As the pale, bespectacled Henry de Zoete folds his tall frame into a café chair — he has no office — I am struggling to understand why he left his job as right-hand man to Education Secretary Michael Gove. De Zoete, 32, quit in January after four years to co-found The Big Deal, a consumer-focused start-up.
“It was a huge, huge wrench to leave,” he admits. “Michael is brilliant, he’s courageous, but he’s also one of the nicest people to work for.”
I am also wondering what to make of the charges of bullying and spinning that swirled around de Zoete and Dominic Cummings (his fellow special adviser to Gove) last year, with allegations of expletive-laden rants and
Twitter skullduggery that seemed straight out of The Thick of It. For de Zoete is a polite, serious man, a low-key old Etonian (he says Gove “didn’t seem to” have any problem with his OE background). He’s a Tory zealot —but he hardly seems a bully.
“There were, of course, robust conversations as we were trying to get things done as quickly as possible,” sighs de Zoete. “But it’s utter nonsense to say there was any bullying.”
Things started on a more positive note. In spring 2010, De Zoete worked for Liberal Democrat ministers too —“when it was Coalitious,” he recalls. “At one point there was even a very brief conversation about my going to the Liberal Democrat party conference. Luckily that did not happen. But that was when everybody was working very well together and it was all fine.”
So what went wrong? De Zoete backtracks a little, but it is not hard to see how Lib-Dem education ministers might have been swiftly discomfited by Gove’s white-knuckle ride.
“We persuaded David Cameron that the first bill we should put through, just like Blair did in 1997, was on education,” says de Zoete. Gove introduced the Academies Bill on May 26, just 15 days after taking office, setting out a vision for all schools to be able to elect to become academies, free of local authority control. It became law by the end of July.
It was not an approach to endear Gove or his lieutenants to the Department for Education bureaucrats. In early 2013, Gove was forced to defend de Zoete and Cummings to MPs after allegations that the pair had briefed against a former minister — they denied it — and that Cummings had bullied a civil servant. In February 2013, civil servants told The Independent of an “us-and-them, aggressive, intimidating culture”. An investigation found no case against Cummings, although the department paid out £25,000 to the civil servant concerned.
I’m inclined to believe de Zoete’s account of the challenges of ramming change through Whitehall. “When you’re trying to make things happen and getting the machine to work, it is an all-consuming project,” he says. “It was mainly project-managing to make things actually happen in the department.”
De Zoete’s free-school philosophy is what drew him to his new venture. “It was the broader argument about seeing markets that were broken and seeing if we could actually change things.” The Big Deal is dedicated to empowering people to get better deals out of large corporations — initially, the energy companies. It will sign up thousands of consumers — 10,000 have already done so — and then demand the best deal in a reverse auction.
Such “collective switching” is a response to anger over energy company prices and profits. Which? magazine did it successfully in 2012, signing up 165,000 people to switch en masse. Following a reverse auction in which six energy companies participated, 38,000 eventually switched, saving an average of £223 per household. Some local councils have followed.
De Zoete is optimistic that The Big Deal will leave participants at least £200 better off. After a 12-week campaign, he hopes to finalise negotiations with the companies within weeks.
Funding came from the Government’s Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, which gives tax breaks to investors in start-ups. De Zoete is adamant that neither he nor any of the investors have any connection to the energy companies. The Big Deal’s income will come from commission the companies pay for each switcher.
De Zoete and co-founder Will Hodson, a university friend and start-up entrepreneur, plan to move on to other areas after energy — perhaps insurance or petrol — “Where big business is not doing the right thing for consumers. We will go on trying to harness collective bargaining power to make those markets work better.”
But wasn’t competition precisely what Conservative privatisations were supposed to give us?
“There are markets that don’t work brilliantly well for the individual consumer,” admits De Zoete. But he adds: “It is difficult for politicians to interfere in the market to make things better.”
De Zoete has a background in what he calls “people power” projects. At Right-wing think-tank Reform he ran Doctors for Reform, a pro-market pressure group attacked by some in the NHS as a front for the private medical industry. And at lobbyists Portland he was involved in work for Tesco organising locals in Sheringham,
Norfolk, to protest in favour of the retail giant’s long-running application to build a store there.
But it was in free schools that de Zoete found his real niche in shaking things up. So why leave them behind?
“It’s a very, very full-on job. I got completely knackered, basically,” he says.
“I didn’t want to fight another election.” He even tried a week in a Stamford Hill primary school last spring to see if teaching was for him. “I realised that I couldn’t do it.”
Whatever the Tories’ post-election future, it is evidently a prospect that plenty of special advisers find less than appealing. The past two years have seen a steady haemorrhaging of “spads”, especially from 10 Downing Street — notably Rohan Silva, James O’Shaughnessy and Steve Hilton. Cummings left Gove weeks after de Zoete.
“A lot of people have come to the same conclusion about when you can leave and when you’re tied in,” says de Zoete. “This is the thing with a fixed-term Parliament.” But perhaps the Tory special advisers’ departures speak of a wider frustration with politics, as reported of Steve Hilton.
“There’s a broader anti-politics thing going on and that’s what we’re trying to tap into,” says de Zoete. “I think The Big Deal could harness that anger and get people involved in politics in a totally different way. Perhaps the ballot box has failed to serve them in that way.”
More information: thisisthebigdeal.com or 0333 222 5871.
Twitter: @hernehillandy