Britain's former top civil servant on life inside No 10, his adversary Dominic Cummings and Britain in the wake of Brexit.
The stocky man in the dark suit and black ankle boots strides out of Westminster Tube station and along Whitehall without attracting a second glance, the way he likes it. He spent the weekend, as usual, at home in a Somerset village where the locals know what he does but are more concerned about whether he is "a decent bloke who helps clear the stream or run the duck race", as he puts it.
In fact Mark Sedwill, 56, has survived close encounters with the Taliban and Saddam Hussein's bodyguards, and is president of the Special Forces Club, suggesting a secretive past that he "could not possibly say" anything about. For the past two years he was one of the most powerful men in the land, advising the prime minister on affairs of state as the nation lurched from one crisis to another.
Until September Sedwill was cabinet secretary, the country's top-ranking civil servant — a job made famous in the 1980s comedy series Yes, Prime Minister, in which it is Sir Humphrey who exerts the real power over a bumbling prime minister while pretending to serve. Now Sedwill has been made a baron (of Sherborne, in Dorset) and given a handsome £250,000 ($484,000) payoff as well as a plum post as chairman of the 2020 Atlantic Future Forum, Britain's alternative to the annual Munich Security Conference, which he was off to host on board HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy's joint-largest aircraft carrier.
Nevertheless I am still hoping he will spill the dirt on life inside 10 Downing Street. There is plenty to talk about. Not only did he have to deal with a country torn apart by Brexit and two very different prime ministers, but also a pandemic that left Boris Johnson battling for his life. Oh, and not to mention a few skirmishes with Johnson's chief adviser, Dominic Cummings.
"There are days when it's like Yes Minister, days when it's like The Thick of It and days when it's like Game of Thrones," he says with a laugh.
Recent months must have felt more like Contagion. He says he still gets breathless following his own bout of Covid, which felled all the key players at No 10 back in April. His symptoms were mild — "just a day and a half feeling rough" and ten days of isolation in his London flat.
We meet a month after his departure as cabinet secretary, in an enormously grand drawing room at Admiralty House that he uses for meetings. "How do you like my new pad?" he asks. It's a very different setting from the first time we met, in early 2009, in a crowded coffee shop in Barnes, southwest London, where we both then lived. He was about to go to Afghanistan to be ambassador and we discussed the prospects of defeating the Taliban among mums with buggies straight from the school run. He never imagined then that nine years later he would be at No 10, running the 400,000-strong civil service. "I would probably just have chuckled at the idea," he says. "That wasn't the career path I was on."
Growing up he wanted to be "a train driver or a professional sportsman — typical boy things", until becoming head boy at Bourne Grammar School in Lincolnshire gave him the idea of public service and he became a reserve in the Royal Marines. At St Andrews University he caught the travel bug, then joined the Foreign Office, with postings to Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan. "I might have aspired to one day be national security adviser, as that was a natural progression, but I would have thought it utterly bizarre that I might end up as cabinet secretary — and of course it was only because of really tragic circumstances that I did."
Those tragic circumstances were the illness then death in November 2018 of his predecessor, Jeremy Heywood. Sedwill had been permanent secretary to Theresa May at the Home Office, then followed her to No 10 as national security adviser. When Heywood took a leave of absence in June 2018 he stepped in as her cabinet secretary. Johnson kept him on when he became PM. His two bosses could not be more different.
"You had two different personalities in Theresa May and Boris Johnson, two different styles of decision-making, and part of my job was to make sure the machine fits around them and enables them to operate."
Can he describe those styles?
"I don't think anything I could describe would be different to what people would see from the outside. In both cases what people see of them is the authentic personality," he says with the diplomacy of a seasoned mandarin.
You saw them up close and every day, I say, surely you gleaned more?
"Yes, nearly every day and sometimes more than once," he replies. "But the relationship between cabinet secretary and PM you have to keep private. It's important for the PM to know they can speak in complete confidence and that they can be completely themselves without worrying that at some point the nature of that dialogue would be revealed."
Did that work both ways, though? Under Johnson he was constantly briefed against by "anonymous government sources". "Certainly by some within government," he replies. "Not, I believe, with [Johnson's] approval, or by him, and of course I was also briefed against in Theresa May's government. These are contentious times and we find ourselves on firing lines. I've remarked before how distasteful that is, and damaging to trust — not just between ministers and officials, and between ministers — it's bad for government."
Who were the most powerful people in Johnson's government? "You have to differentiate between advisers and deciders," he says. "There are highly influential advisers in this government, as there have been in others, and who have the confidence of the PM. But in the end whatever authority they have arises from the PM — they speak on his or her behalf."
It is hard to think of an adviser in recent times as powerful as Cummings, who blogged about his disdain for the civil service and saw Sedwill as his arch-enemy.
Sedwill has described Cummings's notorious trip to Co Durham during lockdown as a "mistake" that "clearly undermined the government's coherent narrative about people following the rules".
Today he insists there is no beef between them. "Actually he and I had a pretty good relationship. We're different kinds of personalities, but both fairly upfront and candid. We had different perspectives of course on things, but generally a solid professional relationship."
And of his departure from No 10? "There's a lot of speculation about 'jumped or pushed', but genuinely I was not pushed. The PM and I had been talking for some time about when it would be appropriate for me to go — it was always a temporary arrangement and it was agreed when I took on the role [of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service] that at some point it would make sense to split the roles again. During the period of Brexit and that rather intense phase it made sense to keep them together."
What, though, did he think of Cummings's plan to hire "weirdos and misfits" to replace traditional civil servants?
"He uses language about lots of institutions, not just the civil service, that people find challenging. That's his style. I'd express it differently, but the idea of reaching beyond traditional sources of people and bringing in those with different backgrounds and different talents is great."
Others have expressed concern about an American-style politicisation of the civil service, citing Johnson's appointment of his Brexit negotiator David Frost, the former head of the Scotch Whisky Association, to replace Sedwill as national security adviser despite his total lack of security experience.
"It is a critical job, but it wouldn't be fair to say he has no experience," Sedwill says. "He was a diplomat, then went into the private sector and is now right at the heart of the most crucial negotiations. Of course he's a political appointee, but [the national security adviser] is a unique job and has been a personal appointment according to the needs of the PM at the time."
Isn't that the start of a slippery slope?
"There's no reason to think it is. My successor as cabinet secretary [Simon Case] is a civil servant through and through. Obviously we always have to be watchful and I'd be really worried if civil servants were chosen for political views or political appointees put into the civil service. But for ministers to have extended offices and more political advisers I don't think we should see as a major shift. Let's not forget the first PM under whom I served, Margaret Thatcher, notoriously was accused of selecting senior civil servants on the basis they were 'one of us'."
Of all the challenges he faced in the role, what was his worst day? For the first time he seems stumped. Eventually he settles on the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018 of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. "It was just that sense the rules we had observed from the Cold War period on had been junked," he says. "It wasn't as if there was a playbook for this. Imagine you are a first responder and had a report of two people sitting on a bench in a peaceful park apparently having some kind of seizure. You don't immediately think it's because some Russian spies turned up and tried to inflict a chemical weapons attack."
As soon as the situation became clear a Cobra meeting was convened. "There was a sense that this could be the start of something, and, depending on our response and their counter response, it could escalate into an even more serious crisis. In the end we managed to contain it, albeit with the tragic loss of Dawn Sturgess [a 44-year-old woman who died after inadvertently spraying herself with the Novichok nerve agent] and dreadful health consequences on the Skripals and others."
He never met the Skripals himself. "The job is not like in the movies," he says. "It wouldn't have been appropriate. First they were very unwell, then needed medical and psychological support." They have since been moved overseas and are, he says, safe.
President Putin got away with it, though, and the perpetrators from military intelligence paraded on Russian TV.
"I don't think that's right," he replies. "I don't think the Russians would have expected — and I'm not sure they would have proceeded had they known — the penalty we imposed. We removed the entire military intelligence apparatus they had in the UK and saw more expulsions of Russian diplomats and intelligence agents masquerading as diplomats at any time since the Cold War around the Alliance [Nato] and many other countries. I hope they have realised that kind of behaviour won't be tolerated … We do have an asset they don't — we have allies."
How has Brexit affected our international standing? "I think the rest of the world is puzzled that a country that was always engaged in the world has had, in the last decade, a period of introspection where we considered our own national identity. It's not what people expected," he says, pointing not just to the 2016 Brexit vote but also the 2014 vote on Scottish independence.
Does he think the controversial Internal Market Bill, which would enable the government to bypass international law and rewrite parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, has tarnished our image? "It's clearly had an impact," he says, though he will not say what his advice would have been. "In the end parliament will decide whether to proceed with these clauses … Don't forget, it will only be enacted in circumstances where government and parliament consider there is a risk to the integrity of UK's internal economic unity — or other international agreements to which we are party, like the Good Friday agreement."
The government's handling of coronavirus has been far from exemplary. Why does he think England suffered the highest levels of excess mortality in Europe at the peak of the pandemic, despite having had time to watch what was happening in Italy and Spain?
"In a sense we don't yet know," he replies. "It will be a question for the inquiry, and history, and whether it will remain the case once the pandemic has run its course."
In the early days, he says, they watched what was happening in mainland Europe "carefully … and did seek to learn lessons. We did see scenes elsewhere of people dying in corridors without proper medical treatment. We didn't have that here. Everyone who needed a ventilator was put on one and we created excess capacity with the Nightingale hospitals to ensure the NHS could cope. We had criticism that they weren't really used, but how would we have felt if the NHS's existing capacity had not been able to cope? Like every other country we had huge challenges — there was a global shortage of PPE and a real knife-fight round the world trying to secure that.
"Of course we didn't get everything right as we were dealing with something unknown that was happening at pace. The big question will be, did we take the right decisions at the right time? And could or should lockdown have been imposed earlier than it was? Actually it was imposed earlier in the cycle than in many other counties in terms of growth of cases."
There has been much criticism of the prime minister for missing five Cobra meetings at the start of the outbreak. Should Sedwill have called him back from Chevening, where he was ensconced with his pregnant girlfriend, Carrie Symonds? "I don't know about that," he says. "He could have taken meetings earlier on, but I don't know if decisions taken would have been different. He was certainly kept informed throughout."
Once lockdown started Sedwill stayed in his London flat, no longer returning to his beloved Somerset at weekends to join his wife and their 14-year-old daughter. By early April Johnson's inner circle were succumbing to the virus, one by one.
"We we were following guidance — trying to maintain distance in meetings, everyone washing their hands — but it wasn't guidance at the time to wear masks, and these are not modern buildings. It's quite an enclosed environment."
When Johnson went into intensive care it was "a very tough moment. We had to confront the possibility we might lose him. You react to that at both a professional and a personal level. He was someone I had got to know over the years — I would describe it as a friendship — but as cabinet secretary I [also] had the professional duty of how do we maintain continuity of government?"
Since leaving, Sedwill has moved house in Somerset, to the next village along, where he is currently surrounded by boxes. He says he learnt some time ago to "compartmentalise" his work life in London from his rural existence at home, and says "this world is probably what enabled me to maintain my resilience".
Apart from spending more time chopping wood and helping out in the village, his new role as chairman of Atlantic Future Foundation will keep him in the midst of foreign and security affairs, where his heart really lies. He is also tipped to become Nato's next secretary-general. What does he see as the main threat to the UK?
"We have to accept in this era there isn't a single one we can focus on, so maintaining our agility to respond is key," he says. "You and I spent lot of time in places where we were dealing with the aftermath of terrorist attacks in failed and fragile states, so that has dominated our national security thinking for a decade or more. Now we are focusing back on threats from adversarial states, notably Russia but not just them. And we have the challenge of a rising power on the world stage that is not an adversary but has a very different political system to ours — there are certainly points of friction between us in the West and China."
He says we must also remain "agile to deal with serious organised crime, some with state elements to it, which actually kills more day to day than any other threat. We have to deal with terrorism, with hostile states, threats to our democratic system, and operating in not just land, sea and air, but space, cyberspace, information and health and economic security. We have to be able to deal with them all."
At Sedwill's final cabinet meeting in September Johnson presented him with prints of two government-owned engravings he had kept on his office wall. One was of Thomas Cromwell, who as key adviser to Henry VIII was effectively the first cabinet secretary. The other was of Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Elizabeth I, who could be regarded as the first national security adviser.
"I joked that the cabinet secretary of his day was in the end dismissed and executed for treason, while the NSA died in his bed and has been revered ever since, and maybe there was a lesson in that for me.".
Written by: Christina Lamb
© The Times of London
