The Conservatives have ceded power to the failed, Leftist permanent establishment
Do you get it now? Do you understand why the British state, after 13 years of Tory-led government, remains interventionist, eco-obsessed, euro-compliant, high-spending and woke? It’s because it is run by a standing bureaucracy that pursues its own agenda, more or less regardless of the ministers who are notionally in charge.
It has taken the appalling Sue Gray scandal to expose the seriousness of the problem. A senior civil servant, who had access to the most sensitive government secrets – that, after all, is what her propriety and ethics role involved – turns out to be a Labour partisan. A prime minister who had won the biggest Conservative majority since 1987 was brought down in part by an official who now proposes to work for Sir Keir Starmer.
Take a moment to recall the circumstances of that investigation. Boris Johnson and a dozen or so staff gathered briefly at his place of work to mark his birthday. There was no attempt to hide the fact: it was reported in a newspaper at the time. Johnson had earlier that day been presented with a cake while visiting a school. Again, the event was briefed to the press, and no one was scandalised.
This was June 2020, when restrictions were being eased, and it seemed as if the lockdown was gone for good.
Two years and two lockdowns later, Gray was asked to rule on the events. Her investigating barrister was a vocal Labour supporter, Daniel Stilitz, who had posted a mass of anti-Boris and anti-Brexit material online over years. The law here was murky and protean – Britain, after all, had never had a lockdown before – but their conclusions ultimately led to the toppling of a PM whom our Europhile elites had always hated.
Gray’s acknowledgment of her Labour sympathies might, frets Alex Thomas of the Institute for Government, “give critics a stick”. Ya think, Alex? An elected PM was brought down by a civil servant who now looks as though she opposed much of what he stood for? Yes, I rather think that might give the rest of us a stick to whack away at the self-righteous, unelected, pronounneutral Davos Men and Women who spent five years trying to undo Brexit.
The muted nature of the Institute for Government’s criticism is telling. That organisation – a collection of former civil servants and associated grandees – is supposedly there to invigilate and improve the system. Here is surely an open-and-shut case, where a bureaucrat who was in the innermost councils of government, armed with all the dirt on ministers, proposes to take her knowledge to the other party.
Apart from anything else, it is a clear breach of the Armstrong Memorandum, which lays down that “the duty of the individual civil servant is first and foremost to the Minister of the Crown who is in charge of the Department in which he or she is serving”.
Yet the Institute for Government can’t bring itself to condemn one of its own outright. Instead, it tells us that “Gray’s move, while surprising, was not a sign of politicisation”, and has the nerve to lecture Rishi Sunak, as though he is somehow responsible: “The Prime Minister’s task is not to stoke outrage.”
Jill Rutter, another former official who headed the Institute for Government for a decade, responded to the news with a neat demonstration of the everything-before-the-but-isbulls--grammatical rule: “I think the Gray move is a mistake, but perhaps it was seeing the massive failure of leadership laid bare during the partygate inquiry that tipped Sue into deciding she needed to help another party, with a commitment to raise standards, to prepare to govern.”
Even more striking was the response from Dave Penman, who heads the civil service trade union: “Mistake for who? Labour get
We happen to have heard of Sue Gray. But there are many civil servants like her pursuing their own partisan agendas
If you are part of the Civil Service-Blairite-BBC dinner party network, you start seeing certain positions as neutral
someone who can help them prepare for govt. Sue gets a unique opportunity to help shape a future govt. Those that claim it undermines the impartiality of the civil service were already claiming this and actively undermining its impartiality every day.”
Got that? A senior functionary breaks all the principles on which the Civil Service is meant to work, betrays the people she was working with and reveals her bias. But the threat to impartiality does not come from her; it comes from her critics.
It is this semi-closing of ranks that so utterly damns the system. Had the Institute for Government, the retired Labour ministers, the quango heads and the BBC panjandrums said, “this is an utter disgrace, but it is a oneoff ”, they might have salvaged some credibility.
But that, by and large, is not their line. Their line is, “Sue has done something a bit silly, but fair enough after working with Boris, and anyway it was her job to stop these Tory maniacs getting their way.”
It is human nature to assume that your views are objective, whereas those of your opponents are dogmatic. If you are part of the Civil Service-Blairite-BBC dinner party network, you start seeing certain positions as mainstream, sensible and, yes, neutral.
The idea, for example, that government intervention does more good than harm. The idea that gender roles are a social construct. The idea that sovereignty is outdated (except when, as in Northern Ireland, it is asserted by the EU).
So when a civil servant openly avows her loyalty to a party that shares these assumptions, you don’t really see it as bias. Had she gone to work for, say, Richard Tice of the Reform Party, you might see things differently.
We happen to have heard of Sue Gray. But there are many such officials who are not household names. Believing themselves to be disinterested, they have taken to frustrating what they see as ideological ministerial demands. Their bias is institutional, and runs across every government department.
The Treasury systematically underplays the secondary or dynamic effects of tax cuts – that is, the way in which a lower tax rate can encourage more economic activity and so end up generating higher revenues. The Home Office hates repatriating illegal immigrants: its civil servants, through their trade union, went so far as to challenge the Government’s deportation policy in court.
The Education Department does not want a knowledge-based curriculum. The Department for International Trade dislikes cutting tariffs. The Business Department wants to keep Brussels-era regulations. And, of course, every ministry subordinates its notional function to the two ruling ideas of our age, namely identity politics and net zero.
For the past week, the pages of The Telegraph have been filled with revelations about the lockdowns. They cast light on Whitehall’s consistent over-reaction: forecasts of future infections were overly pessimistic, and there was a terrifying readiness to seize draconian powers on the flimsiest of excuses. Some politicians emerge badly, especially Matt Hancock.
But what one glimpses also is the way in which official Britain – the highly paid but anonymous advisers, officials and quangocrats – messed everything up, consistently overrating the danger, consistently under-performing when it came to testing, procurement and other responses.
It was officials who opposed dealing with the issue under the Civil Contingencies Act, thereby necessitating legislation, putting the devolved jurisdictions in charge and prompting (as we now see from the leaked WhatsApp messages) a race among the four administrations to be as authoritarian as possible.
The one success story was delivered by Kate Bingham, brought in from the outside, who gave us the world’s best vaccine rollout. Yet her appointment was howled down as cronyism by those who have barely raised an eyebrow at Gray’s behaviour. Why? Because she was the wife of a Conservative MP, and Tories are seen as doctrinaire, Leftists as neutral.
It is too late to do anything about it. The Conservatives might have reduced the size of the Civil Service. They might have undone some of the equalities and climate legislation which officials use as their excuse to defy ministers. They might have allowed Secretaries of State to appoint their own people – their own speech writers, heads of office, chief strategists and press spokesmen, if no one else.
How, after all, can any minister be confident that they are not dealing with another Gray? Sadly, they let the moment pass. It is their loss; and Britain’s.