Remaking the civil service while the clock ticks down
Lord Maude has delivered recommendations for radical reforms to the Whitehall system, so here is a chance to think about the wider context
Civil service reform: always a subject to stir the heart
You could be forgiven for having shuffled this matter to the back of our collective memory over the past few months, or years, during which the rest of the political landscape has seemed like a succession of binfires (more than seven bins, it has seemed to me). Start when you like: the pandemic, or Brexit, or the coalition, or the financial crisis. We simply don’t seem to have been offered five minutes on a bench to look at the ducks and get our breath back. Then again, it is also true that civil service reform is a subject of particular interest for very few of us, but if you are one of the cognoscenti, then you probably have palate developed to an exquisitely fine degree.
(There is an unintentionally hilarious line in the backwaters of the www.gov.uk government-wide wesbite. If you find the right page, in the section on the civil service, you will find a banner headline which admonishes you in a combination of the tones of Orwell’s Big Brother and the last months of the People’s Temple at Jonestown, “Civil Service Reform is now called Modernisation and Reform”.)
If you can bear to think back to the summer of 2022, you will recall the slow-motion Romani wagon crash which was the disintegration of Boris Johnson’s government. The core of the crisis lasted just over a week, from the resignation of government deputy chief whip Christopher Pincher on 30 June to the prime minister’s grudging acceptance of the inevitable on 7 July when he announced his resignation. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. As spectacle, it was unmatchable, unpredictable, unfathomable, and it was somehow exciting to be an eyewitness to history. Once Johnson took the decision he had to, it was the task of the Conservative and Unionist Party to elect a new leader, and since the rank-and-file membership was entrusted with the final decision in 1998, the process had a minimum time it would inevitably take. The 1922 Committee set a timetable which would see a result announced on 5 September, and until then, Johnson would stay in Downing Street.
There was an air of unreality about Whitehall for that high summer. Simply to fill portfolios, Johnson had been obliged to make some ministerial appointments which were at least imaginative, and there were some ministers, especially Johnson loyalists, who knew their tenure would end when the boss stepped down. Until then, however, each was a minister of the crown, with all the entailed. A year before, in June 2021, the prime minister and the secretary to the cabinet, Simon Case, had signed a document called the Declaration on Government Reform. Following a series of questions about how Whitehall was working, this paper laid out some basic principles but also pledged to commission a review of decision-making and accountability.
In the very dog days of July, Jacob Rees-Mogg, sporting the title of minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency and buried away in the Cabinet Office, announced that Lord Maude of Horsham would lead a review of civil service governance and accountability. It is said that Maude submitted his report, including a long list of recommendations, early in September but they have yet to be published and are meeting some resistance within the civil service. Now, however, The Times is reporting that Jeremy Quin, paymaster general and minister for the Cabinet Office, wants to release Maude’s conclusions without the government necessarily endorsing them.
The Times describes the highlights of Francis Maude’s thinking, which I had intended to examine. Instead, though, I will keep my powder dry until a full and official version of the report is available. What I want to do at this point is to touch on a few fundamental principles, both theoretical and practical, which I think underlie any attempts to change how Whitehall works, and try to highlight some lessons from the past which may or may not be on people’s radar. This is, I concede, an occasion of “opinions my own”, but then, that’s presumably why you read these essays, so I don’t feel too sheepish.
It feels more logical to rely on an organisation than a person, but it might be mistaken
Some prime ministers are more interested than others in the so-called “machinery of government”, that is, the shape and responsibilities of government departments and other bodies. As I wrote of reshuffles last October, changes to the structure in Whitehall will always appeal to Downing Street because they can be eye-catching, dramatic and an opportunity to put your own mark on the government. They are not “free”, in the sense that relocating staff and functions always takes time, and there will be degree of expenditure on quotidian items like new signage and new headed notepaper. That is small beer, but there is a persuasive argument that you will see a drop in efficiency and effectiveness as the cultures of different teams or even departments have to learn about each other and find potential trip hazards.
Nevertheless, these obstacles can he over-emphasised. A classic example is the reunification of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development in September 2020 to created the rather ugly-of-name Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. At its simplest, this was returning to the FCO those overseas aid functions which it had only acquired in 1970, and then lost in 1997 when Tony Blair decided that a separate organisation to distribute the UK’s largesse would look progressive and generous. There was nothing wrong with the decision—DfID’s predecessors, the Overseas Development Agency and before that the Ministry of Overseas Development, had stood separate from the Foreign Office from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1979—but it happens to be a separation I would not have made.
When its reversal was announced, however, the hue and cry from the international aid and NGO vested interests would have made you think Johnson had despatched a fragile nun to live in a cathouse, so great was the outrage. The Overseas Development Institute, an international aid think tank, uttered dire warnings. “The Prime Minister has made no secret of his desire to see the foreign aid budget spent more in line with the UK’s “political and commercial interests”’,” it spat, almost gagging on those four words, before ceding to experts to issue their impenetrably pious texts.
Foreign policy prioritises a nation’s immediate economic and geopolitical interests through the negotiation of international relations. Development policy is meant to advance long-term shared collective interests by investing in activities overseas where the primary beneficiaries are not British voters.
We shall have none of your self-interest here! That could almost have been written by someone who genuinely despised taxpayers.
As three former Prime Ministers have said, the merger is a bad decision. Given the cross-party agreement, history suggests it will be reversed. Having one institution with two goals is a recipe for costly muddle and mess. Checks and balances have also been removed. It will therefore be left to the Treasury to decide how UK taxpayers can receive value for money.
Imagine the Treasury deciding how public money can be spent. Truly it is like watching a lord of misrule. Then came a note of purest nostalgia, as if Waugh had paused during Brideshead Revisited to address UK aid policy.
In DFID’s heyday, its Secretary of State provided a challenge in cabinet to security and trade priorities, for example. However, this has steadily been eroded, and humanitarian funding has increasingly drifted away from the crises in greatest need. The FCO/DFID merger risks continuing this trend and further marginalising humanitarian aid at the expense of political and security objectives.
These arguments, grandiloquent and circumlocutory though they may be, are the epitome of a “clash of cultures”.
The truth which prime ministers should be told, however, is that organisational changes, although they can be carried out at the stroke of a pen, are extremely unlikely to provide a silver bullet for your chosen target. The chances are far greater of a a new secretary of state, junior minister or senior official providing game-changing drive, a fresh perspective of the policy area or a different professional background. This is especially true in the UK ministerial system in which the political leadership will have specialist knowledge and experience only occasionally and almost coincidentally, the civil service providing policy advice and detail.
As examples of talented people making the difference, one could look at Peter Mandelson as Northern Ireland secretary from 1999 to 2001: he had no particular connection to Northern Ireland nor deep knowledge of the Troubles or the generational sectarian strife, but he was intelligent and hard-working, mastered a brief and kept the details at his fingertips and was known to have a close relationship with Tony Blair, therefore supposedly giving him political credit on the mainland. His appointment effectively advertised the fact that Blair saw Northern Ireland as important and worthy of heavyweight input.
By contrast, the shortcomings of a machinery-of-government approach has been proved over a number of years and many changes of name and portfolio in the area of the government’s handling of business and industry. From 1983 to 2007, these policy areas were the bailiwick of the Department of Trade and Industry, a slightly Janus-like organisation plagued by the running battles between officials steeped in dirigisme in the “industry” part and more economically liberal free-traders under the “trade” section. There was a very brief rebranding after the 2005 general election to create the Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry, much more Blairite terminology, until the new secretary of state, the always-practical, Alan Johnson, pointed out that PEnI was dangerously close to “penis”. The change was reversed and largely forgotten.
In 2007, however, Gordon Brown, newly appointed as prime minister, shook up the Whitehall departments, and the bulk of the DTI became the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. In 2009, it was the bulk of the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and that was recast in 2016 as the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Finally, in February this year, Rishi Sunak rattled the cage and carved new fiefdoms out, the closest successor the BEIS being the Department for Business and Trade run by Kemi Badenoch. Seven organisations in less than 20 years, and I would be very hard-pressed to say that significant and lasting policy benefit came from so many changes.
It is—isn’t it always?—a little more complicated than that;. An institutional solution to a long-standing problem should, obviously, resolve the challenge permanently, whereas a gifted administrator or political leader has a shelf life. The merging of the three Service ministries into a unified Ministry of Defence in 1964, for example, brought a greater level of co-operation and joined-up thought to UK security policy for which it had been striving since at least the early 1920s, and while the creation of the MoD owed a lot to the hard-working and intelligent combination of Peter Thorneycroft as defence secretary (1962-64) and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten of Burma as chief of the Defence Staff (1959-65), it was the bureaucracy, the framework which survived.
And yet, my last observation on this point, organisational change in itself may not be enough. Look at the short and ill-starred Heath administration of 1970-74. Edward Heath was genuinely fascinated organisational systems and, rare among prime ministers, could easily have been a very senior mandarin himself; after leaving the Army as a temporary lieutenant colonel in the Royal Artillery in 1946, he sat the examination for the civil service and jointly topped it. He was duly appointed to an assistant principal post at the Ministry of Civil Aviation’s Directorate of Long-Term Planning and Projects, but was disappointed not to be sent to the Treasury. With parliamentary ambition still smouldering, he left after a year when he was selected as parliamentary candidate for Bexley.
Might Heath have become a person of seniority in Whitehall? He would later joke that a Treasury post might have swayed him, and that he might have spent the early 1970s not as prime minister but as a permanent secretary. After all, his second cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt, who succeeded Sir Burke Trend in 1973, had joined the civil service in 1946, just like Heath, albeit at the Dominions Office and after wartime service in the Royal Navy; the permanent secretary to the Treasury from 1968 to 1974, Sir Douglas Allen, had, like Heath, been a gunner in the Second World War and had been given a junior Treasury position in 1948. So anything was possible.
In any event, Heath assumed the premiership not only fascinated by but convinced by the power of structural changes. He wanted to trim the cabinet in size, and one of his methods of achieving that was to scoop up some of the increasingly outdated departmental distinctions in Whitehall and form “super-departments” which would be headed by powerful cabinet ministers but would be almost individual federations of policy. In October 1970, two behemoths were unveiled.
The Department of the Environment, its title deliciously vague and 1960s/70s, as if an early work by David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury, was created by merging the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Public Building and Works. The first secretary of state was Heath’s slick, classless protégé Peter Walker, not yet 40, who had made a fortune as a corporate asset stripper in the 1960s. Walker had no fewer than seven junior ministers across his empire, from the impatiently ambitious Michael Heseltine looking after transport and local government, to the unlikely sight of the God-and-Empire Julian Amery—Eton and Balliol, friend to Chiang Kai-Shek and King Zog—as minister of housing and construction.
The other super-ministry (an alternative moniker, “monster ministry”, could be heard in Whitehall) was the Department of Trade and Industry. Established the same week as Environment, it merged the venerable Board of Trade, originally a 17th-century sub-committee of the Privy Council, with the hyper-modern Ministry of Technology, only six years old and known by the modish as “MinTech”. It also pulled in responsibility for monopolies and mergers from the Department of Employment, while passing aerospace research, development and procurement to a new (and short-lived) Ministry of Aviation Supply, from which many of those briefs would return in 1971. The first secretary of state for trade and industry (retaining the title president of the Board of Trade) was John Davies, who has been director general of the CBI until 1969 before Heath had bundled him into a constituency in Knutsford at the general election and then straight on to the front bench as the Conservatives’ most senior attempt to translate a senior business leader to elected politics. Davies was joined by four junior ministers, two for trade and two for industry.
The lesson of the super-ministries is a tale of the dog which didn’t bark in the night. They had several purposes: the first was to ease the pressure on places at the cabinet table by federating several interlinked but distinct functions, previously with their own ministries, under one paramount chief who would represent them at cabinet. They were also supposed to increase the efficiency and coherence of government business by reducing inter-departmental divisions. And the DTI, in any event, carried half-articulated hopes that it might establish itself as a serious source of economic and industrial policy and offer some challenge on that front to the all-powerful Treasury.
None of these things happened to anything like the extent Heath hoped. Although the DTI grew further when the Ministry of Aviation Supply was wound up in 1971 and aerospace policy was transferred, its cabinet representation was doubled in November 1972 when Sir Geoffrey Howe was made minister for trade and consumer affairs with a seat in the cabinet. It then lost a great chunk of responsibility at the beginning of 1974 when a panicky Heath created a standalone Department of Energy to deal with the fuel and power shortages. When Labour returned to office in March 1974, Harold Wilson carved up the remainder of the department into three separate fiefdoms, Trade, Industry and Prices and Consumer Protection. Similarly, the Department of the Environment lost transport to a stand-alone ministry in 1976.
The significant factor behind both departments was that restructuring on its own was not enough if a ministry lacked powerful political leadership. Although Peter Walker was environment secretary (1970-72) and then trade and industry secretary (1972-74), and was close to the prime minister, he was still on an upward trajectory (although by 1972 he was being discussed by the chief whip as a potential chancellor of the Exchequer if Anthony Barber were to step down), and did not at that point carry the weight of Willie Whitelaw, Barber or Lord Carrington. Other secretaries of state were a batting order down; John Davies, for all his business experience, never found his feet in the House of Commons and lacked authority; Geoffrey Rippon, who took over as environment secretary in 1972, was a careful ad diligent minister who had steered the European Communities Bill through the Commons but was, in the words of his obituarist, “not a man to everyone’s taste”; although he was an expert in local government, he simply lacked clout at the cabinet level.
The lesson to take away, then, is that organisational change can help the government work better, but it is rarely enough on its own, and may well be outpaced by the appointment of a new minister.
The cabinet is too large, but making it smaller is fiendishly tough
There are surprisingly clear rules about the size of cabinet. Under the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975, there may only be 21 paid members of cabinet (excepting the lord chancellor, who is paid separately). However, other ministers may be “invited to attend” cabinet, even on a permanent basis, and unpaid ministers fall outside the scope of the act. When Rishi Sunak sits down with his top team every Tuesday, there are 31 ministers, including himself, and anyone who has spent much time in formal meetings knows instinctively beyond 30 is too large for a genuine discussion forum; and when you consider that some recent meetings struggle to break the half-hour mark, it is a clear that the cabinet is no longer being used for much in the way of deep discussion, more a a forum for rubber-stamping decisions and passing on messaging and lines to take.
This is a problem which has been growing for some time. David Cameron’s first cabinet, albeit it had to manage a coalition, started with a cabinet of 29, while Gordon Brown had left office with 27 in place. This was to some extent a cheap way to placate the disgruntled and play balancing acts without needing to spend or do anything. But if the cabinet becomes more and more formalised and ritualistic, it loses meaning, and it also diminishes its potency in terms of collective responsibility: if a matter has been well ventilated in cabinet and individual ministers feel they’re more involved, more committed. It was no coincidence that John Major’s first cabinet meeting in November 1990 was relaxed and good-humour, the prime minister opening by remarking “Well, who’d have thought it?” *(It was also the last time a cabinet was all-male.)
Cutting the size of the cabinet was one of Edward Heath’s structural priorities too, as we’ve seen. In October 1964, Harold Wilson, one of the very slyest of dogs but a man who saw the machinery of government almost entirely through the lens of party management, had created a cabinet of 23 (of whom two, Patrick Gordon Walker and Frank Cousins, were temporarily members of neither House of Parliament). He whittled the numbers down over the six years of Labour government, but, although, like Heath, a civil servant manqué—he was a Whitehall statistician from 1939 to 1945, as well as research assistant to Sir William Beveridge, master of University College, Oxford—he never brought much coherence to his cabinet changes.
Heath exercised discipline and showed no fear of unpopularity among colleagues in June 1970 when he formed his government, and was able to keep the cabinet at just 18 members, the smallest size it has achieved since then. He did at least have a systematic approach to controlling the size of his top team; not only did he federate smaller ministries, he excluded the chief secretary to the Treasury, who had usually been of cabinet rank since the post was created to assist the chancellor in 1961, and he shifted the then-independent Ministry of Overseas Development under the control of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
To argue that a smaller cabinet is more effective, deliberative and able to undertake in-depth, strategic debates on future policy is hardly ground-breaking. Some cynical minds have reflected that perhaps not every prime minister actively wants an effective forum of debate to meet every Tuesday; and it is also true that the offer of cabinet posts or those “attending cabinet” is a useful element of patronage for any premier. The notion of ministers who “attend” every cabinet meeting as a matter of routine but are not themselves classed as part of the cabinet gained traction under Tony Blair and is now an entrenched part of the make-up of Whitehall. The current cabinet has 23 members, at the top end not only of the size permissable under statute but also of an operative body of discussion and deliberation, but there are a further eight ministers, representing five government departments, who “also attend cabinet”.
The hard truth is that keeping numbers down is hard. If you sit down with a blank sheet of paper (I have done this countless times since an unhealthily young age, I suspect) and work with the current number of government departments (19 plus the Attorney General’s Office), you have a cabinet into the low 20s at least without any effort. This leaves two options. It would be theoretically possible not to include the head of every government department in the cabinet, though the current practice extends at least back to the 1970s and would lead to intense political controversy. Imagine that a prime minister did not make, say, the culture secretary a full member of cabinet in an attempt to keep numbers down: the sectoral interests would shriek immediately that the government cared nothing for our glorious creative industries and was more interested in the barbarism of defence policy or the hard yards of the Ministry of Justice than policies which spoke directly to the human soul. Every department has its own quirky, braying leak who would feed continuous reports of disaster to the waiting media, and the news cycle can over get fatter.
The other option, and this is a parlour game any Whitehall watcher should enjoy from time to time, is to take another blank sheet of paper, choose a set number of departments (say, 16?) and attempt to shoehorn Whitehall’s functions into that number. Some parts of the game are easier than others: it is relatively safe to say we need a department to look after welfare, and that is a job (and a departmental budget) of such a size that attaching any other significant functions to it is probably unwise. But there are some delicate morsels for seasoned contestants. If the Treasury were to broken up into two or three different units, would this create new, and therefore additional department chiefs, or would most of its functions be carried out, as now, by new combinations of old functions (for example, some kind of analogue of Washington’s Office of Management and Budget being part of refurbished Cabinet Office)?
Without being so daring that the ideas would attract the description of “courageous” from a civil servant, I have never, to my recollection, managed to find a net saving of around one department, which would not leave a radical legacy. The fact is that in a highly centralised political system like the UK’s, where no major fucntions of government are devolved so far from Whitehall that there is no need for a corresponding department, we have roughly as many chiefs as we need.
So that is my second lesson or gentle observation. You may see yourself as a radical surgeon when it comes to the shape of Whitehall, and you may have some bracingly innovative ideas, but, taken in the round (because almost every civil service commentator worth his or her salt will have one idea or policy area which they think warrants a new administrative structure), you will be doing well if you hold the line in terms of the size of the cabinet. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Whitehall will always rely on its people so make sure you see them clearly
My last observation at this stage is—sorry, but it has to be—about an aspect of the culture wars. One of the fronts in this conflict has opened up over the civil service, with a thesis increasingly promoted by people on the Right that Whitehall is a leftist, group-thinking, pro-Remain, obstructionist, entitled “blob” which hates the electorate, hates its elected tribunes even more, and will do anything in its power to frustrate the “will of the British people”, whom it regards as stupid, crude, backward, racist, misogynist… look, you can fill the rest in. It’s a theory which has been proposed with not very much subtlety by people like Nadine Dorries, Ben Bradley, Lee Anderson, Suella Braverman, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Cummings; a true alliance of the slow-of-thinking and the should-know-better. And is it true? No.
Well, mostly not.
On a macro level, I don’t believe the civil service, all half a million of them, have a hive mind and have closed ranks against ministers whom they dislike or of whom they disapprove. Quite apart from the logistics of this wannabe conspiracy—do they have a newsletter? meetings? a committee?—it imagines a false homogeneity and identity among civil servants and a quiet, patient determination to act as a fifth column against Brexit, stricter controls on immigration, unapologetic celebrations of our colonial and imperial past and acceptance of reality on gender issues and the like. These barely sketched attitudes are scooped up together and “the blob” becomes an avatar of everything about which a certain section of the Right is paranoid and fearful. I just don’t think this is true, not least because I think it vastly overestimates how much energy the ordinary person, even an ordinary civil servant is prepared to devote to thinking about politics.
I also loathe this repeated invocation of “the will of the British people”. It’s an inchoate, unquantifiable, irrefutable attempt to outflank normal political systems, it demonises any opposition, and it’s strangely off-kilter. The home secretary has already uttered its incantatory power when the House of Lords was failing to act completely compliantly over what is now the Illegal Migration Act 2023, and there was no doubt about her intent and implication. That is not how we do politics in this country, MPs are not delegates or empty vessels for their constituents’ views and our very sparing use of referendums is sparing precisely because we know how ill they sit with the traditions we have.
But I have to qualify this, even if only a tiny bit. I do sadly and grudgingly admit that there is a cohort of civil servants, probably small but perhaps disproportionately senior, which feels profoundly out of sympathy with the whole ethos of some parts of the Conservative Party, regards Brexit in particular as a question to which there are objectively right and wrong answers, and is baffled and appalled, still, seven years on, by the Leave victory in the 2016 referendum. Whether it is the gravity of leaving the European Union, or if Brexit is a proxy for a slew of other things, this cadre does, I think, regard its opponents as beyond the Pale, unacceptable, having stepped out of the boundaries of normal debate and simply de trop. While I regard 95 per cent of the accusations on social media that Boris Johnson, or Russell Brand, or Tucker Carlson, or Andrew Tate has been “cancelled” because they have come to threaten the Establishment as nonsense and dangerous distortion of the truth, I am persuadable that on one or two occasions there may have been a tiny fragment of a grain of truth in the idea.
The obvious case which may or may not enlighten us is that of Dominic Raab, who had to resign as justice secretary and deputy prime minister in April this year (is it really only April this year?) after several accusations of bullying and harassment. Let me make a few things clear: bullying in the workplace, harassment, inappropriate behaviour, are all unacceptable and there is no place for them in politics or anywhere else. I know too many people for whom that sort of behaviour has had profound professional and personal consequences and it should not be tolerated. Equally, do I think Raab is a relaxed, easygoing, laid-back man who is a joy to work for? No, I don’t. I’ve never worked with him but have no problem believing he can be demanding, irrational, short-tempered and patronising, unnecessarily confrontational and keen to prove what he feels is his intellectual superiority.
At the same time, I know perfectly well that a lot of civil servants in the Ministry of Justice dislike him intensely, and I can easily believe that some of them think he is one of Hillary Clinton’s deplorables, his views on Europe and the human rights sphere so far from theirs that he is beyond salvation. Can I then imagine a scenario in which officials who disliked him ideologically felt, perhaps subconsciously, that aggressive and challenging behaviour on his part was not only difficult and unpleasant but had crossed a line into unacceptability? Yes, I can believe that to be potentially true. I can also believe that intelligent men and women might find themselves in a situation in which what Raab was saying or wanting came from a place so far distant from their intellectual experience that he was no longer untouchable, but made himself a legitimate target, and that an opportunity to see him off was one which should be taken.
I could be wrong in all of this, but I think the fact that I can believe that it could happen means that relationships have broken down very seriously. To be absolutely clear: I am not the epitome of a critic of the civil service. I worked in Westminster for more than a decade, I have been a keen Whitehall watcher for 30 years, probably, I was raised with Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, and mesmerised by tales of brainy self-effacement, dry, understated judgements and impossible sang froid in the outposts of Britain’s empire. I’ve worked with the real thing across several departments, from hyperfocused Treasury brains who put breathing in and out in their Outlook calendar so it doesn’t get missed under the nth meeting of the day, through blunt, jolly, jargon-lovers at the MoD and patient, detail-amassing experts on the British high street and the shortcomings of business rates, to sprawling, weatherbeaten lags from the Diplomatic Service who have anecdotes for any occasion, in a range of local dialects.
I am not, however, starry-eyed (well, not much). As a professional coping mechanism—many clerks are the same—civil servants often assume an attitude of slight disdain towards ministers. They are, to use Robin Day’s infamous words, “here today, gone tomorrow”, they are at the mercy of an electorate, and, because they are not usually steeped in expertise of their portfolio, they have to acquire the ability of absorbing just enough information very quickly and to just the right depth. Some are jaw-droppingly good at that. But clerks are usually, if you can pull away the last layers of the chain-mail cynicism, joking, while I’ve found that civil servants more often mean it. Perhaps it’s because clerks often have more frequent, and sometimes more informal, contact with ministers and MPs.
This attitude is no great weakness, or, at least, it wasn’t. But something happened to us as a nation and a society in 2016. The Brexit referendum campaign was an inglorious one and I don’t think many of our leaders can really claim to have emerged from it enhanced. There was certainly a feeling that Remain was the Establishment cause, endorsed by the great and the good, while Vote Leave was the insurgency, attracting some figureheads who had broken with the consensus but fundamentally an organisation of disruptors, mavericks and renegades. The public face of Vote Leave was that unlikely political Castor and Pollux, the shambling, untucked, empty but potent phrasemaker Boris Johnson, and the quiet revolutionary, the polite, funny, freewheeling Michael Gove.
The victory for Leave shocked the political community (though the clues were there). This had, I think, two opposite effects. The first was to embolden that disruptive part of the Right which had felt powerless for decades, seeing policy after policy which it hated become orthodoxy, and handed it the victory which, for many, was the sort of hazy dream of a balmy summer’s day: not just reform of the EU, not just substantial adjustments to the UK’s relationship, but simple, flat-out, unequivocal departure. It was almost as if all those years since accession on 1 January 1973 did not happen, did not matter. If Chesterton’s “Secret People” had suddenly, finally, stood up and achieved this, nothing was now impossible, nothing was off the table. But there was one seed of bitterness: amid their jubilation and incredulity was a sour determination that the Establishment would not deny them.
For Remainers, the effects were as profound. There was not only shock but a kind of offence, of personal hurt. The arguments in favour of EU membership were so overwhelming, so clear-cut, and had been so carefully prepared and gussied-up for public consumption, it was impossible that the electorate would reject them. It made no sense: the Remain campaign did everything it was expected to do, not only setting out the broad sweep but explaining how losing membership of the European Union would affect individual voters in terms of income, rights and lifestyle. The voters had not listened, or at least some of them had not: and it was particularly galling that many of those deaf to the logic of remain were older, whiter, less well educated and more rural than young, urban, multiethnic graduate Remainers. The wrong sort of people had won the referendum.
Perhaps it was inevitable because of the narrow margin of victory, that famous 52/48, but there was no magnanimity nor any acceptance of a fair fight. Brexiteer jubilance was tempered by paranoia, hardly helped by the frequency of demands for a second referendum from the side which had lost in the first, while Remainers became increasingly certain that the narrow majority for Brexit had to derive from ignorance, or prejudice, or a failure to understand the question or its consequences. And of course in some ways both sides were right: there were Remainers for whom any mechanism to reverse the result was acceptable, just as there were Brexiteers whose vote had been influenced by racism, or xenophobia, or simple dissatisfaction.
The current debate over the role of the civil service is one of the bitter fruits of this many-branched tree. Brexiteers see the civil service as part of a huge, only semi-secret bloc which is unreconciled to leaving the EU and, even if it cannot reverse the process, will carry out some kind of scorched-earth Werwolf operation to deny Brexit champions and have vengeance where possible. Remainers, by contrast, see Brexit and the ministers who want to push forward as dangerous forces with no sense of propriety, restraint or, in some cases, legality. If Boris Johnson would deceive the late Queen to prorogue Parliament unlawfully, then the holders of senior office are capable of any outrage. That is the perception of Suella Braverman and her increasingly sceptical noises about the European Convention on Human Rights, and I’m quite sure many in the Ministry of Justice reacted with similar fright and disdain to Dominic Raab’s idea of a British Bill of Rights. A version of this was introduced into the House of Commons in June 2022, but it was withdrawn before even being debated in the face of stiff opposition.
All of this relates to Lord Maude because those who absorb his recommendations and make decisions about how far they should be implemented must do so with a fair and reasonable view that the civil service is neither an unimpeachable Rolls Royce nor a snooty guerrilla movement for the Guardian readers of whichever chi-chi part of London you want to defame. What Maude has been developing is a programme of institutional change to make the civil service more effective; he is not completely without form in this regard, as I will explain when I go through his actual proposals, but it will be a calamity if either side uses the changes, or opposition to them, to fight the current battle or those of the past 15 years, and try to settle old scores.
Conclusion
As ever I have said too much, or said enough at too much length, and yet, equally as ever, I have left out a lot that I could or would or should say. My purpose was to give readers a kind of “rough guide” to Whitehall, an immersion in some of the debates which are currently going on and against the backdrop of which Maude’s reforms will have to be judged. Consider this a kind of last-minute briefing in the back of the car, just an attempt to make sure the main points are in your head.
Maude’s recommendations will not want for thought: he has been circling this terrain for a long time. Having been a young high-flyer before losing his seat in 1992, he scrambled back in as so many colleagues were forcibly ejected in 1997, and easily found a place on an opposition front bench short of talent. But the hard-nosed Thatcherite of the 1980s was now a moderniser, and managed Michael Portillo’s failed 2001 bid for the party leadership. By 2005, he was barely into his 50s and lacking an obvious purpose. Yet it found him: Michael Howard, having announced that he would step down once a new leader was elected, appointed him chairman of the Conservative Party in May 2005; his speech at that year’s conference in Blackpool, hardly recalled now, was in many ways the foundation document of David Cameron’s reinvention of the Conservative creed. In 2007, Cameron appointed him shadow Cabinet Office minister and gave him the job of preparing the party for government in the event of their winning the following general election. Which, in a way, they did…
Maude would spend five years in the Cabinet Office after 2010, tackling public sector efficiency and reform, Whitehall leadership and management, transparency and open government, the Government Digital Service and the exploitation and protection of data. He was responsible for the Civil Service Reform Plan of 2012 and a one-year update in 2013. He left the Commons in 2015 and was ennobled, spent nine months as minister for trade and investment, then committed to the private sector by setting up Francis Maude Associates with his former special adviser Simone Finn (Baroness Finn) “to work with governments outside the UK to help them save money, improve services and build lasting capability”. So to whom else would Boris Johnson have turned last summer, as waited out the dying gasps of his premiership, than Maude to review the “hidden wiring” of Whitehall, to employ Peter Hennessy’s perfect phrase?
Until then, adieu. And let us reflect on the fact that a review commissioned not much more than a year ago was the work, not of the prime minister, nor of his predecessor, but of her predecessor. Imagine John Major receiving the conclusions of a review announced by Jim Callaghan…