Our problems come from a useless civil service, but we prefer to blame ministers
Though officialdom is plainly failing in its duties, nobody is being held to account, except our beleaguered politicians
This week, the normally staid House of Lords witnessed a rare moment of drama. Lord Agnew, an entrepreneur serving as an unpaid minister at the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, made a statement about fraudulent claims for Covid grants.
Having torn into the uselessness of the officials involved, he announced that he was quitting the Government, thrust his resignation letter at the Tory whip, who happened to be sitting next to him, and stomped out of the chamber to scattered applause.
It was the liveliest thing to have happened in decades, but it received surprisingly scant coverage.
Journalists initially tried to make it a story about the collapse of Boris Johnson’s authority, but Agnew – an enormously able and respected minister – made clear that he had no quarrel with the PM. Indeed, he apologised for the coincidence of timing. No, his problem was with what he called the “arrogance, indolence and ignorance” of the government machine. And that, for most pundits, was simply not news.
This lack of interest partly explains the problem that Agnew was complaining about. No one pays attention to the failings of officials – except insofar as they can somehow be pinned on politicians. The current rows over lockdown violations, for example, largely involve civil servants. Yet from the headlines you might think that the Prime Minister’s was the only name in the frame. The same is true of the kerfuffle about evacuating animals from Kabul. Something similar could be said of the fact that Lex Greensill was brought into government, rewarded and decorated at the initiative of a senior civil servant, but it all ended up being blamed on David Cameron.
In an inversion of Stanley Baldwin’s complaint about press barons, ministers have “responsibility without power”, carrying the can for things that are outside their control. These days, a politician’s place is in the wrong.
Keeping politicians in the wrong can require mental contortions. During the first lockdown, commentators raged about our inability to get enough protective equipment, ventilators and tests. These failures were largely the responsibility of Public Health England and the NHS.
But the same commentators were reluctant to admit as much while the country was applauding the NHS, figuratively and literally. So whenever they wrote about procurement disasters, they performed a neat semantic sidestep and referred to the NHS as “the government”.
Initiatives are measured by diversity, which in Whitehall means ‘people who look different, but think the same’
The electorate as a whole engages in the same doublethink. We demand that public bodies be “free from political interference”. Yet, when these agencies fail, we excoriate the very ministers whom we had insisted on keeping away from them.
This asymmetry in scrutiny has a great deal to answer for. Many civil servants are models of disinterested diligence. Certainly, they are every bit as competent and virtuous as politicians. The difference is that the politicians are more likely to be held to account – which tends, all things being equal, to raise their game.
Nothing new, you might say. The tension between publicity-hungry ministers and wily officials was the basis of the ingenious BBC satire Yes, Minister. But a number of things have changed since the elegant jostling between Sir Humphrey Appleby and Jim Hacker was first broadcast in 1980.
For one thing, as a haggard minister put it to me, “At least Sir Humphrey was good at his job.” We cling to the image of a Rolls-Royce civil service, but, in truth, its best days are behind it.
Contrast, to pluck a recent example, our failure on PPE and testing with our success on vaccine purchases. The difference was that, while the former was left to our lumbering official agencies, the latter was deliberately taken out of their hands and given to Kate Bingham from the private sector – who, let’s remember, was roundly excoriated for her pains.
Another difference is that the civil service now has a collegiate outlook, a set of shared beliefs.
Sir Humphrey had no agenda beyond ensuring that civil servants were numerous, influential, wellremunerated and, where possible, knighted. His successors, by contrast, have an ideology.
They may not be partisan, but they are prejudiced. They tend, for example, to believe in the benevolence of government intervention and the efficacy of public spending. They are keen on supranationalism, and regret Brexit. Above all, they have elevated identity politics almost to the point where it has become their chief concern, displacing the notional functions of their departments.
We see this in small ways. For example, at some point over the past two years, most civil servants started appending their preferred pronouns to their email signatures. These pronouns are never, in my experience, unexpected; but their purpose is not to inform so much as to serve as a tribal signifier, a badge of belonging.
A trivial thing, you might say, but a telling one nonetheless, in that it sets our officials apart from the general population. As permanent secretaries fret more about how they are ranked on “inclusion”, they necessarily have less time for what ought to be their main jobs.
Considerations such as merit, efficiency and value for money are downgraded, as initiatives are instead measured by the gauge of what is called diversity – which, in Whitehall, means “people who look different, but think the same”.
What is the basis of this obsession? Is the civil service seeking to correct an ingrained bias against minorities in its recruitment? For an answer, we need only look at the latest figures. Last year, 23.3 per cent of civil service fast stream recruits were from ethnic minorities, as against 14 per cent in the population as a whole.
In the same intake, 58.6 per cent were female, as against 50.6 per cent of the country; and 19.6 per cent were LGBT, as against (depending on what measure you use) between three and seven per cent.
What proportion would our mandarins consider sufficient? Do they aim to get to 100 per cent in all these categories? If not, what figure do they have in mind? And, more to the point, on whose authority have they chosen it?
It was revealed last week, for example, that the Foreign Office remains one of the largest sponsors of Stonewall – despite the Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, having made clear that she considered such links to be a distraction from the chief function of government departments. Truly, the Blob is an awesome thing. Squash one part of it and it bulges up in 10 other places.
Which brings us to the biggest difference between Yes, Minister and today. The balance of power has shifted decisively. No longer is it a duel between more or less evenly matched parties.
As Sir Humphrey has become better resourced and more ideological, Jim Hacker has become more cowed, constrained and distracted. Each Greensill-type affair makes MPs more nervous. Some cabinet ministers now refuse to hold meetings without a civil servant present. They know that they enjoy the automatic disbenefit of the doubt. Simply to tell their officials what to do is to risk accusations of undue interference or of bullying.
Not every politician is a yes-man, of course. Michael Gove is the outstanding example of a minister who, instead of becoming the champion for his officials, sees it as his role to make them work for the rest of us. Lord Agnew was another such. So, to a degree, is Steve Barclay, who, as Minister for the Cabinet Office, occupies the closest thing to Hacker’s imaginary job of Minister for Administrative Affairs.
Occasionally, these ministers have forced through reforms that the administrative state detests – for example, moving some civil servants out of London to places where they might run into an occasional Leave voter, or insisting on more objective aptitude tests. But, in most cases, Sir Humphrey need only wait until the minister is reshuffled, sacked or (like Agnew) worn down.
What, then, can be done? Some sensible ideas were set out by the Commission for Smart Government, chaired by the former MP Lord Herbert: bringing in more outsiders, using performance measures, and the like. We could, as Australia does, allow ministers to bring in hundreds of advisers, so evening up the balance. Or we could go the other way and scrap a great many government agencies.
Such things, though, ought to be initiated at the start of a ministry, and pursued relentlessly and singlemindedly. The arrival of the coronavirus barely two months after the 2019 election postponed the reckoning.
Going into battle in mid-term will be far more gruelling. But not doing so could be fatal.