir’s plan is based, Mr Brown gently poked fun at the idea.
He explained: “Triumvirates have been pretty difficult in the first place. To have a quadrumvirate though, is very difficult.
“The historical experience of that is very inauspicious, if I may say so.”
He continued: “King Herod was part of a quadrumvirate when the four of them governed the Roman Empire, and you can take it right through to recent times and the Gang of Four, which if I remember right has not survived to tell much of the tale now.”
In the context of China, the Gang of Four was a Maoist political faction which consisted of Chinese Communist Party officials which wielded enormous power in the 1960s and 1970s.
When Mao died in 1976, they lost their grip on power and were handed lengthy prison sentences.
Mr Brown continued: “So I think the inner Cabinet idea may need some work. I doubt that the other 20 members of the Cabinet would be very happy if they were told that they were outside this inner circle.”
The IfG report argued for the break-up of the Cabinet Office and the creation of a new smaller executive cabinet committee, made up of a handful of ministers appointed by the prime minister.
The review is the result of a year-long “commission on the centre of government” convened by the think tank.
Mr Brown, speaking alongside former Tory Prime Minister Sir John Major, said he would be “quite shocked and surprised” if the suggestion of an inner Cabinet of four “could ever work”.
Sir John added that while he agreed the 32-person Cabinet had become “too large and cumbersome”, there were “practical drawbacks to a formal inner cabinet” proposed by the report, including that it would alienate those who are excluded.
He also took a swipe Sir John, in his remarks, at some of his successors in Downing Street, issuing Rishi Sunak over his Rwanda policy and Liz Truss for her controversial sacking of top civil servant Sir Tom Scholar.
He said: “Let me be clear about this: Three prime ministers in one Parliament, with a few malcontents seeking a fourth, does not help the perception of the centre of Government.
“Nor does a Supreme Court ruling that the Government has broken the law.
“Nor is it a good optic when ministers indulge in public arguments, openly blame or, in one or two occasions, insult their civil servants.
“Or when they favour the advice of often inexperienced political advisers over that of civil servants with years of specialist experience and knowledge.
“Or when they sack senior civil servants who offer candid advice, which simply did not suit the Government’s thinking.”
