Why the cabinet secretary could join the exodus from Starmer’s No 10 team

In our world of government by rumour, it seems that the cabinet secretary will soon be the latest senior figure to leave the prime minister’s side – albeit having nothing to do with the Mandelson scandal.

Chris Wormald is expected to depart after a little over a year in the role, an extremely short tenure. Antonia Romeo, permanent secretary at the Home Office, is reported to be in line to replace him. It’s a significant appointment.

It’s not because of the Epstein/Mandelson affair. The recent turmoil in No 10 presents the prime minister with an opportunity to make further changes to the wider Downing Street team. Wormald was sceptical about reforming the civil service in the way ministers would like, and the prime minister would like someone more attuned to him (even though Wormald was actually appointed by Keir Starmer, in December 2024). His predecessor, Simon Case, was a Boris Johnson appointment; he replaced Mark Sedwill, who was let go prematurely because Johnson and his adviser Dominic Cummings felt that he wasn’t embracing their style of governance. Plus ca change.

A very well respected figure who has been considered for the top job in the British civil service at least once before. Before running the Home Office, she was permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice for four years, and before that she held the same role at the Department for International Trade; she also served in New York as consul general.

Unlike so many of her predecessors, she’s not a civil service “lifer”. She was appointed as a civil service economist in 2020 having enjoyed a career in the private sector at a strategic consultancy firm, Oliver Wyman. She has a degree in PPE from Oxford, but also has advanced qualifications from the London School of Economics and an Advanced Management Programme diploma from Columbia Business School. Her greatest benefit might be breaking up the “boys’ club” atmosphere in Downing Street.

As well as being able and experienced, Romeo is presumably up for reshaping the Downing Street machine in line with Starmer’s vision. One principal competitor – Ollie Robbins, head of the Foreign Office team – is tainted by his involvement in Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador (and also, for some, by his role as a Brexit negotiator under Theresa May). There is a feeling that Starmer made a mistake in choosing Wormald as a “safe pair of hands”, when different qualities were really required.

Aside from the management of the civil service itself, the job is what the incumbent wants to make it. The cabinet secretary is the prime minister’s principal non-party-political adviser, but is also there to ensure the efficient and ethical government of the country. As such, they work with the prime minister’s chief of staff and political advisers as well as ministers.

The odds are against it. The Partygate scandal, and the wider chaos of the Johnson-Cummings years, highlighted how difficult it is to achieve success with a quasi-presidential, centralised system driven by a prime minister, in what is still a cabinet and parliamentary framework of government.

In her report on Partygate, Sue Gray complained about the dysfunctional interactions between No 10, the prime minister’s office and the (separate but overlapping) Cabinet Office during the pandemic. She suggested the creation of a prime minister’s department with its own permanent secretary, additional to the cabinet secretary, but this never came to pass.

Starmer last year made the novel appointment of Darren Jones to the new role of “chief secretary to the prime minister”, but the challenge of meshing political strategy, policymaking, career civil servants and Spads (special advisers) remains unresolved – as it has, more or less, since Lloyd George created the Cabinet Office in 1916 to deal with the exigencies of the Great War.