My wife, a keen gardener, has a cold-frame forcing pen. It contains privileged seedlings which, thus sheltered, are hardened off before planting. These are the star blooms of seasons to come.
In Britain’s New Establishment we call such specimens ‘ministerial special advisers’. They are placed in the Whitehall cold-frame and given special treatment. Within a few years these ‘spads’ become vigorous bushes. David Cameron and George Osborne used to be special advisers, as did all but one of the candidates in the recent Labour leadership contest. Nick Clegg was a special adviser in Brussels. The lucky lad worked for Leon Brittan when that housewives’ favourite was a European commissioner.
Spads tend to be young, assertive creatures, impervious to self-doubt, unmottled by the flaws of normal 20-somethings. I knew David Cameron slightly when he was Norman Lamont’s special adviser in 1992-93 and do not recall ever seeing him drunk or high or in the grip of girlfriend trouble. The rest of us were hosing back the Chateau Agitator at lunchtime and chasing barmaids, but young David was as guided as a Royal Navy missile — controlled, ambitious. Most unsporting.
Special advisers have a passport to the very citadel of public life. They are not elected and are often chosen by nepotism rather than merit, but if they keep their snouts clean they can end up running the kingdom. That’s modern politics.
State-paid special advisers were invented by Harold Wilson, who mistrusted the civil service and decided that he needed hirelings of his own kidney. As the special adviser flourished, so the role of the elected parliamentary private secretary (PPS) diminished. The PPS’s job was to keep the minister plugged in to parliament but, pah, who cared about the boring old Commons?
Edward Heath did some minor fiddling with special advisers, if we can put it like that, and made them answerable to Cabinet rather than to individual ministers.
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