Let’s hear no more from Ivan the terrible moaner

BACK in the late 1960s when the unions were driving Britain into bankruptcy, my Permanent Secretary at the Department of Employment and Productivity, Sir Denis Barnes, had a quiet word with me.

I was director of information at the time. “We have got to keep the country going,” he told me. There was not a touch of arrogance in his voice, only sadness at the state of the nation.

It was a matter for argument whether the DEP was helping when its conciliation service was striving to settle disputes. As the late Tory minister Cecil Parkinson put it: “When the Government gets involved the price goes up.”

But somebody had to try to get Britain back to work, given that the average employer was like putty in the hands of the rampant union barons.

I mention all this because I am beginning to wonder whether today’s Civil Service could run anything. That fool, Jeremy Corbyn, seems to think it could because he wants to nationalise the railways, thereby ensuring that the RMT and Aslef, among others, could bring not just Southern Railway to a halt but the entire network.

Let us examine the evidence about the fitness of the top echelon of the Civil Service, represented by the First Division Association (FDA), to manage our affairs if politicians default.

To start with, it has just effectively put in a pay claim. It says the sheer scale of the challenge set by Brexit for the Civil Service is unprecedented in peacetime and it wants the pay cap removed. You would not think that a top civil servant’s average salary is £77,000 and that 360 are paid more than the Prime Minister’s £149,440.

The Remoaners, of course, claim that the Civil Service is seriously short of the requisite skills for renegotiating Brexit.

But in my day members of the FDA prided themselves on being able to tackle anything – the cult of the gifted amateur.

What has happened to their self-confidence? Or is it just pay opportunism? Or have they all become cowards? I doubt whether a lot of them know what work is. Twelve-hour days were nowt when I was in No 10.

The next piece of alarming evidence about their grasp of essentials comes from the diplomatic service. It is not that Sir Ivan Rogers resigned early as our top man at the EU in Brussels before he was moved. It is the manner of his going that has cast serious doubt on the integrity of the Civil Service.

Not for him quietly sliding into another top job to keep him warm. Oh, no. The Europhile had publicly to tell the Government what he thought about Brexit and how ill-prepared it was after earlier saying it would take 10 years to extricate us from the EU.

Sir Ivan’s job is undoubtedly to advise Ministers but it is not to blast Theresa May publicly over the Government’s policy and its handling of the issue.

His behaviour has been disgraceful, casts serious doubts on the independence and objectivity of the upper Civil Service and damages his calling. It is comforting to know that he has shocked senior mandarins who share my view that he has harmed the Civil Service with “a political attack”.

Other evidence which casts doubt on the efficiency of top civil servants is to be found in the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence. The former has anything but a distinguished track record for controlling the useful distribution of foreign aid while waste on procurement in the MoD is almost endemic.

Then there is the spectacular failure of government and associated economists to get anything right from the Exchange Rate Mechanism to the euro (about which many were enthusiastic), the 2007-08 crash and Brexit’s economic effect.

At least Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, is frank and brave enough to say that the economics profession is now in crisis after its dire warnings about Brexit – the “hurricane” forecast by the Bank of England after the Brexit vote that “had not materialised”. “It’s a fair cop,” he conceded.

After Sir Ivan’s brainstorm and the FDA’s opportunism, we could do with hearing a lot less from civil servants and a lot more quiet dedication to implementing government policy.

They may think their political bosses are dead wrong and useless but at least they know what they have to do: get us out of the EU sharpish and no fiddling. They should shut up and get on with it...

It is the manner of his going that has cast serious doubt on the integrity of the Civil Service.

BOWING OUT OF BRUSSELS: Britain’s permanent representative to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, who took a parting shot at the Government when he announced he was quitting the job.