In January 2020, two of McKinsey & Co’s Associate Directors in France, Karim Tadjeddine and Thomas London, appeared in front of an inquiry by the French Parliament’s Senate into ‘The Growing Influence of Consulting Firms on Public Policy’. In the first year of the COVID crisis, between March 2020 and February 2021, €11.35mn had been spent by the Ministry of Health on seven consulting firms, including McKinsey, which alone had received €4mn. Among the services McKinsey had supplied was providing a staff member as ‘liaison officer’ for coordinating vaccine logistics at Public Health France. A senator asked: ‘Don’t you think that there are civil servants within our administration who could carry out this mission?’ Tadjeddine, Head of McKinsey’s public sector practice in France, replied simply: ‘Yes’. McKinsey has a large public sector consulting practice worldwide, with over 520 specialist consultants and more than 5,400 projects in the public and social sectors, spread across more than 105 countries. Tadjeddine explained to the French Senate: ‘Advising the public sector is now a common practice, particularly in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries.’ In the United Kingdom, the public sector made up 22 per cent of the whole consultancy market, against 9 per cent in France. McKinsey was well-connected with the French state. President Sarkozy, elected in 2007, was the first politician to make extensive use of consulting companies, spending about €250 million during his tenure in order to facilitate reforms. McKinsey was one of the beneficiaries alongside other major firms such as Deloitte, BCG and Accenture. It was at this time that Emmanuel Macron, then a fast-rising civil servant working on economic reform, first met a group of McKinsey consultants working on a ‘pro bono’ (charity) basis under the leadership of McKinsey’s French Head of the time, Eric Labaye. Among the group showing off their Excel spreadsheet expertise, one young consultant stood out: Karim Tadjeddine. In 2015, Macron sought advice from McKinsey again when working on further economic reforms for then President François Hollande. When the next year Macron left his civil servant role to launch a bid for the French Presidency himself, he again called on friends in McKinsey. About 10 McKinsey consultants joined Macron’s campaign as volunteers, with one taking on the job of party director and another the job of chief number-cruncher. A leak of Macron’s emails during the campaign revealed correspondence with Karim Tadjeddine. Around this time, Macron provided the preface to a book on economic policy to which Tadjeddine contributed and which was edited by Thomas Cazenave, who would become head of the government department responsible for coordinating consulting contracts in Macron’s presidency. After Macron won the presidential election in 2017, he made several senior-level appointments in his new government direct from McKinsey, including the Chief of Staff in the Finance Ministry and Deputy Director at the Statistics Department. Eric Labaye, whom Macron had first met back in 2007, was appointed Head of the École Polytechnique, the elite engineering school where many high-flying French civil servants begin their higher education. McKinsey was well-placed to assist during the coming COVID crisis. In fact, France got off to a slow start with COVID vaccinations, with the first one delivered on 27 December 2020. At that time, nearly 50 per cent of health ministry officials were estimated as suffering from burn-out. The ministry’s capacity was said to have been undermined by two decades of budget cuts. Two McKinsey partners and seven McKinsey consultants set to work on coordinating the vaccine roll-out. One year after the start of the vaccination programme, France was ahead of Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom in the share of people fully vaccinated. Sources: Archyde, 23 January 2022; La Depèche, 6 February 2022; Politico, 8 February 2021 and 20 January 2022. Questions 1Identify four ways in which consulting companies such as McKinsey develop close relationships with government. 2What are the pros and cons of relying on consulting companies for public sector work?