Sir Keir Starmer has appointed Sir Chris Wormald as his Cabinet Secretary – the head of the civil service and one of the most powerful jobs in government.
Announcing the appointment, the prime minister said he wanted a “complete re-wiring of the British state” and that there was “no-one better placed” to do that than Sir Chris.
As someone who has worked for the civil service since the early 1990s, Sir Chris has plenty of civil service experience.
Depending on your perspective that either makes him an ideal candidate who understands how to fix the system’s problems or an establishment figure, wedded to the status quo.
His appointment was greeted with delight by Lord Jim Bethell, a former health minister who worked with Sir Chris during the Covid pandemic.
“When the killer zombies invade, I’d like Chris Wormald at my back,” he posted on social media.
Ex-health secretary Sajid Javid described Sir Chris as “brilliant and dedicated” while another former health secretary, Matt Hancock, said he was a “natural reformer” who knew “where the bear-traps are”.
However, another former colleague has been less complimentary.
Dominic Cummings, a senior No 10 adviser during the pandemic, said: “Today should be a wake-up call to all investors in UK and young talent.
“The Westminster system is totally determined to resist any change and will continue all the things of the past 20 years that have driven us into crisis.”
In May 2016, Sir Chris became the most senior civil servant in the Department of Health and over the next eight years worked with no fewer than seven different secretaries of state from Conservative Jeremy Hunt through to Labour’s Wes Streeting.
In that role, he oversaw important policies and decisions made after Covid emerged. And also – crucially – in the years before the virus started spreading, when planning for a pandemic was meant to be taking place.
He has already given evidence on three separate occasions to the public inquiry into the government’s handling of the crisis.
Following one of his evidence sessions, one lawyer for the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice group accused him of providing “an object lesson in obfuscation, a word salad, so many, many words, so very little substance”.
In November 2023, the Covid inquiry published text messages he exchanged with his then-boss, Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill.
These were sent on 12 March 2020, less than two weeks before the country entered its first national lockdown.
In the messages, Lord Sedwill wrote: “Presumably like chickenpox we want people to get it and develop herd immunity before the next wave. We just want them not to get it all at once and preferably when it’s warm and dry.”
Sir Chris replied: “Exactly right. We make the point every meeting, they don’t quite get it.”
Around that time, the government was forced to deny it had a plan to develop so-called herd immunity by accepting that younger, fitter people would catch the virus.
Asked about this at the time, Sir Chris accepted he had been “very, very loose” in his language but was, in reality, following scientific advice.
Writing on X following Sir Chris’s appointment on Monday, Cummings was fiercely critical of his role at the time.
“Many officials came to me in panic when they realised the cabinet secretary and permanent secretary of the health department in charge of pandemic planning truly believed that the faster everyone got Covid, the better,” he wrote.
“He is now in charge of the entire system. Plan accordingly!”
Cummings also accused Sir Chris of being “embedded deeply” in the infected blood scandal and repeatedly telling ministers “untruths about the documents”.
In 2018 Sir Chris did write letters of apology after it emerged two former health ministers were incorrectly told all documents linked to infected blood had been placed in the National Archives, when campaigners later established that was not the case.
Three years later, in 2021, Sir Chris then recused himself from any decisions related to the scandal.
It later emerged that his father Peter, who was himself a Department of Health official from 1978 to 1981, was involved in meetings and decisions related to Britain’s Blood Products Laboratory and had provided written evidence to the infected blood inquiry.
Sir Chris was born in London in 1968 and went to Rutlish School in Merton, the same school former Prime Minister Sir John Major had gone to over 20 years earlier.
He studied at St John’s College, Oxford and on graduating almost immediately joined the civil service, starting out as a fast stream trainee in the Department for Education.
Over the next 20 years he rose through the ranks, serving across Whitehall including at the Department for Communities and Local Government and in the office of the then-Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Now at the pinnacle of his career, it had been widely-known that Sir Chris was on the final shortlist to be the prime minister’s new cabinet secretary, alongside Antonia Romeo, who leads the Ministry of Justice, and Tamara Finkelstein, the top civil servant at the environment department.
Nevertheless his appointment came as a bit of a surprise in Westminster, where there was a feeling that Sir Chris’s time had been and gone.
While some civil servants privately share Cummings’ assessment of their new boss, those in the health department may welcome the fact that the top job has been given to someone who understands the NHS.
Getting down NHS waiting lists is one of the prime minister’s priorities and he may have had this in mind when picking Sir Chris.
Another factor in the selection could be Sir Chris’s relatively low media profile.
Bruised by the brief tenure of his well-known chief of staff Sue Gray, the prime minister will hope that Sir Chris largely continues to go under the radar of the wider public’s consciousness.
