WASHED-UP POOH-BAHS STICKING THEIR SNOOTY SNOUTS WHERE THEY DON’T BELONG
GIVEn the juicy pensions they pocket thanks to our tax money, you might think former Whitehall grandees would be content to retire to their gardens to water their tulips, read novels and toddle into town for the occasional Reform Club lunch.
Is that not what normal people might do in their autumnal years?
But as we have seen this week, exWhitehall mandarins are not as other folk. They consider themselves a cut above.
They think it is still their place in life to meddle in national affairs, to a level that is dangerously incompatible with their professional standing.
Take, for example, a rancidly political intervention by Lord Kerslake, ex-head of the Civil Service.
On BBC2’s newsnight on Wednesday, commenting on the Windrush affair, he compared the Conservative- led Government with that of Hitler’s fascist regime in Germany.
Admittedly, it can probably be agreed that the Home Office has goofed in the Windrush saga. Theresa May has conceded as much. But to equate it to the conduct of the nazis, who deported millions of people to death camps, was bizarre, inflammatory and wicked.
Lord Kerslake may claim he was merely reporting a comparison once made by a minister (we can note he did not name any such person) but it is impossible to accept his remarks as unbiased.
This same Kerslake — a laughably substandard figure who, at his unlamented departure from office, was given life peerage as a supposedly non-partisan Crossbencher — is closely linked to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. He has been employed by Mr Corbyn to advise the shadow cabinet on how it can prepare for government.
Though he trades on his past as a princeling of Whitehall objectivity, ‘bungling Bob’ Kerslake must be seen these days as an undeniably party-pris figure. not that you often hear his political connections mentioned when he goes on the airwaves.
Just hours earlier, in the House Of Lords, a former Foreign Office boss, drawling Lord Kerr, led a pro-EU rebellion against the Government. He was supported by fellow former mandarins — five former Cabinet secretaries and three former Foreign Office permanent secretaries. What remarkable uniformity of thought from these supposedly independent thinkers.
DID it flow from the genius of Lord Kerr’s oratory, the eminence of his policy logic, or from something less noble: an old- fashioned protectionism by the trade union of washed-up Whitehall pooh-bahs, peeved that the world is changing and the electorate has rejected the clubby EU status quo they and their fading generation so damagingly and dishonestly imposed on our country?
Lord Kerr’s amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill could force Britain to try to stay in the Brussels Customs Union. That could wreck this country’s free-trade prospects with the rest of the world. At the very least it reduces our negotiating team’s freedom to manoeuvre as we reclaim our independence from the EU.
Sir John Kerr, as he was, retired from the diplomatic service 16 years ago, yet in proposing his amendment to the Lords the 76year-old posed as a worldly fellow, intimate with today’s global affairs. In his prime, he was no doubt a formidable operator with unrivalled contacts in the chancelleries of Europe.
To what extent is he still on top of that fast- shifting diplomatic game?
Beside him in the Lords was Lord O’Donnell, the one-time Treasury press officer (from my days as a City reporter I remember when ‘gassy Gus’ rang our office peddling propaganda for the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precursor to the European single currency). He went on to become Cabinet secretary under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
In the Lords, O’Donnell could be seen laughing in apparent derision when Brexiteers argued that the referendum’s Leave vote must be honoured. Voting alongside him for Lord Kerr’s wrecking amendment were the likes of Lord Armstrong (principal private secretary to Ted Heath when he was PM), notoriously weak ex-Cabinet secretaries Lord Wilson and Lord Turnbull, and that ultimate Establishment figure, the ineffably headprefectorial Robin Butler, who has admitted that Brexit has been ‘a dagger to my heart’.
Sob sob! Poor Robin, to have his cosy consensus so uprooted by the electorate which was never asked if it wanted the EEC to become today’s federalist EU.
Why, you may say, should such eminent figures not cast their votes in the Upper House? They are life peers. But that would be to ignore the partisan nature of what is going on over Brexit.
The Labour Party in the Lords is pouncing on Lord Kerr’s proRemain activity to try to weaken Mrs May. By their concerted support for that sly game, these former mandarins are stretching to breaking point the concept of Crossbench impartiality, which is the only way they should ever be admitted to our legislature.
In the case of Lord Kerslake, adjectives such as ‘eminent’ are misplaced. The man is a prize drongo. Top officials are not often exposed to public scrutiny, but when (to widespread astonishment) he became head of the Civil Service, Kerslake occasionally gave evidence to Parliamentary select committees.
It quickly became horribly apparent that he was a muddy thinker, quite lacking wit, dynanism or the ability to communicate clearly any sort of executive vision.
I used to attend such meetings as the Mail’s parliamentary sketchwriter and recall exasperated MPs having to ask this supposed titan of our ‘Rolls-Royce’ officialdom to stop mumbling and spit out his words. It was like watching primary school teachers dealing with a hesitant ten-year-old.
Before leading the civil service he had been a Hounslow council official and later chief executive of Sheffield city council. He then led the Homes And Communities Agency before being put in charge of the Communities Department. These jobs were reasonably senior (and well paid) but they were hardly in the intellectual fast lane. Something of a stodge, intellectually, was boring old Bob.
AT WESTMINSTER it was an open secret that onetime provincial accountant Kerslake was the plaything of Whitehall’s real svengali, the urbane Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood. He and Kerslake used sometimes to share a car in to the office in the mornings. Did shrewd Sir Jeremy use those trips to tutor his slow colleague?
Is it any wonder that a system led by such a plodder was often so slow to react to emergencies, and, in the case of the Windrush fiasco, went on stubbornly carrying out a flawed programme?
We often, rightly, admonish ministers for blaming their officials, but there is something to be said for the argument that bad officials are too often resistant to change, which can land their ministerial masters in trouble.
If this happens when the officials are genuinely non-partisan, that is excusable. If it happens as a result of an official who has barely-concealed party-political leanings, that is deeply worrying.
Suffice it to say that when Sir Bob Kerslake was running the Civil Service, I heard people from Downing Street complain about his donkeyish under-performance and ( as they saw it) wilfully obstructive ways.
His latest outburst is not his first blatant political sally in the past five months. In December he made a to- do about quitting as chairman of a London hospital. It was later claimed that he was about to be fired on account of the hospital’s financial mismanagement.
In most occupations, when you retire, you leave the stage. Former chief executives, head-teachers, editors, surgeons: they do not continue to practise. If wise, they accept that their time is up.
Yet former top civil servants put themselves in a special category. They presume that they can continue to have an input as unelected legislators — and to be paid £300 a day for it. Thus do they create a terrible inertia in our public life.
This is becoming a serious problem, not just for Brexit but for public confidence in officialdom.
If voters see a discredited clunker such as Kerslake, or a cunning EU zealot like Kerr, and are told that they embody the virtues of the civil service, they will conclude that Whitehall is rotten.
And if the clearly expressed will of 17.4 million Leave voters is stymied by a handful of richly-pensioned former mandarins, they are not likely to take that placidly.
The likes of Kerslake and Kerr are sticking their snooty snouts where they do not belong. And it stinks.