We can but wail bleakly at our wretched civil service
The British Library’s new AngloSaxon exhibition includes artefacts to make your heart marvel: the Sutton Hoo gold belt buckle, as intricate and gorgeous today as when it was fashioned c.600 AD; and Spong Man, a five-inch pottery figure which once stoppered a 5th-century burial urn. Comrade Spong, we should perhaps call him, or Spong Person, for the gender is not certain. Elbows on knees, hands to either side of his neck, he wears an expression of gawping, ghostly emptiness. I haven’t been able to remove Spong Man from my mind.
The exhibition also includes Great Domesday Book, that vast clerical undertaking of 1086 which audited the estates and vales and innermost pockets of England’s shires. Our kingdom had been conquered 20 years earlier and its brutal new rulers from the Continent were hellbent on extracting fistfuls of geld from their quivering domain. With Domesday Book, the civil service grabbed power. Bureaucracy lassooed the lords, bishops, villans, cottars and sokemen of Albion. Every plough and pasture, wood, meadow and fishpond was noted in the Normans’ register. There it sits today at the British Library, 413 giant pages of yellowing sheepskin parchment covered in spidery black and red ink. An undisplayed entry even details the Herefordshire mill where I live. A millennium ago the mill paid the canons of Hereford three shillings a year. Before tax.
At this point, Sir Mark Sedwill, newly imposed Cabinet Secretary (being a pet of Theresa May he was given the job last week without any interview process), might protest that civil servants are above censure. Wisecracks about Domesday Book’s officials would be dismissed as “sniping” by “people who should be ashamed of themselves”. That was certainly the tone of a peculiar letter Sir Mark wrote to The Times recently, possibly around the time he heard that his predecessor Sir Jeremy Heywood was quitting owing to illness.
Sir Mark’s letter was indignant that people were being beastly about Olly Robbins, the civil servant leading Britain’s negotiations with Brussels. Such criticism was improper because Robbins was simply doing his “duty” to the elected government, claimed Sir Mark. Mandarins do not usually rush to the Press. What was going on? Mr Robbins had come in for some flak, yes, but it had been pretty light. When Robbins appeared at the Commons Brexit select committee, leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg went out of his way to excuse him of responsibility for the Government’s Brexit capitulations. Mrs Heath – sorry, I mean Mrs May – was the person who should be blamed, said Mr Rees-Mogg.
Unless Olly Robbins is an unusually flimsy soul, it is hard to believe he is badly upset by occasional raspberries in the public prints. I suspect he is amused by them. It seems more likely that Sir Mark Sedwill is using the matter to his own grubby purposes. So pleased was Sedwill with his Times letter than he took to Twitter to publicise it, ending his tweet with a hashtag, #brilliantcivilservice. Good grief. This man has just been made Cabinet Secretary and he goes in for hashtags. A proper Whitehall selection board might have questioned him about such puerile behaviour.
Sir Mark’s letter earned him publicity but it actually damaged Mr Robbins. It drew a sharp response from former MI6 boss Sir Richard Dearlove, who argued that Robbins had “serious questions of improper conduct to answer” for placing British military power at risk of EU control after Brexit. So far as I know, Sir Richard Dearlove does not “do” Twitter, but if he did he might adopt the hashtag #bloodyawfulcivilservice.
Sir Jeremy’s retirement provoked many warm words. Given that he has had cancer, this was only right; even past foes will look forward to him taking his crossbench seat in good health as Lord Heywood of Whitehall. The Whitehall in
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion question is in Glossop, Derbsyhire, a small place today and in Domesday Book, which lists it as having just four bovates, or oxgangs as the AngloSaxons would have said.
Yet Sir Jeremy’s health worries need not prevent us noting that today’s civil service is indeed wretchedly political. How else did it allow David Cameron to spend £9million of public money promoting a Remain vote before the referendum? How else did Mr Robbins allow his staff to operate in secrecy as they drafted a White Paper to rival the more Eurosceptic one prepared by former Brexit Secretary David Davis? How else have Downing Street officials become so remote from Cabinet ministers that their “homework” now has to marked severely by the admirable new attorney-general, Geoffrey Cox?
In Parliament last Thursday, former Whitehall supremos Lord Butler and Lord Kerslake made plain their lofty distaste for the 2016 Leave vote. Sir Mark Sedwill’s squealy protestations to the contrary merely accentuate the impression that officialdom today is bent, as beholden to Continental masters as it was in 1086. We mere villans and cottars of the electorate, like Spong Man, can only sink elbows on knees and heads on hands and wail, bleakly.