Preparing for a change of government: the history of the ‘Douglas-Home Rules’

After taking a break during the election campaign, Since Attlee & Churchill is back with a look at the history of civil service 'access talks' with opposition parties.

Picture: Keir Starmer in 10 Downing Street. July 2024. Credit: Number 10.

Preparing for a change of government: the history of the ‘Douglas-Home Rules’

by Lee David Evans

Britain doesn’t change governments very often. If you are in your mid-60s, you will have only had the chance to vote in four elections which ejected one party from office in favour of another: 1979, 1997, 2010 - and now, 2024.

Such is the gap between changes at the top that most new governments comprise MPs whose overwhelming or exclusive parliamentary experience is on the opposition benches. Tony Blair and David Cameron both entered Parliament when their parties were in opposition and first experienced government as prime minister. The same is now true of Sir Keir Starmer, who first became an MP in 2015. 

As Pippa Catterall has written, ‘The only post‐war government to enter office confident, well‐acquainted with the Civil Service and with a fund of administrative experience to draw on was the Attlee administration formed in 1945.’ Almost every other time, including now, prime ministers and ministers with little-to-no experience of office have had red boxes thrust into their inexperienced arms.

The machinery of the British state has found a novel way to mitigate the naivety of incoming governments: ‘access talks’. In the lead-up to a general election, civil servants, who usually serve the government alone, are permitted to meet with members of the opposition to discuss their plans for government. The idea is that it will help the opposition better understand how the essential elements of Whitehall are organised, and also enlighten the civil servants on what they may be asked to do in the event of a change in their political masters.

What may seem self-evidently sensible has only been practised for the past six decades. When Alec Douglas-Home came into office in October 1963, the Conservatives had been in government for over a decade and an election was due within a year. When the poll came, it was widely expected to result in a comfortable Labour victory and with Labour’s fresh-faced leader, Harold Wilson, entering Number 10. Wilson promised to shake up the British state for the 1960s, but like many other incoming prime ministers he would have to do it with a relatively inexperienced team. Labour had been out of office since 1951 and only three members of the Shadow Cabinet (Wilson himself, James Griffiths and Patrick Gordon Walker) had any previous Cabinet experience.

As the Parliament ran towards its natural end, talk of civil service-opposition discussions began. (The Parliament of 1959-64 was the first since the end of the war to run for a full five years; no other Parliament would do so until 1992-97). However, the idea of even informal discussions was controversial. Tim Bligh, Principal Private Secretary to the prime minister, wrote:

The Civil Service are servants of the Queen and serve the Government of the day. They cannot also serve the Opposition… What would be the effect on the morale of the party if they thought that the Prime Minister was conniving at the Civil Service preparing the Labour Party for... Government?

Ultimately Bligh, and Douglas-Home, saw the sense of letting the talks go ahead:

... there is a real problem… the nation’s well-being might be seriously affected and this is because a newly elected Prime Minister has, in practice, very little time to form an administration.

And so in the six months leading up to the 1964 election, informal talks were held - chiefly focused on the economic departments - between Labour and the civil service. Douglas-Home’s endorsement of the talks led to the convention being named the 'Douglas-Home rules' by Peter Hennessy.