There’s a saying that has always struck me as both profoundly wise and profoundly unfair: ‘The people get the government they deserve.’
It implies that we are the architects of our own political fate. That if we choose poorly, we suffer accordingly. I’ve repeated it myself. But the older I get, the more I think it lets the wrong people off the hook.
We are, broadly speaking, a representative bunch. Walk into any council chamber or parliament and you’ll find plumbers, accountants, teachers, farmers, PR professionals and small business owners.
In that sense, our democratic institutions genuinely reflect the communities they serve. The assumptions we make about politicians being some rarefied breed, cut from different cloth to the rest of us, are largely wrong.
Research consistently shows that politicians worldwide are disproportionately drawn from a narrow personality profile.
Studies across multiple countries find they score significantly higher in extraversion than the general public, and narcissism registers as the single highest average trait score measured across political populations.
Add to this what researchers call the Dark Triad, covering excessive self-focus, emotional detachment and a tendency towards manipulation, and a pattern emerges that is worth sitting with.
This is not a character assassination. Most politicians do not enter public life because they are venal or ruthlessly selfish, but because they genuinely believe they can make a difference and feel a sincere pull toward public service. That motivation is real, and it matters.
But the personality type that politics selects for – confident, outspoken, persuasive, dominant – is essentially the personality type of a leader. And here lies the problem. We only need a handful of leaders. What we mostly need are team players.
The skills that get you elected are not the same skills that make you effective once in office.
The ability to command a room, project certainty and present a compelling narrative are electoral assets. But they are not, in themselves, governance skills.
Leaders by their very nature tend not to make great collaborators. They are wired for assertion, not deference. For conviction, not inquiry.
This creates a peculiar dynamic. Once in office, politicians are expected, and often expect themselves, to undergo a remarkable transformation.
The candidate who campaigned on instinct and passion is now supposed to become a competent overseer of complex public services, intricate financial systems and specialist technical decisions they have never encountered before.
We ask them to develop overnight expertise in fields that take professionals decades to master.
I have a vivid illustration of this from the past. In the days of the Civil Defence Committee, a perfectly decent tomato grower and deputy could join such a body and within weeks be pronouncing confidently on the finer points of nuclear fuel reprocessing, the safety thresholds, the radiological risks, the engineering tolerances, as though they had spent a career in the industry.
It was faintly absurd.
But it was also entirely human. Give someone a title, a seat at the table and a briefing document, and the personality type that sought that seat will almost always fill the confidence gap with something that sounds like knowledge.
We see this today.
Think back – and I encourage you to go back and look at the actual quotes – to the political commentary that accompanied major decisions like the outsourcing of public IT provision.
You will find confident predictions of transformation, efficiency and progress, delivered with the authority of genuine expertise.
The reality, as many of us now know, was rather different. Those politicians were not lying, nor were they stupid. They were doing exactly what their personality type equipped them to do: taking a briefing, internalising a preferred narrative and presenting it publicly with conviction.
They were passengers. The vehicle was being driven by the senior management team and this is the part we rarely say out loud.
The quality of our local government, any government, is ultimately a function of the quality of its officers, not its elected members. Politicians set direction, provide democratic accountability and reflect community values. All of that matters enormously. But the technical competence, institutional memory, professional judgement and strategic capacity that turns political intention into real-world outcomes sits with the senior management team.
Without an exceptional SMT, good politicians will fail. They will make decisions based on flawed advice, pursue strategies that look coherent on paper and fail in practice, and defend outcomes in public that they privately cannot explain.
The most dangerous scenario is not a politician who knows they are out of their depth. That politician asks questions. The most dangerous scenario is a confident politician receiving partial briefings from an SMT that either cannot or will not tell them the full picture.
The result is what we see periodically in public life: sweeping statements, unfounded optimism and the steady accumulation of problems that nobody wants to name until they become impossible to ignore, usually just before an election, when it is far too late.
We cannot, and should not, stop electing confident, outspoken people. Democracy would be poorer for it, and frankly the timid rarely put themselves forward. But we can be clearer, with ourselves, with our politicians and with our institutions, about what we are actually voting for.
We are voting for values, for representation, for accountability.
We are not voting for expertise. The expertise has to be there already, embedded in the professional structure beneath the democratic layer. That structure, the SMT, the senior officers, the institutional framework, is where we should be directing our scrutiny and our expectations.
Which brings us to where we are now, and to the harder conversation that can no longer be avoided.
The candid report on the MyGov programme is coming. £20m. and nothing to show for it that the public can use or trust.
When that report lands it will make painful reading, not just for those directly involved, but for anyone who cares about public confidence in government’s ability to deliver. And it will not arrive in isolation.
It sits alongside the failures of the tax system and the well-documented disaster of the IT outsourcing programme. Together these are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern, and patterns tell stories.
The media and public will draw the obvious conclusion: that the States cannot be trusted to deliver large, complex projects.
That conclusion will be uncomfortable. It will also be essentially correct. And the worst response, the one we must resist, is to appoint a review group, add governance layers, tighten sign-off procedures and declare the lesson learned.
That is trying harder with the same toolkit. It will fail again, perhaps more slowly and more expensively.
The only way to restore public confidence is to change the fundamental capability, not dress up the process around it.
I should be transparent about where this view comes from. Before entering politics, I spent a number of years as managing director of the largest IT and project delivery company in Guernsey, and before that founded a technology business that I later sold.
I am not a politician speculating about a world I don’t understand. I am someone who has sat on both sides of this relationship, who has been in the contractor’s chair, and who knows exactly what it looks like when a client organisation lacks the capability to lead what it is paying for. I have watched good projects fail not because the delivery team was poor, but because nobody on the client side could ask the right questions or recognise the warning signs until the money was gone.
That experience is precisely why I find our current position so frustrating, and why I also find it fixable.
Our chief executive has now been in post for over a year.
The honeymoon is over, and in its place is something more valuable: clarity. He has begun advocating for a return to dedicated chief officers and a genuine transformation of the professional layer beneath elected government. That is the right instinct. But I want to make the case for going further, in one specific and critical direction.
Project delivery must become a recognised discipline in its own right, with the seniority, status, budget and career structure to match.
This may sound technical. It is not. It is fundamentally about whether government can be trusted to do what it promises to do. Every major policy commitment eventually becomes a project.
A new system, a new service, a transformation programme. At the moment we approach these with a mixture of optimism, external contractors and mid-level project staff who lack either the authority or the organisational backing to raise the hard questions when things start going wrong, as they always, at some point, will.
Contractors are not the answer. They are at best a supplement. Bringing in external expertise to deliver a project that your own organisation cannot oversee, interrogate or eventually own is a recipe for dependency and failure. The contractor leaves. The knowledge leaves with them. The organisation is no more capable than it was before, only considerably poorer.
What we need instead is something harder to build and far more valuable once built: an internal project delivery capability that is genuinely professional, genuinely senior and genuinely respected within the hierarchy of the civil service.
The point I have made directly to the chief executive and to Policy & Resources is this, and I believe it is the most important of all.
Even the finest project professionals in the world cannot save you if the senior officers overseeing them have no experience of bringing large, complex projects to completion.
This is not a slight on anyone currently in post. It is simply the reality of a discipline that is poorly understood at leadership level across most of the public sector. Project delivery is not something that can be done to a department. It has to be led by a department. And that requires senior officers who can ask the right questions, read the right signals, interpret contractor assurances with appropriate scepticism and know, from hard-won experience rather than instinct, when a project is drifting into trouble before the money runs out.
The capability gap, in other words, is not only at the delivery level. It runs through the senior management team.
No amount of project governance, reporting frameworks or external assurance will compensate for senior leaders who have never personally delivered anything of comparable scale and genuinely do not know what good looks like from the inside.
The public and the media who will scrutinise the MyGov report will rightly be impatient with ambition that is not anchored in specifics. ‘We will do better’ is not enough. ‘We will try harder’ is not enough. ‘We have added a new oversight board’ is not enough.
What the public needs to hear, and what I hope we will be in a position to demonstrate before long, is that we are professionalising. That we are building a project delivery function with genuine standing in this organisation.
That we are ensuring the senior management team contains people who have actually delivered major programmes, not merely overseen them from a distance. That when the next significant project is commissioned, the question will not be who do we hire to do this for us, but whether we are genuinely capable of leading it ourselves.
The MyGov report will be painful. Let it also be useful. Buried in £20m. of failure is the clearest possible argument for doing something that should have been done long ago – building the capability that means we never have to write a report like that again.
The public are not unreasonable. They understand that organisations fail and learn. What they do not forgive, and should not, is the same failure wearing a different name, arriving on a different budget, a decade later.
We have been warned. Loudly, and by our own history.
The saying goes that the people get the government they deserve. But when so much depends on people the public never votes for, never scrutinises and barely knows by name, perhaps what we truly deserve is a more honest conversation about where capability actually sits.
