British Prime Minister David Cameron’s disciplinary action against his publicly warring senior Cabinet colleagues, the exasperating Education Secretary Michael Gove and Theresa May, the home secretary and leadership aspirant, that led ultimately to the sensational resignation of the latter’s controversial special adviser, Fiona Cunningham, holds lessons and insights aplenty for Jamaica.

These are especially relevant for those of us who genuinely seek to appreciate the evolution and role of special advisers in our own version of Westminster government beyond the boorish preoccupation every five years with what one newspaper headline cynically referred to in 2012 as ‘Big bucks for gov’t advisers’.

Unable to settle their differences privately about Islamic extremism and the safety and learning of children in British schools, Gove stretched the Westminster model by taking to the media to lambast May, whose special adviser, in turn, took it upon herself and did the unthinkable under the Westminster system of democracy of leaking Cabinet correspondence attacking Gove, and posting a critical letter from her minister to him on the Home Office website.

As expected, the decision taken by Cameron to demand merely an “apology” from Gove while sacking one of May’s closest advisers, has not gone down well in some quarters of the British conservative political establishment.

Cameron’s action must be seen in the context of a return of economic growth, rising living standards, and the perception that the Opposition Labour Party is feeble 11 months before the next general elections are due.

On reflection, both May and Cunningham may yet live to fight another day, because controversial special advisers and their ability to ruffle the civil service establishment, the Westminster village and Parliamentary party are not new to Britain.

In 1964, the late Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had adopted the device of special advisers with unprecedented enthusiasm, created some amount of unease with who were then known as the ‘Hungarian twins’ — Nicholas Kaldor at the Treasury and Tommy Balogh in the Cabinet Office.

But in the face of objection from his aggrieved civil servants, Wilson prevailed in convincing them that the two gentlemen had the specialist expertise and experience which could not be found in the civil service of Great Britain at the time.

Mr Wilson was so convincing in his argument that within the decade following 1964, the phenomenon of special advisers became the norm in Britain, from where it spread to places like Jamaica where the ruling democratic socialist Government of the People’s National Party (PNP) in the 1970s put its hands on a wide array of advisers, or “whizz kids”.

Among them was Michael Witter of the University of the West Indies’ Department of Economics who was asked to help in the articulation of policies which were designed to herald a new social order intended to place the vast majority of the Jamaican people at the centre of the decision-making process.

The reason the PNP gave for this was that there was not enough of the expertise needed for the new thrust to be found in the traditional civil service. As such, Michael Manley enthusiastically engaged the services of a wide range of skills as special advisers, despite the Opposition’s attempt to discredit them.

The new device for assisting with the articulation of policies also found favour with ministers like Mr Edward Seaga of the JLP in the 1980s, who, himself, had very little patience with the chronic lethargy of the traditional civil service and less tolerance for the rules of seniority mentality that, to this day, continue to plague the civil service in defiance of proven talent and projected efficiency.

Despite this, however, the Opposition JLP of the 1970s did not have to goad our civil servants into opposing the phenomenon of special advisers.

The public attacks by some of Manley’s young and self-assured advisers on the three senior civil servants of the period who came to be known as the three ‘Bs’ — G Arthur Brown (governor of the BOJ), Gladstone Bonnick (director, Central Planning Unit) and Horace Barber (financial secretary) — for allegedly misleading the Government in the area of policy led to a backlash by their civil servant colleagues who accused them of subverting the ancient and hallowed canons of professional probity, neutrality and political anonymity of the Westminster civil service.

The lesson here, as in the case of Fiona Cunningham, Dominic Cummings, Alex Smith, Henry de Zoete, and other sacked British special advisers of recent vintage, is that in the final analysis the secret nature of Westminster government demands tact, propriety and appropriate silence from those who have neither the courage nor capacity to face the hustings.

In other words, the engine of the Government machine under the Westminster model is still the electoral performance of the members of the Cabinet and their official aides — the civil servants.

In this context, Theresa May’s special adviser clearly overstepped her bounds by going rogue and improperly disclosing official correspondence between ministers treating with delicate matters. She clearly took her trusted special adviser status to the extreme.

Unashamedly, she saw herself as a political animal engaged to further the political interests of her minister who, after all, cannot afford to get too busy with ministerial chores to the detriment of the constituency which elected her.

Uninformed Jamaicans are prone to viewing native special advisers in this way. But while this type of non-career operative within the political system survives in such outposts as Jamaica and continues to thrive in Britain, their detractors should not be too quick to dismiss them as nothing more than “friends at court”, “spies”, or “personal assistants”, since many could even be formal civil servants with skills beyond the fetch and carry requirements.

What oftentimes causes great confusion in the minds of many about the role of the special adviser is that even when none are appointed there are enough self-appointed ones who would want to foist themselves on Jamaica House to instruct the elected head which minister to appoint where, and who to fire or reshuffle.

Yet, generally speaking, special advisers who come with the full weight of specialist knowledge and skills in a given field are well-known and established in Jamaica since the 1970s. Admittedly, many of them have been drawn from the Mona campus of the UWI and the private sector. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, especially since a great many have taken their expertise into contract jobs in the public service in furtherance of the goal of nation building.

Looking back, I don’t quite know why the JLP regime under Mr Seaga did not fancy special advisers as much as its predecessor. But what was obvious to many Jamaicans was that Mr Seaga did not scruple to pack the Government machinery with “consultants” — mostly from abroad — who, ironically, had a similar effect on the traditional civil service which, along with native professionals, felt increasingly marginalised to the work they were being paid to do.

Whatever the category of advisers Governments operating under the Westminster system choose to engage, it behoves those so appointed to ensure that they are not overbearing in giving their advice, that they do not go public when they ought to make the elected minister do the job of promulgating, and that they do not behave as though the civil service does not exist, despite the parlous state in which Jamaica has found what was once its colonial pride and joy.

What happened in Britain with Fiona Cunningham could happen in Jamaica as well, because freedom of speech and action still remain the building blocks of our democracy, giving institutions like the press the latitude to virtually reshuffle cabinets, if not change governments. But no respecting head of government need take any notice, for their loyalty is as mandatory to their Cabinet colleagues as theirs is to them.

As long as special advisers, for their part, hold steadfast to the view that they are not agents for the ministers they serve, but servants of the Government as a whole, our democracy will survive.