The Spectator’s Notes | 2 February 2008

The appointment of a Permanent Secretary at No. 10 Downing Street shows that the office of Prime Minister is swelling fit to burst. Everyone says that the man with the new post, Jeremy Heywood, is excellent. Nothing is known against him beyond his atrociously New Labour recreations in Who’s Who — ‘child-care, modern art, cinema, Manchester United’ — but it is not clear why his job needed to be invented. The Prime Ministership is not a government department. It is easy to list all the people who are annoyed by the new role — the permanent secretaries of real government departments, the Cabinet Ministers for whom they work, all the private secretaries in No. 10, and particularly the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, who has been taking literally Mr Brown’s promises about a politically neutral Civil Service. Not so easy to list the people who are pleased. Mr Heywood left his job as Principal Private Secretary to Tony Blair in 2003 and then worked for Morgan Stanley, but he did not need the title and emoluments of a permanent secretary to lure him back to No.