Our Government is right to challenge the overweening power of bureaucrats
Rumours about Priti Patel, who wants to reform a failing department, should be regarded sceptically
In 1980, when she had been in office for a year, Margaret Thatcher experienced two contrasting events. On May 5, on her orders, the SAS stormed the Iranian embassy in Prince’s Gate, London, rescuing the hostages held there and killing their terrorist captors. The next day, she gave a dinner at Downing Street for all the permanent secretaries (ie, head civil servants) of the government departments. She was trying to galvanise change with a message of “you and I can beat the system”.
It was a rotten evening. The mandarins resisted, telling her, in effect: “We ARE the system.” Mrs Thatcher turned to her Cabinet secretary and whispered: “They’re all against me. I can feel it.” The contrast between the can-do SAS “boys in black” and the can’t-do “men in grey” was painful to her.
The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is the greatest Thatcher admirer in the present Cabinet. She will be nurturing similar feelings today. A woman outsider trying to bring about serious change in matters such as post-brexit immigration, and to see through roughly a third of the legislation coming before Parliament this year, she is facing obstruction from officials. Indeed, her situation is worse than Mrs Thatcher’s, because she is also facing character assassination.
From the day Ms Patel announced her points-based immigration system three weeks ago, she has been the target of anonymous denunciations in the media. She is alleged to be a shouting, swearing bully. Now the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Mark Sedwill, has begun an investigation “to establish the facts” as to whether she has broken the Ministerial Code. The code says: “Ministers should be professional in their working relationships with the Civil Service and treat all those with whom they come into contact with consideration and respect.”
Additional accusations have been dragged up from the two other departments in which Ms Patel has already been a minister. This is supposed to imply that she has a record as long as your arm. It seems, however, that no formal complaint against her has ever been made. We are in the realm of rumour. We do not even know whether there are any facts to “establish”. So the Cabinet Secretary’s investigation involves going round departments seeking complaints, like police going round looking for evidence without knowing whether a crime has been committed.
This seems a bad system: it is, literally, asking for trouble. It is against the interests of good government if a Cabinet minister can, without hard evidence of serious wrong-doing, be put in political limbo while the people who are supposed to serve ministers sit in judgment on them. This is part of the modern mania for “compliance”. Everything has to be codified; everything has to be formally investigated, which means being taken over by officials. It gives too much power to people we, the public, cannot control, and takes power away from the people we have elected. Wherever possible, we want government to get on with its work. That is the true public interest.
Obviously, it is important to behave courteously to civil servants. Most of them are conscientious; many are essential. It is a vanity of modern politicians to imagine that they could run the country without massive official backing. There is a vast range of expertise, detail and administration that no elected politician, or his appointees, could possibly have time to master. An example is the preparation for health emergencies. If we did not have a permanent staff of health officials and experts planning for such contingencies, hundreds of thousands might have coronavirus by now, and arrangements to treat them and prevent further spread would not exist.
But it is also true that civil servants should live up to their name. They serve: they do not rule. If you bear that in mind, you must regard the behaviour of Sir Philip Rutnam, the Home Office’s permanent secretary until last week, as very strange indeed.
Last Saturday, Sir Philip invited the media to come and film him while he stood under an umbrella in a London park. I understand he had never made any formal private complaint about Ms Patel to her or anyone else, yet here he was, attacking her. He announced that he had been offered lots of money to go quietly, but would not do so. Instead, he would bring an action for constructive dismissal in the courts. He said he had been the victim of “a vicious and orchestrated briefing campaign”. Ms Patel had denied any involvement in it, he said, but “I regret I do not believe her”. He was therefore resigning. Sir Philip’s lip trembled.
As I watched Sir Philip’s performance, two things struck me. The first was that he was behaving like a politician not a civil servant. He was deliberately going public and making himself the story. By, in effect, calling Ms Patel a liar, he was trying to bring her down. Presumably, he calculates that she will be too frightened to go before an employment tribunal. Such behaviour is way beyond his pay grade (although, be it noted, under our odd system, he was paid much more than the Home Secretary, with a much better pension and infinitely greater job security). It also represents an extension of the “lawfare” increasingly used, especially on the Left, to bypass elective government and conduct politics by other means.
The second thing that struck me was that Sir Philip and his like are losing. His conduct was that of a desperate man. A previous inquiry after the 2018 resignation of Amber Rudd when, as home secretary, she gave inaccurate evidence about deportation numbers to the relevant Commons select committee, found that she had not been properly supported by the Home Office (permanent secretary, Sir Philip Rutnam), which kept giving her wrong information because its officials did not know the facts. The report by Wendy Williams on the Windrush scandal is due soon. Sir Philip already knows what is in it. It is thought not to read well for his Home Office. He may have felt he was running out of road.
I am not speaking so much about the individual, however, as about the generality. Theresa May’s three years of government were, in an odd way, a golden era for Civil Service power, because there was such weakness at the top. Most of the senior officials were profoundly hostile to Brexit, and saw this as their chance to prevent or compromise it. With so little lead from ministers, they also felt they must take charge of their departments while the politicians squabbled.
Since last December’s general election, all that has changed. The Government has a big majority. Brexit has happened and is being followed through. These changes have massive consequences for government policies, and it is the job of civil servants to recognise that and implement them.
The current battles in Whitehall are sometimes represented as a struggle between a careless Boris Johnson and a brutal chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, against the forces of proper process and decency. Clearly, it is never right to bully, belittle and so on. Possibly Ms Patel can be too sharp-tongued – though it may simply be that she needs to be, as Kipling put it, “more deadly than the male”. But that is not really the point. In the battle between bureaucracy, victimhood, litigation, and “compliance” on the one hand and democratic responsiveness on the other, our elected Government must win.