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A former Brexit negotiator and three Whitehall department heads have been nominated as candidates for the next cabinet minister, with an announcement expected this week.
Sir Keir Starmer has already begun interviewing the final four candidates for the £200,000-a-year role, which advises the Prime Minister and Cabinet and oversees the civil service.
Former civil servant Sir Ollie Robbins, who was also the most senior official involved in the 2017-19 Brexit talks, is the only outside candidate, according to sources familiar with the process.
After 20 years at Whitehall and then at Goldman Sachs, he now leads the Europe, Middle East and Africa practice at Hakluyt, a global strategic advisory firm.
The internal candidate is Dame Antonia Romeo, Deputy Minister of Justice. Tamara Finkelstein, Permanent Secretary, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; and Sir Chris Wormald, permanent secretary to the Department of Health and Social Care.
Nikhil Rathi, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority and former private secretary to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, was nominated but did not make the shortlist. The FCA came under fire from MPs and Lords on Monday in a damning report calling for a complete overhaul of the regulator.
Starmer is seeking a replacement for Simon Case, who announced in September that he would step down at the end of the year to seek treatment for an undisclosed “neurological condition”.
Case was appointed by then-prime minister Boris Johnson in 2020 and led the civil service during the pandemic-era ‘Partygate’ scandal.
The process of appointing his successor so far has been handled by the first civil service member, Baroness Gisela Stewart, and a panel that interviewed a shortlist of 10 candidates.
Starmer is interviewing candidates individually, according to a source familiar with the process. It is said that this is partly to test the ‘chemistry’ between the prime minister and his cabinet secretaries, as they will be working closely together.
Robbins is said to have received the support of Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sue Gray. But his candidacy survived her departure from Downing Street.
There had been speculation that a woman would be elected to counter accusations of a ‘boys’ club’ at the heart of government, but officials said appointments would be made on merit.
Romeo was previously head of the Department of International Trade and former consul general in New York.
Wormald is the longest-serving permanent secretary, having overseen the Department of Health since 2016 and the Department of Education before that. He played some of Case’s roles while on medical leave, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Finkelstein has worked at the Treasury for 20 years and the role at Defra is her first permanent secretary position.
Previously, former Deputy Minister of Justice Chakrabarti was elected, but did not make the final candidate. Melanie Dawes, head of media regulator Ofcom, was widely seen as a candidate but did not apply.
