Being in charge of a pivotal part of the UK brings long working days and unforeseen problems. Christmas can be a particularly fraught time. Nevertheless, there are compensations: in the last financial year it brought a package totalling more than £7m. But Stuart Machin was not running the country, just Marks & Spencer, the quintessentially British retail chain that has been in business since the 1880s.
By contrast, Sir Keir Starmer’s official salary for endeavouring to run the UK is just £172,153, some of which is sacrificed to pay for the dubious privilege of living in Downing Street.
Starmer’s job brings with it the constant glare of the media spotlight, on him and his family. Machin, however, continues to enjoy the luxury of privacy: apart from the fact that he has a dog called Kostas, the only information in the public domain about the current M&S chief executive relates to his business career.
Machin had proved himself a highly successful retailer before being recruited to his current role by the M&S chairman, Sir Archie Norman. Norman also sat as an MP from 1997-2005, and for most of the final three years he combined that role with chairing a public company, Energis. Since then, he has concentrated on business, to which he is clearly better suited and for which he has been much better rewarded.
Starmer could enjoy a more lucrative career as a successful barrister than he ever could in politics and without any of the attendant aggravations. He would have a degree of control, rather than being at the mercy of a fickle public. And if he did return to the law, he would not even need to contemplate joining the unseemly parade of former politicians attempting to persuade the commercial world that their services might be worth buying.
If anyone is looking at the current government, or the main opposition parties and asking themselves why there is such an apparent dearth of talent, then part of the answer lies in the deeply unappealing job conditions. Even from the relatively meagre level at which it was set back in 2009, the PM’s official salary entitlement has failed to come close to keeping up with inflation.
The time has come for the UK to think seriously about how we want the country to be run and who we want to do it. The traditional reaction to any suggestion of increased pay for politicians is outrage from much of the media, which fuels a general public distrust of politicians and promotes the idea that “they are only in it for what they can get”.
So perhaps the answer is to slim down the entire government operation. Do we really need all those parliamentary constituencies for such a small country? Genuinely devolving power to regional authorities and mayors would make far more sense.
None of this should detract from the crucial matter of having truly able and focused ministers and rewarding them appropriately. The package would not have to be on the M&S scale.
But the UK is way down the league table for paying its political leaders. Singapore’s prime minister, Lawrence Wong, is the world champion on nearly $1.7m and even entry-level ministers get close to half that.
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The aim is to benchmark the salary to the top levels of the private sector, aiming to attract the best people to the political realm while also insisting on the highest standards. Any hint of corruption is immediately career-ending.
While Singapore’s is not a regime that the UK would wish to emulate, having competent ministers who remain in place and who are dedicated to doing a job for which they are well rewarded seems a sensible recipe for making a country function more effectively.
Equally, ensuring that ministers are relieved of the need to focus on anything other than doing their job would remove many of the banana skins that lurk ready to catch out careless politicians. Registering other financial interests, paying stamp duty on second homes, accepting lavish – and not so lavish – gifts, would no longer be an issue as capable civil servants would sweep away all such concerns.
If, eventually, the political system demanded a change of government, the outgoing administration would have been sufficiently well paid to endure a period in purdah before stepping into the private sector.
Of course, the missing element in all this is proportional representation, which would ensure that changes in government, when they came, were gentle moves rather than violent swings.
But the need to begin seriously thinking about reshaping the political model is here now. Without significant change, we will soon face a situation where only the incompetent, a few chancers or those who are very rich or, worse still, in the pay of the very rich, will want to play the political game.
