Spare the civil service from the rush to topple overmighty institutions

Shaking up Whitehall risks becoming a distraction to the more pressing concern of renewing the country

When governments are elected on the promise of change, but are not entirely clear even on what they are trying to achieve let alone how to bring it about, they invariably start by attacking the country’s established institutions. Top of the hit list is generally the civil service. Boris Johnson has also signalled a shake-up of the judiciary, the quangocracy, and the BBC.

There is nothing especially new about this rounding on a supposedly obstructive “establishment”. It was pretty much the same under Wilson, Thatcher and Blair, all of whom came into office with a deep suspicion of the apparently Luddite instincts of the civil service, and with grand plans for “modernising” the machinery of government. Gordon Brown was so mistrustful of what he thought of as a Treasury poisoned by Thatcherism that he brought in his own team of policy wonks to bypass the established channels. The era of the Spad (special adviser to the minister) blossomed, and little good did it do us either.

The present lot have some reasonably promising ideas for reform. The creation of a separate super, economics and business ministry as a counter to the power of the Treasury is, for a Government intent on reviving the fortunes of the North, a must. A similar separation in power has worked well for Germany.

Likewise, folding international development into the Foreign Office, so that the overseas aid budget supports the country’s foreign policy goals, makes obvious sense. Halving the size of the Cabinet should make for more effective government, though it would also mean riding roughshod over some big political egos. Is this a Prime Minister who wants to be loved by his ministerial colleagues, or feared? We have yet to find out.

Yet much of this stuff is in reality little more than a distraction. It will not in itself bring about the sense of renewal and purpose the nation craves after 10 years of post-financial crisis drift. It is also depressingly familiar to close observers of the corporate world, where high-visibility restructuring is very much part of the new chief executive’s armoury, regardless of whether the company needs it.

The often futile nature of these exercises is neatly summarised in a quote sometimes fancifully attributed – very likely wrongly – to the Roman courtier, Gaius Petronius Arbiter. “We trained hard”, he reputedly said, “but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation”.

Everyone knows this to be true. What pretends to be progress turns out to be a form of regression. This is not to argue that our institutions are beyond criticism and worthwhile reform. Too often they behave like a kind of ancien régime, with a tremendous sense of entitlement. The way our retired senior civil servants, police officers, military personnel and even members of the security services constantly pop up in the media to criticise the Government and inflict on us their precious pearls of wisdom is completely unacceptable.

In one particularly egregious case of it, the former Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’donnell (appropriately nicknamed God), said it was his civic duty to break with the conventions of political neutrality to tell us why he was voting Liberal Democrat. Small wonder that Leavers suspect a nest of unrepentant Remainers at the heart of the government machine.

New governments tend to be led by political ideologues who yearn for a Maoist-like, year zero cleansing of the stables. They naturally think of themselves as the only true patriots, the only proper arbiters of the national good. This is particularly the case with Brexit, which many think of as a revolutionary moment. But it creates an immediate problem when they bump into the civil service, which constitutionally works for the Crown, not Parliament or its political parties, and, because it has been there a long time, has been around just about every block there is when it comes to policy.

In my experience, top civil servants tend to be not only determined to serve the government of the day, but also extremely patriotic. It is sad to see this underlying sense of public service trashed by ideologues, who label the civil service “obstructive” when some cherished wish breaks on a practicality.

Most ministers eventually come to value their civil servants, people who will write their speeches, set out options for them, help them fight the Treasury, or push back fantasy policies from pressure groups, or when cornered by their own party zealots. Strong ministers revel in the support they get from Whitehall. Weak ones scapegoat it for their own failings.

If the anti-intellectual, “no more experts” line prevails, it basically means, with details missed, bad practical outcomes for the UK. Yes to dethroning our institutions, some of which have become overmighty. By all means, let’s have the cohesion between private and public sector enjoyed in Singapore and its like by encouraging top business people, doctors, engineers and technologists to serve their time in the civil service.

But let’s not forget why we have a depoliticised administrative class in the first place. Born out of the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, it was to create a civil service free of corruption, and selected on the basis of merit, not political favouritism. By and large, it has served us well.

It is still far from clear what “One Nation” Johnsonism really is. Other than Brexit, lots more infrastructure spending and more money for the NHS, last week’s Queen’s Speech left us little the wiser. You had to read all the way to page 131 of the long version before encountering the hard reality of fiscal rules intended to ensure responsibility in the public finances. This was possibly deliberate, for they seemed directly to contradict much of the programme outlined in the first 130 pages.

From what we can tell, the Prime Minister aims for a kind of fusion of liberal, free market economics, state activism, and big state spending. He’ll need all the support of his civil service and some to deliver on such a heady mix.