Cabinet secretary contenders: who’s in line for top job in UK civil service?

Simon Case is expected to step down as cabinet secretary early next year on medical advice, after taking time off for health reasons last year.

The former royal aide, appointed by Boris Johnson to the top job in the civil service during the pandemic, has overseen Whitehall departments through the Partygate scandal as well as the premierships of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

Keir Starmer and his new chief of staff, Sue Gray, will now seek a fresh start for the civil service, which has endured years of attacks from ministers and threats by successive prime ministers to cut jobs.

Several Whitehall sources said they believed it would be a more open competition than has been run in the past – with a wide field to ensure the best candidate. There has never been a cabinet secretary who was not a white man.

Here are the runners and riders for the role:

Sir Oliver Robbins

“Olly” Robbins, who was recently made a partner at Hakluyt, a consultancy founded by ex-MI6 intelligence officers, has repeatedly been linked with the job. He oversaw Brexit negotiations under Theresa May before leaving the civil service in December 2019.

He has been spotted going to meet Starmer and his team, but has not confirmed that he would be interested in making a return to government.

However, one Whitehall insider said they thought Robbins might have too much “Brexit-related baggage” to be the right fit for the cabinet secretary job, and suggested he could be lined up for a more international or security role instead. “He’s straight out of civil service central casting, and do they want that?” the insider added.

Antonia Romeo

The permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice is a rare high-profile senior civil servant. She may have irritated colleagues by having a higher profile than many permanent secretaries. But Romeo’s reputation was burnished when it emerged she had spoken out on behalf of more junior colleagues during the row over Dominic Raab’s bullying of private office staff. She was reported to have spoken to the then justice secretary when he returned to the department to warn him that he must treat staff professionally and with respect, amid unhappiness about his return.

Sharon White

The outgoing chair of the John Lewis Partnership is a highly respected former civil servant – and half of a power couple with her husband, Sir Robert Chote, the chief of the UK Statistics Authority and a former head of the Office for Budget Responsibility.

White, named the UK’s most influential black business person in 2023, said in June that she was retiring from the job after getting the retailer “back on track” and “more fit for the future”. But some in the industry told the Guardian last year that she was “too clever for retail” and more used to the “genteel decorum” of the civil service. White had previously been a Treasury official and chief executive of Ofcom.

Jeremy Pocklington

A career civil servant, Pocklington has been the permanent secretary of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero since its creation, after doing the top job at the Ministry of Housing. He is known to have got on with Gray, who will be working closely with whoever gets the role as cabinet secretary, and recently spoke to the Global Governance Forum on how the “AI and digital revolution is going to transform the civil service”.

Melanie Dawes

Dawes, the chief executive of Ofcom, has previously worked in a huge number of government departments, from HMRC to the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, and has been the permanent secretary of the then Department of Communities, including during the time of the Grenfell Tower fire. She gave an interview to Civil Service World last year which touched on the difficulties of juggling parenthood with a big job, and how Grenfell had helped give her a “very deep belief in the importance of good, effective, proportionate regulation”.