The Prime Minister has confirmed the creation of a dedicated Cabinet-level position responsible for attributing all current difficulties to the previous administration, with the role expected to carry a salary of £134,000 and a substantial index-linked pension.
The Secretary of State for Historical Accountability and Legacy Management, as the position will formally be known, will oversee a department of approximately 180 civil servants tasked with maintaining a comprehensive database of problems that can credibly be traced back to the period between 2010 and 2024. The successful candidate will be expected to make between seven and twelve references to “fourteen years of Conservative failure” during each Prime Minister’s Questions, with quarterly performance reviews to ensure targets are being met.
Rachel Edmunds, a former special adviser who helped draft the role’s specification, said the position had become necessary due to the “increasingly complex landscape of blame attribution”. She added that while ministers had previously managed these responsibilities on an ad hoc basis, the sheer volume of issues requiring historical contextualisation now justified a dedicated department with its own budget line.
“We found that cabinet members were spending up to 40 per cent of their media appearance time on retrospective fault allocation,” Edmunds explained. “That’s time they could be spending on other essential activities, such as avoiding questions about their own policies.”
The job description, which was published on Thursday afternoon, specifies that applicants must demonstrate “an ability to maintain a tone of weary disappointment when discussing inherited challenges” and “a working knowledge of at least thirty discrete policy areas in which the previous government can be held accountable”. Desirable qualities include “stamina for extended media rounds” and “comfort with repeating similar phrases across multiple broadcasting formats”.
The role will include responsibility for coordinating messaging across government departments, ensuring that ministers do not accidentally accept ownership of problems before the optimal blame window has elapsed. Internal guidance suggests this window typically closes around the eighteen-month mark of a new administration, though extensions may be granted for particularly severe inherited issues.
James Whitfield, who served as a junior minister in the previous government, said he understood the reasoning behind the appointment. “I spent three years as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Blaming Labour’s Economic Record,” he noted. “It’s demanding work. You need someone senior enough to really commit to it.”
The department will be housed in a newly refurbished office building in Westminster, the renovation of which ran 23 per cent over budget due to what officials have described as structural problems dating back to construction work carried out between 2010 and 2015. Applications for the position close on the 14th of next month, with interviews scheduled to take place over a period of fourteen days.