Cobblers about COBR? Does it matter if the Prime Minister attends or not?

There has been much speculation in the press this weekend about ‘Cobra’ meetings, who goes to them and whether a failure by the Prime Minister to attend implies that somehow an issue doesn’t really matter. Is this fair comment, or is it perhaps an indication that people don’t understand fully how the UK system of government works?

There has been a growing tendency in recent years to focus on attendance, perhaps over asking what the purpose or value of attendance is, and in turn to focus less on the output of the meetings, and more on who was present.

At its heart is perhaps the problem of trying to understand how the UK system of crisis management works. We are not a presidential system, and while the Prime Minister of the day holds sway, this person is the head of Government and not the head of state. Their cabinet is intended to bring empowered people together to lead their respective parts of government machinery to a common end.

Nowhere is this more visible than the much vaunted COBR process, which to the media implies the pinnacle of crisis management in action. Somehow the words ‘the PM has called COBR’ 

immediately lends a sense of gravitas to any crisis and sends a message that the Prime Minister is taking a personal charge of the situation.

By contrast when COBR occurs without the PM present, the implication is that this doesn’t matter or that it suggests that somehow the Government doesn’t care about the situation  at hand – after all, if the PM can’t be bothered to show up, why should we care?

The COBR process works well because it is designed as a means of convening the right experts around the table at the right time to work out what to do next. It is a very potent short term decision taking body, able to make things happen without recourse to the usual lengthy process of submissions, policy papers and analysis and cross government write arounds to solicit views – it just does stuff.

This works really well for a crisis like hostage rescue, or Russian intelligence smearing novichok in Salisbury when you need to bring in parts of the state to work out what to do in the short and medium term to respond to an emerging crisis.

This can be very powerful in the short term as the right parts of government share their understanding of a situation and collectively a common way forward is developed for the short term response – be it to deploy troops, send diplomatic messages or consider what the Government approach needs to be for the short term.

Who chairs the meetings is often an irrelevance – what matters is firstly which departments and experts are round the table, and secondly the fact that the meeting itself has been convened. COBR works well by putting people at the table to share their understanding of a situation and offer advice on what to do next – this information is recorded and quickly disseminated across government to ensure action is taken. The real strength of the process is the act of bringing people together who can make stuff happen, not posturing by putting senior politicians in to appease the media.

COBR also gets taken seriously because it is, to all intents and purposes, being convened by the Cabinet Office on behalf of No10. Its often forgotten that the Downing Street operation is very small, with only a relatively limited number of senior civil servants inside it, along with political and policy advisors. It functions essentially as the private office for the Prime Minister, and not as a centre of government itself.

The role of the Cabinet Office is to carry out the role of supporting the Prime Minister by marshalling the resources of government to deliver the aspirations of No10. This involves convening committees, co-ordinating policy work and trying to act as conductor for the band of ministerial departments to ensure that instruments are played in the right order in a synchronised manner.

When COBR is called, it is done so because there is a clear understanding that an event is occurring which may require co-ordinated activity outside of the normal machinery of government process. The act of convening is an extremely powerful signal in itself that the PM is interested enough in an issue to want their government to work on resolving it.

Its important to realise that it is actually relatively rare for a serving PM to chair COBR meetings. Outside of the most immediate life and death decisions, which is really what the process is intended to handle, most COBR meetings would usually be chaired at lower level – for example by a Secretary of State or even a wider minister in due course.

Does this mean that the PM of the day abdicates responsibility for the crisis though? No it doesn’t. If Government is doing its job right when it comes to COBR, then the PM’s views will also have been taken in advance, and they will have expressed an opinion on any specific goals or outcomes they want from the meeting. This is where the Civil Service can deftly steer the machinery of state, ensuring that the meeting delivers short term goals that match up to wider policy aims.

What will also happen is that No10 will almost certainly have an empowered rep in the meeting, someone with sufficient seniority and authority to not only have direct access to, but also able to speak for the Prime Minister if required. 

More widely the minutes and actions will undoubtedly be shared with No10 to ensure that the PM is aware of the outcome of the meeting. In other words, there is no direct need for the PM of the day to be present just to ensure their voice and views are heard.

More widely there is a risk that we perceive that the British Government has only two states – COBR or no action at all. There doesn’t seem to be a recognition that actually the business of government is more subtle, and that failure to call COBR does not mean that Government is failing to do something.

As noted, COBR is a fantastic short-term crisis response tool, but it is not an effective medium to long term policy development tool. Much of the work needed to develop longer term responses, understand how to shift and change policies, practises and work needs to take place in a slightly longer-term time frame, and this is where the Government excels at creating opportunities.

Behind the scenes there will usually be a huge range of cross-Whitehall committees, Cabinet Committees, cross departmental meetings, policy teams and work done on all manner of issues. Often these will hide behind very bland titles, hiding work of great importance. The National Archives are full of dull file reference numbers for meetings covering subjects like nuclear deterrence and continuity of government.

The mistake we often make is to think that if COBR isn’t happening, or if the PM isn’t involved in it, then somehow it doesn’t matter. This simply isn’t true – Government continues to work across a variety of means and timelines, and COBR is just one tool among many for handling the response to an issue. If anything, COBR is emphatically not a policy making forum, which is where many of the debates on longer term issues (which seem particularly pertinent to things like COVID-19) are hammered out.

There is a wider question too of time and competing priorities. One of the truisms of the role of PM is that your life is no longer your own. A private office full of dedicated civil servants will be doing their utmost to balance off the range of submissions, notes, letters, advice and briefings sent in, and try to filter it into some semblance of order, to work out what truly matters.

For the Prime Ministers role, the challenge is to balance off leading the nation through their role as head of Government, leading their cabinet colleagues in delivery of a policy agenda, and leading their political party in pursuit of their political agenda. This is a very complex balancing act, which consumes huge amounts of time and effort.

Everyone working on policy in Government likes to think their issue is important, and that it matters (after all, if it doesn’t matter, why is it the business of Government to get involved in it?). The challenge is working out where the decision taking buck stops, and where it can be delegated – too much delegation to departments can lead to uncoordinated policy confusion and chaos. Too much central control, with the insistence that No10 signs everything off leads to stalemate as all decisions coalesce around a single individual.

The art of being an effective private office is to balance these demands off, identify where papers can be noted but not read by the PM, where they can be delegated back down to Departmental level to resolve, or where they need to go into the box to offer advice to the PM for a decision to be taken. This needs to be done while balancing time for the remainder of Government business as well as political, constituency and even personal time too.

In an optimal world the UK system works at its finest when the PM of the day exhibits a relatively light touch but is supported by an empowered centre that ensures that departments are delivering to agree policy agendas. This means letting the right minister chair COBR when necessary and giving the space for the policy making machine to function, not constantly interrupting to change its course depending on the imminent crisis.

The other risk is that people assume that not being present means that the PM does not care about an issue. Not only is this untrue, as noted above, but there is also a reality check needed in how much time can be dedicated to focus on a single issue at one time. In the early stages, when it is not certain what may happen, and when there are plenty of other events going on in the world, sending the PM to chair every COBR meeting, no matter how routine it may be is not necessarily the best use of their time.

Some may see this as a derogation of duty that at the first sign of an emerging issue, the PM is not necessarily present for every COBR going. But a better question may be ‘what value does the PM presence add, and what decision cannot be taken in their absence that the COBR system cannot cope with’?

If you work to the assumption that the PM has to chair every COBR, be present for every crisis meeting then very quickly you’ve essentially paused the business of government, and turned the PM’s role into that of a national security figurehead in a very presidential system of government, rather than a cabinet of empowered Ministers able to do the job at hand.

This perhaps the biggest challenge here – as a nation we’ve come to think that somehow the PM in the COBR hot seat means that the problem is real and must be taken seriously, and that if they aren’t there, then it isn’t a problem because they clearly don’t care enough about it.

This perception is inaccurate because it implies that the system cannot cope or care about anything unless the PM is personally present – something that is neither practical nor usually necessary. Instead we would do well to think about the totality of a response to a crisis and understand that much of what goes on happens outside of formal COBR mechanisms.

A better way to look at this is to focus on the fact that COBR has been called in the first place. The Cabinet Office has an excellent slide (below) which shows how the role of Government is to respond as a crisis grows – it is only at the point of the highest risk and growing national concern that COBR is activated to provide central control and direction – prior to this point its role is more in advice and support.

Different emergencies happen all the time in the UK and most are resolved at relatively local levels, with little external input or cross Government support. The activation of COBR, even if the PM does not chair it, then is a sign that the Cabinet Office, and by extension No10, feel that the situation warrants closer examination and support.

To that end, its perhaps better to focus on the fact that COBR was called, that it was run bringing together the right people, empowered to take decisions based on the evidence at the time, and to consider that at the time the first COVID-19 meetings were happening, this was still very early in the crisis when it was not clear what would happen.

This will not be enough for some people, who feel that the only way that you can show an interest in something is to physically attend and chair a meeting. There will be those who feel that the lack of attendance reflects a lack of interest, even if there is no suggestion that this was the case.

There is perhaps a deeper question to be asked about what is it we expect as a nation from the office of Prime Minister? Is it someone to lead to the business of government, or is it someone who should drop everything the moment a crisis threatens and dive in to chair COBR and be seen to take charge? Do we want a figurehead essentially borne for crisis management, or do we want government to be about letting individuals get on with their jobs and reserve the intervention of the PM for the right time and place?

Ultimately you will never be able to please everyone – had the PM gone to all 5 early COBR meetings on COVID-19, there would probably be sniping from other quarters that he was taking an overactive involvement in this area and neglecting the rest of his job to focus on a crisis that his ministers were perfectly capable of handling, and that No10 was showing signs of ‘control freakery’ to the detriment of delivering the wider government agenda.

Whatever view you take, the key things to perhaps draw from this are that COBR works very well for the specific tasks which it is designed to do. The machinery of government in the centre is far from clunky, and actually does a very good job of balancing off short term crisis response versus longer term policy shifts, and finally no matter what your views on this subject, it is clear that far too many people still don’t understand that COBR is never, ever, referred to as Cobra!