He has this gift for juggling 16 things at once, for keeping it all in his head”. The Italian greasy spoon (now gone) sold overpriced, watery cappuccino, but was only yards from both Downing Street and the Treasury, and its interior, only dimly visible from the street, was small enough to deter eavesdroppers.“Jeremy has this gift for managing to find a way through acrimonious, seemingly impossible situations, picking out what matters most to people, and managing to persuade everyone that they’ve won,” says Portes. Has he reached the zenith of his influence at precisely the wrong moment?Heywood applied to Oxford University to study history and economics. He was a chainsmoker. She earns a lot more than his £195,000 salary, which is high but not exceptional for a top civil servant – the ultra-competitive Heywood has been known to complain about the disparity – and she is younger. “He understands how to make this massive machine move,” says Rohan Silva, who was, between 2010 and 2013, a key member of the Downing Street Policy Unit. Sir Jeremy Heywood is working late again. He sees the cabinet secretary’s job as essentially private – to be an intimate of the powerful and advise them frankly – and therefore not a very useful object of public scrutiny. To the extent that he gets angry, it’s always been because individuals have been behaving badly ... or incompetence ... or something conspicuously wasteful.” The latter is a longstanding Heywood preoccupation. Officer Henwood is the second San Diego policemen to have been fatally wounded in only 10 months While the Treasury had been telling other departments to tighten their belts for decades, its own operations, in Heywood’s view, were too unfocused and hierarchical. “Jeremy has a chip of ice in him,” says a friend.Yet, occasionally, off-duty, he lets off steam. And some of their criticisms of him seem incompatible.
“He is the person who is always in the room with the prime minister, the person who is always there on the conference call,” says a former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit (even Heywood’s former colleagues usually prefer to talk about him off the record). He went with the anarchists on an overland trip to Pakistan.”But Heywood is a good compartmentaliser. Because it controls the money, writes Hennessy, “The Treasury has a window into every ministry.” In 1984, when Heywood joined, the Treasury was particularly potent, with a self-confident new chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and the British economy finally beginning to boom again after the recessions of the 1970s and early 80s.Heywood was one of many sharp youngsters in the department. In 2012 it was announced that Hilton was leaving the government for a university post in America. “Modern politicians of all parties are desperate for [tangible] things to change on the ground.” It is a climate that suits Heywood. He was educated at Bootham School in York before taking a BA in history and economics at Hertford College, Oxford and an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics.A Amazon calcula as classificações de estrelas de um produto usando um modelo de aprendizado de máquina em vez de uma média de dados brutos. But Cameron’s director of strategy, Steve Hilton, was an outspoken critic of Whitehall: he wanted the government to shrink the number of civil servants by three-quarters. But the committees summon him increasingly often, anyway, and question him more and more impatiently, sometimes with open exasperation. He soon became known for expertly combining technical tasks with more politically delicate work. “He reads everything. A secret Blairite, as some rightwingers insist, while also the eager servant of Tory governments? As Seldon put it in his 2007 book Blair Unbound: “Balls had no respect for Blair as an economist or a thinker, and assumed that he merely took his script from Heywood.” A politician who has worked closely with Heywood says: “To be very good at being a private secretary or cabinet secretary, you have to be very close to the boundary between civil service work and politics, but not step over it.