Sir Cover-Up and a grubby betrayal

Whoever wins, QUENTIN LETTS says Britain’s top mandarin must be investigated for corrupting Whitehall’s neutrality . . .

EVERYONE loves Yes, Minister. Of course they do. That classic TV series brilliantly depicts the upper slopes of Government and makes politicians look such fools. It gave us the expression ‘Sir Humphrey’ to describe a Civil Service mandarin, one of those urbane figures who outmanoeuvre their elected masters with silken ease. How droll.

Yet that wonderful series, written in the early Eighties by Sir Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, is misleading if you watch re-runs. For were Jay and Lynn to approach the subject matter today, they would need to make Sir Humphrey a markedly less congenial figure.

I’d go so far as to suggest that Sir Humphrey would need to be a seriously bad villain, played not by a cuddly Nigel Hawthorne, but by an actor more vulpine and acidic.

We are reaching the end of a dreadful few months in which our Civil Service, supposedly impartial in matters of electoral politics, has been anything but that.

Writing that sentence gives me no pleasure. A romantic, I like to think the best about my country. I like to think our police are un-bribable, our bishops holy and our public officials dispassionate.

Civil servants are the political system’s day-to-day arbiters — and arbiters must be trustworthy or they are nothing.

Corruption among state officials is something I would once have associated with countries where the chief of police takes a siesta and the local hooch has a worm in the bottom of the bottle. The British civil servant was spotless, surely.

Wrong. In the past year, particularly since February when David Cameron returned from Brussels with his flimsy ‘re-negotiation deal’ on the EU, Whitehall has been distinctly, aggressively, foolishly partial. The man in the London ministry has behaved in a grubbily political manner.

The person accountable for this is Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, and it is hard to see how he can properly stay in his post. Sir Jeremy — whom the Mail has long nicknamed ‘Sir Cover-Up’ due to his attempts to block the release of sensitive documents to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War and for presiding over a culture of secrecy in Whitehall — has, in fact, this time been astonishingly brazen.

Perhaps over-confident that the referendum would be won by his friends in Remain, he allowed David Cameron to instruct Whitehall to blow more than £9 million of taxpayers’ money on sending pro-EU propaganda leaflets to every household.

NOT content with the leaflets, Sir Jeremy ordered almost every Whitehall website to promote the propaganda leaflet on its online home page. This ruptured the spirit of campaign-spending limits for the two sides in the referendum. That was but the start of things.

Sir Jeremy and his sidekick Sue Gray, a one-time Newry publican who is head of ‘propriety and ethics’ at the Cabinet Office, issued advice to civil servants that they should cut pro-Leave ministers out of the loop when it came to EU policy. This was a constitutional outrage.

Ministers were there as members of ‘ Her Majesty’s Government’ to be accountable for the administration of our country; yet those of them who had decided to support Leave were being kept blind on great swathes of Government policy.

Simultaneously, there was a concerted move, across Whitehall, to identify pro-EU initiatives and news stories and publicise them to help Remain. Ambitious officials were left in no doubt that pro-EU wheezes would be good for their careers.

Imagine if the Civil Service were caught rewarding officials for coming up with pro-Tory or pro-Labour ideas. We would be aghast, would we not?

We should be similarly disgusted at what has been happening with this referendum.

Occupants of some of our most cherished public positions, to their considerable demerit, hurled themselves into Sir Jeremy’s ignoble project. The Director of Public Prosecutions, the head of the NHS and the Chief Scientific Officer, among others, went public with their views on the EU.

These were occupants of some of the very most precious positions in our public life, yet they were being allowed to stray into highly contentious political territory. A wiser Cabinet Secretary would have told them to keep silent and protect the sanctity of their office.

A wiser Cabinet Secretary, too, would have prevented the Treasury’s name being linked with the absurd claims that families would be left thousands of pounds worse off per year if we left the EU.

Sir Jeremy, however, was happy to see pro- Remain George Osborne tarnish Whitehall’s name in that way. Smash, tinkle, went more of our communal assets.

The Treasury also leaned on banks and businesses to support the Remain cause.

Have favours been bought? One hopes not. But can one do so with confidence? Look at how last weekend’s Queen’s Birthday Honours gave gongs to so many Remain supporters. By the way, among the recipients was a woman called Rachel Hopcroft. Her former job? Principal private secretary to Sir Cover-Up!

Throughout the spring, Remain enjoyed a comfortable lead in the opinion polls. The might of the official machine was helping the pro-EU side. The referendum was being dominated by the Civil Service and Leave campaigners stood in front of it, as powerless as Tiananmen Square protesters in front of China’s state tanks. Then came ‘purdah’. Purdah is the term for the closing weeks of an election, when public officials must, by law, retreat to their lairs. Much of the propaganda abated.

What happened? Leave’s position in the opinion polls started to improve. Westminster observers used a football analogy. They said that ‘David Cameron has lost his star striker’. Suddenly the goals started going in at the other end.

But did Sir Jeremy really withdraw from the field? Not entirely. The Government machine, handin-hand with its chums at the BBC, defied purdah to whip up publicity about voter registration.

SIR JEREMY could no doubt say with his most innocent face that this was done in the interests of perfectly creditable democratic engagement. But it was not quite so straightforward as that, was it?

Any political observer will tell you that the late-registration frenzy benefited the Remain side, because it was likely to activate younger voters (who are more likely to be pro-EU). Then, oh so conveniently, the official registration website crashed in the last couple of hours.

This led to a 48-hour extension of the deadline and masses more likely votes for Brussels. That little saga was worthy of something from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Now, intriguingly, the opinion polls suggest Leave may win next Thursday’s ballot. As a Brexiteer, I am not counting my chickens until they cluck. But if the result is close, and particularly if Remain loses, there will be huge consequences.

Will David Cameron have to quit? What about George Osborne? Actually, I suspect Mr Cameron will survive, if only because a period of stability will be essential. But might the real loser not be Sir Jeremy Heywood?

The politicians have played a hard game, yes, but they have done what politicians should do: they have made a judgment and have pursued it with all their energy.

Sir Jeremy, however, has broken the terms of his high office. He has been parti pris. He has become a political player. I defy even the most eloquent barrister to acquit him of this deadly charge.

The priority must be to restore the Civil Service’s reputation. It seems inevitable that there will be a parliamentary inquiry into the way officialdom behaved in the pre-referendum period.

That inquiry will likely be led by Bernard Jenkin MP, Tory chairman of the Commons select committee on public administration. Mr Jenkin is a prominent member of the Leave campaign and, though gentlemanly, is distinctly unamused by the way Sir Jeremy has run the show. ‘Sir Cover-Up’ is going to be placed under the microscope and it is not likely to make pretty viewing.

I understand Sir Jeremy (and Mr Cameron) are already preparing their defences. Downing Street must soon appoint a new First Civil Service Commissioner, charged with ensuring that Whitehall remains impartial. Moves are in train to give that vital job to Ian Watmore, a friend of Sir Jeremy.

Mr Watmore is himself a former ‘Sir Humphrey’. It would be thoroughly improper were he to be appointed, not least because a recent report said the First Civil Service Commissioner must be ‘clearly seen to be independent’.

Until recently, many of us would have accepted the correct procedures would be followed. We would have relied on Whitehall to observe rigorous codes of impartiality.

But that was when Sir Humphrey was Sir Humphrey. Sir Humphrey is now Sir Jeremy and he can no longer be trusted.