Special advisers: who spads are and why they matter

Every Cabinet minister arrives in a department of thousands of officials who did not choose them, will outlast them, and are bound by rules requiring political impartiality. The handful of people the minister actually brings along, the special advisers, are the exception written into the system: temporary civil servants, appointed personally, paid from public funds, and explicitly permitted to be partisan. There are usually between 100 and 130 of them across the whole of government at any one time, disclosed each year in a report to Parliament that lists names, pay bands and totals. That is a tiny headcount for the influence attached to it, because spads sit precisely where elected politics meets the permanent machine.

The legal scaffolding is unusually explicit. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 put the civil service on a statutory footing and required, in general, that appointments be made on merit after fair and open competition. Section 15 carves out special advisers by name: a minister may select one personally, subject to the Prime Minister's approval, and the appointment ends automatically when the appointing minister leaves office or a general election is called. No board, no competition, no security of tenure beyond the minister's own. The model contract and the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers, both published by the Cabinet Office, fill in the rest. Salaries run through the same pay machinery as officials, with the most senior advisers in Number 10 historically paid in the region of £140,000 or more.

The trade embedded in that code is the heart of the arrangement. A spad may brief journalists with a party-political slant, draft the attack lines a neutral press office cannot touch, and negotiate with the party machine in ways forbidden to career officials. In exchange, the code forbids them from authorising expenditure, exercising statutory powers, or managing permanent civil servants. The one sustained breach of that boundary is instructive: in 1997 an Order in Council allowed up to three advisers in Downing Street to give orders to officials, and Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell used it. Gordon Brown revoked the order on his first day as Prime Minister in 2007, and the prohibition has held formally ever since.

What they actually do all day

The job description is deliberately loose, and in practice spads split into two rough types. Policy advisers work the substance: testing departmental advice against the manifesto, spotting where a submission quietly buries an option the minister wanted, and carrying negotiations between departments that officials cannot conduct because the disagreement is political rather than technical. Media spads manage the minister's relationship with the lobby, trade information with journalists, and coordinate announcements with Number 10's grid, the central timetable that decides which department gets which morning's headlines. The most effective advisers do something subtler than either: they let the civil service read the minister's mind. A permanent secretary who can ask a trusted spad "will she wear this?" saves weeks of drafting in the wrong direction, which is why senior officials tend to value good advisers and quietly despair of weak ones.

The accountability gap

The ambiguities are where the trouble lives. A spad's formal accountability runs to the appointing minister, who is responsible under the Ministerial Code for their conduct, yet the adviser's practical loyalty often runs to Number 10, which approved the hire and can force a dismissal. When an adviser misbehaves, the question of who answers for it has repeatedly proved awkward: Damian McBride's smear emails in 2009 ended his career but left Gordon Brown insisting he knew nothing, and Dominic Cummings operated in 2019 and 2020 with an authority over ministers' own advisers that no document quite described, including mass dismissals no minister publicly owned. Select committees struggle to compel advisers to testify, since the government's position is that ministers, not their staff, account to Parliament.

None of the periodic reform proposals, statutory caps on numbers, sharper codes, pre-appointment scrutiny, has removed the underlying tension, because the tension is the point. British government wants an impartial permanent bureaucracy and ministers with the political capacity to direct it, and the spad is the hinge holding those two ambitions together. A hundred-odd temporary appointees, hired on patronage and fired by election results, are what keeps the seven-figure permanent workforce and the transient elected layer speaking the same language. When the hinge fails, the failure is loud; when it works, nobody outside Westminster notices it exists.