Revolving doors in the nine circles of hell
Sir Patrick Vallance and General Sir Nick Carter join The Tony Blair Institute.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, and General Sir Nick Carter, the UK’s former Chief of the Defence Staff, are to join The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), in the latest rotation of Britains’s classic revolving doors syndrome.
They will both act as Strategic Counsellors for TBI whose raison d’être is in the name: working with political leaders to drive change. This is not the sort of grassroots change that populations clamour for from the bottom up, but other sorts of change driven from the top down by generous funding and high-level hobnobbing.
Some churn between civil service and private sector is inevitable and it’s not all bad; there can be a real benefit in exporting expertise from one side of the door to the other. There are obvious appreciable risks, not least that those in the public sector might have carried out their duties in such a way as to influence expectation of future employment. In other words, they might be lured by the lucre.
Vallance’s and Carter’s appointment to TBI feels a little more concerning than your normal slightly grubby handprint-besmirched revolving door, because of the dots people will draw between their roles in the UK government’s management of Covid-19 and TBI’s goals.