The government has confirmed the creation of a dedicated Cabinet-level position to manage the increasingly complex process of explaining why policies announced last week are no longer applicable this week.
The Chief Excuse Officer, a role commanding a salary of £142,000 plus accommodation at a grace-and-favour property in Pimlico, will oversee a team of seventeen civil servants tasked exclusively with crafting explanations for ministerial reversals. The department will operate from newly refurbished offices in Whitehall, though officials stressed these were already under lease from the previous administration and absolutely did not represent new spending.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer defended the appointment during an appearance at a Bristol community centre, one he definitely always planned to visit and which was not hastily added to his schedule following criticism about being out of touch.
“We have been entirely consistent in our approach to consistency,” Starmer told reporters. “What people need to understand is that when we say something on Monday, we mean it completely, right up until the moment on Thursday when circumstances that were readily apparent on Monday require us to adopt a different position.”
The new department will absorb responsibilities currently scattered across multiple ministers, including maintaining the semantic distinction between a ‘working person’ and a person who works, explaining why fiscal rules are both ironclad and flexible, and coordinating the precise wording around which planning reforms are still operational.
Jennifer Holloway, formerly a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Government, has been appointed to the role. Her seventeen-page CV includes extensive experience in strategic communications pivoting, stakeholder expectation realignment, and what one colleague described as “an almost supernatural ability to use the word ‘however’ in the middle of a sentence.”
“Every modern government needs infrastructure that matches its ambitions,” Holloway said at a press conference held in the Churchill Room, though officials later clarified this was actually the Attlee Room and the nameplate had simply not been updated following restructuring. “We are building a centre of excellence in responsive policy communication, which I should stress is entirely different from making things up as we go along.”
The department will publish quarterly reports on policy stability, though these will be subject to revision. An internal memo, leaked to the press, suggests the team has already prepared 187 template explanations covering scenarios ranging from ‘clarifying previous clarifications’ to ‘responding to unforeseen circumstances that were actually foreseen but publicly stating otherwise would have been politically inconvenient.’
Treasury officials confirmed the new department would be funded through efficiency savings, specifically from the budget previously allocated to the now-defunct Office for Policy Consistency, which was quietly dissolved in September after it became clear there was insufficient work to justify its continued existence.
Opposition MPs have described the appointment as cynical. Graham Winters, Conservative MP for Hexham North, called it “an admission that this government has elevated incompetence to an art form requiring dedicated management structures.”
Downing Street has not responded to these criticisms, though sources suggest a response is being prepared and will be issued once the precise wording has been agreed, subject to revision.