Bad advice: how the jerry can salesman is crippling Cameron's Downing Street

George Osborne may be taking much of the blame for the crisis-a-day budget that has spawned anger from Greggs pasty counters to charity balls. But he shouldn't shoulder the blame all by himself. There is another figure who deserves to share the credit blame with the Chancellor: Francis Maude. When last we heard from the Cabinet Office Minister, he was advising us to stock up on petrol-soaked jerry cans in our garages, in an act designed to show just what he thought of all that silly 'elf and safety advice. Since his wisdom was not received in the spirit of helpfulness with which it surely was intended, the Horsham MP has disappeared.

Cameron will hardly have thanked Maude for his jerry can sales drive, as it added to the narrative of woes that also included his own misremembered pasty-eating escapades on Platform 3 at Leeds Station. But his ingratitude should be extended more widely when it comes to Maude. For he is responsible for most of the Government's woes. Oh, I know, Andrew Lansley must take the fair share of the blame for his crazed health reforms, but since he is so totally lacking in self-awareness, he can't really help it. And Osborne really should have foregone the White House in the week before the Budget, but he knew that his quadmate Danny Alexander was there to do the Budget read-through in his absence, so perhaps he can be forgiven too.

Yet, if Cameron had some politically astute, policy-focused special advisers in Downing Street, at least they could have confined the wayward health secretary to banning labels on fag packets and getting Coca Cola to feign an interest in making fat people thin instead of screwing up the NHS. Had he got somebody wise shadowing the Treasury they might have spotted the dangers of the granny tax, the pasty tax, the charity tax and all those other delights that keep on giving from Osborne's car crash of a budget.

But the reason that he relies instead on a policy unit dominated by civil servants with little political nous is Francis Maude. For it was his bright idea to mock Labour's lavish spending on, er, 84 special advisers across government that as Neil O.Brien of Policy Exchange so shrewdly noted in yesterday's FT cost less in a year than DWP pays in benefits to dead people every week.

People worry about the expense. But peak expenditure on special advisers under Labour was £5.6m a year – less than the government pays in benefits to dead people each week. Advisers enable ministers to grip their department and cut costs. Elsewhere, their numbers are much higher: Australia has twice as many, with only a quarter of the number of civil servants. Germany’s Angela Merkel has a whole chancellor’s department to enforce her will.

Maude decreed that the coalition - especially No 10 - would be purer than pure when it came to special advisers, obviously assuming that they were all straight out of The Thick of It rather than a vital lever of power. Funny enough, the civil service were generally happy enough to encourage him in his delusions. And the result is what it is: a dysfunctional government that is still making headlines with a cost-neutral budget and a government that lacks much sense of direction or purpose despite some progress in education and welfare.

Of course, wiser ministers have simply cocked a snook at the Jerry Can salesman by recruiting like-minded folk as policy advisers or in communications roles to top up their SpAd quota. But, really, why the pretence? It is as utterly silly an issue as the debate over party political funding. Politicians think the voters really care that much, when in fact it is the attempt to raise money from other than taxpayers that causes all the problems or the chaos that comes from not biting the bullet on special advisers that creates chaos.

Here is an issue where there needs to be some common purpose between the parties. Politics and good government need to be paid for. Let them stop treating voters like idiots, and tell it to them straight.

Fox fiasco, NHS bill chaos. Move Maude.

David Cameron's two big crises of the moment, the Liam Fox/Walter Mitty saga and the slow death of Andrew Lansley's pointless NHS legislation owe a lot to another member of his cabinet and a silly self-destructive piece of gesturist posturing. Francis Maude's obesessive opposition to political advisers in government has led Fox to use unorthodox methods to maintain the advice of his Alanticist soulmate Adam Werritty, while Lansley's ludicrous bill would never have seen the light of day had Cameron enjoyed half-decent political back-up in No 10 while it was being dreamt up.

I hold no brief for the increasingly bizarre Werritty or his politics, and some of the meetings that he set up would not have been appropriate for any political adviser. But a Secretary of State is entitled to have political advice that reflects his political position as a counterweight to the bureaucratic certainties that he will receive from his civil servants. The civil service is fine at offering what it sees as the tenable options on any issue, but it can benefit from radical challenge from political advisers as well as ministers. And the idea that ministers should not have sufficient political back-up to fulfil a democratic mandate is pretty undemocratic. I have no idea whether there is more to Werritty than a go-for for Fox: but if that is all that he is, he should have been able to work for Fox in an official capacity, albeit with fewer luxury hotel visits and first class flights. Had he done so, his role would have been properly defined.

Which brings me to Lansley's bill that is finally getting the scrutiny it deserves thanks to a re-energised David Owen and a canny offer from Andy Burnham, who has made a flying start back at Health by offering to back GP commissioning if the bill is dropped. As Camilla Cavendish points out in an excellent piece (£) in the Times this morning, the bill makes no difference to patients, it will be blamed for the next NHS crisis [which I believe will follow Lansley's equally ludicrous abandonment of targets] and it doesn't actually require primary legislation. Indeed it may even set back the private and voluntary provision already introduced as a result of Alan Milburn's reforms. But all of this was entirely predictable, and would have been seen by a half-competent, politically aware NHS adviser in No 10. Cameron lacked such a figure because the No 10 policy unit was virtually non-existent thanks to the strictures of Maude. Even today, it is filled with civil servants rather than politically astute figures, for the same reason.

Of course, Francis Maude thought he was being terribly clever when he announced a reduction in the number of Whitehall political advisers. And, funnily enough, the civil servants in the Cabinet Office cheered him on, as did the newspapers. It allowed a nice dig at Labour too. All of which would have been exchanged for a day's bad headlines had the coalition increased their number. Some ministers have created policy adviser posts for political appointees (who are subject to the strictures of civil servants on political activity) to get round the rules. But they shouldn't have to. The Prime Minister should have a strong cadre of able well-informed political advisers, and individual cabinet ministers should be able to assemble small teams of people they can trust politically to act in the interests of their democratic mandate.

So, if and when Liam Fox goes, and once Cameron finally gets rid of the disaster that is Andrew Lansley [and it gives me no pleasure to note that this blog told you so long before the election], he should also move Maude. And do a U-turn on political advice.

Getting pensions in perspective

The education secretary Michael Gove has played his designated role when faced with teacher strikes: he has urged teachers to turn up for work to show their professional commitment on Thursday, as two of the three big unions, the NUT and ATL, strike over pensions, and suggested that schools should defiantly remain open staffed by militant mums. Meanwhile the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has joined the chorus of criticism over the strikes, recognising that any sign of union support could terminally hurt his already weak leadership ratings.

Of course, the strike is a fairly blunt instrument, and has been more used in conference motions than actual pickets by the teaching unions over the years. The NUT rarely manages fewer than half a dozen such threats at its annual Easter shindig. But this time the anger among teachers, as with other public sector workers, seems a lot stronger than usual. The relatively moderate ATL is striking, and even the moderate leadership of the National Association of Head Teachers is tempted to join in, though the second biggest union the NASUWT has so far resisted doing so.

The issue is pensions. The typical teacher will have to pay an extra 3.4% a year of their incomes into pensions by 2014, up from 6.4% to as much as 9.8%. At the same time, the retirement age is rising, the value of pensions will fall with a link to the Consumer Prices Index rather than the Retail Prices Index. And, most contentiously for headteachers and school leaders, the value of the pension will be based on average rather than final salary. All of this comes amidst a pay freeze that happens to coincide with significant inflation. As the NUT's attempt to justify its action shows, it makes a powerful combination in teachers' pockets. The change could knock £16,000 a year off the pension of a secondary head and cost an average teacher an extra £1000 a year in pension deductions.

Teachers feel that the salary gains made in the Labour years are already being eroded, and that without strike action, their pensions case will not be heard. This government is certainly more sensitive to the unions than the Thatcher government, and Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has been presenting himself as the Government's union point man.

It does seem premature to be having strike action, as some unions have recognised. However, talk of banning strikes in the weekend press seems at odds with Maude's efforts too, and can only increase the tensions on both sides. And the case on pensions may enjoy more public sympathy than ministers expect. Lord Hutton, the former Labour minister whose excellent report on pensions heralded many of these changes, has warned of the dangers of moving too quickly.

The problem is that the Government's hurried approach to reform seems particularly inappropriate with pensions. Not all public sector schemes are the same: the teachers' scheme is fully funded whereas the local government scheme could collapse if members withdrew over high contributions. Polling has suggested that teachers don't mind paying a bit more so long as they retain their pension scheme: the problem is less the extra contributions than all the other changes combined. And for heads, the loss of a final salary scheme is a particularly bitter blow. Ministers may not want to signal any retreat before Thursday, but they should be open to looking again at the combined impact of their proposals, and alternative mixes to reach their required savings.

It beggars belief that Cameron didn't know

News that David Cameron's own constituency party has had to return £7400 in illegal donations surely calls for an apology to the House of Commons. Francis Maude told the Commons on 4 December: "our donations have been properly made and properly declared, and all have been made by permissible donors." I trust that Maude will now apologise for misleading the House. After all, in the immortal words of Mr Cameron, it 'beggars belief' that he didn't know what his own constituency party was up to. And surely he would have shared such knowledge with his colleague before allowing him to mislead the House?