In her evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry, the former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara said that the narrow backgrounds of both ministers and civil servants meant they were taking decisions for the whole country without a real sense of the wider public’s lives. She highlighted a lack of recognition of the inequalities that vulnerable and disadvantaged people face, alongside “superhero” egos and “nuclear levels” of confidence on the part of the decision-makers.
I recognised those points from my time in government, and I had a name for it: entitlement syndrome.
Entitlement syndrome is the opposite of impostor syndrome. When I became the secretary of state for transport in 2011, I sometimes felt as if I didn’t belong, and my confidence in the role took time to build. This is normal, but I soon realised there were others in politics and the civil service who had varying degrees of the opposite mindset.
Entitlement syndrome is when people who have had the luck to start at the top, with resources and connections to navigate and avoid the pitfalls of life, mistake that as meaning, somehow, they are cleverer, more talented than others. In fact, had they started at the bottom like so many do, or even in the middle, Britain’s weak social mobility means they’d quite probably be stuck there too.
It is that misplaced sense of “betterness”, often accentuated by an education set apart from everyone else’s, that drives the “superhero” ego and the “nuclear levels” of confidence noted by MacNamara. And it creates an unhelpfully narrow lens of what real life is actually like for other people. Overconfidence combined with weak insight leads to gung-ho and unrealistic decision-making. And when too many people with entitlement syndrome make decisions together, it creates a dysfunctional environment of groupthink that resists outside challenge.
Not everyone from advantaged backgrounds has entitlement syndrome. I’ve had the privilege to work with outstanding people who’ve come from all walks of life, and talent really is spread evenly across our society. But those with entitlement syndrome don’t get that. For them, if someone isn’t getting opportunities it’s down to lack of talent, not lack of access – which is something they have never experienced.
The problem is particularly rife in politics and government. As education secretary, I faced the challenge of getting crucial children’s services investment from HM Treasury civil servants, the least socioeconomically diverse department in Whitehall. Too often I felt officials had no individual or collective frame of reference to understand the lives of the children or families who rely on these vital services.
It’s politically widespread too. Some entitled ministers’ version of life means that once they’ve issued orders, it’s for others to do their bidding and it’s up to them to make the plan. Perhaps Matt Hancock genuinely assumed someone else had a Covid pandemic plan, as he repeatedly assured others.
But it wasn’t just him and it wasn’t just evident during Covid. As development secretary, prior to 2016, I recall joining a junior minister from a domestic department in an EU Council meeting, to find them making notes on a book of poetry instead of participating in the discussion going on around them. And during cabinet meetings, I occasionally had to listen to colleagues making barely relevant anecdotes from classical history or tangential cultural reference points, part of a bizarre, intellectual willy-waving contest the rest of us had to endure. It is a deliberately exclusive behaviour, detached from the wider world.
Entitlement syndrome feeds impostor syndrome in others because it penalises the latter for apparently displaying a lack of personal confidence when they rightly worry about getting the details right. Those with entitlement syndrome can challenge others, but are affronted when they face challenges themselves, as Dominic Cummings’ abusive, misogynistic messages about MacNamara showed. We can expect many more claims that other people didn’t make good enough plans, and that everyone else was the problem, in the coming weeks and months of the inquiry.
Britain’s weak social mobility is our social norm. It persists because it hides in plain sight, and it only intensifies in the centres of power, fed by entitlement syndrome. It is an institutional problem not just an individual one.
The solutions are complex and long-term, but measuring socioeconomic background in our politics and government would provide transparency, and highlight where the biggest risks posed by entitlement syndrome are. It would target our efforts and, crucially, drive progress.
Better decisions need voices from all backgrounds, not just a narrow few. Entitlement syndrome drives suboptimal decisions and blocks social mobility, holding the whole country back. Perhaps finally giving it a name, and calling it out, is the first step towards changing that for good.
Justine Greening is a former education secretary and Conservative MP for Putney
